Last weekend, when more than 2 feet of snow covered us and forced us to cancel church, our dog Brownie was very confused by the snow. She wanted to go out for her walk, and so we opened the door and she saw this numbing, cold, soft blanket of white outside the door. And she looked back at us, with an expression that said, “What have you done with Reality? Where is the world outside?”
And so Saundra and I took turns digging a path through the snow along the sidewalk with Brownie running back and forth behind us in the deep canyon of snow that she was too small to climb out of. It took hours, because we did not want to end up calling 911 because of a heart attack, but finally, we broke through to the parking lot and Brownie was able to run free in the world. And she was so excited to be free again!
Approximately 450 years before the birth of Jesus, the Jewish nation largely lived in Babylon, stuck there in slavery. Because of a prophecy through Jeremiah, the emperor Cyrus was led by God to order that the Jews should return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. They did so, The Temple was rebuilt.
A second wave of people returned a few years later, led by Ezra, a teacher of the law, who was appointed as governor. Later still, Nehemiah was made governor, and Ezra became a leading teacher and priest.
Nehemiah’s task was to protect Jerusalem by rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. He did so. And when those walls were rebuilt, the Jewish people broke free.
And when the walls were rebuilt, on the first day of the seventh month, Nehemiah and Ezra assembled the people in front of the Temple, and Ezra read the Law of God to them, the Law which Moses had given to the people, He read from early morning until noon and various priests translated and explained the difficult parts.
This first day of the seventh month was in the fall of the year, since the Jewish religious calendar began at Passover, around the time of our Easter celebration. This day was known as the Feast of Trumpets, and also became known as Rosh Hashanah, the agricultural New Year. On this day, the ram’s horn, the shofar, was blown in short bursts to announce that it was time to prepare yourself for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement that would be coming up in a couple of weeks.
In the tradition of the rabbi’s, the first day of the seventh month was a very important day, because it was the day that Adam was created. And according to the rabbi’s, it was also the day that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the day they were judged by God. And since it was the first Day of Judgment, it only followed that this day would also be the day when the final Day of Judgment would occur.
On this particular day, Ezra read the Law of God to the people, and the people listened from daybreak until noon and they wept. They listened to all the things that God had done for them, they listened to all the great wonders that Moses and Aaron and Miriam had seen, they listened to the story of the Exodus, and they listened to the Law that Moses had brought down from God on the mountain. And they wept because they remembered, and they saw in their minds the beauty of what God had done for them, and they realized their own guilt and shame and sin, and how they had wasted their years and trivialized their lives when they could have been living for God, doing things with eternal meaning, living with the wonder and the love and the friendship of God, but they had spent their time in vain pursuits, doing worthless deeds, and it touched them to their hearts and they wept.
Even today, we weep when we think of our lives and what God has done for us, how many times God has carried us through the water that would sweep us away, how many times God has lifted us out of fiery furnaces, and we remember how ungrateful we’ve been and we weep.
As the people stood there listening and weeping, Nehemiah and Ezra said to all the people:
“This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Nehemiah understood that the Lord wanted people to turn their concerns from their own guilt and brokenness to the strength and love of God, that if they were to weep, they should weep for the joy that God loves each person, that God loves you deeply and wonderfully, that God’s strength is yours to call upon and so be joyful, be filled with a wonderful, beautiful joy, because your God loves you and takes care of you and so you should celebrate!
And then they cheered up and they celebrated and they had a feast and a wonderful afternoon and evening. The next day, the leaders of the people came to Ezra, they discussed the Law and they found in the Law that they were to make temporary shelters for the next couple of weeks, tents and huts to remember the time they had lived in the wilderness, and so they commanded all the people to do so and they did this and the Bible tells us that “Their joy was very great!” And so a great revival broke out in Jerusalem that month, as the Festival of Tabernacles was celebrated and Jerusalem, which had been sent into exile in Babylon almost a century before, now was rebuilt, with a Temple, with walls, and was now standing strong again, the people were once again with God and all was well with the people of God.
