Sermon Notes — February 8, 2026
Luke 4:14-21 and Luke 9:1-2 (NRSVUE)
February 8, 2026
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
“Together We Rise”
Beloved Community.
Over the last four weeks we have focused our worship and our life together on the beloved community. As far as any of us know, it was a philosopher named Josiah Royce who first used the phrase “beloved community. He described the beloved community as “the kingdom of heaven,” – the ultimate, ideal community, a utopia of sorts – characterized by loyalty and grace.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would later pull out that phrase and dust it off. For King, the beloved community was the community formed in the aftermath of nonviolence. In other words, if violence were to cease, we would experience the beloved community. Now, maybe Dr. King asked a lot of nonviolence. In the aftermath of nonviolence, he said, would be beloved community – in the aftermath of nonviolence would be redemption – in the aftermath of nonviolence would be reconciliation.
We could have long discussions about whether or not we believe that nonviolence can accomplish all of these things, but first we would have to imagine a world on the other side of violence – a world that contained no physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual harm. And if you ask me, that would take a lot of imagination.
So my intention this morning is not to preach nonviolence – my intention this morning is to invite us to imagine the beloved community. For the next few minutes I want you to engage your imagination. You have a piece of paper to help you engage your imagination – the opportunity to imagine what God’s recreated world will look like – to imagine what needs to be recreated where we live, in our neighborhoods, our schools, maybe even our church.
This morning, imagination is welcome – imagination is encouraged.
Will you pray with me and for me?
Jesus’ first sermon in Luke – what Jen read for us this morning –Jesus’ first sermon in Luke is a study in holy imagination. So far in his adult life, Jesus has been baptized and identified as God’s beloved. The Spirit has led him into the wilderness where he has endured fasting and temptation. And now, according to Luke, the Spirit has led Jesus back to Galilee where he has been preaching in the synagogues.
Here’s a map so we’re all imagining the same thing. Right in the middle of this map you see the Lake of Ginosar, which is another name for the Sea of Galilee, which is really a lake. But Galilee is also a region. This whole region in green is Galilee. Jerusalem isn’t on this map, but it’s south of this region. And if you look at the names of the cities and towns in the region of Galilee, you’ll see some that look familiar. Capernaum might be familiar to you – that’s where Jesus spent a lot of time. You’ll see Magdala, there on the west coast of the Sea of Galilee. That’s where Mary Magdalene was from. You’ll see Cana, the site of Jesus’s first miracle in John. And you’ll see Nazareth, Jesus’s hometown.
When we read the gospels, this is where almost everything we read takes place. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, grown up Jesus only goes to Jerusalem at the very end of his ministry. In John he goes to Jerusalem three times, but even then most of his ministry is spent in Galilee.
So when Luke tells us that Jesus returns in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, we should picture him traveling all over this area. Every town on this map probably had a synagogue, so Jesus never ran out of places to preach and people to talk to. And he gained quite a good reputation. Luke tells us that he was praised by everyone.
In today’s scripture he is back in Nazareth. This is his home church. This is where the ladies in the nursery changed his diaper and taught him the stories of his faith. These are the people who know all the embarrassing things about what Jesus was like growing up and they aren’t afraid to tell them. These are his people. We’re not going to get into the whole story this morning, but when you go home this afternoon you should read all of Luke 4 because you’ll see at the end that he makes these folks – these same folks – his church folks – he makes them so mad that they try to kill him.
But in today’s text, he is their teacher.
Now your regular old run of the mill synagogue in the time and place of Jesus probably wasn’t led by a rabbi. Instead, the members of the synagogue would take turns reading and teaching, and as the honored guest of the day, Jesus was likely invited to read and to teach, and that’s what he does.
If you’ll open up your Bible to Luke chapter 4, you’ll see in verse 17 that Jesus found the place where it was written in the scroll that he wanted to read from. He didn’t just unroll the scroll and put his finger down anywhere and start reading. He was looking for something in particular. And what he read – or at least what Luke says that he read – came from what in our Bibles is the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah:
The Lord God’s spirit is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for the captives, and liberation for prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and a day of vindication for our God.
(Isaiah 61:1-2)
And then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant – and by the way, this isn’t just a little rolled up piece of paper – this is very likely a scroll wrapped around a huge spindle, which is incredibly heavy and bulky – and he sat down. Sitting down is the position that teachers would assume as they began to teach. You’ll see it all through the gospels – whenever Jesus is going to teach, he sits down.
And so he sits down and he says
Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
Now, like I said, he’ll go on and say stuff that will make them mad and want to kill him, but this is kind of how he sums up what he wants to say to them.
All this stuff that I just read
has been fulfilled in your hearing today.
