Kate Campbell’s music is a soulful and soothing cross between country, blue grass and folk.  Her song, Jesus Is The Way Home, starts this way.  “If you’re ever in the Richmond jail, with no one around to go your bail.  If you’ve lost your way, it might to help to know, Jesus is the way home.  If you’re trying to put that whiskey down and you realize you’re losing ground, you don’t have to walk that road alone.  Jesus is the way home.”  She refrains those lines with these words, “You don’t have to worry where you’re at, or why you’re there, he knows all that.  You just let the good Book be your map.  Jesus is the way home.  For the Bible tells me so.  Jesus is the way home.”

There’s a part of us that tends to believe that what got us in the mess we’re in somehow or another makes the mess we’re in more or less forgivable.  Like the other day when I got my first speeding ticket in over fifteen years.  I just wasn’t paying attention.  But, that didn’t matter to the officer who already had the citation ready for me to sign by the time he got to my window.  He didn’t care that I love my wife and kids, even my dog, and, least of all that I am pastor of this church.  He didn’t even ask.  All he cared about was where I was, not what got me there, or failed to keep me from getting there.

But, what about Jesus?  What if he doesn’t care as much about what got you in the mess you’re in as much as getting you out of the mess you’re in to somewhere else?  If we let the good Book be our map, will it lead us to the future God has prepared for us despite our past?  What if “it (really) don’t matter where you’re at, or why you’re there” because “he knows all that” and that he’s still more interested in where you’re headed than where you’ve been? 

Part of us knows that already, doesn’t it?  That Jesus, being the son of God, knows all about us?  Just like he knew the Samaritan woman at the well’s history of sexual and marital infidelity even before she admitted it, even before we start making excuses, Jesus can tell us more about ourselves than we want to know.  We believe that, right? 

So, what’s with these people who’d known Jesus since birth, when Jesus went back home, back to the place where people had watched him grow up.  Do you ever wonder what they saw when Jesus was five or ten or twelve or sixteen?  The Bible gives us practically no information at all about those years of Jesus’ life when people knew him as just another kid on the block, as just another ordinary human being.  Now, having gone full circle to maturity, Jesus had gone home to give something back to the people who had nurtured him in his immature years.  Perhaps to bless some people who had blessed him along the way.  What the Bible does tell us is that all his efforts to bless those people only ended up offending them.  “‘Where did this man get all this?  What is this wisdom that has been given to him?  What deeds of power are being done by his hands!  Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’”  They’d seen Jesus be so human it was difficult for them to believe that he could be so divine.

That’s the way it tends to go.  If you’ve been close enough to someone to see how human, how ordinary, they are, it’s very difficult to accept it when God uses them to do something extraordinary.  Except that God does what he does through very human, very ordinary people.  Unbelieving skepticism comes at a dear price.  If you won’t accept the extraordinary gift of God when it comes to you through someone very ordinary, perhaps someone you could have never imagined God using to do anything good, then you also close off the possibility of God doing something extraordinary in the life of someone as ordinary as you.

The people in Jesus’ hometown couldn’t believe that God could do something so incredible through someone with a common career and human enough to have brothers and sisters.  So, “amazed at their unbelief,” Jesus said, “‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’”  With few exceptions, “he could do no deed of power,” there and moved on down the road to work with people who were more interested in where he was headed than where he’d come from.  People who came to discover that, whatever our past may have been, it doesn’t have to be our permanent home.  Jesus is the way to a new place to call home.  A place of healing and hope and new life.  That is the Christian message, right? 

On June 26, in what has been called one of the most significant rulings of the past century, the United States Supreme Court ruled that state laws that govern the private sexual lives of homosexuals are unconstitutional (Lawrence et al. v. Texas, June 26, 2003, as reported in “The War Over Gay Marriage,” Newsweek, July 7, 2003).  It is widely believed that this ruling will open the final door to the legalization of gay marriages.  In case you were sleeping through it, please be aware that the cultural sand just shifted under our feet again.  In my lifetime, if there has been an issue more confusing and divisive to churches, not to mention families, than the issue of homosexuality, I don’t know what it is.  Even those who claim scripture as the ultimate guide in matters of faith can’t agree on what the Bible teaches.  Very intelligent, very Christian, people can’t agree on whether homosexuality is a choice or people are genetically predisposed to their sexual orientation.  No one seems to have clear answers. 

