January 31st Sermon based on Luke 4:21-30

Home.  Has there ever been a word so full of meanings as this one?

“There’s no place like home,” we are told by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

“Home is where the heart is,” Pliny the Elder first said, and two thousand years later many of us are still saying it.

Thomas Wolfe tells us, “We can’t go home again.”

The word “home” has a way of hitting different people in different ways, and the same person in many ways, too.

Home may be the place you find peace and rest.  It may be the place where you have had to be careful of how loud you get, or whose space you invade.  Home may be the land of your birth and a hostile place where you fear for your life.  Home may be a place you love to go, but also the place you love to leave.  For some, home is where people know you best, or think they do.

In the Gospel today, Jesus’ triumphant homecoming of last week, where he had the love and approval of everyone, that homecoming takes an unpleasant turn. 

There is a moment where I pinpoint the turn taking place.

“Is not this Joseph’s son?”

I think so much turns on that one moment.  It is so authentically a homecoming moment.  In a small town, or even a particular community such as a church for instance, identity is communal.  You are more than just yourself but also an extension of the entire community.

This is Jesus.  This is Joseph and Mary’s son.  We knew him when.  We saw him running through the streets as a child.  We remember how his laughter rang down the alleys when he and his friends chased one another.  This is our boy.

This is home town boy makes good stuff.  He has come back to us and we have heard all the amazing things he has done.  He must have come to bring good things to us.

But this is not that kind of homecoming.  In fact, Jesus reminds them of how Elijah and Elisha both healed outsiders/enemies rather than their own people.  Jesus won’t be healing anyone that day.  Not in Nazareth anyway.  And then the people rage.  Hey, he isn’t who we thought he was.  We raised him better than that.

Except Jesus isn’t living to please his earthly parents or the community who raised him.  He is living to serve his Heavenly Father.  And what does that service look like?  It looks a lot like bringing good news to the poor, releasing the captives, restoring sight to the blind, freeing the oppressed and proclaiming the year of God’s favor.

And the truth of the matter is: There are poor, captive, blind, and oppressed people all over the world.  And Jesus came for them also.

We think we can build walls to keep “those” people at bay.  We want a literal wall between ourselves and the others, the undesirable, the unwanted, the refugees fleeing for their lives.  David Lose wrote a brilliant letter in relation to this week’s Gospel and used the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost to illustrate his point. 

The poem is about two neighbors walking the fence line between their lands and replacing the rocks that have fallen down.  As they walk the neighbor says, “Good fences make good neighbors” but the writer questions whether or not this is true.  “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out.  And to whom I was like to give offense.  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

God does not love walls.

Jesus does not love walls.

Jesus came to break the walls down.

I read just recently, and I am sorry I can’t recall who said it, that anytime you build up a wall, you can be certain you put Jesus on the outside.  Jesus will always choose the side of the outsider.  As Dorothy Day put it, “I really only love God as much as the person I love the least.” 

Jesus fled death with his parents as a child because Herod was killing children.  Jesus was a refugee.  Jesus was born into a world where all things that live die.  Jesus didn’t come just for the people you like or the people you think deserve God’s love.

We love to hear that Jesus loves us.  Do we love hearing it so much when we realize Jesus loves everyone?

Because that is the nature of the Loving God we believe in.  We believe in God who loves us and loves this world of God’s creation so much.  Maybe we sometimes find it offensive to believe that God’s love is for everyone.  But isn’t that what makes God’s love so extraordinary?  Isn’t that even what makes it Good News?

God loves us all.  None of us deserve it.  But God doesn’t care who among us is worthy. 

We all have a place at home in God’s arms. 

Thanks be to God.

Amen.