July 8, 2018 Going Home: Identity and Belonging Mark 6: 1-13

“I’m a both!” was the answer my son came home with from grade seven one day. He had been asked to fill out a form and in the identity section he had stumbled over the question of language. Was he English or French? He reasoned quite logically that having an Anglophone mother and Francophone father meant that he was a both. He ticked off both boxes! His questionnaire probably got rejected at the data entry centre. On those kinds of questionnaires there is often no provision for “both” or “other” or any kind of written explanation. It has to be yes or no, black or white. It simplifies life.

Now I can get a lot of information about you from the identity section of a questionnaire. Suppose you are filling out an immigration form. I can find out your gender, your citizenship, your age and education. I can know your country of origin and what kind of trade you are in. If I did a genealogy study and a DNA test on you I could find out more. If I paid Facebook for your social media file I would learn even more. But would I really know who you were? We each have a unique and complex identity. It sometimes takes us a lifetime to find it, to embrace it and to honour it. Today we are going to be looking at questions of identity and belonging.

In the gospel lesson Jesus goes home and preaches to the hometown crowd. At first there is a lot of excitement about his visit. He has gathered quite a following. He starts to teach in the synagogue. He looks around at the familiar faces. They are impressed. He speaks so well. He has self-assurance and poise. He seems to have a wisdom beyond his years. Then the village folk get to thinking. “Wait a minute. Don’t we know this fellow? Why of course. He’s Mary’s boy. What’s he doing standing up, spouting off things he knows nothing about? Does he think he’s a priest or a Pharisee? Gotten too big for his bitches. Too big by far!” The folks get mad. They think they know who Jesus is. And what they know is that he’s just one of them- no better, no worse. And if he wants to remain one of them he better stop acting like some kind of hotshot.

We all struggle with being pigeonholed and labelled and yet we have a fascination with wanting to do the same to others. We have made whole areas of study, trying to categorize, label and predict the behaviour of individuals and entire cultures. Psychology, sociology, archeology, epidemiology, criminology and probably many more sciences try to identify and classify you and me. But what happens when we get it wrong? ; when we don’t ask the right questions? ; when the answer to the question is sometimes ‘both’?

The villagers of Nazareth get it wrong. Yes Jesus is the son of Mary. Yes he was the local carpenter, until he abandoned all his family responsibilities and left home a year ago. But along the way he has grown up. He has experienced a spiritual awakening and a deep connection to the sacred nature of all of life. He can’t wait to share this with others. He wants especially for his own town folk to experience what he has. But he meets with rejection and disapproval. They are ready to caste him out if he does not conform to the identity they have decided is his. Without the trust of the people Jesus can perform no healings. If he wants to belong, Jesus must look elsewhere.

Identity and a sense of belonging are something we all search after. Our gender, our language of birth, our family history- these are all elements that play a key role in who we are. But I don’t believe that the kinds of questions we can answer on a questionnaire will ever do justice to who we really are. Jesus knew this. Brought up in a Jewish home of modest means, he knew how important the keeping of Torah was to his family and his people. It defined them and it distinguished them. Yet he came to understand that there was one principal that overruled all the other laws of his faith and that was the principal of compassion and caring. This principal was not only the most important in his own faith, it was a basic unifying element for all peoples of the world.

This week on the CBC journalist Alex Wagner, a woman of mixed Asian and European race, was talking about identity and where we find our sense of belonging. She talked about her struggle to discover her roots and feeling a little bit like an astronaut without a docking station, floating in space without any place the call home. Who are you when you are a ‘both’? When we step back and take a bird’s eye view of the current rate of intermarriage and global travel, we can see that our races are mingling more and more and our children are having greater difficulty filling out those forms that try to fit them into black and white categories. Our world is getting smaller. Our cultures are rubbing up against each other. We now have the option when ordering take-out : will it be Thai or Mexican or Lebanese? But we also experience diversity in sexual orientation and in religious beliefs. All across the globe we know the friction these encounters generate. And we have a choice. Do we build walls to keep out foreigners who take our jobs? Do we make Anglophones in Quebec feel less than welcome with talk of pur laine origins? Do we refuse marriage to gay couples who wish to feel God‘s blessing of their union? Our identity, who we are, is fundamental to our sense of belonging and well-being. Each of us needs to find some place we can call home; a place where we know safety and where we feel accepted, just the way we are.

Jesus brings us the key to this search in a world that is so diverse, and sometimes threatening. He calls it the kingdom of Heaven. He tells us our common humanity is what unifies us all. We are all children of the one god, that is to say we have a divine core. We have a sacred spark. Our brief time on earth is not a trivial thing. We have work to do here. If we trade our fears and judgements of one another for compassion and curiosity, we are working towards this kingdom. Let us then leave off our preconceived notions of who our neighbours are, leave off our judgments and our black and white thinking and give one another permission to discover ourselves, each of us growing into the higher , better selves of our nature. May it be so. Amen.