(Luke 4:14-30)
The carpenter, you said? And miracles?
Hard to credit. Preaching, too?
The grown-up son of what’s her name?

Voices from our neighborhood: working folks,
The livelong struggle. Would we have enough?
Self-reliant, skeptical, subdued to earth and sky.
“We’ve gone a ways without the help of miracles.”
We resented when he said we’d spoiled our lives,
Unwelcome reproach from one we knew,
Lesser than ourselves in human worth.
We called it upstart jealousy and blocked
Our ears to what he had in mind for us.

Dreary times had blurred our sight.
(Every day is gloomy if
We choose to see it so.)
Our souls were calloused from the scrape of life
And our trick of not exploring our beliefs,
Never looking closely at ourselves.
We accepted narrow circumstances as
The way our lives must be. Little wonder that
We went after him with murder in our minds.

Our flinty spirit failed to hinder him.
With firmness, clarity, and warmth,
He spread His light – words of warning and release.
Believers came to him in other towns.
Grateful for deliverance from
The death-in-life that shuttered all our souls.
For a time, they gave him hospitality,
Then mostly fell away, including me.
Of course, when we heard he’d escaped
The coldness of a grave for him and us,
Some went back with penitent rejoicing. We
Talked about his promises and offered prayers
For a world that’s filled with neighborhoods like ours.