25th January 2026
Good News from Unexpected Places
I was back in Rochester at the end of last week, to rehearse with my old choir. I'm looking forward to joining old and new friends on tour in Barcelona after Easter. Someone asked me if I was still in Penge, and, when I said yes, simply responded "Oh dear!" She was the same person who said "Can't you get anywhere better?" when I said I was going to be a curate in Strood. I thought about this while preaching on Jesus' encounter with Nathanael (John 1:43-end) at the 8am service on Sunday. Nathanael's response to Philip's excited exclamation "We have found the Messiah!" is scathing. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
While I was an ordinand, I had the opportunity to visit the Holy Land, and, for a few days, Nazareth was our base. I loved it, partly because it was still such an ordinary, unassuming town. There were no architecturally magnificent buildings, like the churches in Jerusalem, nor ornately over-decorated chapels, like in Bethlehem. We visited a simple 2000 year-old house, cut out of a rock, with a hole in the roof to let in light, and imagined Mary receiving that visit from the Angel Gabriel where she learnt that she would be the mother of God's son. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Well, as Nathanael was to learn, something very good did come out of Nazareth.
During that same trip, the taxi driver who brought me from the airport to Jerusalem refused to take me to the door of St George's College where I was staying. "Very bad street", he said firmly, tipping me out with my luggage somewhere beyond the end of the road and insisting that I walk the rest of the way. As far as I could tell during the time I was there, it was a totally ordinary street.
We can be quick to dismiss a place (and, by implication) its people. We even have a word for it - "godforsaken". But the good news for Nathanael and for all of us who have been tempted to ask "Can anything good come out of...?" is that, in God's unexpected kingdom, good does indeed come from unexpected places. I love the fact that, when God chose to be born as a human in our world, he didn't choose somewhere big, wealthy and powerful. When God came to live among us, he chose Nazareth - an ordinary place on the edges of an occupied country. For years, Jesus grew up and lived an ordinary life in that ordinary town of Nazareth. He must have done chores at home, learnt his scriptures, attended synagogue, learnt carpentry, played with friends. I wonder if anybody realised, during all those years, that God was already living, breathing and at work in that ordinary town?
God has not forsaken the ordinary - nor, indeed, the desperate places of our world. By God's Spirit, God is already at work there too, in ordinary lives lived by ordinary people - people like you and me and people totally unlike you and me. I wonder where we can notice God's life among the ordinary places and people we encounter this week?
