By The Rev. Lindsey Altvater Clifton
I’m a big fan of professional soccer. Well, women’s professional soccer, really. The men’s game tends to be riddled with too much flopping and flailing for my taste. While is has been three years now, I remember the USWNT World Cup win from the summer of 2019 like it was yesterday. They were celebrated with a Ticker Tape parade in New York City after their powerful 5-2 defeat of Japan… And when the US’s hometown team of incredible women made their way to the White House, the President said what we were all thinking: “This team taught all of America’s children that playing like a girl means being a badass.”
While not all of you may share my enthusiasm 
for the beautiful game, I’m sure each of you can call to mind a significant hometown return of someone from a community you’ve been part of or connected to, right?
Whatever images of welcome and celebration and reconnection that come to mind…Jesus experience returning to Nazareth…is NOT that.
A bit like a seminarian retuning to preach at their “home church,” we find Jesus teaching in the synagogue of his youth. The people are astounded. And full of questions:
“Where did he get all this? What’s this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary? And aren’t his sisters here with us?”
“And they took offense at him,” the text tells us. The Greek there indicates that they are scandalized by Jesus. I imagine them to be annoyed by and resistant to what they perceive as Jesus putting on airs. He’s gotten too big for his britches, as we’d likely say.
Based on the questions they ask, it’s clear that the hometown crowd doubts Jesus authority because they think they know him…he grew up among them, after all, and his mother…well, we all know what her deal is…and he’s just a carpenter.
As one scholar notes:
“The defection of the Nazareth citizens is obviously linked to Jesus’ roots. Their expectations preclude the possibility that he could be anything more than a [misguided, arrogant] hometown kid. Their preconceived notions prevent their entertaining the thought that Jesus could be the embodiment of God’s promised rule…It is the same story at the heart of many rejections of Jesus. When measured by the criteria set by the world as to what a religious leader worth their salt ought to be, he simply does not stand up well. He is not successful enough or influential enough or prestigious enough to merit a commitment” (TFP 419).
“Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house,” Jesus says. And he doesn’t accomplish much in Nazareth (especially when compared to the miraculous healings he’s done leading up to this passage). He stays long enough to cure a few sick people, but amazed at their unbelief (and surely hurt by their rejection), he moves on to other villages to teach.
And that’s when he does it. This is the moment he chooses to send his disciples into the world. Y’all… I’m not a leadership training or discipleship guru, but I’m not sure on the heels of what had to feel like a very public, very painful hometown failure is when I’d send my trainees off on their own.
But that’s why I’m not Jesus. Although as I’ve thought more about it this week, maybe that’s the perfect time to nudge them out of the nest. Because to be a disciple of Jesus is to follow him into rejection and even outright hostility. So they’ve seen him respond to such an experience not with a posture of combativeness or defensiveness, but with a posture of relationality and vulnerability. Now they have to learn that and practice it for themselves alongside one another.
Speaking of disciples in training, those of us crazy enough to go to seminary must learn to exegete passages of Scripture. To exegete is to thoroughly (endlessly) examine and analyze the text from every possible angle: historical and cultural context, literary criticism, grammatical analysis, reflection on authorship and audience, its theological messages and the traditions of its interpretations. We return to our classroom and submit papers—13 painfully wrought single-spaced pages—with countless footnotes that describe in detail what our exegesis reveals about the meaning of the text.
As one pastors notes, “In Jewish seminaries, however, when a rabbinical student is handed a passage to exegete he or she is informed to return with not one understanding, but a dozen understandings of the same passage. The rabbis-in-training are learning to see the Word of God from other, often diametrically opposed, perspectives. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks takes this exegetical discipline to the next level when he applies it to the practice of living in community. Rabbi Sacks says, “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image” (The Dignity of Difference, p. 60). Only when we can see from the perspective of another, only then can we see past our own perceptions, past our own reflections in the mirror, to the God we did not create in our own image.
Jesus’ hometown experience of, being perceived as the Other (and rejected as such), informs and inspires his sending out of the disciples. He knows what it feels like to be seen the capital-O Other, and what it will take for the disciples to see beyond whatever initial impressions they may form of others they encounter.
So Jesus sends them out, telling them to travel in pairs, to listen and learn, to share the Good News with their neighbors. In a nutshell, Jesus sends the disciples—and us—out from the security and familiarity of his fold into the world all around them.
“Go on, git!” he says in the New Revised Southern Translation. “Tell your story and mine; and listen to other folks’ stories. Build relationships. Don’t take much of anything but an open heart, a closed mouth, and peace to leave behind. Be grateful for the hospitality you receive; eat whatever you’re served, even if it looks kinda funny. Cure the sick. If you don’t get welcomed, if folks aren’t hospitable, then shake the dust from your feet to let ‘em know that’s not cool, and jus’ move on.” Nothing fancy or complicated.
One preacher says it this way:
“They were instructed to do exactly what they already knew how.
Tell their story.
Listen to other people’s stories.
Be present in someone else’s life.
Invite someone else to have a relationship with the holy.
Be the presence of the holy in the community.”
It is good for Jesus and the disciples to be together; “the world’s great religions have always required communities of people to make them work. Whether they call themselves congregations, covens, ummas, or churches these communities are the places where the concrete teachings of the religion are tested” (BBT p.93). We need time and space to explore and enjoy community and kinship with like-minded people who share similar convictions or commitments, ideology or theology, standards or disciplines.
Think about the gift is it to be part of quilting circles, sports teams, social networks, trivia nights, choirs and choruses and bands, political committees, civic clubs and dinner clubs and book clubs, and so on.
The challenge, of course, is sameness. Uniformity. On the one hand, that is what keeps us together. On the other hand, that is what keeps other people out.
So two-by-two, we’re sent away into the world. We need companions for the journey, so we don’t go-it-alone or get too lost or lose our temper. And we take with us Jesus’ relationality and vulnerability. And we take with us his authority. The very authority that the hometown crowd rejects is what empowers the disciples and us as we go. But lest we get it in our head that the authority is ours, it isn’t. Jesus’ authority is from God. This is totally NOT about us. This is not our church, it is God’s church.
Sure, if we’re lucky and open and grateful, we’ll get changed and transformed and softened along the way. But it’s about the gospel good news that love and acceptance have the final word; that there are no capital-O Others, after all. That each and every person bears the image of God. If only we can leave the familiarity of our hometown places to see beyond our hometown biases and glimpse the reflection of God’s image in one who is not in our image. In that regard it seems only fitting that we go celebrate with LGBTQ folks at Lehigh Valley Pride this afternoon. And I imagine our church’s kinship with our dear Muslim friends from Afghanistan makes God’s heart dance. Two by two, friend. Off we go to love everybody. That is Jesus’ call for us today. May it be so. Amen.