Will you pray with me?  Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

Noted author, blogger, and Baptist preacher Gordon Atkinson tells the story of his friend Roger.  He says that Roger is a “good man, a hard worker and a serious and gentle Christian”[1], and there will be many good things to say about him when he dies one day.  But there is something about Roger that not many people know, a thing that not many who know Roger would, apparently, ever expect or suspect of him, and having learned it himself one day, Atkinson thinks the secret should be made known. 

It’s about the ranch Roger owns in South Texas, about 40 miles north of the Mexican border.  He does not live on the ranch most of the time, but spends a couple of weekends a month there in a small, simple house.  The secret that Atkinson wants you and the world to know is this: at the end of each weekend that he spends there, as he is leaving for home, Roger does an odd thing.  He piles canned food on the kitchen table, closes the door—but leaves it unlocked—, and hangs a sign on it.  The sign says, in Spanish, “Please turn off the water and close the door when you leave.  Thank you.”

You see, it is hot in South Texas, especially in the summer.  The people and animals breathe great sighs of relief when the day ends and the world finally cools down to the low 90s.  The terrain is huge and unforgiving, a desert covered with thorny brush and cactus.  Shade and water are rare, human habitations few and far between. 

It is a barrier more effective than any wall, and one thousands and thousands of Mexicans attempt to cross each year in search of work and wealth in the United States.  Trusting to guides they pay to show them safe paths, or to the stories and hand-drawn maps of friends and relatives who made the trip before, or simply to rumor, they head out across the bushy desert and triple-digit heat, often unaware of the true distances and challenges they must conquer, and desperate to the point of recklessness and bravery.

In 2004, the US border patrol captured and sent home 1.2 million illegal immigrants along the US’s southern border.  There’s no way of knowing, for us or for the families they leave behind, how many more are claimed by starvation or thirst or exposure and die gasping and all unnoticed in the desert. 

So, because not many people know about it, because he will not tell you about it himself, and because you probably wouldn’t suspect it no matter how well acquainted with him you were, Atkinson wants you to know that whenever his friend Roger leaves his ranch at the end of a weekend, he puts food on the table, leaves the door unlocked, and puts a sign out in Spanish asking, “Please turn off the water and close the door when you leave.”  Atkinson wants you to know that whenever Roger goes back to his ranch, “…the door is always closed, the water is never running and the food is always gone.”  And he wants you to know that he believes that Roger’s house is talked about in homes south of the border and north of it, that it is marked “salvation” on thousands of little hand-drawn maps, and that there are God-only-knows how many people in the world that are not dead because of his unassuming friend Roger.

In today’s story from Mark, Jesus has been wandering around the countryside for some time, gathering disciples, teaching, healing, performing great deeds of power.  He suddenly shows up back in his hometown, goes to the local synagogue, and begins to preach in the way he had done to such great effect in other towns in the area.  Here, the people see what he’s doing, hear the tone of authority in which he teaches, know some of the deeds of power he’s accomplished, and they are astounded at him.  But, here among the home folks in the place he’s from, the people are astounded not by his miracles or his wisdom.  Here, in the place where he was suckled and weaned and raised and educated, the people are astounded rather by just how much bigger than his britches this particular local boy has become. 

You see, these people have lived with Jesus his whole life.  They knew him when he was a baby, and when he was a boy, when he was a teenager and when he entered his twenties.  They know him now, or they think they do.  These are his family by birth and by association, and they know Jesus too well, too intimately, to be able to easily wrap their heads around the powerful preacher before them.  They were there for all the mistakes and childish triumphs of his growing up.  They know his foibles and clay feet.  They were there for his adolescence, God help him, for zits and ill-proportioned limbs and mood swings and all the rest.  One can hardly blame them if that’s what they still see standing before them, even if the awkwardness of adolescence is long gone.

Commentators and theologians tend to purse their lips and shake their fingers at the townsfolk in this story, shocked as Jesus at the people’s lack of faith.  But then again, the commentators and theologians themselves grew up not knowing how Jesus was as a little kid, but how he turned out to be as an adult, and none of them ever changed his diapers.  I think this story is wonderful, for I think it’s about just how human our God chose to be.  Anyone who ever grew up in one small place or among one group of people, then went away to college or work or whatever, found big new ideas and dreams and abilities, and then went home again, has had such an experience.  Everybody loves it when a hometown boy makes good; nobody likes a hometown boy telling them how to fix themselves. 

I think this is a story about people who love Jesus reminding him that he really is human and has shared a human life with them.  You see, it’s the job of the people at home to keep you real, remind you of where you came from, and that no matter how big and powerful, how smart or famous you are, even if it turns out that you’re God, somebody still had to change your diapers when you were little.

