This sermon was never preached to a congregation. I wrote it for practice for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity 2021, and preached it on Zoom to my friend.
Gospel: Mark 6:1-13
Old Testament: Ezekiel 2:1-15
Epistle: II Corinthians 12:2-10
Two big things happened to me this week. I moved back to the North West, and I wasn’t ordained deacon.
On Wednesday, I loaded all of my belongings into a van, drove them to Liverpool, and unloaded them again into my new house.
It has been a bittersweet return; I’m not here to do what I had hoped. This would have been my first sermon as a deacon, preached to some congregation in Liverpool. Instead I’m just speaking down the phone to my friend, and we are the only two people who will ever hear this.
Moving house is often said to be one of the most stressful things you can do in your life, but we speak much more fondly of homecoming. This is what has provided the sweetness in my move to the North West, and is an experience we share with Christ in today’s gospel reading.
The first time I returned to Widnes after I’d transitioned, I was nervous. I met my friend for lunch, and as we walked through town I was keeping an eye out for people I knew, worried that they would use my old name or be unkind to me. My anxiety, however, turned out to be misplaced. When I saw people I knew, I introduced myself with my name, explaining that I was a woman, and they began to use it immediately. The people of Widnes were quick to accept what I had said.
For Jesus, his experience in Nazareth was more similar to what I was expecting to happen in Widnes. Neither of us had fundamentally changed in our time away from our hometown, but our presentation had somewhat. In Mark’s gospel, there are a lot of things that don’t make sense without the interpretive key: “Jesus is God.” If you go into the text thinking that Jesus is anything other than God, it is a baffling story. In Mark’s gospel today we read about Jesus presenting as God, in a similar way, I arrived in my hometown presenting as a woman.
In Widnes, people were quick to believe and to adapt. Here I was with a claim: “I am a woman.” which was immediately assumed to be accurate. In Nazareth however, the people were clinging too tightly to the picture of Mary’s son, and didn’t have the faith in him to believe his divinity. Can we learn to approach God with the faith of a Widnesian? Can we allow our unchanging, permanent pictures of God to be changed through encounter? It is easy to mistake an unchanging, permanent picture of God, for a picture of the unchanging, permanent God. How can we hold these pictures lightly, ready to be informed by our encounter?
Last Saturday was the worst day of my life. It was the day on which I wasn’t ordained deacon.
We are all called by God and I, much like Ezekiel, heard that call clearly and loudly. For a period of four years, I worked with the church to discern what God was calling me to, and in the last year of that process it became clear that I was being called to Cambridge to study theology and to be trained and formed for the office and work of a Deacon and Priest in the Church of God.
As anyone who has ever learned anything about God will be aware, to study God involves a great deal of studying the self. The God who indwells me is so intimately connected with my self that I have been unable to learn anything about God without finding my self shaped and formed in the process. When we allow that unchanging, permanent picture to be changed, we hone and clarify our own pictures of our very selves.
When my picture of myself was clear enough for me to realize that I am, in fact, a woman, I came out. At this point I, like Ezekiel, realized that I was called to a stubborn and obstinate people. In its desire for conservatism, tradition, and stability, my home had perceived a change in me, and had changed around me.
Last Saturday, I watched my very best friend be ordained deacon on the day that I would have been ordained had all gone to plan. It was painful to remember the abuse, and to see my best friend become a servant of the very institution that had perpetrated it. The most painful thing though, the thorn in my flesh, was the call. I still hear, as clearly as ever, God’s Ezekiel-call to me. I can see all the damage that has been done to me by following that voice, and I can see all the pain still to come. Last Saturday, I prayed a prayer I have never prayed before. “God, leave me alone.”
Here’s the thing about God though: God will never leave you alone.
God will never leave you alone.
God will never leave you alone.
If that is comforting for you to hear, then good. Hold on tight to it.
If that is painful for you to hear, then even better. Hear it again: God will never leave you alone.
As St. Paul noticed: God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness.
Perhaps an easier picture is this: when we understand our own weakness, when we see the frailty of our picture of God and of our self, when we come to God with the faith of a Widnesian: that is when we can boast. That is when we are most able to see through those gappy pictures, to encounter the word which was made flesh and moved into our hometown, that is where God is perfect in our weakness.
When we are truly broken, when we are truly fed up, when we just want it all to be over, when we just want God to fuck off: that is where God’s strength is perfected. I don’t understand it. I don’t have a handy guide for how to find or see God’s perfected strength in those moments. It is a mystery, but it happens.
I leave you with this. Know it, especially when it hurts:
God will never leave you alone.