Mark 6:1-13

The disciples want to know who Jesus is. The people from his hometown do not.

Throughout scripture, human bodies are not an obstacle to righteousness; they are its location.

Is this passage more than a cautionary tale about the tendency to stuff a suitcase to the gills?

The final lesson in Discipleship 101: learning to fall

As a young minister in my early 20s, I was often admonished by the senior ministers to keep a guarded distance from laypeople. To get too close, they would say, is to become too familiar with a resulting loss of one's ministerial authority. They thought authority was protected by distance and diminished by relationships.

As Jesus prepares to send the Twelve, his experience of failure seems to color his instructions.

Once I finished working with this week’s gospel text, I went back into my files to see how many times I’ve managed to preach on it in my seven circuits through the lectionary. I found that I’ve missed it more often than not—no surprise there, as it falls at a convenient time of year for that. And when I have preached on it, the sermon has always been on one half of the text or the other—either on the scene in the Nazareth synagogue or on the sending of the disciples. I have never written a sermon that dealt with both stories.

The villagers of Nazareth knew Jesus, and they thought him to be nothing special.

Rejection has been the traveling companion of the gospel from the beginning.

Even with Paul's wish to serve, even with his good motives, the Lord does not answer his prayer as he asked or expected.