Some of you may remember that I was an elementary school teacher for “quite a while” before I retired a few years ago.  At the start of every school year, I would have each one of my students write me a personal letter, which I saved and then gave to him or her on the last day of school in June.

You can imagine the fun we all had in completing this exercise, especially in reading the letters months after they had been so diligently written on the first day of a brand new school year.  So in September, I would ask the children to write about their thoughts, wishes, fears, and expectations for the coming year in my classroom.  I asked what they wanted to learn and experience, specifically with me as their teacher.  Often, children would describe how they were looking forward to being in a classroom they had heard would always smelled like apples because of my having an ongoing bowl of them for my students if they needed a snack during the day.  Other times, someone would write that they had heard that I was a “tree hugger” and loved poetry – that would cause one to say, “No way, Mrs. Pierce!” and another to report, “I want to learn how to write poems.”  Another time, the son of one of my neighbors wrote that he had never had a report card with straight A’s before and that he was certain he would get them this year because his mom and I were friends.  The words he wrote down on paper for me were filled with the hope of a genuine miracle.  I could almost hear him shouting, “Yahoo!  This is going to be a great year!  Straight A’s for me!”  Well, guess what?  He did not earn straight A’s and he was very mad at me.  In fact, he decided around January of sixth grade that I was his least favorite teacher to date.  I remember feeling sad about his rejection of me as his teacher.

Our Gospel story, which is an extension of last week’s story of Jesus coming home to Nazareth and being with people he had known throughout his life, is something similar to my own story here.  Both are about how truth-telling and responding to authority can sometimes be very hurtful.  The folks of Nazareth were very excited to see and hear Jesus at first.  They like others who had and would later on do the same, clearly perceived something new, different, deeply spiritual, and special about Jesus.  They themselves were newly excited to be with him, that is until Jesus revealed a deeper integrity about his true relationship with them.  Now this truth telling which Jesus did and the authority that had been given to him by God was the foundation for miracle work, but Jesus had not come home to perform magic acts for his hometown people.  He had not come home to minister only to them.   Jesus had come home to reveal to them the message of how God had fully become an experiential reality for him and how he was speaking to them with God’s Spirit flowing through him.  Jesus wanted to share this experience with them and encourage them to share it with others outside the parameters of Nazareth.  Somehow, however, the folks of Nazareth were seeing a very narrow vision of Jesus perhaps only as Joseph’s son and not the Son of God, a person they might be able to take advantage of to meet their own needs and desires.  Their vision and hopes for a new and better future for themselves were something like the student wanting straight A’s.  “Just give it to us, please!”  They were seeing the world only through the lens of their own needs and desires.  And that is clearly not the future Jesus was introducing them to when he came home to them.  Jesus tried to tell them, “God is much bigger than that.  You are bigger than that.”  It was sad to see that the people that Jesus had known all his life, the people who were excited to be with him in the synagogue, turned on him when he told them they needed a broader vision of life beyond Nazareth.

You know, it would have made my life easier to just give that young, earnest student the straight A’s he so sincerely wanted for himself.  Jesus had already faced a similar, though bigger, temptation to compromise his mission by using miracles as a quick and easy means of solving issues.  But he never succumbed to that, even in his own hometown!  Instead, Jesus stood before the people of Nazareth as a prophet, calling them to become servants, to be light, to bring love to the entire world, not just to Nazareth.  And they just were not willing to buy that notion.  It is so interesting to note that Jesus in all of his ministry – and remember that he did move on from this experience of rejection to even greater and more powerful ministry – even in spite of his rejection, never directly challenged any person’s selfishness or narrow vision directly.  Instead, he told a story from Israel’s history, and through it, the people condemned themselves as they applied the story to their own needs and motives. 

And yet, the Good News moved on, as it still moves on today.  Nothing can stop it!  Even when people rejected and continue to reject Jesus’ message of why we have been called into existence as God’s people, to be light to the world, the ministry and the Good News move forward.  All of us are called and invited to share the vision Jesus experienced at his baptism and then his vision in the wilderness and on through his public activity to see our existence, our lives, and our missions to be marked by a deep relationship of experience with the Spirit of God.  Like the hometown people of Nazareth, we have the opportunity to not just see a new and incarnated future in Jesus, but to become part of the movement forward in life.  We do not have to settle for a God who would be small enough to meet only our own needs, even if they are good, deserving ones.  God is not “on call” for us to pray to for good parking spots, comfortable and high paying jobs, or even on the spot and visible healing for our sufferings.  We may well catch ourselves asking God to attend to only the people nearest us, too.  A lot of people get left out with that kind of thinking.  Recently, I have heard people complaining that the amount of help given to Haiti far exceeds that given to Katrina victims.  I hear people resent Christmas and holiday gifts given to inmates and their families.  I can’t count the number of times I have heard, “They don’t deserve it!”  Another thing is how people of other faith traditions are not always perceived as worthy of respect.  Hey, the message is this: our God is bigger than that!  And we can be bigger than that, as well.

The truly positive response here is Luke’s larger story from the perspective of Jesus and those who chose then and continue to choose now to follow him, right out of town.  In his own consciousness, Jesus was like the prophets of the Jewish Bible in that his calling and passion as a prophet came out of his experience with God.  We’re called to that very same experience!  We are called to be Christ’s followers, to have an experiential reality with God.  Do you want to accept that call?  This is a call to us as individuals and to us as a Church and to us when we leave this building and go out into the world.  This is the real mission, the honest embrace of God’s Good News through Jesus Christ.  There is a price to pay for such discipleship.  People who we love and trust may want to run us off cliffs.  They can let us down.  They can be amazingly narrow in their vision of what God’s love and grace and mercy are really all about.  But the God’s call moves on.  God calls out of our comfort zones to most challenging of places and situations – like Haiti, like the jail, like the people down the street, like any number of needy places – to people who need us, need food, need God, need love.  How willing are you to come face to face with the person you are called to be as a Christian?  To move out of town?

The people of Nazareth did not get the person Jesus wanted to be for them.  The people of Capernaum did.  Who are you, who are we in this truth?  Even though Jesus was and continues to be rejected by some, he moves on, and a great many people move faithfully with him.  The truth of the Good News will never die or be destroyed.  We have to decide if we’ll accept God being with us, working with us, speaking to us to keep the energy, power, and salvation moving forward.  If you were to write a letter to Jesus Christ, your teacher, what would you write?   When you write what you expect from God, write what you expect of yourself, as well.  The truth and the power of our own expectations in God’s existence in each one of our lives will eternally rest in the way we receive and agree to participate with the vastness of the Holy Spirit beyond the smallness of our little lives.  We have the opportunity to live and love big with God.  But we have to be willing to get out of town, out of ourselves to do this.  May we live and move big this week! AMEN.