It’s been hard to read this text this week without feeling a thousand emotions. One of the most powerful things about good literature of any kind is how it reads you as much as you read it. And when you are talking about Scripture, the “being read” goes as deep as the soul.

Kim and I and the kids said goodbye this week to the only house my children really remember. We happily sold it to a dear friend and her family, and then we moved into a rental house in Lakewood a little more than half the size of our old house while we build a new house a few blocks away. It’s just a house, we kept telling ourselves. Just brick and mortar. Just Sheetrock and paint. Just the place so many of you worked so hard on in our first weeks after moving here, because you felt so bad for us that we had bought such a project. Just a house. Just the front yard I threw the ball with my son in. Just the backyard we held birthday parties in. Just the family room where we hosted many of you for new-member fellowships. Just the staircase with 39 school pictures on the wall—tracing the kids from kindergarten through high school. Just a house, just a house we tried to make a home.

We should have consulted a counselor, I think, before we did this. All the kids will be gone in a few weeks’ time, and we might have waited for them to leave home. Instead we decided to leave home with them and start making another house home while we try to make another house after that to be home again for a while. It’s a bit disorienting, don’t you know?!

Jesus went home shortly after beginning his public ministry. And our text today tells us he realized all too well that what Thomas Wolfe said is sometimes true: you can’t go home again. It isn’t that you can’t go home again literally; it’s that you can’t go home again and be someone different there from what all the people who never left think you were. Jesus had to leave home in order to be truly at home. We’ll see how in a few minutes, but for now, let’s follow the story.

Jesus has an entourage with him when he comes into his home hamlet. He has picked up twelve disciples, mostly along the Sea of Galilee. They were only a few miles from the place Jesus grew up, but a few miles in those days might have been America to Africa or Asia for all they knew of each other. So here comes Jesus, the carpenter’s apprentice, the boy who fixed broken yokes for their oxen and made tables for their meals. Once a carpenter, always a carpenter. Nazareth hadn’t turned out any Rhodes scholars in recent memory, and yet here is Mary’s boy with twelve young men in tow hanging on his every word. He’s teaching in the synagogue, the one he used to sit in with his buddies and pass notes during the sermon. Now he’s the one preaching, and he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and that makes some of them feel like he’s talking down to them. What’s more, they’d been hearing reports about him doing like Benny Hinn, but without the bad come-over and the money coming in over the TV. He’d been healing the sick and raising the dead and God knows what else. Instead of being happy about it, seems his homies just want to put Jesus in his place. “Where you think you from, son? You think you better ’n us or something? We be knowin’ your mama and your sisters and brothers. Who you think you are?”

They took offense at him, Mark says. And what does he mean by that? It means for starters that they recognized him, but they didn’t really know him. To recognize someone is to remember the face or the role the person played back when. To know someone is to probe more deeply into the mystery of personhood. You know someone when you know what causes her pain. You know someone when you know his dreams. You know someone when you are willing to carry her in your heart, even if only for a step or two along the journey. And maybe you know someone best when you know how to pray for him. The people in Jesus’ hometown recognized him as one of their own, but Jesus was his own man. He would be owned by no man, only by God. Notice in this story two things about names. First, Nazareth is never mentioned by name. Only “his hometown.” Second, the people of his hometown never call him by name. They mention the names of his mother and brothers, but not his name. He is the carpenter. It’s as if they have him sized up by his occupation, and he’s not allowed to grow beyond it. So Mark returns the favor by not naming the town except in reference to Jesus—“his hometown.”

When you come here to church, you may be familiar with who Jesus is, but have you allowed him to make a home in your heart instead of trying to making him fit your heart? To know Jesus is to love him as he is, not as you want him to be. To know Jesus truly is to follow him where he leads next rather than trying to take him back to where you first met him. To know Jesus is to let him out of that small box you put him in when you first met him.

But maybe this was a blessing in disguise for Jesus. I mean, many of us get locked into roles based on what our families of blood tell us we are or what kids in high school thought of us or what side of the tracks we grew up on. We cannot imagine rising above that. This is who I am, we say to ourselves, because that is who you are is what is said to us. But Jesus leaves home, and he leaves home with new perspective. He understands that he is not to be a hometown hero but a worldwide messiah. He is not out to win popularity contests; he is out to tell the truth and bring the good news to a hurting world that heals and restores those that receive it.

