This Might Be All About Ministry Trauma (Mark 6:1-13)

A decade ago, when I read this text, I saw a light packing list. In commissioning the Disciples to go out into the mission field, Jesus tells them to take basically nothing – no food, money, or extra clothes. One need only hit the road in a decent pair of sandals, and I did essentially that. I traveled light, racking up academic and ministry experience in a dozen countries and living out of a messenger bag and a backpack. I only needed the basics: a bed, food, semi-reliable electricity, and an Internet connection. In that season, God took me on a grand adventure. I lived in one of the poorest neighborhoods in South America, a small, rural Kenyan village, Oxford University, Venice Beach in LA, and a string of pilgrims’ hostiles in Spain. I attended two sessions of the House of Lords, preached a sermon to a fledgling United Methodist Church meeting in community center in Russia, and smashed my foot to pieces helping run a evangelism conference outside of Lima, Peru. When Jesus sends the Disciples out, I only had eyes for get out and don’t take much, and I glazed over the rest of it.

At some point, that shifted. Now, I only see an instruction for what to do, when you get rejected. I suspect that trauma from the past six years of ministry has changed my scriptural vision. In my first six months at Grace Church in Palestine, I watched 50% of the church walk out the door either because they experienced trauma at the hands of the previous pastor or because they wished that I could be a more moral version of the previous pastor. The next four years of holding that church together and rebuilding it at least twice shifted something within me. The past two years at Servants of Christ banging my head against finding sustainability and containing growth on one side while watching another side whither sticks with me too.

Also, I keep looking around and seeing fewer and fewer people that I started with. The best sermon writer that I knew in seminary, who could treat a sermon like poetry and whose ability with words remains aspiration for me, left the ministry and the church and has found peace running an amazing online yarn business. The best church planter that I’ve ever encountered who built a church so cool and interesting and life giving that I’m still chasing it, left the ministry a few years ago to pursue other projects. The best pastoral carer from my leadership program cohort, who can naturally build caring relationships without a sense of prying or obligation, lost out in the game of musical chairs that ministry can be and ended up without a pastor job that could meet his family’s needs. He teaches high school now. The top expert in Methodist polity that I’ve ever had the joy of working with, who innately knew how it all fit together and how to navigate even the system’s most arcane corners, just left the ministry to become a financial planner. I reflect on all of their stories and my own experiences in the past few years, and Christ’s words of commissioning resound in a whole other key. I hear only the admonition to shake the dust from my sandals, when they don’t want to hear you.

The writers of the Revised Common Lectionary help accentuate this. I usually pull my Scriptures for the week from the Revised Common Lectionary, a standard, three year cycle of texts shared across many protestant denominations. Each year travels through Matthew, Mark, or Luke and includes the vast majority of each Gospel across the year. However, in looking at Mark 6, they didn’t have to put the story of Jesus commissioning the Disciples with the story of Jesus getting rejected by his hometown in the same lection. Mark puts the stories right next to each other. The way Matthew structures his Gospel, the story of the commissioning sits in the same chapter as my life verse, Matthew 10:36, “One’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” However, looking closely at Mark’s structure, we get a big paragraph break between hometown rejection and the commissioning. One could approach them as separate thoughts, but the Revised Common Lectionary chose to directly link the commissioning of the Disciples to the story of Jesus getting utterly derailed in ministry by a crowd that also insults his mother. It creates a Gospel lesson that essentially has Christ saying, "This just happened to me. It may happen to you. Now, get out there.”

It took a decade of preaching for that to sink in for me, though. I’ve preached many sermons on this text, and its companions in Matthew and Luke, as, “God provides. Don’t worry. Get out there. I did it. It was great.” I would illustrate them with plenty of stories about encountering God during my traveling light years. I still preach those sermons, sometimes. They still hold true.

However, I find myself reflecting more about the nature of success in the Kingdom of God and how hard kingdom building is. I find comfort in Christ’s struggles in ministry. As a member of the Trinity, he contains the essence and power of God and lived entirely without fault. It still didn’t always go perfectly for him. Prior to the past few years, I never thought about this aspect of Christ’s life and ministry. Now, I can’t get these scenes of struggle and failure out of my mind. They fill me with hope because they help properly set the size of the problem. Even Jesus didn’t simply collect a mountain of wins.

To me, this is the power of the incarnation, of seeing God at a human scale. Christ, in encountering prejudice and misdirected freewill, has the same experience as the rest of us. In reality, the full arc of Scripture often tells of humanity rejecting God, but it all becomes more relatable, when God is a man having the sexual propriety of his mother questioned by his home congregation. When the crowd says, “Mary’s son” rather than “Joseph’s son,” one can read it as an assault on Mary’s purity. Watching that happen to Jesus means watching that happen to God and places us in great company, when inevitably, it happens to us as well.