Jesus won't be your citizen

Luke 4:21-30

The people in Jesus' home town expected favors from their hometown son.  Yet Jesus had mixed news for them.  He had come to proclaim the good news to the poor, the release of captives, sight for the blind, the year of the Lords favor - and surely the people of a little village like Nazareth were poor and sometimes oppressed.  Yet something in their attitude stopped Jesus from offering the signs of the Kingdom's in-breaking. They expected him to be theirs.

And here is where it gets uncomfortable.  My town, Sebewaing, is a small village like Nazareth.  We also long for Jesus to do something for his church long struggling.  Don't we have a claim on him like the people of Nazareth?  Moreover don't we think that America has a claim on him? We tout our status as a Christian nation and make impassioned speeches about American Exceptionalism, but Jesus refuses to be called a good ol' boy, or the citizen of a place or kingdom.  He tells his neighbors that he is a prophet like Elijah and Elisha who went to the gentiles.  This angers them to the point of murder.  Would some in our churches be enraged if Jesus said that about the US?

Where do we find him then? He is serving the poor and disenfranchised and not the expectations of those who would lay claim to him.