Jesus’s return home in Mark reminds me of the movie musical, The Greatest Showman. God’s dream is made, not by or for the powerful, but by the misfits for all of us. And for it to work, we must all have a part to play.
Jesus and “The Greatest Showman”
Proper 5B | Mark 3:20-35
“You can’t go home again.”
That’s what they say. But what they really mean is you can go to the place home was, but you’re not going to find it there. It’s gone.
You know that’s what Jesus is thinking when he goes home. I’m not going to find it here. And we know he’ll be right.
So we need to find home. And Jesus will even supply the answer. His answer, anyway. Here, wherever we are. And these apostles are my family.
You know this is a kick in the gut to his mother and his brothers and sisters.
But really, does anything about this hometown feel like home?
What Jesus left behind
What Jesus left behind was every hometown. A place forever gone, forever present, and never real. Always a place of a past masquerading as a present and divorced from its own future.
And what he finds is definitely not a home. No hugs, welcome homes or atta boys! But a crowd of desperation and pain. If Galilee is the birthplace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the home he returns to may as well be the city of Rome.
This isn’t the home of God’s dream for the world. It’s a horror show. If home is where the heart is, then this place is the butt.
All these people surround Jesus, call him crazy, force him around so he can’t even take a break [the dude just wants a sandwich!]. His family, his own mother(!) tries to hold him down, force him to be different. He’s crazy!
This world Jesus enters isn’t God’s world; even when it’s full of god-fearing people.
The Freak Show
In The Greatest Showman, a collection of misfits and runaways make a home of a freak show. People who couldn’t show their faces in public become the voice of every outcast:
I am not a stranger to the dark
“Hide away,” they say
“‘Cause we don’t want your broken parts”
I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars
“Run away,” they say
“No one’ll love you as you are”
Lettie Lutz, the bearded lady sings for all these literal freaks and geeks who society casts aside during the day and pays tickets to see perform at night.
The selfish desires, the fear from freaks in society, they’re treated like God’s mistakes and punished by men for just being who they are in public.
And of course, the high society, attending the finest theaters and performances couldn’t possibly share the same room with this riff raff. No, they’re the abomination. God’s mistake.
But Lettie’s not done
“But I won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious”
She knows what it’s like to be alone. But now she knows what its like to have a home. What a real home looks like. Because she finally has one. And this is a treasure worth protecting.
That’s Just Crazy
While The Greatest Showman is a historical fiction about the circus, it is also the story of love, of crazy, of home. And it can cast a reflection on the world we know against the one Jesus dreams.
It reveals a world of pain and separation; of hatred and cruelty. But in the midst of it are dreamers looking to change it. Because the world isn’t set and pre-determined. So it isn’t just that there are outcasts, like an objective and permanent fact for us to accept, but that there are outcasts because there also people who cast others out. And still more who benefit by keeping them out.
And this story of outcasts, misfits, and dreamers looks and sounds so much like the gospel.
Tell me if this sounds kind of familiar. When the P.T. Barnum character sings:
You stumble through your days
Got your head hung low
Your skies’ a shade of grey
Like a zombie in a maze
You’re asleep inside
But you can shake awake‘Cause you’re just a dead man walking
Thinking that’s your only option
But you can flip the switch and brighten up your darkest day
Sun is up and the color’s blinding
Take the world and redefine it
Leave behind your narrow mind
You’ll never be the same
now tell me that doesn’t sound like Jesus and the Kin-dom of God!
Preaching Eternal Life
He’s preaching eternal life, vibrant living, free from the fog of death and the pain of constant oppression—loving God, loving neighbor as ourselves—come with me and we can change the world!
Like the current Presiding Bishop Michael Curry preached at General Convention a few years ago, it says they called Jesus crazy. And they were right! This stuff is crazy compared with the values of this world.
We’re not called to sanity—we’re called to join him in the crazy! Bishop Curry’s right. We need some Crazy Christians!
A Crazy Dream
This home Jesus comes back to is everything wrong with the world. How we care more about order and hierarchy and power than we do for other people? When it’s all selfish and angry and demanding Jesus be who they want him to be!
He’s been walking all this way, he’s run out of trail mix, let the guy have some nuts and raisins and chocolate. Buy him a beer before you demand he heal your Aunt Sue’s hangnail.
Jesus doesn’t just see what the world is, he sees what it could be. He sees what it would be if we actually tried to love God with everything we have and therefore gave up control. If we stopped casting each other out and instead of finding reasons to punish, we found the warriors within each other.
We just might find our true home. And sing something like
I close my eyes and I can see
The world that’s waiting up for me
That I call my own
Through the dark, through the door
Through where no one’s been before
But it feels like homeThey can say, they can say it all sounds crazy
They can say, they can say I’ve lost my mind
I don’t care, I don’t care, so call me crazy
We can live in a world that we design
Homecoming
As Bishop Curry preached:
We need some crazy Christians. Sane, sanitized Christianity is killing us. That may have worked once upon a time, but it won’t carry the gospel anymore. We need some crazy Christians like Mary Magdalene and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Christians crazy enough to believe that God is real and that Jesus lives. Crazy enough to follow the radical way of the gospel. Crazy enough to believe that the love of God is greater than all the powers of evil and death. Crazy enough to believe, as Dr. King often said, that though “the moral arc of the universe is long, … it bends toward justice.”
This is why they call him crazy! Jesus is talking about God’s Kingdom and the very people who are supposed to love it, well, they think he’s crazy.
And when we talk like Jesus, we must be talking crazy, too. Like we’re making crazy talk about a crazy world. A world without war, bigotry, racism, sexism, class, and hatred. And when we design a world in which love is the law and hope flourishes with each draw of breath and every dream grows fertile, they call us crazy.
When we talk about this crazy world in which home is synonymous with love and identity and freedom to be without judgement or violence or jealousy; and a world of peace and justice for all God’s children, oh we must be losing our minds!
Imagine that; that we would actually think we can make something of this crazy world; that we aren’t just proud to pass it onto our children but proud to offer them leadership in it now, building it now, sharing it now. That this world could be home for all of us.
They Call Us Crazy
They call us crazy because what God dreams for us knocks the powerful off their pedestals and invites all of us into faithful service and sacrificial love. This is our home!
And our chores include doing the dishes and sweeping the floor and making dinner. And of course, setting the table.
But these are our chores together. We’re all responsible for loving God’s dream into reality. For believing, not only in Jesus, but in this mission of love.
‘Cause everything you want is right in front of you
And you see the impossible is coming true
And the walls can’t stop us now