"Our Homely Messiah"
February 5, 2006: 5th Sunday After Epiphany, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

Scripture:
Isaiah 40:21-31
Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is God who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when God blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? The One who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because God is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, 'My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God'? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. God does not faint or grow weary; God's understanding is unsearchable. God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Mark 1:29-39
As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.

Sermon:
A word first about words, or about two words in particular. I chose to title this morning's sermon "Our Homely Messiah," purposely juxtaposing two words with very dissimilar "mouth feel," as they say in gastronomic circles. To our mental taste buds, "homely" and "messiah" go together about as well as pickles and ice cream or fish candy.

"Messiah" is a grand word. It is rich in history, the Hebrew for "anointed one." The great King David, the slayer of Goliath who united the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah for the first time, was called the messiah of God. So was King Cyrus of Persia, the leader of a mighty empire, whom the prophet Isaiah described as God's messiah for the liberation of the Jewish people from exile in Babylon. The Greek translation of messiah is "Christ," as in "Jesus the"—enough said. Messiah is a word that comes with caviar and a champagne cocktail.

'Homely' doesn't. It is a much earthier word. First, of course, we may equate "homely" and "ugly." It may bring to mind a Cinderella stepsister or, with apologies, Ernest Borgnine. Merriam-Webster puts it a bit more tactfully, saying just: "plain or unattractive in appearance." But before that more familiar modern entry we read this older one: "Homely, adjective, unaffectedly natural: simple; not elaborate or complex' and also, "being something familiar with which one is at home." Being something familiar with which one is at home, in other words, something warm and familiar. Homely is mac and a cheese, perhaps—comfort food.

The two passages of scripture we heard this morning seem similarly mismatched, particularly in the first verses of both. Isaiah gives us a grand image, indeed: the God of the Universe enthroned in the heavens, to whom even the princes and rulers of humanity seem like grasshoppers. The heavens are God's own tent, the stars God's handiwork. "To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal?" booms the voice of the Holy One. Trumpets. Angel choirs. You get the idea. In my usual irreverence, I am reminded of a scene in the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life in which the chaplain of a prestigious boys' school is leading his charges in "praising the Lord." He prays aloud, "Oh Lord, oooo you are so big, so absolutely huge. Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this our dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery. But you are so strong and, well, just so super. Fantastic. Amen." Champagne, anyone?

By contrast, Mark paints a picture of Jesus in the homeliest of circumstances. After a long dusty day of calling disciples and casting out demons, Jesus, the supposed Son of God, has no where to lay his head. He is, after all, only an itinerant preacher, and still a novice, at that, here in chapter one. So when night falls, Jesus has no choice but to go home with Simon Peter and his brother Andrew to crash on their couch, while James and John curl up on the dirt floor beside him. And, get this, Simon Peter is married... and his mother-in-law lives with them, too. This hardly sounds like the Gospel of Almighty God; more like, throw in a wacky neighbor and you've got a new sitcom for ABC, and a cheesy one, at that. This week, Simon and Andrew bring home a new buddy for a little dinner, only to discover that Simon's mother-in-law is sick as a dog—"Hey, I think there's a hair in my hummus!"—and hilarity ensues!

Fish candy, no doubt about it. So how are we supposed to hold these two images together, the majestic God of the ages, enthroned on high and the homely First Century Palestinian preacher? The truth is, we don't, not well, not often, and neither does the rest of the Church. Most days it's just easier to stick with one or the other. So some of us relate better to God as the power behind the universe, in either classically theistic terms—for instance, a literal king sitting on a literal throne in a literal heaven—or more abstractly, philosophically as the Ground of All Being, as theologian Paul Tillich put it back in the 1950s. And others of us relate better to a strictly human Jesus who is our spiritual best friend, a teacher of wisdom, and a mensch, and nothing more.

Neither view is wrong, but neither is either complete in itself. The problem, of course, is that over the sweep of thousands of years our tradition has tried to keep the lofty and the lowly both under one roof, in one book, at one table. And so the puzzle comes to us from Isaiah and from Mark and from a myriad other places and pages in this crazy mixed-up precious library we call our Bible. But nowhere is the tension drawn so tightly as in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, whom we are encouraged to consider the Christ, the Messiah, the One anointed by God for the salvation of the world.

