Epiphany 3 – The Year of the Lord’s Favor

01/28/25 • -1 min

Jesus Unrolls the Book in the Synagogue by James Tissot
(1886-1894)

Epiphany 3 2025
Rev. Doug Floyd
Luke 4:14-21

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”^[1]

There’s an excitement in the crowd. The hometown boy has come home. “Did you hear how beautifully he read?” “He’s become quite a young man!” “That’s Joseph’s son. Don’t you recognize him?”

Even as they admire his speech, they fail to hear him. They fail to hear that, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing.” Even as we listen to these words, I would suggest that “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in our hearing.” The kingdom of God is here, is now. The rule of King Jesus is here, is now, is Today.

Today is The Day of Salvation.

Isaiah penned these words over 700 hundred years before by the inspiration of the Spirit. These words address the people of God, returning home from exile. Isaiah 61 speaks of restoring God’s people as a nation of priests, as the Beloved of God, as a people who will proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, as a people who will rebuild the ancient places.

Jesus declares, “Today these words are fulfilled in your midst.”

Let’s consider briefly these words. Our text opens with an image of the Triune God as work. Our passage opens with the phrase

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me”

I hear a Triune resonance in these words. The Lord God points to Israel’s covenant God, YHWH. He addresses his people by His Holy Spirit in the person of His Son, the anointed one that is the Messiah, the King. Jesus is the true king of Israel, but to the listeners in Nazareth, he is Jospeh’s son.

In my History of Western Thought class, the students are reading “The Confessions” by St, Augustine. His conversion is a long, slow process. Though dedicated to God from birth he spends his youth in unholy escapades. As he becomes a respected teacher of rhetoric, he is well studied in ancient philosophy and is a rising star in the culture. He continues to struggle with sinful desires and actions while also exploring sects and ideas outside of the church.

The Bible disappoints his aesthetic sensibility, and he finds the story of God becoming man in Christ as vulgar and unattractive. He wants to ascent philosophically and God comes down to our earthiness in Christ. He says, “To possess my God, the humble Jesus, I was not yet humble enough.”[2]

God condescends to our human frailty, our human weakness. To follow this Christ, this one true King, we do not ascend a throne, we kneel, we humble ourselves, we embrace Him in His utter humiliation, the way of the cross.

With this in mind, consider this anointed King who has come to save: the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed. His hearers do not actually hear what Jesus is saying. And I fear we can easily miss His words as well. This people who praise His eloquence, who delight in His return to the hometown, who speak of His father Joseph, fail to realize these words are being fulfilled as Jesus speaks. They are the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed.

Think back to Isaiah’s prophecies. He is speaking to a people who are prospering under Uzziah’s reign. They are blessed. I can see them hanging little signs in their home, “Blessed.” Isaiah looks at Israel’s prosperity and says,

The whole head is sick,
and the whole heart faint.
From the sole of the foot even to the head,
there is no soundness in it,
but bruises and sores
and raw wounds;
they are not pressed out or bound up
or softened with oil.
Your country lies desolate;
your cities are burned with fire;
in your very presence
foreigners devour your land;
it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners. ^[3]

He sees their true condition. They are keeping the Temple rituals, but their hearts are unfaithful. They are mixing idolatry with their obligations to the Temple. They are corrupt. They are blind to their condition and to one another. Therefore, they mistreat one another especially those on the margins: the poor, the oppressed. Though they left Egypt a long time ago, they are still enslaved and they are still enslaving others.

Isaiah and other prophets will speak of caring for the poor, the captive, the oppressed and so on. He is literally emphasizing the responsibility of God’s people to t...

Jesus Unrolls the Book in the Synagogue by James Tissot
(1886-1894)

Epiphany 3 2025
Rev. Doug Floyd
Luke 4:14-21

And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”^[1]

Today is The Day of Salvation.

Jesus declares, “Today these words are fulfilled in your midst.”

Let’s consider briefly these words. Our text opens with an image of the Triune God as work. Our passage opens with the phrase

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me”

Isaiah and other prophets will speak of caring for the poor, the captive, the oppressed and so on. He is literally emphasizing the responsibility of God’s people to t...

