I am better at it now than I used to be,
but early on after I was ordained I found it unnerving to preach when someone I
grew up with was in the congregation. A
sister, my mother, other relatives, a childhood friend… if I made eye contact
from the pulpit with one of these people I felt like the king when he realized
his new clothes were non-existent. They
see me as more than who I am, they see me as who I was. And what I was – like all of us – was a kid
who thought like a child, acted like a child, reasoned like a child, and pretty
much did little to hint at the adult I would become one day.
One of my childhood pals has grown up to be
a very successful and accomplished OBGYN in the Akron area. Years ago he delivered the children of
another one of longtime friends.
Remembering how we used to play together, I once asked the father,
“Wasn’t it strange having Cliff as the doctor who delivered your wife’s babies?” “Not really,” my friend answered. Lets just say he has more ability to live the
present than I do.
My college floormates kept up a newsletter
for several years after graduation.
Writing about our new careers was very popular. An electrical engineer employed by the
military noted he could not say much about his work other than it was his job
to make sure if a person used a remote control to open a garage door the device
did not launch a nuclear missile from a silo in a field a mile away. It never occurred to me such a thing might
happen and even more unnerving… a guy I goofed around with in college was tasked
with making sure it didn’t.
I wonder what Billy Gates’ 1st
Grade teacher thought of his future held.
As they played house did Nancy Pelosi’s four-year-old friends ever
imagine one day she we preside over the House of Representatives? Did Michael Curry’s siblings see in him a
person who would preach at the wedding of a prince with all the world watching?
A part of me sympathizes with the old guard
of Nazareth we read about in today’s Gospel lesson. For nearly twenty-five years Jesus lived
among them as he grew from a boy into a man.
Through it all it appears he did little to distinguish himself. There is some biblical evidence he was
intelligent and spiritually insightful at a young age, but to be sure he gave
no indication he could be a future king in the ilk of David.
I learned two things about Jesus’ hometown
when I visited the Holy Land last September.
First, it was not large 2,000 years ago, a village of only about fifty
houses. What Jesus did every day as a
child was known by all. They might have
accepted him as an adequate carpenter, but seeing him as the fulfillment of an
important passage of Scripture would have been a stretch.
And second, I learned the village is
situated at the crest of a very step and rocky hill several hundred feet above
the Jordon plain. When the people he was
raised among determine to throw Jesus off what the text calls “the brow of a
hill”, this is not Jack and Jill falling down a gently sloping, grass-covered
hill (as I had imagined). Had the synagogue
members succeeded, Jesus would have come to a different kind of bloody end with
every bone in his body crushed on rocks below.
Today’s reading is about more than the
self-doubt I used to experience preaching to family and friends. It is more than an inability to shift from
what I knew of a person when he was a child to what he is capable of as an
adult. It is the deepest kind of
rejection imaginable. It is people
saying, “We knew you then, we see you now, and we do not believe in you!”
We do not believe in you. I suspect none of us has ever been told this
so bluntly, but surely, at one time or another, each of you has been brought
down a peg or two by a doubter. And the
longer a person has known you the more rungs in the ladder you have to climb to
rise above the limitations he or she has for you.
Thea Easterby
describes herself as a blogger who is passionate about growing and helping
others do the same. In one post she
writes about why people may not believe in you, no matter what your dream might
be. First, she writes, after learning
about what you hope to do, they may react negatively simply because they do not
get it. In most cases, our grandmothers
and great-grandmothers who aspired to be anything more than a homemaker met
with strong resistance. Striving for
anything beyond the status quo gets the same reaction today it did then.
Next, Easterby
observes people will not believe in you if they think you don’t have the skills
or personality to succeed. It seems to
me, the people most likely to underestimate you are those who have just met you
and those who have known you the longest.
One group doesn’t know you and what you are capable of doing, while the
other thinks it knows everything about you.
And finally, there
are people who will discourage you because they don’t want you to succeed. Perhaps they are afraid of change or worry
about how it will affect them if you ‘make it’ or maybe they are jealous or only
live to say “I told you so”. Maybe they
failed to achieve their dreams in life and knowingly or unknowingly do not want
to see you achieve what they did not or could not.
Jesicca Wildfire
is a writer who describes herself as being a “twisted professor and cheerleader
of the apocalypse.” She notes how, when
given an award or some form of recognition, most people thank their loved ones
and those who have helped them along the way.
But she holds we owe a debt of gratitude to those who lit a fire in us
because they never thought we would amount to anything. She writes, “The first person to do that [for
me] was my kindergarten teacher, Miss. Grimm. She told my parents I’d probably wind up as a
stripper or worse.” Can you imagine!
While people
like this motivated Wildfire to work hard to achieve her goals, she states she had
to learn how to give up the fantasy of throwing her success back in their
faces. “I’d like nothing better than to
show up at my old elementary school and do a striptease for Miss. Grimm, then
flash my doctoral diploma and say, ‘psyche!’ But she probably doesn’t remember me at all.”
The truth of my
experience is I have never known a successful person whose main motivation was
to get over on his detractors. Those who
achieve do so because they believe in their vision and they believe in
themselves. Their vision is never
something as little as to be bigger than their critics. Jesus did not go around the region of Galilee
doing miracles to show up the people of his hometown. He did what he did because he believed in a
vision he called the Kingdom of God.
I believe God
plants a dream in every soul. This dream
is what we refer to as a calling. It is
not just priests who are called by God.
One of my childhood buddies was called to be an OB. The father of the children he deliverd is a
talented graphic illustrator highly regarded in his field. Still another prevents a doomsday scenario
every time I change the channel on my TV.
“We don’t
believe in you.” Jesus would go on to
many crushing experiences – Judas’ betrayal, Peter’s denial, Thomas’ doubts –
but I wonder if this first rejection may just have been the most difficult of
them all precisely because it is first and it comes from those who go back with
him all the way to the beginning. But
Jesus learns how to shake off the dust on his sandals, as we all must do,
because his dream, his vision, his purpose, his mission, his calling is too
important to abandon to the doubters and skeptics.
What is your
calling? Are you pursuing it or have you
allowed your detractors to cause you to forsake it? And what about others in your life,
especially your children, grandchildren, and young people you know? How do you encourage them to discern their
calling? In what ways do you guide and support
them as they pursue it? How do you
discourage and hold them back? In what
ways are you saying, “I believe in you”?
