Click Your Heels Together and Say “There's No Place Like Home”
AM Psalm 72 • PM Psalm 119:73-96
Neh. 13:4-22 • Rev. 12:1-12 • Matt. 13:53-58
Good heavens, what kind of town must Nazareth have been in Jesus’ lifetime? Back in August, I had the opportunity to reflect on the passage from John’s gospel in which Nathanael, hearing that Jesus hailed from that rural burgh, wonders whether anything good could actually come out of Nazareth. Then, in today’s gospel passage from Matthew, we find Jesus showing up there to teach and preach in the synagogue. To put it mildly, the locals don’t take too kindly to him. They pooh-pooh his father, his mother, his brothers, his sisters. They belittle his background.
How does Jesus respond to this snubbing? Essentially, he says “to heck with all o’ y’all” and refuses to perform any miracles in Nazareth because of the Nazarenes’ “lack of faith.” His famous farewell line is this: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home.”
Jesus’ righteous (and I think justified) indignation raises a set of questions for all of us. How do we feel about our hometowns? Are they sources of warm and nostalgic memories? Or are they places where time seems to stand still, where people’s minds seem never to change—even though, as we look back, we realize that there are lots of minds there that could stand some changing? If we have left our hometowns at an earlier age and established ourselves in some calling—in other words, if we have become something of a different person than we were when we grew up there—how would we feel about moving back to our old roots?
One of my favorite writers, Scott Russell Sanders, takes up these questions and a myriad of others in his 1994 essay, “Homeplace.” Even though the American mythology, Sanders claims, argues for the wisdom of moving on—“from the beginning, our heroes have been sailors, explorers, cowboys, prospectors, speculators, backwoods ramblers, rainbow chasers, vagabonds of every stripe”—he ultimately supports of the conviction of what he calls “staying put”: “By settling in, we have a chance of making a durable home for ourselves, our fellow creatures, our descendants.” Sanders is not trying to run counter to the central theme of Thomas Wolfe’s famous 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Again. Sanders is suggesting that we perhaps never should have left.
Written by David Jolliffe
At St. Paul’s, David sings in the choir, assists with community meals, and helps to coordinate the Tippy McMichael lecture series. His family has lived in the same county in West Virginia since 1830, but he has no desire to move back.