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Can Anything Good Come out of Nazareth?

CAN ANYTHING GOOD COME OUT OF NAZARETH?

TEXT: JOHN 1:43-46 

INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE

As most of you know that I have just returned from an 9-day tour of Israel with a group of clergy from Lexington and surrounding towns. Several of us had to preach sermons soon after our return-a fact that made me glad I was not Jewish since Rabbi Jaffe, our leader, had to step into his pulpit about 3 hours after our return. I had a hard enough time getting any thoughts together in a full day and ½. In spite of the fact that all of us were joshing about writing our sermons on the trip, nobody seemed to have come up with much by the time we were climbing on the bus for the trip from Logan to Lexington. The vacant facial expressions and half-closed eyes were testimonies not to inspiration but exhaustion.

I had to give our secretary, Diane, a worship bulletin in advance and came up with the somewhat facetious title taken from the Gospel of John, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" It is from one of the stories about Jesus calling his disciples.

Jesus Calls Philip and Nathanael ~ JOHN 1:43-46
43The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, "Follow me."
44Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. 45Philip found Nathanael and told him, "We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote-Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."
46"Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?" Nathanael asked. 
 "Come and see," said Philip.

Can anything good come from Nazareth? Quite disparaging of Jesus' home town. Nazareth was the boonies, a small town in the Galilee-a backwater, the sticks.* Not really Messiah country. Although in the U.S. we're attracted to the outsider-we'd like that Jesus was from outside the beltway-that's not the way they saw it in those days. The center of learning and tradition and leadership was Jerusalem.

So, that's the context. In this brief vignette, we're set up for one of the central themes of the biblical story-God comes to us in unexpected ways-a stuttering Moses, a still small voice in the midst of a storm, a child born to a peasant family. God is full of surprises.
Using Nazareth as a symbol for Israel, I thought I'd use the question to ask myself what good came out of my experience there and to share just a bit of that with you today. Surprises abounded.

FIRST, GENEROSITY
The most obvious good thing about this Israel trip was that it was underwritten by anonymous Jewish philanthropists. Eighteen clergy or para-clergy were flown to Israel, put up in fine hotels or a modern kibbutz, and had all of our meals taken care of. We paid a token $500. One family from Temple Isaiah donated about 85% of the cost because they believed in their Rabbi's dream-that this would be a way to introduce a range of religious leaders to Israel. The plan is that we will be drawing on this experience and interpreting it for our own faith communities and that we will continue to process and deepen this experience with one another. While I'm sure the donors wanted us to come away with a greater appreciation and sympathy for Israel, it was decidedly not a propaganda trip. They knew that we'd be meeting with Palestinian leaders and hearing multiple viewpoints-most, even the Jews, not sympathetic to Israeli hard-liners.

Another family at Temple Isaiah wanted us to be able to keep a written account of our trip and presented each one of us with a beautiful leather journal on the day we left.

A daily manifestation of generosity was Rabbi Jaffe's kindly attention to each traveler. It's as though Israel gives him a shot of adrenalin; he was inexhaustible in his attentiveness to our needs-from shopping for camera batteries for someone, to taking another to a clinic for a diagnostic test, to supplying huge bags of noshes for the bus rides. "You've got to try this special Israeli sesame bread!" "This place is known for the best falafel!" "Only in Israel can you get chocolate bars with pop rocks embedded in them. Try them, you'll like them!" Oh, did we eat! It's a good thing we walked for miles every day.

The group was generous to one another too; especially in honoring the theological differences among us. We talked honestly about our faith and discovered enormous variation in how we interpreted the sites we were seeing or the political speakers we heard. But the watchword was respect.

SECOND, AMBIGUITY
I thought that I'd come home with a much clearer picture of how to address the Israeli/Palestinian issue. Far from it.

One of our speakers put it this way. An American scholar came to Israel to study the situation. For a week he toured the country, went to settlements, Palestinian refugee camps, and talked to members of the Knesset and Hamas. He came back to the states and wrote two long opinion pieces and a book. Then he spent a month in the region, learning more about its complexities. He came back and wrote a single short article. Later, he went back and lived in Israel for year. After that, he never wrote another thing.

We heard a panel of three people representing several factions-a Palestinian Muslim, a Jewish Israeli, and a Christian Palestinian citizen of Israel. One of them said, "We don't want to be part of the problem, we want to be part of the way forward." Did you catch that? What were you expecting him to say? "We don't want to be part of the problem we want to be part of the ..... yeah, solution! Nobody we heard talked about solutions-not activists, not military people, not scholars. Not even the colonel who was responsible for designing and building the looming barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Nobody claims to be able to fix it. They are willing to sit with temporary measures and see what unfolds.

I thought that this was an especially valuable lesson for us as we face our election. Contrary to what we have been hearing during the campaign, neither candidate is going to be a quick fix. No matter who is elected, there will be no easy solutions. Will we be able to muster the patience displayed by some Israelis and Palestinians? Will we hold our judgment and anger if we don't get what we want right away? I hope so.

FINALLY, A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
Of course, the Holy Land is a place of pilgrimage where people come to be touched by God, to experience awe. You watch as people kneel down to kiss the slab of rock where they say Jesus' body was anointed for burial, you see people lighting candles with tears in their eyes at the Church of the Nativity, men and women lost in prayer at the Temple wall.

My deepest spiritual response did not come at a Christian pilgrimage site-these have been over-ritualized and controlled by rigid sects or zealous tour guides. Many of them are desecrated by the rivalry and conflict between opposing Christian denominations that hold pieces of them. The infighting among these groups is disgraceful. And the grand and flamboyant structures built over the sites are dampers to the imagination. It doesn't look anything like it might have in Jesus' time. The manger should be in a barn or a cave on the side of a hill, right?
No-o-o, it's in the lower level of a cathedral all gussied up with golden chandeliers, silk hangings, and enough ornate marble to make Leona Helmsley swoon.

By far, the most spiritual place in Israel for me was Yad Vashem-the Holocaust memorial. Here suffering was not covered over and glorified. Here we saw the cruelty visited upon the people who were Jesus' own kin. Here we came face to face with human brutality and also courage. One of our presidential candidates visited the Yad Vashem this year; here is what he wrote in the guest book:

"At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man's potential for great evil but also our capacity to rise from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here and know this history so they can add their voices to proclaim ‘never again.' And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us and who have become symbols of the human spirit."

I believe that God is still speaking. We still hear the invitation, as Nathanael did, to "Come and see." God continues to reveal truth and meaning to us in our life experiences. I definitely heard God still speaking through the people of Israel, my colleagues on the trip, and the tragic images and haunting voices of Yad Vashem.

* The province of Galilee was where Jesus did most of his teaching and ministry. We took a boatride on the same small sea that he did and I brought home a sample from it to add to our baptism water. I also filled a bag with small stones from the beach in Tiberias-a place Jesus might have walked. (My suitcase was heavy on the way home.) There is a basket of these stones on the end table of the Sun Room. Pick one up for a keepsake if you like.