Pastor’s Column 2/8/2026

PASTOR’S COLUMN​

²⁵ “Certainly there were many needy widows in Elijah’s time, when the heavens were closed for three and a half years, and a severe famine devastated the land. ²⁶  Yet, Elijah was not sent to any of them. He was sent instead  to a foreigner – a widow of Zarephath in the land of Sidon.  ²⁷  And many in Israel had leprosy in the time of the prophet Elisha, but the only one healed was Naaman, a Syrian.”  ²⁸  When they heard this, the people in the synagogue were furious^{. 29}  Jumping up, they mobbed Him and forced  Him to the edge of the hill on which the town was built.  They intended to push Him over the cliff, ³⁰  but He passed right through the crowd and went on His way.       Luke 4:25-30, NLT

“3rd Sunday – Passing Through Trouble!”

One of the great failures in understanding Jesus is to perceive Him only as meek, but not to see Him as a bold and courageous advocate for the oppressed, least, left out and lost. To be certain,  when Jesus preached at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, He spoke from the prophet Isaiah’s text. He proclaimed the Lord’s mission. Jesus spoke of bringing Good News to the poor; release to the incarcerated; and  giving freedom to the   enslaved.   Sight and insight would begiven to the impaired. This is the Jesus we so vividly see when we read the Scriptures. We see Jesus whose formative years were spent in the much-malignedtown of Nazareth in the Galilee region. Later Jesus preached His message of freedom and justice to His hometown crowd, He lifted Gentiles, or foreigners, as the object of God’s healing and redemption. This angered the attendees over the mentioning of Foreigners having God’s favor. Their racial animus led Jesus to the edge of the hill intending to kill Him, but Jesus “passed through” them. The vitriol and ignorance of others towards any of us will never prevail. The God who parted the waters of the sea, will always see us through! “Truth, crushed to the earth,” Dr. King said, “will rise and live!”