Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight
O Lord, my strength and my redeemer., AMEN.

When I was in seminary, every so often I would get invitations to go preach at a local church. The rector would call up and ask if I would be willing to preach on a Sunday in the near future and give me the readings. I would take a glance at the readings, and usually agree to be the token seminarian on "Theological Education Sunday."

I have to admit; I never really got too worked up when it came to writing a sermon for a church that I didn't go to. Don't get me wrong I always tried to do a good job. I wanted to represent the School of Theology, my diocese, and myself well, but I figured my homiletics professor had always said I did a fairly good job preaching at Morning Prayer, so I figured I would go in and wow them. At the very least I would be a change of pace for a small congregation that usually only heard their priest preach every Sunday. And being good Episcopalians, most of the congregation would thank me and continue on with their Sunday mornings whether they liked my sermon or not.

But nothing got me more nervous than preaching in my home congregation back in Virginia. Every time I was going to go home, my priest expected me to let her know, and she would ask me to preach. Our priest at St. Barnabas was a very good preacher. She had great personal stories that seemed to match the readings perfectly, and she could keep everyone engaged and listening. And I wanted to live up to that as well.

I would spend hours agonizing of the readings, pulling out every bit of minutia I could. I wanted to impress my home parish with what I was learning in seminary. I would write and rewrite my sermon, and preach my sermon to anyone who would listen to it. It had to be just right. I wanted to prove to the folks back that I could PREACH; that I was indeed worthy to be in seminary learning to be a priest.

The Sunday would finally arrive, and I would be all decked out in my cassock and surplice and I would stand in the pulpit. And even though I had practiced delivering my sermon and even though I knew that the people sitting in the pews would be extra nice to me, because I was "one of theirs", I would still be nervous. I would get through my sermon and return to my chair, shaking and in serious need of a handkerchief to wipe my face.

For me, going back home to preach was very hard. It was, and in many ways still is, the same way for me here at St. James, which is now my home parish. As a preacher, you want to have something to say worth listening to. You want to have something to say that will touch people, or make them think. I bring this up, because this is exactly what Jesus is doing in our Gospel reading this morning. He has returned to his hometown of Nazareth, and he does a little teaching in the synagogue in front of his neighbors and people who might have seen him grow up. I can't picture our Lord and Savior sweating or being nervous in front of his local synagogue, I mean he is the Son of God after all. But what Jesus taught that day must have made the people in the synagogue wonder.

Jesus read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah a prophecy that described restoration and transformation for the people of Israel. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."¹ In our modern Bibles, we find this in Isaiah, chapter 61.

Here is a passage of Scripture that speaks of huge events happening; ancient ruins will be raised up, ruined cities would be repaired, there will be gladness instead of mourning, captives would be set free, the blind would see; the types of events that when they happen, people will stand up and take notice. And Jesus stands up in the synagogue and says "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."²

We can almost hear the people who would have been listening to Jesus say "What?!?! None of these things have happened yet! How can you say that this prophecy has been fulfilled?" And we can ask this very question ourselves; what was Jesus talking about?

But when we look at what Jesus was quoting in Isaiah, it doesn't say that the captives will be set free right now, or that all the blind will have their sight restored immediately. However, "what he said was that the coming of all that was being proclaimed to these people along with the message that the year of the Lord's favor was upon them. They were seen by God. The lowest of the low, the ones so marginalized as to scarcely register on our human awareness were seen by and loved by God himself."³

At the synagogue, Jesus is proclaiming and ushering in the Kingdom of God here on earth. What Isaiah says about the servant of the Lord, Jesus declares it to be fulfilled. He will announce good news to those who are poor, blind, in captivity, and oppressed.⁴ Jesus is telling the people that it is he who "anointed."⁵

The kingdom Jesus was proclaiming would not be announced in flashy ways. In the first part of Luke, chapter 4, from which our Gospel reading comes, proves this. Jesus refused to be tempted by the devil's temptations to "prove" that he is indeed God's Son. He didn't command the angels to protect him; he didn't turn a stone into bread. He wasn't interested in worldly command and power. Instead Jesus was interested in serving God, ushering in the slowly evolving Kingdom here on earth.⁶

And we can sympathize with the people who must have had a hard time understanding or believing Jesus when he said "This has been fulfilled." Life was hard for them, bad things still happen. And two thousand years later, bad things still happen. We still see hardships; we still see injustice on the earth.

But Jesus' words still carry hope. They still carry the promise that God is with us. One writer has called it the agony of "the already and the not yet."⁷ God's kingdom on earth has already been ushered in with Jesus Christ, yet we wait for the day when it will be completed with his coming again in great power and glory.

We can and must continue to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth in the meantime. We are a part of the Body of Christ that Paul writes about in his First Letter to the Corinthians. "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it…"⁸ When we work to end suffering in the world, we are bringing about God's kingdom on earth. When we live fully into our baptismal covenant, showing love to those around us, we are bringing about God's kingdom on earth. When we live as Children of God, we are bringing about God's kingdom here on earth.

And we get glimpses of the Kingdom of God breaking through like the first light at dawn. We see the kingdom of God when people gathered together to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina. We are seeing the Kingdom of God in the people beginning the rebuilding process in Haiti. We see the kingdom of God in the gathering of the community of the faithful at our spaghetti dinners. And we see the kingdom of Heaven in the joy on the faces of our Christmas families as they collected their gifts from St. James.

St. Teresa of Avila puts it perfectly in a poem entitled "Christ has No Body" that sums up what we are as the Body of Christ:

"Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours."⁹

We come to Saint James each week as a broken people, living in a broken, sinful world. We know that many in the world are hurting, we ourselves maybe hurting. Yet, we affirm every week that "Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again."¹⁰ Christ will come again. Such a simple statement, and yet it gives a glimpse of "the already and the not yet", and that gives us peace in the here and now.

Amen.

¹ Luke 4:8-9 and Isaiah 61:1-2
² Luke 4:21
³ Hoezee, Scott Luke 4:14-21 - found at The Center for Excellence in Preaching website
⁴ Johnson, Luke Timothy, Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Luke (The Liturgical Press: Collegeville, Minnesota, 1991), 81>
⁵ Isaiah 61:1
⁶ Hoezee, Scott Luke 4:14-21 - found at The Center for Excellence in Preaching website
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ 1 Corinthians 12:26
⁹ St. Theresa of Avila, Christ Has No Body - found at http://www.journeywithjesus.net/PoemsAndPrayers/Teresa_Of_Avila_Christ_Has_No_Body.shtml
¹⁰ BCP, 363