It all reminds me of the question the disciples once asked Jesus about a man they encountered who had been blind from birth.  “‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind (John 9:2)?’”  I only hope that man’s parents weren’t standing close enough to hear the question.  If they are like most parents I know, they’d already spent enough time grieving over the impact of their failures on the lives of their child, wondering if there was any hope for their child’s future despite the past they gave him.  The disciples seemed to think, like we sometimes do, that the answer to every malady lies in tracing it back to its ultimate moral roots.  But, Jesus’ answer to their question was centered more in that man’s future than his past.  And, Jesus’ answer to the question of your life and mine is more future than past oriented, too.  What got us where we are is not insignificant.  But, what will get us from here to a new place to call home is of greater significance. 

So, what about the homosexual issue?  The Southern Baptist Convention met in Phoenix last month and unveiled a program designed to encourage homosexuals to become heterosexuals.  No matter how well intentioned it may have been, as always happens when conventions adopt programs to deal with issues, that program will be perceived differently than it was intended.  Homosexuals will conclude that all Baptists are saying to them, “Get your life in order first and then come talk to us about following Jesus.”  But, what if we stopped dealing with homosexuals as an issue and started dealing with them as individuals and as human beings for whom Christ also died?  What if we simply said, “You don’t have to worry where you’re at, or why you’re there, he knows all that.  Jesus is the way home.” 

Last week, at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina, Nancy and I attended a breakout session led by Brian McLaren, a pastor from Washington D.C.  McLaren pointed out that, especially in the Middle Eastern world, Christianity is perceived as much or more as an American political ideology as it is a religious ideology.  Asking a Muslim to become a Christian often makes American political ideology a barrier to faith.  What if, McLaren asked, instead of asking Muslims to become Christians, we simply asked Muslims to follow Jesus?  Good question.  If a Muslim follows Jesus, will they be any less Christian even if they remain a political Muslim living in Saudi Arabia or Palestine than a Democrat or Republican Baptist living in Longview or Ft. Worth?  If anyone decides to follow Jesus, no matter where they’re at now or why they’re there, won’t Jesus lead them to the new home he’s built for them?  McLaren’s question got me to thinking.

What if, instead of first asking homosexuals to become heterosexual, we simply invite them to follow Jesus and then let Jesus lead them wherever he chooses?  If a homosexual follows Jesus, will he or she, in the end, be any less Christian than someone who never struggled with their sexual orientation but who has struggled with, say, cheating on their taxes, or their spouse, or putting the whiskey bottle down, or backbiting gossip or, for that matter, reigning in a sexual appetite that is as straight as an arrow but totally out of control?  In my experience, the more I follow Jesus, the more the stuff that dishonors his name in my life tends to slough off like dead skin after a bad sunburn heals.  Something about staying where the light is brightest, in time, just kills sin dead.

The scripture we’ve read this morning tells us that Jesus empowered his disciples to leave his hometown and go help hurting people who seemed interested in the kind of help they had to offer.  They went out and did some extraordinary things.  They cast out demons and healed sick people.  People who apparently were willing to heed their message of repentance.  Repentance, long before it is moral reform, is a willingness to change your mind about God and your relationship to him.  To believe that, through the person of Jesus, God wants to do something extraordinary in someone as ordinary as you. 

This past Sunday, Nancy and I worshipped at Providence Baptist Church in Hendersonville, North Carolina.  Gail Coulter is the pastor there and she told a story I’d heard but forgotten about Karl Barth.  Barth is one of the greatest theological minds in Christian history.  He was once asked what was the greatest truth he’d ever learned.  Barth, who could have answered with thoughts so deep that if we dove after them we’d all get the bends coming up, simply said that the greatest truth he’d ever learned was, “Jesus Loves Me, this I Know, for the Bible tells me so.”

That’s where repentance begins, and ends.  In believing that the Jesus who knows where you’re at and what got you there loves you anyway.  We have few examples in the New Testament of people first changing and then following Jesus.  In fact, we have none.  What we do have are many examples of people following Jesus and then being radically, even miraculously, changed.  People who finally discovered, “You don’t have to worry where you’re at, or why you’re there, he knows all that.  You just let the good Book be your map.  Jesus is the way home.  For the Bible tells me so.  Jesus is the way home.” 

Wouldn’t you like to be one of those people?  What is it about your past that you think disqualifies you for Jesus’ future?  What is it about where you are right now, at this very moment in your life, that you believe disqualifies you from going on from here?

Listen again, “You don’t have to worry where you’re at, or why you’re there, he knows all that.  You just let the good Book be your map.  Jesus is the way home.  For the Bible tells me so.  Jesus is the way home.”