Flouting every theological and philosophical convention of their own day—and ours, really—our ancestors in faith believed that Jesus was not the almighty God come trick-or-treating disguised as a human being, pretending to be human. Neither was Jesus just "a really great guy," the best and the brightest of us, a human being pretending to divinity. No, in reflecting on their experience of him, the Church early on and over the ages has come to confess that, in some mysterious way, Jesus was one hundred percent human and one hundred percent divine.

That's two hundred percent, you know: a mathematical impossibility, and yet an article of Christian faith. Yet it's not important because it's impossible. It's important because it means something. This mystery is not a boundary beyond which we may not travel, but a doorway through which we do not travel alone. That Jesus, our homely Messiah, is in fact God With Us, sharing our home, our hearth, our table, is a puzzle that by its very ridiculousness draws us deeper into the mystery of our relationship with God and with one another.

Think about it: If God remains high up and far away, the High King of Heaven, what hope do we grasshoppers have if God should simply change God's divine mind and sweep us away? Or similarly, if God remains an abstract principle, a force of nature like gravity or the second law of thermodynamics, what hope do we poor creatures have who live and love and yearn and die? And if Jesus remains a mere mortal, a good man, better than most perhaps, but someone who fought for the right and was killed for it, end-of-story, what hope do we have who gather here in his name all these many years later?

But our tradition hands us this holy Rubik's cube and asks us to keep playing with it, keep turning it over and over in our hearts and minds, trusting that though we may never get all the columns and rows and colors to line up neatly, the exercise itself helps draw us closer to God and one another. So we come here, Sunday after Sunday, turning the prayer wheel of the church one more time around as we ask God to show us what it means for the Messiah of God "who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited," what it means that the Holy One "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form... humbled himself... to the point of death—even death on a cross." That is how the Apostle Paul talked about our homely messiah in his letter to the Philippians. Our United Church of Christ Statement of Faith puts it more succinctly, reminding us that in Jesus, God, the Eternal Spirit, "has come to us and shared our common lot," all of it, the little that's lofty and the lots that lowly, even sharing our death—even death on a cross.

The church over the ages has thrown its hands up in wonder at this mystery—wonder and frustration. And so, yes, over and over again we've settled for one simpler side of the equation of the other. But really, to be a part of the life of a church is to participate in this jumble of the holy and the homely. We dare to believe that God chooses to reveal God's Own Self here among us, among the joys and thanksgivings, the stresses and strains, even the faults and the failings of our all-too-human life together as a community of faith; for, as we all know, though this train may be bound for glory, we're still several stations shy of that goal. But, you see, this is not the tragic flaw that guarantees our failure—we remain so very human, after all. Mystery of Mysteries! We believe that in Jesus, God meets us here in the doorway of our very own home, where we live crowded in with our siblings and our spouses and our children and our sick mothers-in-law all under one roof and on one dirt floor, and the Messiah of God comes in to us to stay with us, to abide with us, to share out common lot and our the simple setting of our table.

It is from this communion that salvation begins to flow. God, the One Holy God, turns from heaven to earth, and suddenly those who are faint are empowered, those who are powerless are strengthened, the weary and exhausted mount up with wings like eagles, they run and are not be weary, they walk and do not faint. Jesus, the face of God turned toward the world in love, comes to us, and the sick are healed and the possessed made whole, first one and then another and another and another. When such mysterious, amazing grace comes to town, the lost are found, the blind are given vision again, wild hearts are tamed, fears are relieved, and the wandering spirits are brought home with rejoicing.

This is the communion we celebrate this morning, the marriage feast of heaven and earth. It's not much of a meal, as feasts go—a little bread, a little grape juice, that's all we supply. But the meager fare is more than made up for by the graciousness of the host. These are the ordinary things of the world, it's true, but it's through such ordinary things, and through such simply, homely people that the Lord God Almighty bends to us to bless us... though, you see, in Jesus, our homely messiah, we understand that God doesn't have to bend at all. The Ground of All Being is here, now, present with us already, with dirt on his face and dust on his sandals and healing in his hands. This is the messiah's table, Jesus' table and thus God's table, and, somehow, in the mystery of faith, it has become our table, too. Come, sit, eat. Comfort food has never tasted so rich.