And every week, they gathered together in small groups, in the synagogues and read some of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms and talked about what it meant. From early in the morning, men would read the scrolls of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and then they would debate the meaning. Every adult man who could read took his turn reading. Sometimes they read of the history of the people of Israel. Sometimes they read of the wonderful things God had done for them. And sometimes they read of things that would be, things that had not yet come to pass, things prophesized to happen in the future, and they would wonder – when will these things happen? And after the reading, the man who read would sit back down and perhaps he would speak first, perhaps another would speak first. But they would speak and talk and discuss and argue, and that was how they learned about God’s will, because Ezra and Nehemiah read the Law to the assembled people that morning in Jerusalem, and the hearing of the Law changed people that day, for they realized now how important God should be to them.
And so, over 450 years later, a man walked into a synagogue in Nazareth near the Sea of Galilee one Saturday morning. “He stood up to read,17 and 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 proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
It was something they had heard dozens of times. From Isaiah’s scroll, they had heard this read many Saturday mornings and wondered what it meant, who it referred to, when it would happen. But the poor were still poor and starving, the prisoners were still in the Roman prisons and galleys, the blind were still blind, and all of Israel and Judah were still under the control of the oppressive Romans. It would happen sometime in the far, distant future, at the end of time, after all, no one really understood what it meant, no one understood that the poor were the poor in spirit, the prisoners were the prisoners of sin, the blind were those who could not see the reality of God’s love, the oppressed were oppressed by their fears and the lies of the devil. And because they did not understand, they looked around them and hoped that something would happen, maybe sometime in the far future, that Messiah, the Savior would come and set people free.
Just like now, today, when we sit in this room and we read scripture, we don’t really see that it means anything to us, to our children, or affects us in this world, because our culture has taught us that everything involving Christ is a myth, almost a legend like Santa Claus, a story we’ve heard so many times it has lost any impact upon us and we sit here and listen and wonder when or if things will ever change, for the rich still control the government, the prisons are filled with more people than ever before, and we still work hard to survive, and nothing much that is said has anything to do with us, We don’t understand that the poor means the poor in spirit, the prisoners are the prisoners of sin and addiction, the blind are those who cannot see the reality of God’s love, the oppressed are oppressed by their fears and the lies of the devil. And so we still come to this building on Sunday mornings, because that’s what we do on Sunday mornings, we listen and talk and discuss and our friends are here, and so we are here, and we listen to the story again and it seems so distant from us and our life.
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 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Everyone looked at him. “Such a good way of reading,” they thought. “He was so clear in his speech, and gracious,” one whispered to another. Then, it began to dawn upon them what He had said. And the arrogance of it began to hit them. For when he said that “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” he was claiming to be God’s anointed, he was claiming to be the Messiah, he was claiming to be the savior of the people of Israel. And yet, they had seen him grow up, they had seen him read the first time about 15 years ago, they had given him money to fix their plows and tables and chairs, for he was old Joseph’s son, the carpenter, Mary’s boy, Yeshua bar Joseph, Jesus of Nazareth, a smart kid, a smarter man, but he was one of us, he grew up in this town, and people from this town never, ever change the world!
And he was claiming that the end times were upon us, he was claiming that the myth was becoming reality, he was claiming that the world was beginning to change and he would change it and so he was dangerous, and everyone began to shout and men grabbed him and pushed him, “we need him to get out of here”, "he’s dangerous", we don’t want our world to change", "kill him", "throw him off the cliff edge", and then they stopped for a moment on the edge of the cliff and he walked right through them and left them behind forever...
We don’t like the idea that our world might change. While we like to toy with the idea that Santa Claus might really come down the chimney, our reaction to meeting the man himself in our kitchen would probably be violent:
“WHO ARE YOU and WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY KITCHEN!”
“Ho, Ho, Ho, I’m Santa Claus!”
“Right, buddy!. I’m calling 911 right now, so don’t try anything.”
