The Third Sunday After the Epiphany Because They Know You Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ! Amen! Dear Christian friends, God has a great blessing for you in today’s Gospel, especially if you have people in your life who do not appreciate or admire your breed of Christianity. • Do you have friends or loved ones with whom you cannot discuss matters of the faith because a fight will break out? Today’s Gospel is for you. • When you do take courage and speak about the faith, does anyone roll their eyes because they know you too well? Today’s Gospel is for you. • Are there people who do not want to hear any Bible verses from you because they already have their minds made up? Today’s Gospel is for you. Wearing your shoes for you today, “Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up.” By coming “to Nazareth, where He had been brought up,” your Lord Jesus voluntarily faced the very same things you must face from the people who know you best. By taking the punishment that the people of His hometown dished out to Him, Jesus is letting you know that He fully understands the punishment you also must take from your own friends and family. Today’s Gospel is somewhat like a family reunion where everyone seems to know that it is just a matter of time before things get nasty. At one moment in today’s Gospel, “All spoke well of [Jesus] and marveled at the gracious Words that were coming from His mouth.” In the very next moment, the good people of Nazareth began to scratch their heads and wonder Jesus’ audacity, speaking the way He speaks! “And they said, ‘Is not this Joseph's son?’” Very quickly after that, the wheels fell off the cart, so to speak, and “all in the synagogue were filled with wrath” toward Jesus and His arrogant way of pointing to the Scriptures. How closely our Lord’s life runs in parallel with our own lives! Pennsylvania, Michigan, Kentucky and Texas all have towns named Nazareth, but I do not suppose any of you were born there. Nevertheless, each Christian has his or her own Nazareth. That is to say, each of us has—as Jesus had in Nazareth—people who have a hard time taking seriously our Christian faith and way of live. • We all have people who do not take our faith seriously because they know us to well. They have seen us in action and our actions have not been good! I once attempted to stop a family fight. I recited a Bible verse to my warring relatives. When I did, their wrath immediately turned away from one another and toward me. And my relatives were right, despite their screeching: “Sweep in front of your own door! You are no better than us! What makes you so holy and sinless to speak that way?” (Perhaps something similar has happened to you.) Praise be to God! The very same thing happened to our Lord Jesus here in today’s Gospel. “All in the synagogue were filled with wrath” because Jesus dared to bring a Bible passage to bear on their lives. The people of Nazareth knew Jesus as well as our own people know us, and the people of Nazareth held that knowledge against Jesus. To be sure, Jesus has none of the sin that we have (Hebrews 4:15), but that does not mean Nazareth had nothing to hold against Jesus! “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they asked. It is as if Nazareth said concerning Jesus, “This is the little child we once saw running in our streets and playing with our own children. How does this overgrown brat now dare to cite Bible passages to us? Where did He get these ideas?” • Just as we all have people who will not take us seriously because they know us too well, we all likewise have people who do not want to hear about the things we believe! More than holding our sinful actions against us, family and friends will also hold our faith against us. o Do you have friends who dislike your faith in infant Baptism, or who feel angry our practice of closed communion? Do you have a brother or a sister who has left our confession of faith, through marriage or otherwise, and now refuses to discuss the very things he or she once believed? Do you have a relative who flatly rejects the Christian faith, or who pretends to be Christian but wants nothing to do with Christ and His Word? Such family and friends do not wish to hear your Bible verses any more than the people of Nazareth wished to hear what Jesus read from the Bible to them. o Again: are there people in your family who feel disgusted at you because of the way you planned a family wedding or funeral? They wanted the service to be all about the family, and you insisted that the service be all about Jesus! Your Bible verses did not help then, either! Your family members plugged their ears and perhaps are still plugging them (cf. Acts 7:57), in much the same way that Nazareth finally had enough of listening to Jesus. o Yet again: do you have loved ones who simply will not listen because they are totally hung up on their own ideas? Do you have loved ones who have already made up their minds and do not want to be confused by any facts? Do you have people whose joking will turn to anger at a moment’s notice, especially when talk of the Christian faith is involved? Praise be to God! The very same thing happened to our Lord Jesus here in today’s Gospel. Praise be to God! Jesus bears up where we so easily fall short. Praise be to God! Jesus speaks faithfully and Jesus acts faithfully for us and for our salvation: o Enduring the very same temptations and torments that we ourselves must endure from some of the closest people in our lives, thus showing Himself to be fully sympathetic to our temptations and torments; o Doing for us in “Nazareth, where He had been brought up,” the very same things that we find so impossible to do in our own circles! That is truly the wonder and joy of today’s Gospel! Today’s Gospel is an excellent and praiseworthy example of how our Lord Jesus has done much more for us than simply die on a cross to give us forgiveness and life. Yes, Jesus certainly died on His cross for your forgiveness and life; and yes, all your sins are utterly and completely are forgiven because of Jesus’ suffering and death, which results in you eternal life. But your God is not satisfied with giving you that one gift—even though His gift of forgiveness and life stretches beyond the limits of any human imagination and it far exceeds anything we might expect or deserve! In today’s Gospel, God wants us to know that our dear Lord Jesus did much more than die for us. Today God illustrates how our dear Lord lived every moment of His life for our profit, for our strengthening, for our blessing and benefit. • God says in His Bible that Jesus fully and completely understands all our weaknesses because He personally experienced all our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15)—including those weaknesses you and I feel on account of our closest family and dearest friends. Today Jesus faced and endured family-weakness for us and for our strength. “He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up.” • God also says to you in His Bible that Jesus “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Here in today’s Gospel, Jesus bears and carries the very same temptations imposed by family and friends that we ourselves must bear, sometimes on a daily basis. Here in today’s Gospel, Jesus displays for us His Epiphany glory. Today, Jesus shows us that His glory is found in much more than merely displaying His divine strength and power to us. Today, Jesus wants us to know that His Epiphany glory consists of bearing our temptations and enduring our trials for sake—including those temptations and trials imposed upon us by family and friends. Draw comfort from today’s Gospel, dear saints! When you have a hard time with your sister or brother, think of Jesus here in Nazareth. When you find that you cannot talk about the Christian faith with your son or you best friend, think of Jesus here in Nazareth. When your father chuckles dismissively; when you aunt rolls her eyes because you listen to God’s Bible; when people at your family reunion smile and nod and walk away, remain here with Jesus at Nazareth. You have gone nowhere that Jesus has not gone before you—not even family reunions. “He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up.” Jesus stood faithfully among His own kith and kin, and He will continuously bear you up as you stand among your own. _______________________________________________ Sermons mailing list Sermons@cat41.org http://cat41.org/mailman/listinfo/sermons