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Epiphany 2 – Epiphany 2 2025 -The Wedding

Marriage at Cana, Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (c. 1530)

Epiphany 2 2025 -The Wedding
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
John 2:1–11

“You have kept the good wine until now.” – John 2:10

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

There’s something wrong at the wedding at Cana in Galilee. Things go wrong at weddings. I’ve been a priest now for 30 years and the stories abound: there’s the shock of no flowers at the service because although they were ordered in the hectic run up to the day, no one remembered to pay for them. There’s the truly bizarre, like the spectacle of an ex-husband entering the church and rolling a bowling ball down the aisle toward the couple about to be wed. The stories are so great in number that they could derail our reflection on this passage from the start.

Early in premarital counseling, I try to address the issue head on, telling the intending couple that things go wrong at weddings, and that whatever happens, it will all turn out ok. They never want to hear it. I think it’s that in our culture, we have now replaced the celebration of the wedding with “wedding as performance art,” which means that the truth that things go wrong is too unpalatable to consider. This is also perhaps why the two hardest people for me to deal with as a priest going into a wedding were always the wedding planner – whose livelihood depended on things not going wrong – and the mother-of-the-bride- who having learned that things go wrong at a wedding when she experienced her own, often has developed over the years a rather controlling desire to relive her wedding dreams through the person of her daughter.

God bless them, their efforts almost never work. Their efforts, however, do point to the high-anxiety, low-stakes world we have made for ourselves: from posting photos of our meals and our workouts to everything being turned into a joyless routine geared toward excellence- meditation, travel, raising children, home decor- we have sacrificed the living of life for the management and curation of it. Living “Your Best Life Now,” demands it. So we strive and strive and strive, even as we fail and fail and fail. Anxiety and fear skyrocket, as do stress-related illnesses, that nagging sense of emptiness, pharmaceutical hacks, and self-help cures. But our human reality means that, try as we might, we’ll never get it right. Not really. Things just go wrong at weddings, and everywhere else.

And so it shouldn’t surprise us that there’s something wrong at the wedding at Cana of Galilee. Jewish weddings of that time were quite different affair then what we’re used to. There was a formal betrothal celebration, with a contract between the families, a bride-price, and several rituals. The betrothal was, in some ways, more important than the wedding itself. For the wedding proper, friends and family would come from near and far for a 7-day live-in party, not just a service and reception.

It’s in the midst of the multi-day party that we join the Cana wedding in progress today. As the festivities have run on, it seems they’ve run out of wine. Here is a failure of planning, a loss of honor, a sense of shame that dwarfs all my wedding tales. Everybody knows what’s expected- a seven-day party. How could you possibly allow the event to run out of wine? Further, in an age without a nearby Sam’s Club, how can this mistake possibly be fixed?

On the surface, the story we have today is simple enough: despite an initial pushback towards his mother- because Jesus is the Messiah, and not a caterer- he nonetheless intervenes and in the midst of potential embarrassment, performance expectations, and uncertainty, he provides a stupendous amount – we can estimate it at about 2160 standard glasses – of not just wine, but the very best wine. The wine flows, the party continues, the steward is impressed, the bridegroom is praised, and Mary and the disciples gain faith in Jesus. “The end.” That’s the story as we have it. But the meaning? The meaning goes deeper, for it connects to a deeper story, and a deeper performance anxiety. John tells us that what happens at Cana is Jesus’ first sign, which means it’s not about the wine or the party. It’s about him. It’s about his work. The wedding and the wine are simply pretext and context for a deeper story and a deeper issue.

See, there’s something else wrong at the wedding at Cana in Galilee. It has everything to do with the jars Jesus uses to hold the wine. Those large water pots are for the Jewish rite of purification. They are a reminder that, at the most basic of levels, all is not well and that there is a need greater than that of a further supply of wine. Water from them is used for the washing away of sin. It is used, but it doesn’t work. Saint Augustine muses that it is tasteless and colorless and joyless, and it doesn’t take away sin. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, we hear that reli...

