Sometimes you can go home
Last weekend, I was invited to preach in the church I attended as a young adult 25 years ago. The Thursday before at the Harbor gathering, we had looked at Luke 4:24, “No prophet has ever been accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” When I shared during the after party what I was doing that weekend, we all had a good laugh.
Jesus says this after the mic drop moment of reading the text of Isaiah 61, proclaiming the Spirit of the Lord falling upon him and claiming the year of the Lord’s favour. His hometown crowd was not kind to his renewed empowerment, and attempted to throw him off a cliff, from which he narrowly escaped (Luke 4:28-30).
As a queer person, as a kid who was bullied relentlessly in her hometown, I relate to the lack of acceptance and violence we can face when we dare to return home as our fully realised selves. In the words of Brené Brown, “There is no greater threat to the critics, cynics, and fear mongerers than those of us who are willing to fail because we have learned how to rise.” There is no more tragic truth than the high percentage of LGBTQIA+ youth who live on our streets because they are in more danger at home simply for being their true selves. According to research by the Trevor Project released last year, 28% of LGBTQIA+ youth experience homelessness at some point in their young lives, placing them at extremely high risk of assault and self-harm. A home that would place a child in harm’s way is no home at all.
But I’m also a little critical of Jesus at that moment. It is easy for me to imagine my hometown as “backward” and the people as narrow-minded because, in my imagination, all those people are exactly the same as when I left 30 years ago. I don’t know the ways they have grown and evolved in the same way I have grown and evolved. I could write a screed to the hometown of my childhood that forced out racialized families and gay couples through social exclusion and violence. I could condemn the adults then and now who were silent bystanders to the violence I faced in school. And it would all be true. It would also be incomplete.
Today, those same schools and the shops of the main street fly Pride flags. Many of my classmates who had no anti-bullying education as children are now making positive contributions to their communities and the world, including raising kind and intelligent children. That doesn’t excuse the past, but it demonstrates growth and a willingness to learn new ways. And that’s not nothing.
So, I’m asking Jesus, standing in that holy place where his mother regularly took him to teach him the sacred ways, to pause and consider a little self-awareness and patience. Who was I when I left this place? Who are these people seeing? Who are they now? And, maybe, declaring myself a prophet in their midst without learning about them is a little…brash.
Lack of self-awareness does not warrant being thrown off a cliff. And I am not asking anyone to dismiss the potential violence they know they face by going back. I’m talking about the difficult, not the violent. The elders who still pinch your cheeks. The eye rolling comments about “kids these days,” and the “aren’t you SO GLAD to be home” references to what a bad choice you made to move away. Give those people a chance to demonstrate how far they have come, how much they have grown and evolved. It might not be obvious at first, so try to be patient.
Even the church? Yeah. Many of us are never darkening the doors of a church again. I get that. I don’t have an answer, just an observation. Sometimes churches change, too. As I walked up the street early that Sunday morning with my robes over my arm and my sermon in my pocket, I stood in the middle of the street and, on either side of me, stood two old churches with the Pride flag painted on their doorsteps. Now, that’s an evolution, and I’m so glad I didn’t miss it.
