Mark 1: 1-11
Who are the people God chooses to use? Most of us would answer: great people; gifted people; talented people; holy people. We answer this way because the people in the Bible have been held up to us as icons of virtue—and we know that we are anything but that. Sometimes we even start thinking that our ministers must be “holy people” who can do no wrong. (However, if you are ever close to ministers you’ll soon lose that perspective.) The thought remains that if God uses someone then they must be radically different from the normal person; therefore God cannot use me. Nothing is further from the truth. God is in the business of using normal, ordinary people doing normal, ordinary things that become extraordinary in their impact through his love and power.
Look at this scene of our gospel text: two unnamed disciples are sent to get a donkey from an unnamed owner. The faces in the crowd are nameless, insignificant people just going about whatever it is they are supposed to be doing. If they are disciples then they are following Jesus, something they have done for up to three years and other than a few miracles nothing earth shattering has occurred. The crowd—they are those anonymous souls going about their daily work: buying and selling, doing whatever their livelihood requires, and a parade starts their way so they stop for a few moments to see what the commotion is about. The people ask who this is and the reply comes: “Jesus of Nazareth.”
I can hear their thoughts: “Oh, the prophet from that backwater town. I wonder what he will say this trip.” They were somewhat accustomed to kooks showing up every so often and proclaiming themselves the Messiah, so this is nothing new. They watch the parade pass by and then return to their work, not really knowing the significance of what has transpired.
Though it may bother us to think that our Lord was perceived as insignificant, is not this how God works? Has not God always worked through insignificant people at insignificant places in insignificant times doing insignificant things to accomplish the significant?
- Abram is out minding his own business and God comes and gets him to move to a new country, promising to make him the father of a great nation. Lest we forget, Abram is 75 and childless.
- Moses is a Jew raised as an Egyptian in Pharaoh’s court but is in hiding on the back side of the Negev when God finds him—and a people are set free from slavery.
- David is a small shepherd boy on whom God lays God’s hand on for reasons known only to God—and a kingdom flourishes.
- Mary is a young teenage girl in Nazareth to whom an angel appears—and her life is never the same.
- Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John are carrying on their fishing business, Jesus walks by, and their lives are irrevocably changed.
- Paul is being a proper religious rabbi, i.e., defending God, when Jesus shows up on the Damascus Road. Paul’s life is turned 180 degrees around and so are millions of others for the rest of history.
God always works through the insignificant and unimportant—and does so in ways that are mysterious and wonderful.
Our lives are like that, are they not? We are neither the famous nor the important—at least as far the world is concerned—and yet Jesus continues to show up in our lives at the oddest moments to work his miracle of grace. Day by day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we come to this place and worship, pray, and listen to each other and the Spirit. Day after day, week after week, etc., we go to work, do our jobs, go to our homes, spend time with our families, take our vacations, and literally spend our lives doing the ordinary. Every once in a while, every so often, something dramatic happens, but most of the time we live in the ordinary. I believe, as strange as it may sound, that is a message we need to hear amid the pomp and pageantry of Palm Sunday: Jesus is most often found among the ordinary, among the normal, among the humdrum existence of life. The presence of the Spirit of Christ does not mean that lights will be flashing and bells going off—rather, the Spirit is found in the day to day workings of human life.
Look where people found Jesus in the New Testament: by the Sea of Galilee or walking along a dusty road; at a well at noon-time in Samaria or on a hillside teaching. We find Jesus most when we look for him in the everyday aspects of life. Someone has said that “the secret to life is doing the ordinary in an extra-ordinary way.” I believe that to be not only true, but the essence of the gospel. When we know the love of God, when we have been touched and transformed at the core of our being, then the ordinary becomes extra-ordinary.
Do you remember the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus? Mr. Holland is a would-be composer who turns to teaching in his early years in order to pay the bills. As happens to many, he winds up teaching for most of his adult life until just before retirement his position is eliminated as surplus due to budget cuts in the school district. On his final day at work he is summoned to the auditorium where, to his amazement, hundreds of his former students are gathered to express his appreciation and to play his opus, his life-long work which had never been performed in public. Here he was, an ordinary man doing ordinary things and feeling like he was a failure. However, through those ordinary things something extra-ordinary was happening: lives were being touched and people changed as he went about his daily life. The ordinary became extra-ordinary.
