Our scripture is about a people on a journey, far from home. And if you know anything all about the Bible, this is the way it always begins-somebody being told to leave wherever they happen to be at the moment and to journey somewhere else. Adam and Eve were told to get out of the Garden, Abraham told to take his bride and baggage to he knows not where, Jacob on the lam, and Israel taking forty years to go about three hundred miles, to say nothing of Jesus, always on a journey, never at home, nowhere to lay his head. With a terse, "follow me," urging these tax collectors and fisherfolk to leave home and wander with him on a journey that seems to have no end. The couple of times Jesus manages to stop by home and visit his family seem to go badly.

Which makes all the more strange, at least …