January 8, 2023
1 Epiphany – George Yandell
The account of the baptism of Jesus begins a pattern in the ministry of Jesus we don’t take seriously enough: Jesus continually pushes those in his kingdom movement to serve. Stanley Hauerwas says John was calling Israel to repentance as a nation. Jesus is all about Israel turning to God, because the kingdom of heaven, where the poor are blessed, is coming. [Adapted from an article in the “Christian Century”, January 2023 issue.] He doesn’t limit the power of God to his own ministry. Matthew’s story of the baptism, when set with the other gospel accounts, offers a subtle but powerful pattern: the grounding, the program of the Messiah, is imbuing power to all those who come after Jesus to continue God’s mission of bringing new life. [ibid]
When John the baptizer protests that he should be baptized by Jesus and not Jesus by him, it foreshadows what will come further on in the gospel: Jesus demurs claiming for himself messiah-like authority and power, as many expected the messiah to do. John wants to reverse the action about to take place. The messiah Jesus intends John to continue his own work; Jesus expects to carry out his mission alongside John. Jesus intends them both to serve the earth rather than ruling it. [ibid] His passion for God means he takes the form of a servant, as Paul says in Philippians. He is a different messiah than most expected.
Jesus insists regularly from this point on that the power to heal the world is from the Holy Spirit.
January 1, 2023
Pondering the Time Being – Bill Harkins
Luke 2:15-21
2:15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”
2:16 So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.
2:17 When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child;
2:18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.
2:19 But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.
2:20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
2:21 After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen.
I bid each of you good morning, Happy New Year, and a heartfelt welcome to Holy Family on this first Sunday after Christmas! Just a week ago we heard the lovely narrative from the Gospel of Luke, telling us of the earthly origins of Jesus in the form of the birth and infancy narratives of which we are all so fond.
December 25, 2022
Christmas Day – George Yandell
C. S. Lewis always liked to say that God has a way of making straight paths into crooked lines.
Sometimes when meeting folks who are unfamiliar with the life of the church or its ministry, it might help us to repeat this mantra: “You know—most of us are just not able to schedule a crisis.” That seems so true of our lives, whatever ‘crisis’ we might face – a crisis of illness and death, or the crisis of unexpected joy and good fortune; we simply cannot schedule what eventually shapes a great deal of our lives. Our life of faith is about seeking and accepting the unseen hand of God when it moves, and accepting the uncertainty of where it may lead us.
I imagine ‘crisis’ was very much on the minds of Joseph and Mary as they fulfilled their state obligations of census and taxes on the road to Bethlehem. Has it ever been easy to schedule the birth of a child? In those weeks that would become our first Advent, on that night that would become our first Christmas, I’d guess that Joseph and Mary might have thought or uttered the word “crisis,” either under their breath or in the depth of their hearts. “What in God’s name is going to happen next?”
The unseen hand of heaven was moving through their lives, all the tables turning, and they had no way of knowing how or where things might end.
December 24, 2022
Christmas Eve – George Yandell
Who or what affects you most strongly in the birth story of Jesus? With whom do you identify? Is it Joseph? Or the inn-keeper, or the shepherds? What about the other guests in the inn? I suspect many of us identify with Mary. Maybe it’s too much to focus on Jesus – but we might be well-served this Christmas to do so.
What exactly are the ‘inn’ and the ‘manger’ described in Luke? Those terms fit well with what we know from the later Ottoman Empire. Its ruined caravansaries still border the Silk Road in central Turkey. (Caravansary literally means “camel-caravan-palaces”.) A more primitive version of those structures was likely found in Bethlehem. The inn had a gated enclosure with a central courtyard for the animals; around that were covered rooms without doors from which the animals’ owners could keep an eye on their livestock. Toward the back there were regular closed rooms. Luke mentions those details not only to emphasize the poverty of the holy family, but to be as accurate as possible. As the census drew so many to Bethlehem, the closed and private rooms were gone, and so were all the covered and semi-private ones around the open courtyard. Therefore Jesus was born among the animals in that open courtyard and laid in one of their feeding troughs. [Adapted from The First Christmas, Borg and Crossan, 2007, p. 150]
Had you ever considered that Jesus was born under the starlit sky,