In “As You Like It” Shakespeare said that each of us, in our lives, “play many parts.” True, but those parts are mostly bit parts, small roles. For instance, of the 12 apostles of Jesus how many could you name? How many are known apart from the lists in the gospels? Other than the big three: James, John, and Simon Peter, we hear virtually nothing of the others. Even the apostles were ordinary people playing bit parts, but in so doing they were part of a movement of God that became the watershed of human history.
How could Jesus have accepted those accolades that day all the while knowing that by Friday the “Hallelujahs” would turn to “Crucify him?” Why did Jesus accept these praises and cheers? He knew that he was coming to Jerusalem to die; he made no secret of that to his disciples. Further, Jesus was not one to seek public attention or acclaim. Could it be that Jesus accepted this because he knew of the “ordinariness” of life? Could it be that Jesus saw that for these this moment would be one that, after the resurrection, they would look back on and know that God had been with them? Jesus saw that they would remember that day when the Messiah had come by and they had thrown their cloak or waved a palm branch—and the ordinariness of life would be transformed through memory into an extraordinary occasion of the love and grace of God.
God has a way of showing up in the most unexpected of ways and at the most unexpected times—and in so doing he graces our ordinary lives with the extraordinary. A wedding ceremony—and how many have I done or you attended—not a usually emotional or moving service save for the families involved—and yet there are moments when the Spirit shows up and the service is graced with love beyond belief. A funeral service—done everyday—and yet there are moments when the Spirit shows up in ways that are unexpected and grace is bestowed.
A simple meal with family or friends becomes a special moment as we share together the stuff of our lives—and God is present. A gesture by a neighbor, a visit to a shut-in friend, a helping hand to one who needs it, and before we know it God has been present and our lives are transformed. How is it that those disciples on that road to Emmaus put it when they realized that they had been walking with the Risen Christ? “Did not our hearts burn within us?” Ordinary moments made extraordinary by the presence of Christ.
Some of you are sitting there and saying, “Wait just a minute. I’ll agree that my life is ordinary, but don’t give me any of that ‘extraordinary’ stuff. My life is just plain boring, as boring as vanilla ice cream. I’ve never had anything extraordinary happen to me.” That is the problem. Ordinary and boring are not synonyms. When we speak of ourselves and our lives as ordinary, we mean that we are just normal human people. We’re not necessarily any smarter, better looking, more talented, or richer than others. It does not mean that our lives are ignored by God. The secret to living an extra-ordinary life as an ordinary person is to look at life and moments in extra-ordinary ways. When we pause and look at our lives we can see moments pregnant with all sorts of possibilities that we overlooked in the time of their occurrence. It is in the eyes of the seer that the ordinary becomes the extra-ordinary as we perceive the presence of God.
There are two inherent dangers in being a person who wants to accomplish something: one is that we will think that the “big event” is what life is about and so we will ignore all else in trying to achieve that moment. When that moment has passed, then we will realize how shallow is that approach to life. The other danger is that we will develop “routine” lives which have no hills or valleys—everything is the same: flat. When we ignore the presence of God in the ordinary of life then it will become flat, boring, and routine. These are the persons who die at forty and are not buried until they are seventy-five.
In December or 1944 the German army launched an unexpected attack. In what was known as the Battle of the Bulge, a deep wedge was driven into the Allied lines. James Jones, in World War II, says:
No one of these little road junctions stands could have had a profound effect on the German drive. But hundreds of them, impromptu little battles at nameless bridges and unknown crossroads, had an effect of slowing enormously the German impetus ... These little die-hard ‘one-man-stands,’ alone in the snow and fog without communications, would prove enormously effective out of all proportion to their size. James Jones, World War II, p.205
In the little battles of life lies the secret to success—and to seeing God. Thomas Carlyle wrote: “The tragedy of life is not so much what people suffer, but rather what they miss.” When we fail to see the importance of the ordinary and of what God is doing in the ordinary stuff of our lives, then we are missing the presence of the Almighty and the essence of life is gone, vanished like a vapor on the breeze of the moment.
Ordinary people—that’s who we are, just ordinary people living faithful lives and in the middle of this ordinary existence God shows up—and we are ordinary no more.