Deep down, we don’t really want excitement. We like what we are doing – and what we aren’t doing, because our lives are pretty comfortable and our culture encourages us to be comfortable. We would prefer to sleep in our spiritual journey, because climbing spiritual mountains is hard work. It is as though we are living in a spiritual dream, where the real world of work and television, and Mountaineer basketball and school and housework and home repairs are the dream we see in front of us, our life flows by us and we are standing apart from it, detached like we are in a dream – and yet somewhere, somehow, we know that there is an even more real world of angels and demons and God and devil and souls trapped in despair and oppression and we hold the keys to setting all of them free, but our dreamworld of reality keeps us from doing anything. And that dreamworld of reality is so inviting, for it is like walking through the world on codeine, we go through each day and everything is predictable, the world doesn’t change much, and we don’t ever do anything to change the world around us. And that is inviting and comfortable.
And our culture helps us to know our place in the world, we know who we are, we know what we are able to do – and we know that we decided a long time ago who we would never be. And so we sit here on Sunday mornings, ready to put some money in a basket if I ask you to, or perhaps we’ll even come to a special Bible study, but only if it seems particularly interesting, and we don’t like being made uncomfortable, because, after all, we’re just ordinary people and that’s all we’ll ever be until we die, and we don’t want to be anything else. And then when we die, Amos-Carvelli or Burnside Funeral Home will come and get us, a hundred or so people will visit with our family one evening later that week, and we’ll be buried at Floral Hills or maybe cremated because we don’t want to be a financial burden on our family.
But yet – every once in a while, one of those Bible readings gets into our heart. Like maybe the one today about us each being a part of Christ’s body. At first glance it’s a nice metaphor, a figure of speech, a nice way to feel part of the church, a way for us to each understand that we each have a role to play, blah, blah, bland, but what if there is something a bit more there. What if there is something just a bit deeper in all that talk about us being part of Christ’s body? What if there is something intensely real about it?
For you know, there is more to it. At the Last Supper, Jesus talked for quite a while about the Holy Spirit, and one of the things He said was that He had to go away for the Holy Spirit to arrive and the Spirit would guide us into all truth. And if you think about that for a while, you begin to realize that it means that in some way, the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ are one and the same substance, and that is what the early church fathers concluded and every significant theologian since then, that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are part of the same substance that is shared by God the Father. The Holy Spirit is made of God-stuff.
And that means, if we are part of Christ’s body, the church, then since we share the Holy Spirit from our baptisms, we are now partly made of God-stuff, and this body metaphor is more than just a figure of speech, and there is something real to this idea that we are all parts of Christ’s body, and when you add in the effect of eating Jesus body and drinking His blood every month, perhaps there is something very real to this idea. Because Jesus was God walking on earth and He sent His Holy Spirit to us to replace Him on earth and we took Jesus into our hearts when we received the Holy Spirit – WOW! That means that there is now a part of God working inside of us and we aren’t just ordinary people anymore and WOW! We have some of the power of God to create new realities inside us!
And sometimes, when part of our body is dragging under the load, just as Jesus’ back was bent under the load of the cross, other parts of the body have to step up and help out, as His legs helped out His back that day. And that means that as long as we belong to His Body, we are never, ever alone, for all the other members of the Body are here to surround us and lift us up.
Our world’s culture has bound us down. We are told we need to have a large house, two cars, a debt load, to work to make money, to have expensive phones, to have a retirement plan, to have health insurance. We are told this by every advertisement we see, by every article we read, by every politician that panders to us and promises us that we can live a better life with a better income if only you will vote for him or her, and we are told that the television show or the Facebook page or the movie or the video game or earning money is the way to spend our time. And the result is that we have gradually, gradually gone to sleep in our spirit, we have bought the entire story about what reality is supposed to be like, that this life is the end-all and the be-all of existence, that what we see around us, especially what we see in the world of entertainment and the struggle for money is the reality that we should aspire to, and we have bought the whole story and our spirits have gone to sleep in this dreamworld that was created by Hollywood and the advertising people and the networks and the people who sell things. And so the reality of God’s beauty has become a dream and the dream of Hollywood has become our reality and our spirit has gone to sleep. Zzzzzzzz.
