Unexpected Places (Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost)

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One of the challenges of reading the Bible is that the stories are often filled with the names of places which are simply unknown to us.  We don’t know where they are.  We don’t know who lived there.  And often, we don’t even know why the biblical writer bothered to include these names in the first place.

Today, in our Gospel reading, we read about Tyre and Sidon and the Decapolis.  Comingled in there was also a passing reference to the Sea of Galilee, which is commonly mentioned and at least we’re familiar with it.  But what about these other three places?  Mark doesn’t tell us anything about them.  And for most of us, they’re just more unknown places in the Bible.

Yet for the first readers of Mark’s Gospel, these wouldn’t have been unknown places.  But they would have been unexpected places.  For what they all had in common was that they were outside of Israel – they were places where predominantly Gentiles lived.

So the first readers wouldn’t have wondered where these places were, but rather WHY Jesus would go to these places?  What was he doing there?  Why did he drag his disciples along?  And actually, who were these people Jesus was helping?

This story was filled not with the unknown, but with the unexpected.  For reasons Mark never elaborates on, Jesus:

• Is in unexpected places – there’s really no reason for Jesus to need to go to any of these places to get to where he’s going (this is unlike some of the other stories where Jesus does need to pass through Samaria to get between Galilee and Jerusalem, for example).  These were not places people would expect to find Jesus.  Theses were not places people would expect Jesus to go.  And yet, here’s Jesus in an unexpected place…

• Helps unexpected people – for most of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus goes about helping the children of Israel.  So why is he among people who aren’t Jewish?  Jews and the pagan peoples who surrounded them didn’t much like each other, and didn’t expect to be helped by one another.  Even the Syrophoenician woman seems to think that the best she can do is maybe to get some crumbs.  But she ends up with the same level of help Jesus gives everybody else. It’s not what anybody would have expected …

• Works in unexpected ways – you’d think that Jesus would have a basic way of doing healings.  That would be most efficient and even let people know what to expect.  And yet, when Jesus heals, there’s almost always something unexpected.  After all, if Jesus can simply tell the Syrophoenician woman that her daughter is healed without even going to her house, you’d think Jesus would just say to the guy who’s deaf and unable to speak “be healed!” But instead, there’s this frankly kind of gross description of Jesus sticking his fingers in the guy’s ears and spitting and touching his tongue.  It’s not what Jesus has done before, and it’s a totally unexpected way of healing in the context of the other healing stories…

The other thing about these stories is that Jesus didn’t go to these unexpected places alone.  He dragged his disciples along!  It’s not clear whether they were excited about this or not!  But what is clear is that, by dragging his disciples along to these unexpected situations, Jesus intended that his disciples, both then and now, should be open to:

• Experiencing Jesus’ presence in unexpected places – and that’s true even and maybe especially if that “place” isn’t a physical place; over this past year and a half, we’ve all become used to finding faith, fellowship and community online.  It was done from necessity, but along the way, many of us actually found that Jesus was there with us, even if online isn’t always the “place” we want to be.  And as with those first disciples, hopefully that experience can help us to be more aware of how Jesus can be with us in the various places of our lives that, at least at first, we don’t expect him to be… (whether that’s a physical place, a virtual place or an emotional place…); and if that’s the case, then we can also see ourselves as people who can help others experience Jesus in places that they don’t expect Jesus to be at work…

• Helping people who don’t expect Jesus’ help – or at least, don’t expect followers of Jesus to be people who care about them and help them.  You may have seen the link in our emails about ways we can partner with Lutheran Social Services in helping resettle Afghan allies who we’ve been watching get airlifted out of Afghanistan.  Actually, Lutherans have been involved in refugee resettlement since the end of the second World War when, frankly, a lot of refugees were Lutherans.  But we got good at it and we kept it up!  And since then, we’ve helped a lot of people who came from places, which, like Afghanistan, many of the people being helped didn’t think Christians would be the people who would help them… (there’s a funny scene from Gran Torino, a 2008 Clint Eastwood film, in which the Clint Eastwood character is asking the Hmong daughter character how it is that they came to live in the Midwest … and she answers, “the Lutherans brought us here…”)  The thing is, when Jesus helped people who didn’t expect to be helped by him, it changed their impression of who Jesus actually was … and when Jesus’ followers help people who don’t expect us to help them, it does the same thing…

• Living our faith in unexpected ways – and sometimes, that simply means living into new routines (or being willing to change our routines.)  By this point in the Gospel story, the disciples knew the routine (travel around Galilee, teach in the synagogues and heal people they knew).  But now, Jesus changed the routine on them – go to different places, work with different people, and do healings in different ways.  It wasn’t all that different, but it was a different routine and a different schedule.  In our personal, professional and church lives right now, a lot of what we’re adapting to is new routines … (whether it’s working from home; online classes or just changing the times or routines for worship and classes at church…) Often, I really don’t like my routines being messes with, and I know I’m not alone.  But today’s Gospel reminds us that sometimes the new routines are precisely where Jesus is leading us, and needing us to go …

As I said before, I’m not sure the first disciples of Jesus were all that thrilled by the unexpected situations into which Jesus dragged them.  Honestly, I’m not all that thrilled about some of the unexpected situations I’ve been living through lately, either.  And maybe that’s true for you, too.

But today’s Gospel reading reminds us that even when we’re in unexpected places in our lives, Jesus promises to be there with us.  This story reminds us that Jesus calls us to be his agents of hope and healing in the lives of people who don’t expect Jesus or his followers to be of help.  And most of all, this story reminds us that Jesus will continue to lead us and walk with us through all of the unexpected routines and unexpected changes that we need to deal with.

Amen.