The good news is here.
It is here today. It didn’t come and go and we missed it. It won’t be here someday. The good news is here today.
And part of our work as Jesus’s people is to imagine what that good news looks like in real time. And thank God, Jesus lived it out in real time, and then he sent his friends to live it out in real time. And so we don’t have to work too hard to come up with how to live out the good news ourselves. To live as if these things are true.
Our readings this morning skip over a few chapters, but in chapter 9 Jesus gives his disciples his power and authority over evil and over illness, and then he sends them out. He sends them out to tell people that the good news is real and present and he sends them out to heal the sick.
Take your Bible again if you would and open to Luke chapter 9. New Testament, third gospel, ninth chapter, about three-quarters of the way back. Open the Bible that you brought, or the one in the back of the pew in front of you, or the one on your phone.
In Luke 9:1 the text says that
Jesus called the Twelve together.
And in verse 2 the text says,
He sent them out.
Now, some of your translations will say in verse 1 that
Jesus called his twelve disciples together.
Ok, now look down at chapter 9, verse 10.
These twelve return. And what does your bible call them?
(Wait for it)
Apostles.
Do you know the difference between a disciple and an apostle?
A disciple is a student. Someone who learns. Up until chapter nine these twelve are spending every day with Jesus. They’re watching what he’s doing and they’re listening to what he’s saying and absorbing all of it. They are learning to be like Jesus.
But an apostle is, literally, one who is sent
Apostle = one who is sent
Jesus doesn’t go with them. He sends them out to do what they had been watching him do, to do what they had been learning from him.
And that, I truly believe, requires our imagination. Our holy imagination, to do, as Dallas Willard once said,
live life as Jesus would if he were in our shoes.
Imagine what Jesus would do if he were you. Imagine where Jesus would send us if he were here today. Imagine what he would ask us to do.
Hold that thought. We’re going to come back to it.
If you’ve put away your Bible, pull it out again, because we have some more to look at in Luke. What I want us to notice together is how deeply and completely Jesus welcomes the Holy Spirit into his life and how willingly he allows the Spirit to lead him.
The first intersection between Jesus and the Holy Spirit happens in chapter 3. We were just here a few weeks ago on Baptism of the Lord Sunday. In chapter 3 verse 21 Luke tells us that
When everyone was being baptized, Jesus also was baptized…
And then
The Holy Spirit came down on him in bodily form like a dove.
Now flip over to chapter 4. Jesus has been baptized and what happens next in verse 1?
Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit
And
Was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
And then we go down to verse 14, where we are today, and we read that
Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee
And then what does he read from Isaiah
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.
From the moment Jesus shows up as an adult, we don’t see him do anything – anything – without being led or guided or prompted by the Holy Spirit. Jesus opens himself over and over again to be filled by the Holy Spirit.
I think that as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who earnestly and diligently want to do what Jesus did and who want to share the good news that Jesus shared, we often forget that the Holy Spirit was essential to Jesus’s ministry. Jesus didn’t do anything without letting the Holy Spirit fill him up and use him. I believe that every one of us in here wants Jesus to use us to create the beloved community and help heal the world. But if we try to do that without letting the Holy Spirit fill us and lead us and guide us, we will find ourselves as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, running aimlessly, staying busy for Jesus without necessarily doing the things that God truly has for us to do.
Building the beloved community takes imagination, and imagination takes paying attention to the Holy Spirit.
If you can believe it, Ash Wednesday is just a week and a half away, and then we’ll be fully into the season of Lent. We’re going to leave this theme of Beloved Community as our worship and preaching focus, but I pray that we won’t forget what we’ve learned. My prayer is that the vision of the Beloved Community continues to poke and prod at our imagination, that the pictures that we’ve doodled today, the prayers that we’ve prayed and the stories that we’ve read in the prayer stations – that we don’t just leave them behind, but that we keep them with us and that we let them settle deeply into our hearts.
And what if, during this season of Lent, we gave ourselves to really listening to the Holy Spirit – to make room in our lives for the Spirit to fill us and use – both in our own individual lives and as a church. To spark our holy imagination. Our work in building the beloved community is not simply to do, but to
Learn – what did Jesus do to create the Beloved Community?
Imagine – if that Beloved Community was real today, what would it look like? What would our church, our neighborhood, our community look like?
Discern – what is the Holy Spirit sending us to do?
Embody – make it concrete. Do the thing that the Spirit and our imaginations are calling us to do.
And this is how we learn and grow and spread the Beloved Community.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
As we leave this house of worship, may God embolden us to act justly, mercifully, and lovingly, so that we might build beloved community – in our families, in our church, and in our neighborhoods. In the name of the One who calls us beloved. Amen.