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Donate| December 30, 2001 1st Sunday after Christmas Commentary by Bruce Epperly & Anna Rollins |
See also: [Year A Archive] |
Isaiah 63:7-9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 2:10-18
Matthew 2:13-23
Traditionally, the first Sunday after Christmas, like the Sunday following
Easter, is designated as a "low Sunday." After the joyous hymns of Christmas,
many families choose to sleep late or visit relatives. After the demands of the Christmas
season, many pastors choose to take a Sunday off to recuperate or pass along their
homiletical duties to an associate. Many of us feel let down in the week following
Christmas – the burden of extra weight, the mental haze of too much alcohol and
sugar, and the thought of returning to "normal" is just too much for us. How
quickly we lose the Christmas spirit as we re-enter "ordinary time." Like some
rare botanical specimen, Christmas ‘blooms’ just one calendar day a year, yet
the incredible image it invokes lives year round hidden in faithful souls everywhere.
"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome," writes C.G. Jung. "Its true life…invisible, hidden… The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away…Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the external flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains." The Sunday after Christmas is a time to remember the quiet eternal presence of a spiritual inheritance guarded deep within.
Today’s readings mirror the tension we feel as we try to hold on to wonder of the Christmas season amid the challenges of the everyday. They call for our active discernment. Isaiah celebrates God’s loving deliverance. God’s tender mercy is our hope and salvation when we have lost confidence in our abilities and/or ourselves. Psalm 148 proclaims God’s glorious presence in the universe. But quickly, Matthew’s Gospel plunges us into the world of hatred and violence, where a raging Herod vows to kill all the young children in Bethlehem and we can hear the fearful cries of infants and the desperate pleas of parents. Yet, the powers of evil do not yield until every last child is murdered…. until God’s dream of Shalom is vanquished by human fear.
Sadly, our world can readily connect to the great tension fear evokes. The morning of September 11 was lovely in the Washington D.C. area as Bruce took his predawn walk through his suburban neighborhood, and marveled at the sunrise and the morning stars. Fifty miles away, under a clear blue morning sky, Anna idyllically put her children on school buses. Not long after, Bruce found himself consoling university students, anxiously awaiting calls from parents who worked at the World Trade Center, while Anna’s conversation with her pastor in his study was halted by the call announcing that a member of the congregation was missing in the Towers’ rubble. Bruce and Anna, and their respective families, while not directly affected, nevertheless responded, as did many others across the nation, with strong feelings of unsettledness in the present and a great uncertainty about the future. In a matter of minutes, the lulling semblance of a settled life was vividly traded for the ambiguity of a constantly variable life lived here and now.
The spirit of Christmas transforms us precisely because of the profound ambiguity of our world. Christ is born within us, and yet we each must work daily to be Christ’s partners in the healing of ourselves, our families, and the world. When we sing of Emmanuel, God with us, we are affirming that we are not alone in our struggles. Where the pain is, God is present. God is the "fellow sufferer who understands" the cries of the Afghan refugee, the grief of the families of those who died September 11, the tension that we feel as we confront destructive habits in ourselves, and the brokenness in our families and our world.
God is not with us in some abstract and perfect place. God is with us here and now. "To start with the ordinary and the everyday, with personal life, with corporate stories, with ‘our times’ in their political and social agony, is the bold business of theology," writes Sallie McFague Teselle. "Theology of this sort is not neat and comfortable, but neither is the life with and under God of which it attempts to speak…" God is always fully present as we face the challenges of this amazingly beautiful, yet wounded, world.
We need to always remember that for Joseph and Mary there was no ‘returning to "normal" the day after Christmas, as their initial choices placed them fully in lives of ambiguity. As parents, their lives were forever personally linked to this new expression of Love that God was giving to the world through Jesus Christ. In such a context, the actual structure of their daily family life became a spiritual practice, as they faithfully ordered their lives to support the vision that God sent to them in their dreams.
"When we see some of our ordinary activities as Christian practices," writes Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra, "we come to perceive how our daily lives are all tangled up in the things that God is doing in the world." Joseph and Mary let their simple life together be woven with the Goodness that God always intends for creation. They chose to live as active partners in God’s reconciling love for the world.
Active discernment involves intentionality, faithful choices and the actual living of our beliefs. It’s a way of ‘being.’ We repeatedly choose how to "be." As Francis Sullivan writes:
a man must choose
he is not a spray of
flowers nor of birdsong
nor the fall of dry twigs
in a rising wind
In terms of how we choose, Isaac Pennington notes, "There is that near you which will guide you. O wait for it and be sure that ye keep to it," calling to mind Jung’s vividly symbolic understanding of rhizomes and that "sense of something that lives and endures underneath the external flux." Rhizomes are thick, fleshy roots: places of reserve, storage, and the site of buds and nodes, those buried meristems, which are the places of potential future growth. The word ‘root’ comes from the Indo-European root ‘ra,’ meaning "to derive, to grow out of." Joseph and Mary’s life was rooted in their faith. Their life grew out of their belief in the vision of Emmanuel that God had given Israel and in their personal acceptance of Jesus into their life.
Gregg Levoy in his book, Callings, speaks of "A sign that will make clear to us which way we should go." Joseph repeatedly received signs. In this year’s Advent and Christmas readings, he is portrayed as a dream catcher as his openness to the mysterious and non-rational presence of God repeatedly delivers Jesus and Mary from the violence of a heartless world. Joseph takes his dreams seriously for he discovers that God speaks to humankind in visions and dreams as well as prayer, meditation, worship, and scripture. "Most spiritual traditions," writes Levoy, " clearly regard dreams as revelations…and consider the act of separating waking life from dreams, the conscious from the unconscious, the same as tearing a plant from its roots." Joseph grows true to his roots.
