Joy to the World –Spiritual Blessings for All -- Lectionary Meditation for 2nd Sunday after Christmas

Jeremiah 31:7-14


Ephesians 1:3-14

John 1:10-18

Joy to the World –

Spiritual Blessings for All

As we meander toward the end of the Christmas season, which according to the commercial calendar began more than a month ago, if not sooner. The carols have all been sung, the presents opened, unacceptable presents have been returned, the trees and decorations have started to come down, and we have begun to focus on the coming new year, when all things become new. The liturgical calendar, however, won’t let us move on quite yet. Yes, according to the liturgical calendar we’re still in the season of Christmas. The texts for this second Sunday of Christmas (unless you decided to skip this day and move to Epiphany a few days early) speak in one way or another of the spiritual blessings that God has chosen to bestow upon God’s people, and the Ephesian letter and the Gospel of John root these blessings quite directly in the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, as the prophet Jeremiah says to us – sing for joy and make your praises heard.

The Gospel lesson for the first Sunday after Christmas for this year comes from Matthew 2:13-23, a passage that speaks of the slaughter of the innocents and the flight of the Holy Family into exile in Egypt, from which they later return, bypassing Bethlehem and heading to Nazareth in Galilee. This theme of returning from exile appears in the Jeremiah passage, where the prophet invites the remnant people of Israel to sing for joy and make their praises heard, as they call out to God, asking that God would save this remnant. In answer, the prophet says, the Lord will bring the people home from the land to the north and gather them from the ends of the earth. Everyone, the blind, the lame, the expectant mothers and those who are in labor at this very moment, yes a great throng of people will return to the land. And the message is this – God will be with them – continuing the message that we heard from Isaiah 7 in a previous Sunday – and God will lead them along streams of water (so they don’t thirst) and God will make their path level so they don’t stumble. Again, don’t you hear in this word from the prophet the promises that were heard during the Advent season, as we heard the story of the one who would prepare the way of the Lord. Now, it is the Lord who will prepare the way for God’s people to return home, and then will serve as the shepherd for this people, protecting and delivering them from the hand of the ones who are stronger than they. And again, in response, the people will shout for joy from the highest points and rejoice in the bounty of God. Yes, they will embrace the blessings of grain, new wine, olive oil, and flocks and herds full of young animals. Their land will be one of blessing, a well-watered garden. In that moment there will be no sorrow and the young and the old will dance with gladness. In that day of blessing, God will “turn their mourning into gladness.” Comfort and joy will replace their sorrow and the people will be satisfied. The blessings spoken of here are more material than spiritual, but the question of the day, as we await the coming of the magi bringing gifts, do we not need the material/physical blessings as well as the “spiritual ones?”

As we stand here with the people of God, rejoicing in God’s outpouring of blessings, we turn to the Ephesian letter, and standing right at the heart of this passage is a strongly worded embrace of predestination – or so it seems. In him, we’re told, God has chosen those whom God has predestined according to the plan of the one who works out everything in accordance with God’s plan. This is an extremely dense theological passage that requires much reflection, in large part because it speaks so strongly about election and predestination. For this meditation, I’d like to leave that discussion to one side (see my Ephesian Bible study, pp. 14-15, for a fuller discussion of this issue), and focus more on the opening line of verse 3, which calls on the reader to praise God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, because God has “blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” The word about being destined – I prefer that form than the use of the word “predestined” – is rooted in this promise that God has chosen us for adoption to sonship in Christ. That is, we are heirs with Christ, of the full blessings of God, which comes to us as a result of God’s grace that includes forgiveness of sins. One of the key points in the Ephesian letter is that in Christ the mystery of God has been revealed, that God had chosen before the world began to bring Jew and Gentile into fellowship, with both peoples being made heirs of God in Christ, so that all might receive the blessings of God. It is, therefore, not a message of exclusion, as if God had chosen to bless some and not bless others, but that God had in mind an expansive sense of love and grace, and that sense is revealed in Christ, and it is sealed, so says the author of this letter, through the Holy Spirit, with which we have been sealed – a deposit guaranteeing that we will receive (redeem) our inheritance as God’s possession, to the praise and glory of God.

When we turn from the Ephesian letter to the prologue of John we move from one theologically dense work to another, though John 1 has a poetic sense to it. This lectionary passage places the first nine verses in parentheses and begins in earnest with verse ten, a passage that invites us to consider the one through whom the world came into existence. Interestingly, while the NIV uses the masculine pronoun in verse 10, the Common English Bible continues the train of thought from verse 9, and speaks of the world coming into existence “through the light.” But, as is often true in life, the world didn’t recognize the light when it came into the world. But, our theme that we’re following here has to do with blessings, spiritual blessings that come to us as a result of our engagement with the living God.

It would seem that the first and foremost blessing is the right to be born children of God, something that happens not because of blood or human desire, but from the decision of God. Consider the Ephesian letter which speaks of God’s election, God’s choice, in adopting us as God’s heirs/children. It would appear that the same theme is present in this text, though here the gift of God comes to us through the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. Even though we may not have recognized the light at first, for those who are willing, they will see the glory of this one who became flesh, whose glory is that of the father’s only sun, one who is full of grace and truth. This grace comes into the world through the Word (Light) made flesh, and it is this one we remember here in this moment that reveals to us the true nature of God.

As we move from Christmas into Epiphany, a move that continues the theme that began with Christmas, the sense that God has made God’s self known in our world. It is appropriate that this liturgical movement comes at the same time as the secular calendar moves into a new year. As we contemplate this new year, we can do so knowing that the one who is our shepherd goes with us, bringing the light of God into our lives, so that we might experience every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realm. What better gift could one one receive at Christmas? And the proper response to this gift is to give thanks and praise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

God is with Us -- A Lectionary Meditation

Isaiah 7:10-16



Romans 1:1-7


Matthew 1:18-25

God is with Us!

