Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

A couple of weeks ago I was having a phone conversation with my mother.  She asked me, “Didn’t you used to know a kid named JR?”  I wracked my brain for a moment, “Did this kid got to North?” (my high school). “No he went to South, and was in plays with you in Greensburg.”  I thought for another moment, and remembered: a blond kid, kind of short, very hyper, smoked like a chimney the summer we were all 19.  In the small town community theatre group in which we did summer plays, he was usually cast as the comic relief.

“Why on earth would you bring up JR?” I asked my mom.  “Was he killed in a car wreck?”  You see, most of the time when I hear about somebody I knew in high school, it is because they have been in some sort of accident and my mom reads the obituary in the local paper.

“Heavens, no!  He wasn’t killed.  He has a big write up in the paper as a success story: Local Kid Makes Good.  He’s an actor, working in Indianapolis.  There are pictures of him and everything.  I’ll send them to you.”

The conversation moved on to other things, and I mostly forgot about JR.  Then sure enough, about a week later, a small envelope arrived at my house.  In it was a note, “I remembered to send them! We are all about the same, Love, Mom” and a couple of clipping from two different editions of the newspaper, meaning this clown JR was news for more than one day in our small home town.

I looked at the pictures.  I didn’t see anybody I recognized.   I finally had to read the captions below the photographs to see which one was JR. Then I had to put on my glasses, (which I sometimes don’t use at home).  Then I had to squint and kind of mentally erase 25 years.  Yes!  There he was.  Old JR popped right into focus.

“My goodness, the years have been about as kind to him as they have been to me.  Is he really still using the name JR?”  I thought to myself. “I thought that was just a high school thing.”  I put the clippings and the note in a spot in my kitchen used for “things to deal with later”, and forgot about them for a few days.

I wonder what the headline would be for me at my old hometown paper?  The truth is, when I go home, things have changed so much that I don’t see too many familiar faces, except those of my immediate family.  My sister and I try to talk sometimes about life in Greensburg, but so much has changed since I lived there 25 years ago, that I have trouble keeping up.  Things are about to change even more dramatically there, since the newest North American Honda plant is being built in my little home town bringing 2,000 new jobs to a town with a population of about 8,000.   Those numbers mean that my little town will very soon be unrecognizable.

Last November my siblings and I talked about the new plant, which is already starting to be built on the edge of town, and about the impact it will have on Greensburg.  My brother owns a Sears franchise, so 2,000 new families with good jobs will likely have an early positive impact on business, especially if some of those families build houses and need appliances, lawn tractors, and tools.  My sister works for the protestant mortuary in town (Porter-Oliger being the catholic mortuary), so impact on her place of business depends on the plant staying there a while, long enough for people to retire, grow old, and pass away.

But the impact on my parents might be something else entirely.  The plant is being built on their end of town, so the immediate impact will be noise and trucks going through there at all times of the night and day.  Eventually it will be increased automobile traffic on that side of town, and my parents will probably learn when to avoid the roads at the time of shift changes, and which restaurants and grocery stores have become too over-crowded for them to use comfortably now that they are getting older and their reaction times—and their patience for change--aren’t quite what they used to be.

And yet—my mother’s note read, “We are about the same” Funny, when I go back there, nothing seems the same as I remember it.

Jesus has gone home to Nazareth.  When we left him last week he had just  read Scripture in the synagogue, and proclaimed it fulfilled.  Today we hear what happens next.  It seemed that that day all those hearing Jesus were pleased that he had come back to the home town to preach—Local Kid Makes Good.  “Ah yes, the carpenter’s son.  Look at him!  Why I remember when he was just this high.”  They might have shared some fun memories of old Jesus, Joseph’s boy.  For you, see, they had heard what he did in Capernaum, and they had been impressed.  Surely he would do for the hometown crowd what he had done for strangers, wouldn’t he?

Jesus anticipated that the crowd would expect that.  So Jesus turns the tables, proclaiming to the crowd that miracles and healing and release and freedom are not just for a select few, but are Gods gifts poured out for all—for foreigners as well as returning hometown heroes.

And that is when things got ugly.  Jesus had taken what could have been a feel-good moment, a day worthy of a photo opportunity in the local paper, a chance for the synagogue crowd to brag on their home town boy, to say “We knew him when…” and reminded them that he was just visiting; that his real work was elsewhere. Worse yet, he was a little judgmental when he said it.

But the crowd missed what he was really saying—that part about good news and the year of the Lord’s favor.  They skipped right over it without hearing it, without understanding it.  It might have been hard for them to realize that he—Mary and Joseph’s kid—Jesus was not just some celebrity they could say they watched grow up, but that he was God with us.

You can go home again…but it’s hard.  It’s always fascinating to me on holidays and special days to watch extended families together in church.  Because most of you have been around here much, much longer than I have, you all know the stories, the legends, the myths that sit in those pews alongside the older generation that I know. You probably remember old so-and-so when they were knee high.  Sometimes the younger generation that has come home spends a lot of time just kind of looking at the sanctuary, trying to figure out what parts of it they remember and what parts they don’t.  Sometimes they are unfamiliar with the back, newer part of the building.

Michelle and Mark have come home today, to the church where Michelle grew up, to have Olivia baptized.  And in this moment of coming home to the faith community she remembers, they will forge new memories for their daughter, by enacting ancient words, and witnessing a ritual as old as Christianity itself.

Jesus was trying to tell the crowd that the promises of God were for all people, that we have a home in God’s love that we can always come to, that in God’s grace there is no one left alone, no one imprisoned who cannot be released, no one blind whose sight cannot be restored, no one oppressed who cannot be set free.   It was hard for them to hear.  They wanted to celebrate Jesus’ success instead.  Jesus was the photograph bearing witness that everything had changed, but the crowd was still believing the note that said, “We are all about the same.”

Today, as we welcome Olivia and her parents home for this celebration, let us remember, and try to understand what the crowd in Nazareth could not.  Let us, as we welcome her into the family of God remember our own homecomings.  Her homecoming is ours, too, for we are all at home in God’s love.  With ordinary water, and ancient words, and with the affirmation of all of us—the family of God gathered here—we proclaim that for Olivia, and for us, nothing is ever quite the same again.

Thanks be to God!