Your Bone & Flesh
SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, YEAR B
MARK 6:1-13
When I think of the term Flesh-n-Bone what comes to mind is the Rapper. Born Stanley Howse and known to his fans as Flesh-n-Bone, this Ohio-bred hip hop artist rose to fame as a member of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony this young man went to prison, and after serving 12 years in the position of a weapon and after spending 3 days out of prison was arrested on another weapons charge. It makes you think about freedom. I think about the pictures of young men walking the streets with military assault rifles and the story of someone who spent 12 years in prison for an unloaded gun. What is freedom? What is independence?
You see, Freedom is a Christian concept.
Freedom is something we can claim and something we can proclaim.
Paul launches the fifth chapter of the letter to the Galatians with the word freedom. “for freedom Christ has set us free.”
For freedom.
What does that mean for us exactly?
For the Disciple, freedom is not simply a gift we are given, but a responsibility placed in our hands.
The question isn’t really “Are you free?” or “How free are you?”
For Christian, the question is, “What are you going to do with your freedom?”
There is a choice to be made.
What will you choose?
For the Black Church in the USA, the Fourth of July is always problematic even more so now that we celebrated Juneteenth last month. And we know every nation has to struggle with the trend toward nationalism that can overwhelm our faith if we don’t walk carefully. We see black pride once again on the rise and have to ask what is the fourth of July to the slave.
The Gospel text gives us two passages this week. Or maybe not. Maybe they are really about the same thing, but one is a failure and the other reaches the goal. Maybe. In the one, Jesus goes home.
2. Jesus goes home.
Why Jesus goes home, Mark doesn’t say. Mark isn’t given to reveal motivations and deliberations. He just says that Jesus went home. But we can imagine why Jesus went home because he is like us. So, he goes home for the same reasons we go home.
He goes home because, well, because it’s home!
He goes for comfort, he goes for identity’s sake; he goes because maybe he thinks that Robert Frost is right and that no matter what he has done to this point, they will take him in. Or maybe he is riding a bit of a high and wants to share it with those who know him best.
The previous chapters have Jesus performing all sorts of incredible acts, and now he is going home to let them see how the local boy has made good. Or maybe he is going home to try and heal what might have been broken by a misunderstanding.
So, he tries again. And it works! For a moment or two anyway. He spoke in the synagogue, and they were astounded by him. For a moment.
When they listened to his words, they were knocked out of themselves for a moment. They were swept up in his vision; they leaned into his promise.
Until someone said, “Wait a minute. Isn’t this that carpenter kid? Who does he think he is?” And everything fell apart. They turned away from him because they thought they knew him. They turned against him because they thought he should stay in his place. They called him names – “Son of Mary” instead of the usual “Bar Joseph,” implying that his parentage was suspect. They laughed, they sneered, they ignored him. And even Jesus was amazed at the level of their disrespect. And they blocked their blessings.
3. Jesus went home, but the home didn’t take him in. My inclination in such a scenario would be to feel sorry for myself. Poor me, they don’t understand me, the real me, me I have become. They still see the goofy kid I was instead of the man I have become. I could have a real self-pity party if such a thing happened to me. Because there is within us the desire to go home. Or maybe better, there is within us the desire to be home, to be welcomed home, to feel at home. And if home won’t take you, what’s left?
The identity of Jesus is a consistent issue in Mark. In the gospel, we hear the opinions of rulers, religious authorities, crowds, disciples, and family members. For the author of Mark, the important question keeps coming around to “who do you — the reader — say that Jesus is?” And if you do honor Jesus as a prophet (or more than a prophet), who does that make you?
Home is not so much a place as it is a level of relationship. It is welcome.
But Jesus tells us that home is about a commitment to a vision of home he called the kingdom of God and a commitment to love one another with the same kind of love he pours out on us. In other words, he is trying to show us the way home.
On this Fourth of July holiday weekend, it seems to me that what we really celebrate is neither a historical happenstance nor the glories of a richly blessed nation.
Instead, it is an ideal, a vision of what we could be, what we long to be.
We who call the United States of America home love our country, but at the same time, we hope for more – more justice for all, more equality, more hospitality.
We celebrate who we are, even as we celebrate who we might be.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
Finally, This is true of every nation, no doubt. We all want a country that feels like home, which means we need people, all the people - of the people, by the people, and for the people - to show us the way to be at home in God's
Kingdom.
Show us the way to be home, a home for all God’s children. For they are our bone and flesh. Our flesh and bone! Yes!