And so perhaps we need to stop spiritually sleeping. Perhaps we need to wake up this part of Christ’s body and begin to seriously do some work for God’s Mission because we have part of God working inside of us! And some parts of this body are doing good work. But we’re always tired, we like the dreamworld, and the REAL reality of God’s beauty would require us to radically change the way we live, like my friends who tithe 50% of their income, or my other friends who left their comfortable home in Ohio and moved to Mexico even though they didn’t speak Spanish just because every time they asked God what they should do, they were told, “Move to Mexico and become missionaries” and they did and they have brought thousands of people to know the Lord. They woke up to the REAL reality of God’s beauty, that they can tap into the power of God.
Or my friends who opened up their home to two homeless people, who live with them and share their cats. Or our former babysitter who, after getting married and having several small children, went with her husband to Afghanistan not because of military reasons, but because they wanted to share the love of Christ in that country with the people there. Or my other friends who sold their home, moved to North Carolina, and who fix up donated computers for missionaries. They want to wake other people up!
Or another friend who travels to Liberia every year and installs solar powered refrigeration systems in medical clinics because the power is so unreliable it can’t keep the vaccines reliably refrigerated. Or still another friend who repairs airplanes for Jungle Aviation and Radio Service so the missionaries can receive supplies in New Guinea. Or another who writes Christian electronic books in Spanish to bring children to know Jesus. And there’s a guy I know who heard another fellow in his church needed a kidney, so he was tested and he was a match, so he donated his kidney, part of his body, to the other guy, but of course, they were both part of the same Body of Christ. One part supports the other part.
Or another guy who goes to Haiti once a year because what he saw there broke his heart and so he puts aside $400 a month so he can visit every year for a week and help out. Or the woman I know who buys the food and cooks and feeds about 50 people at her church one Saturday morning a month because she can do it, and then there are her friends who speak to the people about what Jesus has done in their lives: "Wake up!" and they have all tapped into the Real reality that God the Holy Spirit is working inside them and God wants them to act like Jesus would act because they are the Body of Christ on this earth, changing the world into something wonderful, and that living in the dreamworld of the culture isn’t what they were created to do, even though they were once ordinary people just like us.
For you see folks, there are a couple of ways to look at that reading from Isaiah that Jesus gave in the Nazareth synagogue so many years ago. You can look at it as almost a myth, part of the story of Jesus, part of the story about Him who came from heaven, who ministered for three years when he was thirty years old, and then He returned to Heaven, the Messiah having arrived, acted, and left, to return again someday, as almost a dream.
Or you can look at that reading as Jesus standing up in front of the entire world and telling the entire world that these things will begin to happen on that morning in Nazareth, but they will continue to happen around the world, that the world has changed, that His sacrificial death and resurrection changed things, that Messiah did not leave the earth but only changed His form, that His body changed from being the physical body of one man to being the composite body made of dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people, including you and me and everyone in this room. And if you look at the reading that way, then it becomes something beautiful and powerful and eternal and tells us today what we should be doing when we awaken from our reality dream and look at the world as it truly is, the Real reality of God’s immediate and present existence upon this world, because God is with us, standing right with us in this room right now, God’s Holy Spirit is moving amongst us, and the bells of your alarm clock are going off, wake up, wake up, wake up!
And so let me ask you to join me as we awaken from our reality dream from under those warm flannel sheets of comfort and awaken to the spiritually true meaning of this world, as we rub the sleep from our eyes and look at the REAL world, as we stand up out of our seats and stand together with Jesus Christ, who is present in this room today and read what Isaiah prophesied, together as different parts of the Body of Christ:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
For you were the poor in sprit who needed to hear good news.
You were the prisoners who were bound by sin and your own comfort.
You were the people who were blind who now can see,
And you were the ones who were oppressed by the culture of this world.
This IS the year of the Lord’s favor, for you have awakened.
Are you awake? With Christ’s help, will you go forth and break free from the dreamworld, like our dog Brownie breaking free from the soft cocoon of snow around your house or the Jews breaking free from their Babylonian captivity? Will you spread the Good News about the freedom that Christ gives?
Play your part, do your part, be your part of Christ body, and it will happen.
“Ho, Ho, Ho, I’m Santa Claus!”
“Right, buddy!. I’m calling 911 right now, so don’t try anything.”
