What can we say December 28? 1st after Christmas

   Low attendance warning!!   There is so much preaching fodder around the turn of the year – although I’d sure avoid urging people to make new year’s resolutions that would make your church, or even their lives run more smoothly. I think of course of Wesley’s Covenant Prayer, a great New Year’s compact to make with God (although I always suspect that it means more to me having studied it on a page than it can to people out there trying to listen to me read it).

   There is a fascinating week of Kwanzaa, whose traditions of long leisurely meals where you talk about tradition, ancestors, culture, and dreams, seems about as Christian a way to end one year and bring in the next as anything I could concoct.  And then I ponder the way New Year’s is a huge deal in largely African-American churches – all because of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Freedom – not American-style freedom so much as that Gospel freedom Paul envisions in Galatians: that’ll preach.

  December 28 follows December 26, Boxing Day, not a day for fighting, but a day to box up gifts to give to the unnoticed people in your world: the mailman, the grocery clerk, the garbage pickup guys. A lovely custom, preachable (if we avoid trivializing the rare, seasonal spurt of kindness which should go on all year). It's also St. Stephen's day - if you think folks are in the mood to hear about the first Christian martyr!! Of course, if you're still doing Christmas in the pulpit, I refer you to my blog, "Preaching Christmas," with loads of illustrative material.

    Isaiah 63:7-9. Fascinating, and important: “I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord” – not just for me personally though! “Because of all that the Lord has done for” not “me” but “us.” An uphill, constant battle for the preacher: to persuade people to think of themselves as part of a community, a member of the Body, before thinking of themselves as individuals! And I love Isaiah’s subtle wording: “Surely” they are my people – the “surely” implying some doubt, some iffiness resolved.

   Psalm 148. What an elegant appeal to even the animals and all of nature to praise God – which, we realize, creatures are already doing simply by being. Thomas Merton: “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.” All of nature, if we see it from this perspective, is constantly in praise of its Maker. What a way to begin the year – the way we being every worship service: praise.

   We think, of course, of St. Francis of Assisi and his “Canticle of the Creatures,” inviting sun, moon, stars, all living things, to join in a mighty chorus of praise of God. I wonder how many sermons actually invite people into praise, or settle for being words of praise – instead of lurching toward some takeaway, some moral?

   Psalm 148: did Mary and Joseph sing this one during Jesus’ early days? “Praise him in the heights, all his host” (a la the angels on Christmas night?). Echoes of Job in this stirring tour of creation, including not just the pretty and photogenic, but also monsters, frost, stormy wind, wild, dangerous animals. All praise the Lord, even unwittingly, simply by being. Annie Dillard (in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) muses over the mind-boggling diversity and experimental dazzle that is creation, saying “There’s nothing God won’t try.”

   Hebrews 2:10-18. Christ as the “pioneer” of salvation. The Greek archegos is used for the founder of a city, the leader of a large army, the author, the instigator of things. How shocking, how subversive though: this archegos leads/wins “through sufferings.” Notice the plural. Jesus’ suffering was lifelong, not just the crucifixion, which was plural sufferings enough!

   The family language is moving. He was God the Father’s Son – and so we too are God’s children and hence his siblings. The sibling image is powerful, largely (to me) because siblings have this rivalry and difficulty in getting along! So it is in this new family of Jesus. Why would we expect otherwise?

   Matthew 2:13-23. Joseph had some fantastic, significant dreams while he slept. They must flee – now! – to Egypt, replicating Israel’s sojourn and return to the land. From my book Birth: the Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series), I wrote (or skip past this italicized section to get the Epiphany texts!), Immediately upon the birth of this child, history’s ongoing struggle of good versus evil got ratcheted up quite a few notches. A thin view of Christmas might elicit giggles over the image of parents with their sweet child. But a cosmic battle just got touched off. “Why do the nations rage?” (Ps. 2:1). The idolatrous, unholy powers, immediately upon Jesus’ birth, seemed to realize that their domain had been invaded.

   And so they recoiled – like that haunting moment in Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Lord of the Rings.” The wicked “eye of Sauron,” atop a high tower, casts its evil beam over the land, probing, ruling, intimidating, always watching for signs of good to be dealt with; “its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread upon which hung its doom.” When Frodo put on the ring of power, the eye was seized with some paroxysm of envy and terror, jerking suddenly in Frodo’s direction, far away. Jesus was born quietly at a distance of many miles from Herod or Caesar Augustus. But in that moment, there was a recoil, a leap to secure the borders, and police the people so the powers that be will remain unchecked. How astonishing, that this birth struck anxiety into the hearts of those dwelling arrogantly and securely in the corridors of power.

   An appalling, gruesome manifestation of this evil recoil was unleashed by King Herod. Notorious for his paranoia, famously feeling threatened by and then killing members of his own family, Herod flew into what for him was a typical rage, ordering the cruel slaughter of all male boys under the age of two in his realm. The arrival of the Christ child was no security blanket to shelter the people from harm. On the contrary, his advent actually brought on intense sorrow, such is the ferocious kneejerk retaliation of evil in our broken world against the good that would bring life – back then, and throughout history.

 

  The laments, the shrieks of the mothers of Judea have echoed through time, captured beautifully in fresco by Giotto. If we listen, we can still hear them, and also all mothers who have flailed and strained and crumpled to the ground in sheer agony as they have witnessed brutal violence against their children. A mother, wrenched from her small son in Auschwitz, was forced to watch with the rest of the horrified crowd as he dangled by a rope around his neck. A man in the crowd asked, “For God’s sake, where is God?” Elie Wiesel, who was there, said he heard a voice answer, “This is where – hanging here from this gallows.”

   Of course, thanks to a good angel who had warned Joseph, by stealth the homily family fled to Egypt. Legend has it that lions and leopards in the wilderness bowed their heads and wagged their tails in homage. Palm trees bent low to provide food for them. Two thieves pounced on them, but then relented when Mary wept – the same robbers who were crucified next to Jesus thirty years later. The symbolism of this flight to Egypt would not have been lost on Jews of Jesus’ day or careful Bible readers today. This child, who had come to be the deliverance of the people, descended to Egypt, as Joseph and his brothers had centuries earlier, only to return in peace to the land of promise.

   Still in his infancy, Jesus was a refugee, joining the ranks of countless throngs of people through history pushed out of their homelands, in desperate flight to survive grisly armies, rulers and thugs. I have known Jews who managed to slip out of Europe and elude the Nazis; a neighbor of mine was hidden in a potato sack and thrown onto the back of a truck by her parents, whom she never saw again. Refugee camps dot the globe. Particularly haunting are those camps in the land of Israel to which Jesus came. In Bethlehem itself, camps like Dheisheh and Aida have been the home for thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes, living in harsh conditions for generations now since the war in 1948.