Seeing that many others have undertaken to draw up accounts of the events that have taken place among us,
Exactly as these were handed down to us by those who from the outset were our witnesses and ministers of the world,
I in my turn,
After carefully going over the whole story from the beginning,
Have decided to write an ordered account for you.
Your Phyllis,
So that Your Excellency may learn how well founded the teaching is that you have received.
Jesus with the power of the Spirit in him returned to Galilee and his reputation spread throughout the countryside.
He taught in the synagogues and everyone praised him.
He came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he usually did.
He stood up to read and they handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
Unrolling the scroll he found the place where it is written,
The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me,
For he has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor,
To proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight.
To set the downtrodden free,
To proclaim the Lord's year of favour.
And then he rolled up the scroll,
Gave it back to the assistant and sat down.
And all eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him.
Then he began to speak to them.
This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen.
The Gospel of the Lord.
What beautiful pieces we have to read today.
Here in our Gospel reading we see Jesus in his community.
We see that up to now he has kind of gathered quite a following.
Made name for himself in his community and in the Jewish community.
What went wrong?
How did we go from people in the synagogue on the Sabbath looking expectantly at the Christ to a while later shouting,
Crucify him?
Give us Barnabas.
We don't want Jesus.
It is interesting to see how the influence of influencers of those people,
Those very self-same people that we look up to,
To lead us spiritually,
Lead us as nations,
Lead us as people,
Can change the dynamic from a synagogue with all eyes on somebody to crucify him.
In our reading of the first letter to the Corinthians we read a very well-known Christian story and we see that we are all different parts of one body.
Beautiful story.
I use that to try and show people that it doesn't matter what your race is.
It doesn't matter what your nationality is.
It doesn't matter what your sexual identity is.
It doesn't matter what your religious expression and spiritual expression might be.
We are all part of the same beautiful body.
How does this story relate to the story of Christ sitting in the synagogue and what happens thereafter?
The story of the body has two parts that we almost glance over and we gloss over because we see the part of the eye saying,
I'm not part of the body but how can it be separate and it's not the ear and all of those things?
But just towards the end we see that the reading says that if one part is hurting,
Everything hurts.
If one part is praised,
The whole body is praised.
Some way we've forgotten that.
Some way we laid ourselves to believe that I am ear.
There is nothing that exists other than ear.
Because foot exists doesn't mean that we are connected.
Foot is nothing to me.
And then foot goes and reciprocates.
I am foot because ear says that I am not part of it.
I will not be part of it.
And here we sit with one of the biggest challenges that we face as human beings.
Some way it became fashionable to separate ourselves.
Some way it became fashionable to think that,
Oh golly,
I am better than that person,
That group.
My country is better than that country.
My church is better than that church.
And it is sad that unfortunately many of our leaders use that in order to keep us so focused on our differences that we cannot see that right in front of us is the fact that there is one body.
We are all part of the one.
And that is how we move from the synagogue on Shabbos and on the holy day sitting and listening to the Christ,
To shouting,
Crucify Him.
Because somewhere in between we listened to an eye or an ear or a foot that said that you are not the same,
You are better,
You are different.
And the other side also then happens to be true.
We believe that if we are I and foot tells us we are less than,
We start believing that.
And then we believe,
How can God love me?
Because God only loves feet.
God doesn't have a foot fetish.
God loves.
A while ago we had a discussion.
When the most beautiful thing came out it said that God doesn't have favourites.
God recognises that each one of us have a unique role to play.
Yet we are all part of the one body.
No one is better than the other.
We see that some people are apostles,
Some are prophets,
Some can speak many languages,
Some can interpret those languages.
And that is true today still.
You know vocations have changed over the past two thousand years.
Two thousand years ago they wouldn't have known what an IT expert might be,
What a psychologist is.
No.
But with all of those changes everything has remained the same.
We are all still parts of one body.
While reading this I had images flash up in my head.
My day job is working in a medical centre.
And it's almost as if with all of these branches of identity that we have at the moment,
It is like over the past two thousand years we have been placed under a spiritual microscope.
And that microscope over time gets better and better.
So that we can see these millions and millions of divergent cells that we are.
And within the cells now we see that there is much more to a cell than just this round thing.
It is divided into things.
There is the mitochondria.
And in the mitochondria we have energy.
That's what we use our food for.
It's not a biology class.
Now we zoom out from the mitochondria,
From the ATP into the cell,
We zoom from the cell into the muscle or whatever into the organ.
We zoom out,
We zoom out,
We zoom out and we see the body that is God.
We zoom out from our physical bodies and we see the planet Earth,
This beautiful,
Beautiful space that we are living in.
We are one people.
We've just forgotten that oneness.
And it is the message of Christ and it's the message that we share here over and over and over again that Christ came to break down the barriers.
Christ came to break down these perceptions that we have of being separate from each other.
Because that's a lie.
When we get down to spirit level we are all one.
And so as we go into this week I would like for us all to maybe take some time to focus on this image of Jesus sitting in the synagogue and teaching.
And what if we in our meditations,
We don't have to be Christian to learn from the Christ,
What if we in our meditations put ourselves right there and we become part of the community that looks at Christ expectantly.
And then you apply the first word of the rule of St Benedict.
Listen.
Amen.