Deep down, we don’t really want excitement. We like what we are doing – and what we aren’t doing, because our lives are pretty comfortable and our culture encourages us to be comfortable. We would prefer to sleep in our spiritual journey, because climbing spiritual mountains is hard work. It is as though we are living in a spiritual dream, where the real world of work and television, and Mountaineer basketball and school and housework and home repairs are the dream we see in front of us, our life flows by us and we are standing apart from it, detached like we are in a dream – and yet somewhere, somehow, we know that there is an even more real world of angels and demons and God and devil and souls trapped in despair and oppression and we hold the keys to setting all of them free, but our dreamworld of reality keeps us from doing anything. And that dreamworld of reality is so inviting, for it is like walking through the world on codeine, we go through each day and everything is predictable, the world doesn’t change much, and we don’t ever do anything to change the world around us. And that is inviting and comfortable.
And our culture helps us to know our place in the world, we know who we are, we know what we are able to do – and we know that we decided a long time ago who we would never be. And so we sit here on Sunday mornings, ready to put some money in a basket if I ask you to, or perhaps we’ll even come to a special Bible study, but only if it seems particularly interesting, and we don’t like being made uncomfortable, because, after all, we’re just ordinary people and that’s all we’ll ever be until we die, and we don’t want to be anything else. And then when we die, Amos-Carvelli or Burnside Funeral Home will come and get us, a hundred or so people will visit with our family one evening later that week, and we’ll be buried at Floral Hills or maybe cremated because we don’t want to be a financial burden on our family.
But yet – every once in a while, one of those Bible readings gets into our heart. Like maybe the one today about us each being a part of Christ’s body. At first glance it’s a nice metaphor, a figure of speech, a nice way to feel part of the church, a way for us to each understand that we each have a role to play, blah, blah, bland, but what if there is something a bit more there. What if there is something just a bit deeper in all that talk about us being part of Christ’s body? What if there is something intensely real about it?
For you know, there is more to it. At the Last Supper, Jesus talked for quite a while about the Holy Spirit, and one of the things He said was that He had to go away for the Holy Spirit to arrive and the Spirit would guide us into all truth. And if you think about that for a while, you begin to realize that it means that in some way, the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ are one and the same substance, and that is what the early church fathers concluded and every significant theologian since then, that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are part of the same substance that is shared by God the Father. The Holy Spirit is made of God-stuff.
And that means, if we are part of Christ’s body, the church, then since we share the Holy Spirit from our baptisms, we are now partly made of God-stuff, and this body metaphor is more than just a figure of speech, and there is something real to this idea that we are all parts of Christ’s body, and when you add in the effect of eating Jesus body and drinking His blood every month, perhaps there is something very real to this idea. Because Jesus was God walking on earth and He sent His Holy Spirit to us to replace Him on earth and we took Jesus into our hearts when we received the Holy Spirit – WOW! That means that there is now a part of God working inside of us and we aren’t just ordinary people anymore and WOW! We have some of the power of God to create new realities inside us!
And sometimes, when part of our body is dragging under the load, just as Jesus’ back was bent under the load of the cross, other parts of the body have to step up and help out, as His legs helped out His back that day. And that means that as long as we belong to His Body, we are never, ever alone, for all the other members of the Body are here to surround us and lift us up.
Our world’s culture has bound us down. We are told we need to have a large house, two cars, a debt load, to work to make money, to have expensive phones, to have a retirement plan, to have health insurance. We are told this by every advertisement we see, by every article we read, by every politician that panders to us and promises us that we can live a better life with a better income if only you will vote for him or her, and we are told that the television show or the Facebook page or the movie or the video game or earning money is the way to spend our time. And the result is that we have gradually, gradually gone to sleep in our spirit, we have bought the entire story about what reality is supposed to be like, that this life is the end-all and the be-all of existence, that what we see around us, especially what we see in the world of entertainment and the struggle for money is the reality that we should aspire to, and we have bought the whole story and our spirits have gone to sleep in this dreamworld that was created by Hollywood and the advertising people and the networks and the people who sell things. And so the reality of God’s beauty has become a dream and the dream of Hollywood has become our reality and our spirit has gone to sleep. Zzzzzzzz.
