Sermon preached on 8th July 2018 at St Mary Magdalene Clitheroe on the baptism of Eliza Louise Brown.

Football is coming home: everyone is saying it, including someone singing it at 7.30 this morning outside the Vicarage. But in this morning’s gospel, Mark 6:1-13 tells us that Jesus who we’ve read over the last few weeks, stilling the storm, casting out demons and even raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead did not have a good reception when he came home.

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.”

It seems to have been a problem of expectation. This is Jesus the carpenter’s son, we expect him to be good at, well, carpentry. Expectations can work both ways.

Those of you old enough to remember previous World Cups will know that England (who last won the World Cup in 1966 when I was one year old) has struggled with unreasonably high expectations. The World Cup belongs to no-one by right. And Gareth Southgate has done a fantastic job of managing expectations  so that each England win has been a pleasant surprise and delight.

What do we expect from God? Maybe Christians can expect too much: we pray for rain now but we know that the weather forecast tells us something different. But sometimes I think my expectations are too low: I pray for too little with too little hope that God will answer my prayers.

And after the disappointment of Jesus’ visit home: who could have expected that the 6 parties of disciples who Jesus sent out into the world would convert an Empire of 30 million people in around three centuries?

But I know this: I hear from school kids that the assembly they get in some state secondary schools goes something like “work hard, get good results, get a good job and then you can have a nice car and a big house”. We have a far more ambitious vision for Eliza today. Through baptism we claim her identity as a unique child of God, loved by him before she was formed in her mother’s womb. We don’t know what  lies in the future for her but my hope is that is she fails, she fails spectacularly, picks herself up again and lives her life to her full potential as one loved for all eternity by God, until she comes at last to her home in heaven.