2 Christmas Yr B

One of the funny things about our liturgical year is that it isn’t necessarily chronological. So today we find ourselves with this strange collection of readings from the prophet Jeremiah, and the teenage Jesus and his family at the Temple. Next week we will celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, the arrival of the Magi. So today the question I brought to these texts was what does the prophet Jeremiah have to say to us, and what does Joseph, who we hear so little from or about, have to say to us today. The first thing I remembered was that prophets were not predictors of the future. They talked a lot about the future, but their task was not to predict the historical future. It was much later Christian tradition that made this a central feature of Old Testament prophecy.

And secondly, the prophets’ primary task was to call the people as a community to accountability and responsibility in their relationship with God. If we use the metaphor of covenant to describe that relationship between the people of Israel and God, then the prophets were mediators of the covenant. They helped the people understand what was expected of them in that relationship. In doing so, they often interpreted history, the flow of events, in light of relationship with God. They tried to understand how God was at work in certain historical events, and how the people should respond to those events. That meant that frequently the prophets were very much concerned about the present, and how the people should live in the present as God’s people. Even when they spoke about the future, it was for the purpose of calling people to be responsible before God in the present. Specifically, Jeremiah saw the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple and his mission was to bring courage and hope to the Israelites, and to keep them from returning to idolatry.

How is God at work? What is God up to? How are we being called to be responsible before God today? These are questions appropriately asked as we continue to wonder about incarnation. The incarnation, God bursting into our lives as a baby, shows us that God continues to be up to something. The gospel story today is a fascinating one. It’s about the only story we get of Joseph, and of Joseph and Mary parenting Jesus. The fascinating part for me is that at the same time it is a story about Jesus teaching his elders, it’s also a story about an ordinary father and mother worried about an ordinary teenage son. How many of you have been in that place? Where is he? He’s late, and your first thought is that he’s dead in ditch somewhere. You say that to him as soon as he comes through the door in the midst of your worry and your anger, and the response is, you don’t have to worry about me, I’m just fine, all I was doing was solving the problems of the world with my friends.

What is God up to? What is God up to in our lives? How are we being called to be responsible before God today? How does God with us possibly assuage our worry? These are questions to be asked on the global level, as well as the personal level. I have no definitive answers, but I have spent some time wondering….

We are living through the greatest financial meltdown experienced since the depression. There are so many forces happening all at the same time, I don’t understand it all, but I know that some of it seems like a natural swing of the pendulum, some of it seems like human made mismanagement. It seems to me, if Jeremiah were observing these happenings today, he would speak to us about greed. He would point to investments that seem too good to be true and suggest that maybe they are. Jeremiah would remind us that greed is another manifestation of idolatry; it is greed that values money or possessions more than God. Another way to understand the relationship between greed and idolatry is that greed serves to bring as many things that the greedy person considers valuables to that person, making him the center of his efforts, the one he aims to please, converting him into his own god. Greed cuts us off from God and from one another. Greed puts the accumulation of more at the center of our existence, and more is never enough. Whenever what we want to get drives our decisions and the way we treat people, we succumb to the seduction of greed.

The insidious nature of greed is that we begin to believe that our value can be determined by what and how much we have. People begin to believe that they’re important because of their ability to acquire more; they begin to believe they have power because of their ability to get.
What they forget is that they are held prisoner by that very same greed, and that loss becomes devastating, rather than the natural part of life that loss really is. They forget that even what looks like death leads to new life, and following God’s way leads to new life.

What is God up to? How are we being called to be responsible before God today? What does incarnation have to do with any of it? I return now to Joseph and Mary. The parents who just like you and me worry about their teenage son, how different are Joseph and Mary from you, or from me? Don’t we want more than anything for our children to be happy, to be safe, to be normal, to be successful, to have more than us. And yet Jesus turns out by all measurements of the world to be unhappy, surely not safe or normal, and success seems like it is not death on a Roman cross.

The prophets call us to witness to God’s activity in our individual lives, as well as our lives as a people. Joseph and Mary call us to experience Jesus’ full humanity with all the struggles and all the pain and all the joy. And therein lies the incarnation. Our value is not based on who we are, it is not based on what we have, as individuals or as a church or even as a country. Our value is not based on being normal, or being successful. It is based on being created in the image of God, and it is based on the love of the creator who is fully human and fully divine.

Incarnation is the reality of our creator showing us the way. Incarnation points us to the collective memory of the prophets, who call us to be responsible before God in the present, incarnation points us to the future to show us what life, death and resurrection are all about. Incarnation calls us to live in the present, where at every moment we live with the possibility that God is with us, God is in our midst. Incarnation calls us to live in relationship, relationships that show every person is created in God’s image and every person is worthy of respect and dignity.

Alleluia! To us a child is born; come let us adore him. Alleluia!