"I have met with ancient myths in my dreams, brightly lit," wrote W. B. Yeats, "and I think it allied to the wisdom or instinct that guides a migratory bird…" And so Joseph, faithfully accepting Israel’s vision of Emmanuel, allies himself with the wisdom found in his dreams, and migrates with his family…first to Egypt, then to Galilee…practicing an intuitive faith that eventually guides him and Mary and Jesus to Nazareth.
The hope of the world lies in listening to our dreams. In times of fear and threat, dreams and visions awaken us to God’s own dreams for our world. Without a vision, we perish both spiritually and relationally. Martin Luther King proclaimed, "I have a dream" and invited the world to embody the "beloved community" in which all persons and races find peace with one another. Jesus had a dream. In each encounter, he saw the reality of God’s image beneath all of humankind’s wounds.
Pushed in directions he never previously envisioned, Joseph’s life together with Mary is never the same after Joseph affirms the holy vision brought by the angel who visits in his dream. The baby Jesus is born, and more dreams follow for the young father. Joseph isn’t open just once to some amazing event…he lets an amazing event into his life, and says ‘yes’ to it everyday after. And this open ‘yes’ to his dreams has his family venturing off to Egypt after Bethlehem, and then to Galilee, never to return to Judea.
In faithfulness, Joseph and Mary actually leave home. They break with their everyday life when they accept Jesus into their life. They make a holy pilgrimage of their life together. They call on God and trust in God to help them honor the vision God has given Israel. Their spiritual journey involves a radical break with their settled life.
In speaking of spiritual journeys, Levoy writes, "We open a door, step across a threshold, and return through it from the other side. We leave an old life behind, experience a life transition up close, and receive its thorny wisdom, and then head home and hope to follow through on whatever we have learned." Revisiting the Advent/Epiphany journey of Joseph and Mary holds as much contemporary promise for us as faithful pilgrims as it did years ago for the working class carpenter and his young bride. By annually participating in the Advent ritual that helps us to prepare for Christmas, to receive Emmanuel, our spirit of observance and self-reflection affords an opportunity for our own spiritual passage, the chance for revelation and active discernment that can order our subsequent life. We need never go it alone in times of change. We always have a chance to cooperate with God in doing what needs to be done.
Joseph and Mary lived an entire life guided by a faithful openness to dreams and anchored in the context of the Christmas story. They are not like the static crèche figures that we unwrap from tissue each December and re-box after New Year’s. They were real people who faithfully lived into many different expressions, many neither neat nor comfortable, of the new paradigm of a life with Christ. Their actual life was anything but settled. Each Advent season is a time to commemorate their willingness to choose to live in great ambiguity, to embrace the constant variable of fully living with Christ.
In this very ambiguous world in which celebration and despair are our daily companions, we are called to dream boldly as we listen intently to God’s dream for our lives.
What is God’s dream for you? What great work is God calling you to in your family, community, and personal life? What is God’s dream for your church as it responds to a world that often prefers violence and alienation to love?
Christ came not to eliminate the darkness or immediately solve life’s problems, but to transform the darkness by his embodiment of love, compassion, and integrity. As the African American mystic Howard Thurman notes, the work of Christmas is a yearlong affair. As long we have a dream, we can preserve hope and vitality amid struggle. Today, on "low Sunday," let us aspire to share in God’s great vision for our world. Let us sing joyous carols even as we read the daily news. Let us affirm God’s light as we dream deeply in partnership with God of a transformed and healed world.
"We do not know how life is going to turn out," writes Jung. "…In the end the only events in life…worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions."
This "low Sunday" can become a spiritual high point when we realize that God calls each of us to a great work and a great dream.
I am the light of the world!
You people come and follow me!
When you follow and love
You’ll learn the mystery of what you are meant to do and be.
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the magi and shepherds have found their way home
The work of Christmas is begun.
To find the lost and lonely one,
To heal the broken soul with love,
To feed the hungry children with warmth and good will,
To feel the earth below, the sun above!
To free the prisoner from all chains,
To make the powerful care,
To rebuild the nations with strength of good will,
To see God’s children everywhere!
To bring hope to every task you do,
To dance at a baby’s new birth,
To make music in an old person’s heart,
And sing to the colors of the earth!
(Jim Strathdee, "I am the Light of the World," in response to the "Work of Christmas" by Howard Thurman)
Meditation:
It has been said that we should have the Bible in one hand and the
morning paper in the other. On this first Sunday after Christmas, simply take time to be
still. In the stillness, take a moment to recall the most recent news reports. What
reports have contributed to your anxiety? Where have you read good news in the paper?
Take time to thank God for the good news as you surround these images of hope
with God’s transforming light. Reflect on that which frightens you, surrounding the
situation and the persons involved in God’s healing light. Listen to God’s dream
for that situation. Listen for God’s guidance in terms of how you might creatively
respond to this difficult situation.
Bruce Epperly is Professor of Practical Theology and Director of Continuing Education at Lancaster Theological Seminary and co-minister of Disciples United Community Church in Lancaster, PA. He is the author of twelve books including God’s Touch: Faith, Wholeness, and the Healing Miracles of Jesus, Healing Worship: Purpose and Practice; and Reiki Healing Touch and the Way of Jesus. His books are availabe at Flux Books.
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