For sixteen, he went to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day

he went into the synagogue as was his custom. He stood up to read and the scroll of the

prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written. The

spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Then he rolled

up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue

were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, today, this scripture is fulfilled

in your hearing. This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God. You never see. So I'd like to begin this evening by introducing you

to Sarah. I met her when I was 22 years old and she was a senior at NYU. She grew up

in Texas, some suburb just outside of Dallas and had all these dreams about theater and

the bright lights of Broadway. Then she got in. Got accepted to her dream school in her

dream city and she arrived wide-eyed and full of dreams and began living toward that vision

of her future. She also found this church community that had equally begun widening

her eyes to Jesus. She got together with this one friend and the two of them had a simple

plan. What if we read the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? We just do a chapter

a day, but we agree to take Jesus seriously, seriously enough to actually attempt living

like he's living, to actually follow him, to do the stuff. And then that simple experiment

began to mess up her life in the best possible ways. But it started here. Sarah just could

not shake the fact that Jesus, in scene after scene, is sharing meals with the poor. And

she almost never was. How could she call herself a disciple of this rabbi if she's found

...