Dr. John Tamilio III

© 2020, Dr. Tamilio

Have you seen the show the Mandalorian yet?  If you are a Star Wars fan, you have to see it.  This is not a show I went looking for.  In fact, my son and step-daughter’s boyfriend have been hounding me to watch it for a while now.  I finally broke down and watched the first episode.  “It’s pretty good,” I said to myself, but I also did not see what all the hype was about.  Sure, Baby Yoda is cute and all, but I wasn’t blown away.  The more I watched it, though, the more I was hooked.

I grew up with Star Wars — and the Mandalorian possesses the same, classic, raw feel that the original Star Wars did in 1977.

We are almost done with the first (of two) seasons.  Suffice it to say, I was struck by the inclusion of a character by the name of Migs Mayfield.  Do you know him?  You don’t if you haven’t seen the show.  But this isn’t really about the Mandalorian — or the character of Migs Mayfield.  It’s about the actor who plays Migs Mayfield: none other than Canton’s own Bill Burr!

Someone in this church either knows him or his family.  Canton isn’t that big.  Bill Burr graduated from Canton High School in 1987.  His mother Linda Ann is (or was) a nurse, and his father Robert is (or was) a dentist.  Bill himself is best known as a comedian.  Off-color at times?  Yes.  Funny?  Absolutely.

The first time I encountered Bill Burr was when I watched a video that he made commentating on a video of my favorite Beatle, John Lennon, playing with guitar great Chuck Berry.  John’s infamous wife, Yoko Ono, grabs the microphone and starts screeching during the performance.  Bill Burr goes off.  He goes off!  I cannot even repeat half of what he says in this video.  Suffice it to say, it is hysterical.  Now, he’s playing a role in this Star Wars saga!

I wonder how many of you—or how many of his high school teachers — are saying, “I knew that little so-and-so when he was knee-high to a grasshopper.”

Let me be clear: I do not think that Bill Burr is a prophet.  He is very funny, and, based on what I’ve seen, he’s a fairly good actor.  However, in this town, I am sure he is still “that Burr kid.”  Jesus was the Messiah, and he was also seen as a prophet.  He once said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home” (Mark 6:4).  In other words, everyone honors and respects a prophet, except his family, friends, and the people in his hometown.  And then we have today’s Gospel lesson.

This is the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  He is starting to call the twelve apostles.  So far, he has three: Andrew, Peter, and Philip.  Philip finds Nathanael and tells him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”  What does Nathanael say?  “Nazareth!  Can anything good come from there?”  That would be like someone coming to me — or anyone else who lives where I do — and saying, “We have found the Messiah!  He’s from Lynn!”  Anyone from Beverly would say, “Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin.  The Messiah is not going to be from Lynn.  Please!”  If this scenario unfolded in Canton, the conversation might look like this:

Person #1 from Canton: “Hey, we’ve found the Messiah!”

Person #2 from Canton: “Wow!  Where is he from?”

Person #1: “Brockton.”

Person #2: fill in the blank.

You get the point.  Substitute Stoughton for Brockton and you get the same result.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?  Can anything good come out of China?  The products they make there are pretty cheap and those manufacturers take away American jobs.  Can anything good come out of Chicago?  There’s a lot of crime there — mostly because of the blacks.  The Jews are pretty bad, too.  They run the media and Hollywood and, as we all know, they are greedy.  Mexicans?  Forget it.  Their country is one big slum; that’s why they are all trying to come here illegally.  Any of this sound familiar?  You’ve heard it before.  Sometimes other people are thrown into the mix.  In the early part of the twentieth century it was the Italians and the Irish who were scorned.  Signs reading “Irish Need Not Apply” appeared on all sorts of storefronts.  And those dirty Guineas?  They should just go back to where they came from.  This isn’t their country anyway.

Now before you run for the door and call the Canton Citizen or the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches to report me, this offensive language (and it had to be offensive to make the point) is not unfamiliar to you, just as Nathanael’s words would not have been a shock to Philip.  (Footnote: they were as hard to say as they were to hear, by the way.)

Humankind has a habit of demonizing those who are different, because we fear them, because they pose an imaginary threat to us, because we learned such prejudices from a young age.  We learn to hate; we’re not born that way.

Due to the political and racial divisions we are experiencing in this nation right now, we are hearing a lot of hate.  But something new is happening.  In the past, most of the hateful rhetoric we heard was based on race, ethnicity, religion, and the like.  Now, it is based on political orientation: we hate people based on who they voted for.  I lost a lifelong friend recently because I do not see things the way he does.  Instead of simply agreeing to disagree, he sees me as the enemy.  I am part of the problem and, as such, we can no longer be friends, as far as he is concerned.  It would be as if Nathanael said, “Can anything good come out of the mouth of a Democrat” (or a Republican, or a Libertarian, or a Socialist, or whatever).

The writer of Ecclesiastes said, “There is nothing new under the sun” (1:9).  The hate we see today based on political differences is nothing new.  It’s still hatred of the other; it’s just for different reasons.  We find all kinds of reasons to hate one another: race, religion, ethnicity, political orientation, gender, whatever — it’s still hatred.

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

When we prejudge anyone — when we determine their worth, when we judge them by the color of their skin, for example, instead of the content of their character, as Martin Luther King instructed us — when we do this, we have failed as people of faith.  Why?  If for no other reason than the fact that God created all of us in his image, not just some of us, not just those who look like us.

In the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, John of Patmos describes the final judgment.  As part of this apocalyptic image he says, “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.  They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands” (Rev. 7:9).  This is a symbol of all humanity — black, white, Asian, Latino, American, French, Chinese, Russian, Iraqi, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Communist, male, female, gay, straight, able-bodied, disabled — we will all stand with palm branches, just as the crowd did in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday 2000 years ago, to honor the King who will come to challenge our limited, earthly suppositions and show us the world as God intends it to be.

Yes.  A lot of good has come out of Nazareth, and it will come again.  Amen.