Church of the Good Shepherd CEC

God knows your name. And He knows what street you live on. For some of us it is Just Barely Making It Street. For others it is Heartbreak Avenue. May it is Hopeless Place or Sun-Setting Highway. Then there is always Confusion Court, Perplexity Way, Dysfunction Junction, Sobering Station, Boredom Bypass and the Blvd of Broken dreams. Luke 4:16-20 tells us that God is intent on intersecting with our lives. He has come anointed in the power of the Holy Spirit (verse 18). In other words, He came down to where we live. Into our world of pressures, people, pain, problems, etc., etc. etc. He came to bring positive, powerful change. The kind the world hopes for but apart from the divine does not know or see. God is at work everywhere around us. We only need eyes to see. God came to preach the Gospel to the poor (verse 18). Who are the poor? You and me. Though we may or may not have financial means, we are all poor. We all have need of God. Even in our best moments, we have to come to terms with our limitations and imperfections. Despite our best intentions, we often fall short. God knows that. Only He was ever meant to be our sufficiency. Our poverty comes in our unwillingness or inability to recognize that. Particularly in our western world, where God had blessed us in so many ways, allowing us to make so many advances, we find ourselves poor because of our forgetting that God is truly what we need, and if we could see it, who we really long for. Our poverty comes in not being able to see His goodness, our struggling to be honest about doubts because we fail to see He can handle our doubts and can answer them with the loving presence of Himself. God gives us Himself and in that awareness of His majesty, we understand everything has a place though we may not know exactly how. This is more than a doctrinal acceptance based upon blind faith about an abstract God that feels distant. No, this is about a personal encounter with the divine whose evidence is concretely woven into the fabric of our time and space in a way whose existence our minds can grasp yet not fully understand. God came to us so we could know Him. And to know Him is to know that He is love but that His ways are not our ways. God in Christ came to heal the brokenhearted (verse 18). He knows our pain. Though fully God, Jesus was still a human being and on earth choose to live within the limitations of humanity. Though the reasons why we hurt vary, as people we all know a solidarity in suffering and pain. It is part of living in a fallen world. Jesus knew that suffering too. Let us look to the cross if we ever doubt it. But He endured the cross for the joy that was set before Him. His suffering was a means to a greater end: the joy of resurrection life. And this joy of resurrection life transcends all time and space to all those who offer their broken hearts to Jesus. He is the great physician. Jesus came to set the captives free (verse 18). And we are those who are captive to the short sightedness of sin; the sin that has separated and separates us from God. The sin that feels good for a time but only brings that haunting sense of hollowness that we feel the need to fill with more thrills, political or even religious causes apart from God and the incessant need not to remain still long enough to hear the voice of God calling to us. The sin that leaves us with that sense of perennial purposelessness, a vague or sharp disconnect we try not to reflect upon because it brings us back to wrestle with God. God wants to set us free from that unending cycle. And He wants to set us free from all those behavior patterns that hurt ourselves or others. God wants to give our blind eyes the ability to see (verse 18). See the world from a different plane of perspective, to hope in something more than the now which in turn makes the now full of hope. For us to have eyes to see what has always been there. God wants to see free the oppressed (verse 18). And this is not primarily political in nature thought it does touch upon it. The oppressed in reference are those oppressed by evil spirits. In a word: demons. Demons that seek to harass, confuse, drag down, distort and diminish all things in our lives. They are smarter and stronger than us; but not greater than God. In Jesus, those of us who are oppressed by demons are set free to live life in God to the fullest. Jesus came to give us life and life to the full (John 10:10). Jesus came to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (verse 19). What is the year of the Lord? It is the time of freedom in the here and now for all I have tried to describe in the above and more. God wants to bring us His freedom where we live that only comes with His presence so that where ever we are we can live on Son-Rise Blvd. Open your heart to Him this day and every day. Come Lord Jesus! In the name of the most Holy Trinity. Amen.