Mark says something curious as Jesus is walking out of town. He says Jesus could do no deed of power there –except for a healing or two, which seems like plenty by my standards. But Mark attributes this to the unbelief of Jesus’ hometown people. Now this is not like a magician who won’t do a trick unless he thinks you will be amazed by it. It’s not like Superman whose kryptonite is unbelief. It’s a simple statement about how relational is God’s working in the world. Jesus does not come to dazzle us and make us feel like passive spectators to God’s saving ways. He invites us to experience salvation for ourselves and for others. Even if is amounts only to praying in faith for someone or trusting the future to God when all seems lost or showing up to help someone when it seems you aren’t really helping: these actions put you in touch with the power of God. They allow you to see for yourself that more things are possible “in heaven and earth than are dreamt of your philosophy, Horatio,” to steal a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We do not live in a predictable and boring universe, a closed system where everything that happens, happens in logical ways. Love happens in this universe, and love throws everything off, including both the one loving and the one being loved. Forgiveness and mercy happen, too, and when they do, a small window is opened into the new world coming—and we are invited to live in it.

But look at what Jesus does immediately after leaving home. He goes on to other villages and teaches, and then he sends his disciples on a mission to do the same and more. What happens in this transition is written between the lines.

Last night Kim and I made a small, narrow path through our rental house. We are overwhelmed by the task of paring down 17 years of accumulation and making a home. We had, without knowing we were doing it, been making ourselves too much at home in one place and with many things—too many things. So we determined that this was a gift to us. Our kids are leaving home, as they should. We have only left a house. But we need to rethink our mission in life. We need to remember that home can be anywhere you are where love is. And family doesn’t have to live under the same roof or in the same town to be at home with each other. Family doesn’t even have to share the same blood; they can share the same spirit.

Some of you have had to learn that through a divorce or a death or a job loss or health that changed everything for you. For all the rightful grief over what is lost, there comes a time when you have to re-imagine your future and live into it. The world ahead is the only possible world open to you. You cannot remain attached to the way things were or the people who recognized you but didn’t really know you.

And Jesus teaches his disciples all about that by sending them out with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the gospel on their lips. He wants them to meet new people and not look to take advantage of them. Don’t social-climb, he tells them. If any welcome you into their homes, stay there even if a rich person offers you a softer bed the next night. And don’t carry a wallet, either. You aren’t there to take up offerings and get wealthy from your sharing of the good news. Jesus’ way of wealth has more to do with the friends you make than the things you take with you; more about the richness of the spiritual life instead of the material. Become brothers and sisters by the miracle of God’s gospel.

And if they don’t, if they don’t receive you, then shake the dust off your sandals and move on. Which is just what Jesus did with his hometown. He didn’t mope about it or call them names. He scratched his head at their unbelief and left them to the providence of God.

One way to handle difficult experiences in life, including rejection by people who should have known you and loved you, is to repurpose your life. Take up a mission for others. Get involved with people in need, with those who are receptive to what you have to offer.

I find it interesting that our residents, Andrew and David, are leaving home soon, so to speak. They have been with us for two years. It’s been comfortable, and we have loved it. But even though we have welcomed them and bless them today, they understand they cannot stay here with us and at the same time accomplish what God has for them. There are churches that need pastoring and students who need teaching. And these two are just the ones to do it.

And then we have the commissioning this same day of the church builders group. We have had two couples leave on mission trips already this summer, and others are going soon. Missions involve faith that God will go with us and make our feeble efforts amount to something like deeds of power, because they will be done in Jesus’ name.

Take heart, friends. Wherever you are in your life today, God has more in store for you—more than you have ever dreamed, and certainly more than any of those people in your past ever imagined. Spiritually speaking, home is not behind you; it’s ahead of you. Home is not where you come from; it’s where you are going. And leaving the one home might just be what you need to begin the journey to the new home that lasts forever.