In your career in ministry, have you ever felt rejected by your congregation, as Jesus was rejected by his hometown in today’s gospel?

Nobody ever said being the truth-teller would be easy. Just ask Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, or Jonah, all famously reluctant to take the proclamation of God’s word to the people. It’s a hard job and the task of genuine leadership.

Paul walked down the street, dumbfounded. “We don’t feel that your contributions are beneficial to our organization . . ."

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born and bred a Southerner. Yet, when he began to organize nonviolent resistance to segregationist policies that had been entrenched in the South since the Civil War, he was imprisoned, his home firebombed, and his phone tapped.

Not many years after turning from wealth and war to a committed Christian life, Saint Francis of Assisi, filled with zeal, tried to reach the Holy Land to evangelize the Saracens, an Arab and Muslim people who were fighting Crusaders.

As we celebrate God’s banquet of love, let us remember that it is God who rescues us from sin.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.