When my wife Britt and I moved from Northern California to the Pacific Northwest it felt like a homecoming. Moving back here was a good move for many reasons, not the least of which is that the PNW is our hearts home.
Moving to Seattle meant Britt would be closer to her family in Portland and that I would be closer to my family in Puyallup. These were our homes, the places we were born and raised.
The first time I drove from Seattle to Puyallup I was struck by how much had changed in my hometown and how little had changed. Some of the cool places I once knew and enjoyed like the “go to” burger place and the downtown music store were no longer there. I felt a bit of melancholy. Most of all, the changes piqued my curiosity.
I felt many things had changed and much had not changed. And the people I knew well – some of them changed a little, some a lot, and some not at all. Some of what was familiar and unfamiliar sparked wonderful memories and not so wonderful memories.
How about you? Where is home? Have you had the experience of returning home after a long time away? Did it feel like the place you call home? What changed and what didn’t change?
Jesus is no stranger to your experience. Jesus knew pretty much everything about being human. Jesus, too, experienced the complicated journey of going back home.
Last week, in the Gospel reading, Jesus was quite popular. He drew crowds of people. Who wouldn’t flock to him? As the Son of God he hit the ground running – curing diseases, exorcising demons, calming storms, and even raising the dead. He brought something spectacular and quite out of the ordinary, and he offered help for people’s ailments.
This week the story is remarkably different. Jesus visits Nazareth and receives a very different reception. Instead of fanfare, Jesus is met with suspicion, resistance, and downright rejection. Instead of throngs of people clamoring for his attention Jesus leaves town discouraged and sad.
Last week, people were amazed by his deeds of power. This week Jesus is amazed at people’s unbelief.
At first, Jesus’ family members and old friends and neighbors were happy to welcome him into the Synagogue where Jesus was invited to teach and preach God’s word. Many commented on his great wisdom and were astounded by his teaching.
They were impressed until, until, they began to recognize him.
Can’t you just picture the murmuring in the pews? “Wait a minute, isn’t that Mary’s son? Isn’t that the brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon? When he was just a boy didn’t he play with our daughters and sons? Gosh, I used to live down the street from him? Why isn’t he the carpenter?”
Once they recognized him they began to change their perceptions and impressions of Jesus.
Jesus was familiar to these folks back home. They remembered him. They knew his family. They remembered him well but they could not accept that God would be revealed through such a man as this. They likely believed that if such a person were to come among them, he would not be the carpenter but a learned teacher, someone from the ruling class.
The place we call home provides us with a sense of security, safety, and protection. These are all good things. But when do these things become a rut and keep us from a life of freedom and growth? When we get too settled, we find ourselves resisting change because it threatens the safety and security we need and enjoy through our customs and in our worldviews.
And that includes our image of God.
Jesus was familiar to the people back home. He was someone just like them. But the claim that he was the Son of God they could not accept. It didn’t fit their image of God who was wholly other, abiding in the heavens, accessible only at the temple.
Messing with people’s safe and familiar and secure image of God is quite disruptive and makes us unhappy or suspicious or fearful.
More than once I’ve met folks who cannot hear the good news of forgiveness because for them God is a tyrant. On the other end, God can be nothing more than an abstraction or sweet and nice but these images successfully exclude God from being part of our lives.
Letting go of what we God to be is no small thing.
Yet, that is what prophets do. They seek to turn us away from settled and safe ideas and ways and toward God who is always breaking into our world in new ways and always pushing us toward a deeper trust in him.
Jesus takes his place in a long line of prophets. Their message is resisted. They are rejected and some of them are severely persecuted for their witness. Stated simply, a prophet is one who speaks God’s word. Prophets are truth-tellers. They cannot help but speak the truth that simmers beneath the surface of life that we choose to ignore. They call us to see the truth that makes us uncomfortable. They often come from the margins and speak truth to the powerful who are in over their heads with scandal, corruption, and insatiable appetites for power.
The Old Testament prophets, truth-tellers who spoke for God called out these things and suffered as a result. The prophet Ezekiel was warned about it when God called him. Ezekiel was sent to Israel, a house that was rebellious and stubborn toward God.
Their message is met with resistance and often rejected. Often the prophet suffers as a result and in the case of many, their lives were lost as a result. We name them martyrs – Polycarp, Perpetua, Lawrence the Deacon, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero.
The truth-telling task is no easy task and hearing it isn’t easy either. Why? I think, bottom line, prophets call us to change and to some degree or another change is difficult for everyone.
The prophet points out the troubling truth of institutional racism. More than acknowledging it, we are called to change our minds and hearts.
Prophets will not let us ignore the presence of the poor and hungry and that calls the people of God to roll up our sleeves and get busy to feed and clothe and shelter these neighbors. Just doing that is a change we resist.
Prophets of God help us see our blind allegiance to powers and leaders only interested in greed and self-interest only makes us greedier. It calls for a change – a conversion from greed to generosity.
Festering disdain for those whom we have hurt of those who have hurt us does no earthly good. The prophet points us to Jesus and the God of forgiveness begs for an about face.
We must listen! But our ears get clogged. We find it hard to change our fixed worldviews and reliable habits and practices.
Jesus summed it up well, “A prophet is not without honor, except in her or his hometown, their kin, and in their house.”
For the people of Nazareth, to accept Jesus as something more than what they knew or were familiar with would mean a major reconstruction of their world. This they resisted as do we.
We’re reading a book at home called Our Hearts Are Restless by Richard Lischer. It is about the art of spiritual memoir. Memoirs of notable persons are explored – St. Augustine, John Bunyan, Julian of Norwich, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Day and more.
Many of them are considered prophets and all of them speak of lives filled with both ecstasy and agony. Through their memoir the reader learns about their and our yearnings, longings, doubts, passions, gifts, sins, questionings, relationships with God and others.
Each is unique. All different. The common thread in all of these memoirs is as the title aptly describes – restless hearts. A longing for home but never quite getting there.
The title comes from Augustine who in a prayer said, “O God, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
You see, for Jesus, for all of us, whether our homes are happy places and not so happy places, we never really arrive. There is always more to know and to learn and to discover about God and always room to grow in our life in Christ.
Christian may best be described as pilgrims. It is a journey filled with a kind of restlessness that takes place over a lifetime of dying and rising, dying and rising. Along the way we are buoyed and fed and strengthened AND along the way get dispirited, experience resistance and even rejection. But we do not lose heart – when we are the truth-teller and when we are the one who must listen.
Luther said it well:
This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.
Amen.