There's No Place Like Home

How many of us are able to go to our home town and have people look at us in our collars without them wondering how we ever became an ordained person?

Jesus deals with familiarity that hinders his ability to do the work of God in Nazareth, even after "news about him had spread throughout the region (Luke 4:14)." In Luke's account this story follows right after Jesus returns from being tempted in the desert for 40 days. Now Jesus, again resists temptation, the temptation to embrace the empty flattery of the hometown crowd, by speaking directly to the heart of their words. In essence, Jesus lets the crowd know that it is wholly dependant faith in God that brings healing and wholeness into their lives. He points out that Elijah healed the Gentile woman in Zarephath - a non-Jew who was desperate in her dependence upon God's providence. Likewise, he reminds them of Elisha's cure of Naaman the (Gentile) Syrian army commander of his leprosy. In both cases, there were those in Israel with the same conditions, but none were able to be made whole because of their reliance on themselves and/or the limitations they had put on God's power to work in their lives.

How often do we limit God's power to work in our lives?

And how often do we look for God's healing only to come in presently demonstrative ways that limits our vision and the hope of those we are called to serve?

I wonder if this makes God feel the same way we do when our hometown folks question our credibility.

Here in Luke 4, Jesus' exposure of the truth angers the crowd to the point of an attempt to throw him off a cliff. He survives. Later he will be led to a hill outside another city and he will be crucified, revealing the greastest Truth, . . . God loves us so much that death does not hinder the Divine in bringing wholeness and healing to us in our lives on the other side of the grave.

Resurrection is the ultimate healing. Our hope is founded in this truth.

And our hope and reliance upon God in our lives in the here and now opens us to infinite blessings today that we could not see or realize without this hope. So God's power to act in our lives is far greater than we can ask or imagine. . .if only we believe.

In the end we find out that there is no place like home, home with the blessed economia of the Holy Trinity.

posted by the Rev. P. Lance Ousley
Rector, St. Thomas' Episcopal Church
Wharton, TX