Looks like we won’t be going ANYWHERE today.
Like a couple hundred million of our fellow countrymen, we are pretty much socked-in by winter storm Fern.
A few people seem to be moving about. (Thank the Lord for the middle-schoolers, fer instance, who shoveled our driveway yesterday … and have promised to return today to clear the snow that has fallen since then.) But since we have no particular place to go, “hunker down” seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy for encountering this frigid late-January day.
Hunker down, and perhaps think back to a day when we were able to travel. A time when (with our Holy Land pilgrimage group) we actually moved along “the seaward road, the land west of the Jordan, the District of the Gentiles” in northern Israel, the places we hear about in today’s scripture readings.
Once you’ve traversed this seaward road … and milled about the ruins of the synagogue in Capernaum … you get a deeper sense of the backwater kinds of places that Jesus chose to begin his public ministry. Capernaum is perfectly lovely, but it’s a long way from Jerusalem – where most of the “holy people” of Jesus’ time would have hung out.
Imagine that: Jesus first brought his Good News to “the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali.” He was seeking out not the “in crowd,” but rather “the people who sit in darkness.” People who’d have no real reason to expect any sort of redemption. (After all, they lived on the wrong side of the tracks!)
And as I meditate on this great gift from the comfort of my suburban living room on this frigid January morning, my heart is filled with gratitude. I really don’t have to go anywhere, because grace comes to me. Grace comes to Manchester, no less than to the Naphtali of Jesus’ day.
Grace comes to those of us who sit in darkness. Grace covers us like a thick blanket of freshly fallen snow. And grace then calls us to share this good news, to join Jesus in becoming fishers of men, everywhere we go.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 
John, the readings took us back to the Holy Land Pilgrimage also. What a gift it was to make that journey, a gift that keeps on giving! Enjoy the peace of solitude of being “stuck” inside for a few days watching the gentle snow.