Jan 27, 2013 Third Sunday After Epiphany

Luke 4:14-21

14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. 15 He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.
    16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
    18 "The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
      because he has anointed me
      to preach good news to the poor.
   He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
      and recovery of sight for the blind,
   to release the oppressed,
       19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."[a]
    20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21 and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

“Trouble In The Temple”

This is Jesus first trip; home following his baptism and 40 days in the wilderness.  It is the beginning of his ministry.  He is announcing who he is and why he has come.  And he is doing it in his home synagogue.

Jesus should have stopped before he got himself thrown out of town.  But he didn’t.  He went on to say what they didn’t want to hear.  When we don’t hear what we want to hear, we get angry and fight, or leave.

Paul Rees: “I shall go to my grave firm in the feeling that one of the most frequent undetected sins of Christians is idolatry.  Customs, tradition, forms, ideologies, organizations, institutions, precedents, structures, titles, clichés - in every one of them there is a potential idol.  They arise, it well may be out of historical necessity.  We cling to them, or kowtow to them, or somehow perpetuate them, out of lethargy, or bigotry, or stupidity, or vanity.”

Redemption only happens when I am disturbed enough to let it happen.  When I let God at my life, even those places where I most want to keep God out!

I need forgiveness before I can give forgiveness.  I need to hear what I don’t want to hear before I can hear what I want to hear.   I hope you don’t like everything which is said from here (pulpit), for that may well be a sign that His Word is being fulfilled in our hearing too!
“TODAY: This Scripture is Fulfilled”

Jesus is letting the secret out in his first sermon, in his home congregation, and it is too much for them to hear or believe.  They didn’t take him seriously and rejected what he said.

We do that.  We hear only what we want to hear and believe only what we want to believe.  We take from a sermon only what fits our belief system- not what challenges us to  a new belief system.

Then religion becomes something which keeps us from living the Gospel, and changing our ways so they more closely alien with God’s ways.

And the bite comes with the word ‘today’.  Had he said ‘someday’ it would have been easier to take.  For we live in the somedays more than today.
Yet we are called to be’ ‘today’ people,  fulfilling the scripture today!

We are to make a difference today.  Martin Luther King did.  We can.  Someday is not enough.  Today something of God’s love and Jesus compassion would be fulfilled  in us, through us in our world.  Make what you can of that - today!