Matthew 28:16-20

The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

The first house I ever lived in was my grandmothers’ house in Columbus, Georgia. With my father serving in the army in Korea, this was the little house that my mother brought me home to after I was born. For such a small house, it was a largish household that lived there, for crammed into its tiny rooms were my grandmother and my grandfather, my great grandmother, my mother, my 4 year old sister, my two year old brother and, of course, me.

The house was in a neighborhood of other small houses, each with a chain link fence enclosing a back yard where a picnic table or a swing set stood. In the summer vegetable gardens appeared in those same back yards, plots bursting with green beans, carrots, green peppers and, of course, tomatoes.

The sounds of the neighborhood were a lazy mix of the sounds of family conversations floating from open windows, the sounds of screened doors slamming as people when in and out of their houses, the sound of a plaintive cat or an agitated dog and the sounds of parents calling their children to supper or calling them in for the day as the sun went down.

Inside our house, each day was similar to the day that had come before it—getting up in the morning and cooking breakfast, sitting around a large oblong table in a small dining room making sure everyone had what he or she needed, talking about what would happen that day and then doing some of that. Before long the preparation of lunch would begin and then a time to rest in the afternoon, and a little while after that, the preparation of supper, and then baths and the preparation for bed.

My grandmother’s house and her neighborhood were the places I first understood what both family was and what community was all about.. I learned there that life had a rhythm of waking and sleeping; preparing for and eating meals together; connecting to neighbors and working and resting. I learned that was the place this same rhythm carried us along and sustained us. I learned that a kind of slow, warm, simple hum could be heard through it all. I

According to Matthew in our Gospel for today, after his death, Jesus meets with the disciples on a mountain in Galilee. It is from this mountain in Galilee that Jesus sends the disciples out into the world, telling them to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that (he) has commanded them (to do).”

Galilee is all throughout Matthew’s gospel. You might even say that Galilee is the geographical heart of the Gospel. Early in Matthew after Joseph is warned in a dream of the dangers of returning to Judea with the infant Jesus and his mother Mary, he makes his way to Galilee and to the town of Nazareth to make a home for his family. Matthew then mentions Galilee as the place from which Jesus comes to be baptized by John in the Jordan in Judea. After John, himself, is arrested, Matthew tells us that Jesus withdraws to Galilee where he first begins to proclaim the nearness of God’s kingdom and where he does much of his teaching and healing.

And then Galilee shows up again both when Jesus predicts his death and when the women encounter an angel at the empty tomb. “After I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee.” Jesus tells Peter as he speaks about his impending death. “He has been raised from the dead and…is going ahead of you to Galilee,” the angel urges the women to go and tell the disciples.

And so I wonder: why is it that the story of Jesus begins and ends in Galilee, that lesser, lower-key place of his origins—or to use my own story—why does the story of Jesus begin and end in Columbus, Georgia? Why is it that Jesus is nurtured in Galilee, is baptized and endures the wilderness in Judea, returns and spends most of his ministry in Galilee, dies in Judea and then meets his disciples again on a mountain in Galilee to send them into the world to continue his work?

Which leads us to this same questions for each of us: What is this story describing and suggesting for each of us—about the relationship between our Galilees and our Judeas, the relationship between the places and people we start with and what they nurture in us and the foreign and challenging territories that are the places where we put that nurture to the test or, with God’s help, put that nurture into action?

We, of course, cannot and do not know much about Jesus’ nurture. But we can probably assume this—that his home was humble, perhaps a little like my first home in Columbus, Georgia, and maybe a little like the one you grew up in too—and that it participated in all the rhythms of domestic life and in all the connections to neighborhood that your and mine did.

But in addition to all these things, Jesus’ household had another important dimension—it was a Jewish home, one imbued with the values and practices of Judaism, a way of life that believed that God created the world and all that is in it, that human beings were made in the image of God and that living in covenant with God meant treating the least in the community with dignity and respect.

This, then, perhaps, is the Galilee that Matthew’s Jesus takes with him as goes into the land of Judea where his identity as the Holy One of God will be revealed and developed through his baptism, by his crucifixion, and by his death and resurrection. And this is the pattern Jesus is repeating as he gathers his own onto a mountain in Galilee—his own rag tag, unlettered and homely disciples. He gathers them in Galilee, the place of his own nurture, but a place he returns to wiser and more complete than before, and sends them out into the Judeas of the world so that through them the Holy One may be revealed and developed..

And so it is with us as we yearn nostalgically for our Galilees, the places and people that nurtured us, the places and people who made us who we are. We yearn for them, but the place where what they have given us will come to maturity and fruition is in Judea and even farther away, in the challenging places to which we are sent.

It is a delicious dialectic, isn’t it? Galilee and Judea, our origins and nurture and the new and challenging places that bring us back to ourselves but with a sense of discovery that we would not have known without having left home in the first place. And all of this is not just for the sake of our own development but for the sake of a world that awaits the baptizing and blessing power of what we bring. For…

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”

(T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets)

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