And so perhaps we need to stop spiritually sleeping. Perhaps we need to wake up this part of Christ’s body and begin to seriously do some work for God’s Mission because we have part of God working inside of us! And some parts of this body are doing good work. But we’re always tired, we like the dreamworld, and the REAL reality of God’s beauty would require us to radically change the way we live, like my friends who tithe 50% of their income, or my other friends who left their comfortable home in Ohio and moved to Mexico even though they didn’t speak Spanish just because every time they asked God what they should do, they were told, “Move to Mexico and become missionaries” and they did and they have brought thousands of people to know the Lord. They woke up to the REAL reality of God’s beauty, that they can tap into the power of God.
Or my friends who opened up their home to two homeless people, who live with them and share their cats. Or our former babysitter who, after getting married and having several small children, went with her husband to Afghanistan not because of military reasons, but because they wanted to share the love of Christ in that country with the people there. Or my other friends who sold their home, moved to North Carolina, and who fix up donated computers for missionaries. They want to wake other people up!
Or another friend who travels to Liberia every year and installs solar powered refrigeration systems in medical clinics because the power is so unreliable it can’t keep the vaccines reliably refrigerated. Or still another friend who repairs airplanes for Jungle Aviation and Radio Service so the missionaries can receive supplies in New Guinea. Or another who writes Christian electronic books in Spanish to bring children to know Jesus. And there’s a guy I know who heard another fellow in his church needed a kidney, so he was tested and he was a match, so he donated his kidney, part of his body, to the other guy, but of course, they were both part of the same Body of Christ. One part supports the other part.
Or another guy who goes to Haiti once a year because what he saw there broke his heart and so he puts aside $400 a month so he can visit every year for a week and help out. Or the woman I know who buys the food and cooks and feeds about 50 people at her church one Saturday morning a month because she can do it, and then there are her friends who speak to the people about what Jesus has done in their lives: "Wake up!" and they have all tapped into the Real reality that God the Holy Spirit is working inside them and God wants them to act like Jesus would act because they are the Body of Christ on this earth, changing the world into something wonderful, and that living in the dreamworld of the culture isn’t what they were created to do, even though they were once ordinary people just like us.
For you see folks, there are a couple of ways to look at that reading from Isaiah that Jesus gave in the Nazareth synagogue so many years ago. You can look at it as almost a myth, part of the story of Jesus, part of the story about Him who came from heaven, who ministered for three years when he was thirty years old, and then He returned to Heaven, the Messiah having arrived, acted, and left, to return again someday, as almost a dream.
Or you can look at that reading as Jesus standing up in front of the entire world and telling the entire world that these things will begin to happen on that morning in Nazareth, but they will continue to happen around the world, that the world has changed, that His sacrificial death and resurrection changed things, that Messiah did not leave the earth but only changed His form, that His body changed from being the physical body of one man to being the composite body made of dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people, including you and me and everyone in this room. And if you look at the reading that way, then it becomes something beautiful and powerful and eternal and tells us today what we should be doing when we awaken from our reality dream and look at the world as it truly is, the Real reality of God’s immediate and present existence upon this world, because God is with us, standing right with us in this room right now, God’s Holy Spirit is moving amongst us, and the bells of your alarm clock are going off, wake up, wake up, wake up!
And so let me ask you to join me as we awaken from our reality dream from under those warm flannel sheets of comfort and awaken to the spiritually true meaning of this world, as we rub the sleep from our eyes and look at the REAL world, as we stand up out of our seats and stand together with Jesus Christ, who is present in this room today and read what Isaiah prophesied, together as different parts of the Body of Christ:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
For you were the poor in sprit who needed to hear good news.
You were the prisoners who were bound by sin and your own comfort.
You were the people who were blind who now can see,
And you were the ones who were oppressed by the culture of this world.
This IS the year of the Lord’s favor, for you have awakened.
Are you awake? With Christ’s help, will you go forth and break free from the dreamworld, like our dog Brownie breaking free from the soft cocoon of snow around your house or the Jews breaking free from their Babylonian captivity? Will you spread the Good News about the freedom that Christ gives?
Play your part, do your part, be your part of Christ body, and it will happen.
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