Every year we hear cries from the populace demanding that Christ be put back into Christmas. In the minds of many there is a conspiracy, perhaps by a cadre of elite secularists, who are intent upon stripping Christ out of Christmas. But if Christ is at risk being removed from Christmas then it’s like that the culprit is the very ones who are making the demand. That is, our participation in the commercialization of this sacred feast of the incarnation is what is pushing the true message of Christmas out of the picture.

If we would attend to the voice of Scripture we would hear a message that is summed up in a name – Emmanuel, which is translated “God with Us.” The prophet told the king that God would provide a sign – a young woman would bear a child and she would call this child Emmanuel. And many centuries later, a gospel writer picked upon this prophetic word and reads the story of Jesus in light of it. The one, who, according to Matthew, is named Jesus because he will save his people, fulfills the promise that God would be with us. Therefore, as we watch the blue and the purple of Advent give way to the liturgical white and gold of the Christmas season, and as the hymns transition from a message of expectation to one of fulfillment, the message of God’s presence begins to make itself felt.

This message that God is with us permeates the three texts for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Two of them speak of a young woman/virgin who bears a child as a sign that God is in our midst. Paul doesn’t speak of the birth of this child but does affirm the gospel message that comes down from the prophets of old, that God’s Son, who is descended according to the flesh from David, has been declared the Son of God through the resurrection. Before I engage more fully these three texts I’d like to add into the mix a statement made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his lectures on Christology given in Berlin during the 1930s. He notes that the two stories of Jesus birth and baptism stand together, with one concerning itself with the presence of the Word of God in Jesus, while the other is focused in the coming of the Word of God upon Jesus. He writes that “the manger directs our attention to the man, who is God; the baptism directs our attention, as we look at Jesus, to the God who calls.” He then goes on to say:

If we speak of Jesus Christ as God, we may not say of him that he is the representative of an idea of God, which possesses the characteristics of omniscience and omnipotence (there is no such thing as this abstract divine nature!); rather, we must speak of his weakness, his manger, his cross. This man is no abstract God. (John De Gruchy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ, pp. 116-117).

The texts for this Sunday take us directly into the Christmas story, and they remind us that the Christmas story, indeed the gospel story, isn’t the story of an abstract God-man.

The first word comes to Isaiah and is delivered to King Ahaz of Judah, who is told that God will give him a sign, but the king in a bit of false modesty declines the opportunity to test God’s faithfulness. But the prophet will not be put off, and so God will give him a sign anyway, and the sign will be this. A young woman will bear a son, and she will name him Emmanuel, which means “God with Us.” And before this child reaches the age of understanding good and evil, the land controlled by the kings whom Ahaz dreads will be deserted. In context, this is a word of hope to the people of Judah. The young woman could be Ahaz’s wife, and thus the mother of Hezekiah, or she could be Isaiah’s wife, for Isaiah speaks of his own children as “signs . . . from the Lord” (Is. 8:1). Although it’s easy to get caught up in the debate over whether Isaiah 7:14 is speaking of a virgin or simply a young woman without any reference to her sexual experience, if we do this we miss the point – God has offered a sign in the person of a child, a sign that reminds us that God is with us.

Before we move to the gospel lesson that builds upon Isaiah’s word of promise about God’s faithfulness in dealing with Judah’s enemies, we must stop and attend to Romans 1:1-7. Here in this opening section of Paul’s great letter to the Romans, in which he affirms his own call to be an apostle so that he might deliver the gospel that had been promised ages before through the prophets. This gospel concerns God’s son, who though descended from David in the flesh (note there is nothing here about an extraordinary birth), but who is then declared Son of God through the Resurrection from the dead. And the calling to which Paul has been called is to bring the Gentiles into a position of obedience “for the sake of his name,” for they belong to Jesus Christ. Again the text lends itself to debate. One wonders whether this emphasis on the resurrection being the point at which the Son of David becomes Son of God could signal an adoptionist Christology. That is, God chooses to adopt Jesus as his son – either at baptism or in the resurrection. But as Bonhoeffer reminds us these events are all connected and thus fighting over whether this is an adoptionist perspective again misses the point – God us chosen to be present in Christ.

And so we come to the gospel lesson, wherein Isaiah’s “young woman” gives way to the Septuagint’s translation of the Hebrew almah into the Greek parthenos (virgin). The message is this. Joseph was going to put away his betrothed because she was pregnant, and apparently he was the father. He was a kind and gentle man so he didn’t take the option of putting her away publicly. But as he contemplated this action, an angel appears in a dream and tells him: “fear not,” go ahead and get married to Mary, just as you planned, for this child is from the Holy Spirit. The focus isn’t on the how, but on the sign. This young woman, not yet fully married, and probably very young is pregnant, and that means she has broken her vows (or, more likely had been raped, perhaps by a Roman soldier). Joseph was fully in his rights to set her aside, but he was a good and gentle man and so he chose not to do so, and now the angel gives him further instructions. Get married, have the baby, and name him Jesus (Yeshua), for he will save the people from their sins. He will do this to fulfill the word of Isaiah, that a “virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they will name him Emmanuel.” And so it happened, and Joseph refrained from engaging in sexual relations with his wife until the son was born, and they named him Jesus. The message once again is this: “God is with us.”  And because God is with us, there is hope, even a world full of darkness -- as Matthew's gospel quickly reminds us in the story of the slaughter of the Innocents.  But that text is still ahead of us.  Now, the message is this:  Fear Not!

There is much going on in these texts that require our careful attention. They have a powerful message of God’s abiding presence, not in abstract form or in typical human power relationships, but rather in weakness, as Bonhoeffer points out in a manger and on a cross.