What do you remember best about the town where you grew up? It might have been small or large or in-between. There you were nurtured by family and friends. In that place the best and worst of life’s formative events happened for you. Is the town significant for any reason? Probably not any more than Nazareth was to the unobserving eye. And yet in the places of our human community the Lord impacts our lives in significant, daily ways. Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, poignantly emphasizes just how special the places of our daily life are, regardless of size or location. Such was the case with the town of Nazareth.

Nazareth? Where is that? A man named Nathaniel who eventually became a disciple of Jesus’ asked cynically, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" The town has a name which me…