Our To Do List

Raul Garcia III
3rd Sunday After Epiphany

January 27, 2019

Let us Pray:

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing to you my Lord my rock and redeemer.

Amen.

We we hear the Gospel text and read it in the bulletin you can see that people are excited to see Jesus.

They hear that Jesus is teaching at other synagogues and everyone loved it. So Jesus was coming home.

He was coming home and went to synagogue. That is what he was suppose to do.

As it says in the gospel. As it was custom to go synagogue.

He stood and read the scripture from the prophet Isaiah.

He read Isaiah 61: 1-2 and said this scripture has been fulfilled.

Jesus is telling the people of the synagogue that what Isaiah is saying is what I am all about.

This is my mission statement.

This is what God has put me on earth to do. This is my mission.

We are going to do a little quiz this morning and see if you can guess which

companies mission statement am I reading: Here we go:

To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. - Google

To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. -Facebook

Saving people money so they can live better. -Walmart

To be a company that inspires and fulfills your curiosity. -Sony

To refresh the world in mind, body and spirit.

To inspire moments of optimism and happiness through our brands and actions. -Coca Cola

To make a difference in a global scale through effectively serving children in need.-Mattel

Children by Grace, extending Christ embrace. -Family of God

Bring the good news to the poor, release the captives, recover sight to the blind,

let the oppressed go free. -Jesus

Jesus reads those words from Isaiah and says this is what I am about.

This is what I need you to be for me now.

Here at Family of God we serve and serve well. But, do we serve well?

God has placed you and me, this church, this building,

in this community on this plot of land for a reason.

And that reason is in our mission statement and what Jesus read.

Jesus left us a to do list. It’s the year of our Lord, a year of Jubilee.

To forgive and forget. Back then in Jewish custom, seven cycles of seven years

was called shmita, the custom was to free slaves and prisoners,

debts would be forgiven. This hasn’t been celebrated in centuries.

We need to celebrate Jubilee in our lives in a different way I think.

We need to forget and forgive about what has happened in the past and move forward.

Sometimes we let what has happened in the past dictate how we are going to

live our lives and sometimes serve.

We do learn from our past and grow from those experiences.

We are here to be Christ in this community.

We are here to reflect God’s light especially when this dark world sometimes needs it.

With all that is going on in the news, government and everything all around us now.

We need to show this marvelous light.

I grew up Catholic and I ended up going to a Lutheran College, Texas Lutheran University,

and Lutheran Seminary, Luther Seminary and fell in love with the theology

and somehow was able to catch me a beautiful Lutheran girl.

That would be Rhea just in case you’re wondering who that would be.

I think about my catholic days and here is a nugget of knowledge from a

Catholic saint which I love. That gives us a little light on this Gospel reading.        

From Saint Teresa of Avila -

Christ has no body now, but yours.

No hands, no feet on earth, but yours.

Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks compassion into the world.

Yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good.

Yours are the hands with which Christ blesses the world.

Let us bless the world.

Whether we care to, are we willing to admit what is hard in our lives,

what is lacking, what's difficult, that we all sin,

we fall short of the glory of God and that all our work and trying

just seems empty without Christ being part of it.

Make Christ part our life.
Make Christ a firm foundation.
We are surrounded in society with how we should act,

or how much money we should have, or how big our houses have to be and etc…

Culture put pressure on us.

As a church staff sometimes I think we need to be the all and

everything for everyone.

To be honest I’m sorry, we can’t. We just need to keep it simple.

I went to a Martin Luther King Jr breakfast last Monday and Don Lemmon

was the keynote speaker.

He said a few things that have stuck with me but this one stuck with me.

It was a quote by Mark Twain.

There are two important days in a person’s life.

The day they were born and the day they find out why.

Like I said, I think it’s simple. We all know the why. Jesus tells us.

Jesus came to fulfill what Isaiah wrote:

We know our mission and to understand what God has given us to do is the

most important thing we can do.

It’s no secret what the why is.

Let us move forward step by step, learn from the past and let it go and fulfill

the Gospel text from Isaiah and be the hands and feet of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen!!