You can never go home. That’s the old saying, right?

I applied for a senior minister position one time where I’d originally been the youth minister some years before. I got a letter back from the board chairman politely declining my request to be considered. He wrote: “Thank you for your interest, but we are looking for someone with a bit more maturity.”

The same thing happened to my father when he applied to the church my grandfather had vacated to start the children’s home in Mexico. Ten months passed without a word. Finally, my dad got a letter back from the church saying they wanted to find someone older.

When my grandfather heard that, outraged, he told my dad, “You need to write back to them and tell them you’ve aged considerably since you first sent your application to them … ten months ago.”

Going back home is difficult—I think—because the people back home know you too well—or at least they did at one point. They remember when you had zits and braces.

They know about the time you brought a live chicken in a duffle bag to a school assembly and set it loose.

They remember you as a kid who couldn’t sit still, who couldn’t make heads or tails of geometry, who thought fashion was beat-up work boots and flannel shirts.

They know your dark secrets. They know you used to sport a mullet. They know you once owned a Barry Manilow record. (I’m speaking totally hypothetically here.) They saw you in a dress during that play in high school.

Too much knowledge. That’s what people think the whole you-can-never-go-home-again thing means. Your hometown people just know too much about you.

People don’t often stop to consider that maybe you can never go home again because you know too much about home.

Maybe part of the reason you can never go home again, or because—as Jesus tells us in our Gospel this morning—“No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” is because the prophet knows just what kind of stuff lurks behind the nostalgia.

Yes, they know you. But your hometown has plenty of skeletons of its own, doesn’t it?

The latent racism, homophobia, and misogyny. The deck stacked in favor of those at the top. The inequity. The corruption. The violence. The seamy underbelly of every village, town, and city in the world.

If you come from someplace, chances are that you know where the bodies are buried. And if that kind of thing bothers you enough, the thought of returning to it doesn’t sound particularly appealing—especially if they know you know all the secrets and aren’t the type to keep your mouth shut about it.

I got a message from my mom one time pointing me to an article about the popularity of the KKK in Michigan in the 1920s. And my mom said, “Remember that time when Grandma found those KKK robes in Great-Granny Proud’s dresser after she died?”

Um, no, I don’t remember that at all. And I thought, “What are you doing to me here? My granny used to rock me in a rocking chair in her room and give me horehound candy and sing Trust and Obey to me. She had KKK robes in her dresser?!? You’ve got to be kidding me. Quit messing with my history!”

And my mom said, “Well, I think they belonged to Great-Grandpa—not to Granny.”

And I thought, “Well, that’s ok, I guess. I don’t remember him. He was dead before I showed up on the scene.”

As you get older, you realize that there aren’t any perfect people; everybody has secrets, things the rest of the world doesn’t suspect. I learned all over again in one brief message that everybody has much more complicated lives than we’ll ever really know.

The past isn’t nearly as wonderful as our pastel-colored memories, is it?