Still, the commentators are right, in a way.  The hometown people in the story do fail Jesus.  Not by reminding him, in the way only family and longtime friends can, of his frailty and humanity; those reminders are what going home is all about.   They don’t fail him by reminding him that he is finally one of them; they fail him by not expecting enough of themselves.  They fail him by treating him as one of them, and then assuming that because he’s one of them, deeds of power are beyond his reach.  They fail him by not remembering that as often as not, it is through the familiar ones, the related ones, the ones about whom we think we know all there is to know, that God’s deeds, great and small, are done.  They fail him by not expecting God to show up in regular folks, by not expecting miracles from everyone around them. 

Now, I know all about hometowns.  I come from a tiny one in Upstate New York.  It’s the kind of place where the roads and the people that live on them still have the same name.  I want to tell you a story about a man who lives in my town.  I’ll call him John, since that is his name.  Now, John was born in this town, and has lived there for most of his life.  I don’t know John very well, but his family are nominally members of the church in which I grew up, so I can vaguely remember him doing jobs around the church building when I was little.  He and my father served in the volunteer fire department together.  Though he was always friendly enough to me, I remember that he frightened me just a little when I was very young; he had a couple of missing teeth in front, and tattoos all up and down his arms at a time when only bikers or other scary characters had them.

I got over being scared of John a long time ago.  In fact, up until last summer, far from being scared of him, I would have told you that I definitely had his number: an OK guy, in a small-town kind of way.  Rough around the edges.  Not much education, probably.  Broken marriage in his past.  Probably drank too much, since most of the guys my dad served with in the Fire Department did.  If I were feeling generous, I might have said he was a bit of a victim to all the forces that bear down hard on those in small, poor country towns these days.  I would have said that I could name you a hundred people with the exact same story, and in my mind I would have been writing off most of them as I did. 

Then, last summer, I was home doing a wedding for a family member.  The wedding was out in the country, and happened to be taking place in the backyard of the house in which John grew up and next door to which John had built a house for himself some years ago—I told you it’s a small town.  John had agreed to let us use part of his backyard for the ceremony.  Once, during a break in the wedding preparation action, I was wandering back from having visited the horses in a nearby field when my attention was caught by a large pole standing in a part of John’s backyard where I hadn’t been yet.  When I got closer, I saw that the pole was actually a 10-foot-tall cross.  To the left of it was what looked like a little lean-to about four feet tall; to the right, a huge, roundish rock.  In front of this curious grouping stood a small plaque on which was carved these words: “God tends to confound, astonish, and flabbergast.  A Bethlehem stable, a Roman cross, an empty garden tomb.  We might as well reconcile ourselves to the fact that God’s truth often turns up in ways we don’t expect.”  And under these words, their attribution: Sue Monk Kidd.

Now, by way of confession, I must tell you that a quote from the feminist author of the bestselling book The Secret Life of Bees engraved in the backyard, surrounded by a little stable, a stone rolled away from a tomb, and a cross was not what I expected from John.  As I stood there in thought and not a little wonder, John came walking up to me, and so I asked him about it.  “I did it,” he said.  “I saw that quote somewhere and it just hit me like a ton of bricks.  I think it’s true; I’ve been there myself.  So I built this stuff, and I put it here, where I can see it when I look out my kitchen window or have coffee on the porch in the morning.  I did it to praise God.” 

Later that day, I snuck over and stood under John’s kitchen window to see his view.  The window faces directly east to the monument; beyond that, a small pasture and then a huge, wide, deep green valley, and then the horizon.  I pictured John starting every day with a cup of coffee in his tattooed hands, gazing out at his monument of praise, Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection lined up there with the first rays of the sun blazing across the green valley behind them.

And I was astounded at the largeness of John’s spirit. 

The kid they watched grow from the time he was a baby returns from abroad, and turns out, against nearly everybody’s expectations, to be God’s chosen one.  Gordon Atkinson’s utterly normal friend Roger turns out to have been quietly saving lives in the desert for years.  And John, good ole John, well, it turns he has a capacity for beauty and praise vast enough to be called a miracle.

So, I want you to know that there’s a plaque in a backyard way out in the country in Upstate New York that says, “God tends to confound, astonish, and flabbergast….We might as well reconcile ourselves to the fact that God’s truth often turns up in ways—and I would add, in very familiar people—we don’t expect.”  Amen.

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[1] Christian Century Vo. 123, No. 7. 04 April, 2006.  Gordon Atkinson, “A Thousand Little Maps”, pp. 9-11.