Oreo Cookies on Mars

Learning to love our homeland of heaven

03/24/2025

Luke 4:24-30 Jesus said to the people in the synagogue at Nazareth: “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place. Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the sky was closed for three and a half years and a severe famine spread over the entire land. It was to none of these that Elijah was sent, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon. Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But he passed through the midst of them and went away.

Everyone loves the land where they are born. Hence we feel a sense of patriotism for our fatherland. But what if the parents are born in one country while the children are born or grow up in another country? For instance, my parents grew up in India but my brother, sister, and I grew up here in the United States.

People call my brother, sister, and me Oreo cookies because we’re brown on the outside but white on the inside. In other words, there were essentially two nationalities in my home, but no one really noticed it. This bubbling ethic difference came to a boil when my family visited India when I was a teenager. Of course we traveled during the summer time because we were out of school.

But it was blistering hot in New Delhi in June, and there was no air-conditioning to speak of, the food was too spicy, we could not speak the language, and we really did not know anyone. My parents, on the other hand, were used to all of that and did not need those American creature comforts like we kids were accustomed to.

My parents were loving every minute of the vacation and felt like they were finally “home.” So they were surprised, even shocked, to hear us children complain, “We want to go home!” My folks thought “we are home,” but my brother, sister, and I felt like we were on Mars. The Oreo cookies wanted to go back to the land of the stars and stripes.

In the gospel today Jesus comes as a prophet to tell the people they are not truly home and their true fatherland is in heaven, where God the Father is waiting for them. With two startling examples of Old Testament prophets, he explains that earthly ethnicity is not what matters most. Both Elijah and Elisha are sent to heal non-Jews, a widow from Sidon and Naaman from Syria.

But they do not heal or help people in the homeland of Israel. In other words, Jesus knows full-well that everyone loves the land where they were born, and perhaps no one loves their homeland more than the Jews did. Why? Well, because God had promised Abraham and his descendants the land of Palestine as a perpetual inheritance.

But now Jesus (as a prophet) informs them the earthly land was just a down-payment on their true homeland of heaven. But just like my parents thought India was “home” and my siblings and I thought American was “home,” so the Jews react violently when Jesus tells them that Israel is not their true home. They want to kill him for such unpatriotic blasphemy.

One of my favorite texts from the 2nd century A.D. is called the “Letter to Diognetus” written by an anonymous author. It delivers the same prophetic message as Jesus in the gospel today, exhorting: “Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language, or customs."

The anonymous author continues: "They do not inhabit separate cities of their own or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life…Yet there is something extraordinary about their way of life. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through."

Then he concludes: "They play their full role as citizens but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their true homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others they marry and have children, but they do not expose their children. They share their meals, but not their wives.”

My friends, the challenge for us 21st century Americans is the same as for Jesus’ contemporaries in Nazareth, for Diognetus’ fellow Christians in the 2nd century, and as for me and my family in the 1980’s. That is, we all love the land where we are born. And we should because we cultivate the virtue of patriotism. But as Christians we have a higher citizenship, a heavenly citizenship. And sometimes, we may even feel a little like oreo cookies on Mars.

Praised be Jesus Christ!