Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Not often is Jesus rendered powerless. His enemies were never able to accomplish it. It took his friends to pull it off. Hometown folks. Kith and kin. In Mark's telling of this story, Jesus (who is touring about from town to town) goes home one day to Nazareth (where he had played trumpet in the high school band and where his picture is still in the year book). And, when Sabbath comes, Jesus goes to synagogue -- presumably the same synagogue he attended growing up -- and stands to teach. (This would have been quite normal -- he would have been recognized as a teacher.) At first, apparently, his old friends and neighbors are genuinely amazed. But then, as if a switch is thrown, they turn on him: "Hey, wait just a minute! We know this kid! This is Mary's little boy! There's nothing special about him. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us." And because of this faithlessness in Nazareth, Jesus is unable to perform as many miracles there as he had elsewhere.

What got into these people? We are quite comfortable believing that God did things centuries ago, in distant lands. We might even be convinced that God is at work today, someplace else. And certainly, we know that, whenever and wherever God operates, he operates on an epic scale -- stopping the sun, crushing armies, rescuing nations from slavery. That's easy to believe. That's Hollywood's version of God -- a long time ago, a long way away, and big!

What is ultimately unsettling about true faith, and what had those Nazarenes so upset, is the staggering realization that God works (and has always worked) in the ordinary realm, among every-day people like us. God is not a God of the long past and the far off. The God of faith intrudes upon our present, enters our private spheres. He monkeys with our sons and daughters, and once in a while kidnaps one. He is right here among us. He is present not only in the gold of the high altar, but also in elements as common to us as water and bread and wine. He is an invasive God, a God too close for comfort. He stakes out his claim upon us and upon our lives. People like a little space between themselves and God. They like him to be from another town, or maybe up there on the silver screen. If he's too close, if he lives right in among us, he has us by the short hairs. All our pretenses are gone, and every tawdry part of this life we live is known to him and belongs to him.

Such intimacy with God calls for spiritual integrity. Jimmy Stewart died Wednesday. He was, by all reports, an anomaly in tinseltown, in that he was what he appeared to be. A hundred voices have come out this week to praise him for that. For what? For simply being, and staying, true to himself. How hard it is to do ordinary things well! It is easier to be president of a huge corporation than to be nice to your secretary. It is easier to feed a hundred starving children in Ethiopia than to be a good father or mother to your own children. God is always greener on the other side of the world. That's why we hate to find him in Nazareth, where we live.

Wonderful and terrible things happen in ordinary, every-day life -- in that huge mass of living that never makes headlines. Our families, for example, can drag us down or lift us up. Friends can be heavy burdens or great pillars of strength. A job can be a blessing or a curse. One broken heart can last a lifetime. One divorce can hurt for generations. Births and deaths, among those we love, can refresh us or shatter us. These things touch us far more deeply, and more permanently, than anything we might see on the evening news. (That is why we like news so much, I think: because, while pretending to report real life, it actually distracts us from what is real.)

The Bible rarely tells of important people doing great and historic things. (We get that impression, but only by hindsight.) More often the Bible speaks of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, because God is with them. It speaks of an accused murderer, in hiding, whom God tells to go threaten the King of Egypt, of a shepherd boy with one flat stone, of a carpenter's son from Nazareth with a motley band of fishermen following him around. Don't focus on the ends of these stories, how they turned out. Focus on the beginnings, when things appeared quite ordinary and unremarkable. That's where God came in. That's where he comes to us, in things that seem so commonplace.. He is not only the God of Israel; he is also the God of Layhill. He is not only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; he is also the God of Judy, and Harry, and John. He comes from where we live. He's a hometown boy. When you look for him, don't look too far away.