2 Christmas Jan 3 2016

2 Christmas Jan 3 2016 Audio

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 go backwards in time to celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, and  the arrival of the Magi. The question I brought to these texts we have in front of us today 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. 

First I think it is important to remember some things about prophets and prophecy. Prophets talk a lot about the future, but are not predictors of the future. 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.

The prophets’ primary task was to call the people as a community to accountability and responsibility in their relationship with God. The prophets were mediators of the covenantal relationship between the people of Israel and God. Prophets 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….

It seems to me, maybe it seems to you as well, that we are living in a time when money and wealth seem to be possessed by a few, while the rest work harder and harder and don't seem to get too far. It seems to me, if Jeremiah were observing these happenings today, he may speak to us about greed. It seems to be, maybe it seems to you as well, that we are living in a time when hatred runs rampant in our communities, our cities and our country. 

Jeremiah may remind us that these things are another manifestation of idolatry; it is greed that values money or possessions more than God. It is hatred and exclusion that allow us to keep those with whom we disagree out of our lives and make us think our way of doing and thinking is God's way.  

What happens is that we become the center of our efforts, we only please ourselves, converting ourselves into our own god. Accumulation of wealth, of things and stuff, or rightness, or exclusion, cuts us off from God and from one another. The accumulation of more moves to 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, we become prisoner to the illusion that we are in control. Idolatry, no matter what it's manifestation, leads us to believe that we are god, and god is an illusion. We forget that God is God, and we are not. We forget that loss and death are a natural part of life. We 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 right, 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.