For Sunday
Proper 9B
Collect
O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. **
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
There is a familiar trope about returning home. It can be summed up as: don’t. Or, like, don’t expect much from it. People don’t know who you are, just who you were.
One of the signs of the disconnect between home and the world is often what they call you. For me, going back to where I grew up or visiting extended family are the only times I’m known as Andrew. Well, that and telemarketers.
There is an interesting dichotemy here between people who are familiar with you and people who know you now. There is a kind of knowing that is present and another that exists in the present as a reflection only of the past. Of knowing someone in their childhood and not in their adulthood.
The evangelist moves from this story of knowing straight into his sending out of the disciples as apostles. It is a moment of great promise and trust. And it reflects a bit of the same sense of growth and change over time, I think.
Nazareth isn’t the disciple’s home exactly; they come from throughout the wider region. But Jesus is sending them out as students and they come home as something more like masters.
There is a change in them. It is significant and substantial. And yet they remain the same person in nearly any way those words matter. Peter is still Peter, for instance. He possess the same eagerness and devotion. The substance of the man is quite like the man he was at the start. And yet he has grown, learned, and therefore, changed.
I suspect it is like a parent who is frustrated at the growth of their children or the surprise we have when we see each other’s kids after a few months/years/decades. Shock and tiny bit of horror that they are so grown. Because the idea that we actually stay the same, completely the same, is only an illusion.