Gospel of Jesus Christ

FROM THE INTERIM PASTOR'S STUDY:
 
Any gospel that is not good news to the poor, the oppressed or the least among us is simply not the gospel of Jesus Christ.
                                               Jim Wallis, Sojourners Magazine
 
I am not a fan of Twitter. I rarely look at Facebook. But I received a timely tweet recently sent out by a Jesuit priest named James Martin, who is also the editor of America Magazine, and I decided to share it.
 
He tweeted: "Jesus was from a "s***hole" place."

The minuscule Galilean town in which Joseph and Mary spent their lives and raised their son Jesus, was, quite literally, a joke. Can anything good come from Nazareth? asked one disciple, (John 1:46) when he heard where the Messiah was from. Some scholars posit that this was a popular saying in the 1st century. In any event, Nazareth was on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Roman roads avoided it until the 2nd century. Jesus came from a backwater of a backwater; he and his mother and father, were most likely considered throwaway people.
 
It seems to me that if Jesus taught us anything it would be that these folks, from throwaway places, are exactly the folks that we want to welcome into our communities.
 
That just about says it all, and I can’t explain it any better than that, so I won’t try.
 
Enjoy your Epiphany time.
 
                                                  Pastor Alan