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Pastor Tom Steers on January 26, 2025

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THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY

January 26, 2025

Pastor Tom Steers

Christ the Saviour Lutheran Church, Toronto

Our Opening Hymn is: “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed”

Lutheran Service Book, 398 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhDpx3zqqWs

Confession and Absolution – P. 184-185

Introit – Psalm 102:18-22; antiphon: Ps. 102:13

13You will arise and have pity on Zion;

it is the time to favor her;

the appointed time has come.

18Let this be recorded for a generation to come,

so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord:

19 that he looked down from his holy height;

from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,

20 to hear the groans of the prisoners,

to set free those who were doomed to die,

21 that they may declare in Zion the name of the Lord,

and in Jerusalem his praise,

22 when peoples gather together,

and kingdoms, to worship the Lord.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son

and to the Holy Spirit;

as it was in the beginning,

is now, and will be forever. Amen.

13You will arise and have pity on Zion;

it is the time to favor her;

the appointed time has come.

Kyrie (Lord Have Mercy) – Page 186

Gloria in Excelsis (Glory to God in the Highest) – Page 187

Our Collect Prayer:

Almighty and everlasting God,

mercifully look upon our infirmities

and stretch forth the hand of Your majesty to heal and defend us;

through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and forever. Amen.

Our Bible Readings:

Old Testament – Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

Psalm 19:1-14

Epistle – 1st Corinthians 12:12-31a

Gospel – Luke 4:16-30

THE APOSTLES’ CREED Page 192

Our Hymn of the Day is: “O Christ, Our True and Only Light”

Lutheran Service Book, 839 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITcK0kBrrHg

The Sermon –

How shall we see Jesus today?

How would our lives be different if we started every day with that question?

It’s the season of Epiphany, and God is revealing Christ for our eyes to see.

Having “hidden” Him in the flesh of humanity through the Christmas miracle of the Incarnation, in these weeks of Epiphany, God now brings Jesus out and lets us see that this peasant of Galilee is also the only Son of God.

And our Saviour.

Many in the secular world deny not only Jesus, but the Triune God entirely.

Our Psalm reading in verse one speaks of God’s general revelation to us the universe:

“The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

The Apostle Paul echoes these words when he declares in Roman 1:19-20:

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

In our Gospel reading today we see Jesus looking strangely like God, but not the God of our imagination.

Rather we see Christ as the shocking God who confounds our expectations.

We don’t see Jesus in His victory over some demon, or leprosy, or even in raising the dead.

Today we see Him as God in His rejection, and His use of that rejection to lead to the act of salvation for the very people who would kill Him.

As Jesus preaches His first sermon, and one of the only ones recorded in the Gospels other than the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, we see the crowds grow angry at Christ.

They’re initially impressed and seem to love Him, but not for long.

The message veers off course in their opinion, and soon they take Him outside the village to cast Him from the top of a hill to His death.

They reject Him.

In this He really does look like God, the God the Israelites have been rejecting for centuries, the God many in our generation continue to reject.

Today as we hear this Gospel lesson, Christ passes through a crowd of murderous fellow-countrymen.

Before too many months have passed, He will once again face a crowd of angry fellow Jews who seek His life.

At that point though His ministry had run its course.

He had taught the crowds and His twelve disciples, and He’d born witness to the truth of God’s kingdom.

He healed the sick, cast out demons, fed multitudes, and raised the dead.

He could have walked through the crowd in Jerusalem that called out for His crucifixion as easily as He did the one in Nazareth.

But he didn’t.

He submitted to their murderous anger, endured their blows, the scourge, the lies, the cross, and finally breathes His last and hangs lifeless on the cross.

What makes this account so remarkable is not only Jesus rejected, but in that rejection, He becomes the very Saviour He proclaims Himself to be.

Herein lies the great mystery of God’s kingdom.