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Epiphany 4 – The Freedom of Jesus

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Ecce Homo! (cropped) by Mihály Munkácsy (1896)

Epiphany 4 2025
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Luke 4:21-32

Isn’t this Joseph’s son?.

Luke 4:22b

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

Our Gospel reading today picks up where last week’s reading left off. Let’s just walk through it for a start. As you remember from last week, Jesus read from the prophecy of Isaiah about his messianic mission, and gave a very short and powerful one sentence sermon: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read.” The people marvel at this proclamation of grace, and say the one thing they know for certain about Jesus: “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” They are correct, even if not biologically so, but that’s really about all they can say. It seems they have missed the importance of the “Today” that Father Doug reflected on last week. Jesus is Joseph’s son, we know him. But “Today”? The very fulfillment of the promise of God? Or even a prophet- as Jesus suggests in verse 24- they can’t really say that about him. If we think about it for a minute, we realize they can’t say much about him or about what has just happened at all. Only that he is Joseph’s son.

After the service, Jesus takes his proclamation a bit further. There is grace, yes, but not perhaps in the way that the worshipers at Nazareth would have thought.

Joseph’s son? I get it. I’m from here. Probably makes it hard for you to see just what’s happening when you can remember me as a little boy with smudges on my face. That’s how it was with the prophets, too. Elijah wasn’t listened to during the famine in Israel, the only one who got fed was that widow in Sidon. And although there were plenty of lepers in Israel in the time of Elijah, it was only a Syrian solider that saw the truth and got healed.

In saying these things, Jesus is speaking the truth, but he’s also become very provocative- so much so that the people of his own hometown tried to kill him. His assertion is that the believers in Nazareth are missing the truth of God’s anointed one and the Kingdom because, well, he’s too familiar to them. He likens it to the all-too-easy and comfortable way that Israel ignored Elijah, and so relief during the famine was only brought to a foreigner, an enemy citizen who nonetheless had eyes to see. He reminds them of Naaman, the Syrian commander who was healed of his leprosy because he can perceive what God is doing through the hand of Elisha, when God’s own covenant people cannot. He is suggesting, none too subtly, that God’s covenant people can become so familiar with the God of the Covenant that they miss their “Today” altogether. He’s not just Joseph son, but they aren’t looking for anything else.

The ancient Greek storyteller Aesop is often credited with coining the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt.” It express the idea that a close long-term relationship with a person or situation brings about feelings of boredom or lack of respect. I think that’s part of what’s going on here- the people present in the synagogue of Nazareth are so familiar not just with Jesus, but also with Isaiah’s prophecy, that they can see nothing new. Certain of their ethnic identity, their moral superiority, and the excellence of their religion, and so settled in their own interpretation of the Scriptures, they are missing the inauguration of the Kingdom in their midst.

Familiarity breeds contempt- or if not contempt, at least a dulling of our sense of expectation. We can fall victim to it as well. When you’ve been a Christian for a long time, the wonders of our faith can begin to seem so ordinary, so routine. We know the stories of the Bible so well. The same liturgical pattern, year after year. Knowing how the story goes, it can become commonplace, the liturgy rote. Like a favorite song from our teenage years, we can listen with the ears of nostalgia for what we already know we will hear, muting even the possibility that what we hear might be something new. So this morning, I want to suggest some ways that we might see Joseph’s son with “fresh eyes,” ways that can hopefully shake off the familiarity that can breed an unwarranted level of comfort, control, and yes, contempt of our living and active God.

We need to start with the most basic truth: God is a person, not an idea. Elementary, yet we forget it so easily. As Father Doug reminded us last week, “It is not my knowledge of this truth that rescues me. It is Jesus Himself.”

By the time of the Second-Temple Judaism of Jesus’ day, the religion of the Israelites has become quite complex. In addition to the Torah, the Wisdom literature, and the Prophets, there is now a growing library of rabbinical commentary on the same. There are the synagogues, as well as the priesthood and the temple. And also many, many traditions and rituals. None of this is bad in and of itself- a...