July 6, 2024 – Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

At the beginning of today’s Gospel reading, I am reminded of our cultural practice to celebrate high school reunions. Every ten years or so, many people travel to reunite with those from their hometown to catch up and [perhaps] to boast about what they’ve been doing with their lives, how much money they’ve made, and what they’ve become. They get to “show off” their families and their wealth and show everyone who knew them when they were younger about how they “made it” … and this is especially true in small towns!

And after the reunion, everyone goes back their own separate ways and thinks about all the good that everyone has done. Or, probably in some cases, about how they’ve done better than that kid who was the popular kid and has had his life fall apart or the girl whose dad died and she ended up homeless or … you get the point. We remember who people WERE and not who they’ve become, and we try to infer why people have become who they have.

What’s always been interesting to me is that – especially in small towns – home becomes like a family. You experience things together, you grow together, you fail together, and you share common events. It’s not unlike here at this church – we experience the ups and downs together, we get to celebrate in the joy of baptisms, we hold one another through marriages and divorces, illnesses and deaths, and we recognize the face of God in one another as we receive the sacrament of the last supper.

In the best expressions of it, home is a place of safety. Home should be a place of peace. It is a refuge from the storms we experience out in the world. But Jesus goes home in today’s Gospel, and his fellow Nazoreans didn’t seem too happy to take him in or believe in what he’d been doing.

We don’t have a clue WHY Jesus went home. It could be that he wanted to show everyone what he’d been up to. It could be that he wanted others to know God, the same reason we come here weekly. He might have wanted to share with his best friends in his hometown the stories of healing the hemorrhaging woman or the raising of Jairus’s daughter. Maybe he went home to heal hurt or damaged friendships. Or for a birthday party. A bar mitzvah? The point is, we don’t know.

What we do know from the story is that Jesus catches their attention, and then they – just like we when we go to our high school reunions – remember who he was. And they remembered him as the son of a carpenter, not being able to see him as the prophet he’d become. They remembered him like little Chris who sat in the corner with a stutter who didn’t get any support at home and barely got fed enough. Or perhaps Jerriann whose family couldn’t afford new clothes for school and sent her with homemade dresses that they crafted out of secondhand fabric. Or even Nick, who didn’t feel comfortable coming out to his parents, and so he attempted suicide multiple times before he graduated high school.

We all have a desire to go home and to be welcomed. We have a desire to go to a place where we can release our worries and just let down our guards. A place where we can be our true selves without judgment. And if that home doesn’t welcome us, what do we have left?

Jesus tells us the answer. He “called the twelve and sent them out two by two” (Mk 6:7). He began to create a new home. He sent the disciples out to create a sense of community, to build relationships, to care for those who they met, to trust, to rely on them, and to make themselves at home. The vision we hear from Jesus today isn’t going out to convert people, but rather to spread the message and to forge new relationships. And because the people in his hometown weren’t willing to be in relationship with him, he went forth with his disciples to build new ones. To Jesus, home isn’t so much a place, but a certain way of being in relationship with one another. It’s a commitment to loving one another with the same kind of love that Jesus showed us from the cross.

May we so live our lives that all who come to us are treated with dignity and respect. May we remember that we aren’t the same people we used to be. And may we rejoice together in the ways that God has shown us a new home … most especially when we’re at that high school reunion.