The victory is not had by God smashing the foe, but by God in human flesh being rejected, murdered, resurrected, and yet despised by the very people He is saving.

The very people whose sins He bore and paid for on a cross.

This is what God looks like.

He allowed Himself to lose the wrestling match with Jacob, He put up with the rebellious and stiff-necked people of Old Testament days, and much more.

When any pagan ‘god’ would have lashed out in furious wrath against people, Christ forgave and still loved them.

This isn’t a pushover God, but a God of a different sort of strength.

Not what we expect, but what He is.

Jesus returns to His hometown.

A very limited archaeological dig in Nazareth revealed a small agricultural village of about 200 residents.

It was a modest place, no large buildings, most of the homes were simple affairs whose back walls were formed by a hill.

The people who lived there probably worked in Sepphoris, the nearby town Herod Antipas started building in 4 B.C. as his new capitol.

Being a “tekton” or builder, it’s likely Joseph brought his family back here because there was work for him.

It’s clear Luke sees something in this encounter in Nazareth that allows him to say something necessary about Christ.

Luke wants to kick off your experience of Jesus’ ministry with this account.

But the narrative at first seems strange.

Jesus in the Sabbath gathering is given the scroll of Isaiah to read.

He unrolls and finds the place in the book from which He quotes Chapter 61.

The Isaiah scroll is massive, and this suggests a couple things in itself.

Christ is not randomly picking a verse, but knows this passage, and wants to speak to it.

His message is unusual, but not at first offensive to the people.

He tells them that today is the fulfillment of this prophecy.

And the people are amazed at the gracious words He speaks.

If He was interested in their praise, He would have stopped speaking right then.

But He didn’t.

He goes on to suggest that they’re all waiting for Him to do miracles as He’s done elsewhere.

But Jesus tells them that they will reject him as Saviour, that no prophet is honoured in his hometown.

Christ goes on to use two illustrations from the Old Testament: the story of Elijah and the widow of Zaraphath, and Elisha healing the Syrian captain, Naaman.

The point of both of these Biblical accounts is that the people whom the prophets helped were not Jews.

At the same time Jesus recounts that there were many starving Jewish widows and Jewish lepers who weren’t saved.

That does not go over well.

The crowd grows angry and take Christ outside to throw Him off a cliff, but He calmly walks through them; nothing comes of this.

Notice the reaction of the people to Jesus, and the tensions here.

They love him and hate him at the same time.

Luke will make much of this, that Jesus is essentially killed for being a good man: He heals the sick, befriends the lonely, raises the dead, cares for the weak, and so they kill Him.

It doesn’t make sense.

He speaks the truth and it’s the occasion for His death.

But even stranger, Jesus doesn’t ultimately avoid this death, even though He could.

In fact, His death becomes the mechanism for the salvation of the whole world.

Luke is telling us here that Jesus is no victim of the Romans.

He is the willing master of these events.

The fact that Jesus walks away this time, but not that Friday we call Good, tells us something important.

He could have walked away that day too, but chose not to.

Jesus is not a victim, but the one who takes action in His own death.

The very rejection of the Son of God is instrumental in God’s loving plan of salvation for a sinful world.

The greatest crime ever committed, the unjust execution of the only holy, truly righteous man who ever lived, becomes the means of the rebellious world’s rescue.

An act of rebellion is the rebellion’s undoing!

This is truly a strange and powerful mystery, and Luke is introducing us to it.

Jesus’ rejection in His hometown for speaking God’s truth will be repeated in Jerusalem.

It will lead to a cross, necessarily so, for our salvation, for the salvation of the world.

Amen.

THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH

SERVICE OF THE SACRAMENT Page 194

SANTCUS (Holy, Holy, Holy) Page 195

THE LORD’S PRAYER

THE WORDS OF OUR LORD (The words of Institution of the Lord’s Supper) Page 197

THE AGNUS DEI (Lamb of God) Page 198

THE DISTRIBUTION