Sermon January 4, 2009

Christmas 2, Year B

This morning's sunrise was remarkable! First purple, then purple and yellow, a bright, sharp strip of light across the horizon. And then it was gone! This is not a common winter event for those of us in the Pacific Northwest! But - because of its rarity - it is a moment that evokes profound awe. All the best celebrations are like that - inspired by events that are anything but common-place. That's why Christmas is so special - it doesn't happen every day!

Of course, it isn't only one day either! Yet most of the world doesn't realize this. For instance, today - January 4th - we Christians are probably the only folk in North America still celebrating that birth! For everyone else "Christmas is December 25".

In part that's because Christmas really needs to be seen as a season not one day. That's an unintentional creation. The earliest date for the celebration of Jesus' nativity - once this festival settled down from being literally all over the map (from March to May in some cases) - the earliest celebration date was not December 25 but January 6. The Eastern Church retained that latter date. The Western Church ended up for various and non-religious reasons with December 25. The ecumenical spirit demands we embrace each other's celebrations, and so we get the 12 days of Christmas.

Next Sunday is - in addition to being the first Sunday after the Epiphany - also remembered as "The Baptism of Jesus". It's one of the four Sunday's most preferred for baptisms for that very reason that we're celebrating Jesus' baptism and see it's link to our own..

But today's a pretty good day for baptisms too! Especially as it's younger folk we're baptizing, not adults - there's a strong link between the celebration of the new life of Jesus and the celebration of the new life - both literally and theologically - of these children.

That word - Celebration - is central to what we do today - because this Christmas season is all about celebration: it's about joy and hope.

The birth of a child is perhaps the most fundamental expression of hope, isn't it?! Hope in the future - hope that there will be a future that is worth living.

Certainly those themes of joy and hope permeate the readings from Jeremiah and Ephesians.

The passage from Jeremiah is wonderful - full of celebration and hope - but what's really startling is who's celebrating - Jeremiah is, after all, the "don't mind me I'll just sit here in the dark", Mr Doom and Gloom of the Hebrew scriptures, so to read his language here is startling, to say the least..

Ephesians, too, celebrates a hopeful future-vision, echoing a continuity of theme from Jeremiah. In Jesus we see God's new creation; here's the coming to fullness of some of God's purposes which began "before the foundation of the world".

And the hope? That in this coming to fruition of God's purposes we can see beyond to that time of ultimate fulfilment when God in Jesus will "gather up all things (in heaven and on earth) in him."

God has acted, and continues to act in creation and in history, for justice and for peace.

And - we must remember - this acting isn't independent of us. God continues to act first through people - through us - in the events and moments of our world.

This is all cause for joy, and hope. This is the vision of what should be that is the Christian hope.

It's important - vital - for us to hear these words of joy and of hope and to remember the ways God chooses to act in our world. Because when we step outside of these walls we step back into that "non-Christmas" world - a world where what passes for normal has re-imposed itself. This is the world of the not yet.

Violence, murder, hatred, revenge - all the aspects of the theology of Empire: piety, war, victory - all these have once again exploded in the Holy Land. We are not only basking in the reflected theological glow of Jesus' birth, we're living in that awful time when bombs are falling in Gaza and rockets in Israel, where civilians on both sides are the victims. The events of the last weeks have made that land anything but Holy, and have made contemporary the language of the massacre of the innocents - whether their flag is blue or green.

It would be easy to become discouraged in the face of seemingly intractable situations like that one. The way we approach the world is vital, therefore. God's continuing invitation is that we don't understand life's journey as a movement from the safety of celebration to insecurity and fear of an unsafe world, from joy to impotence. We have to hold both within us, and allow the realities of violence and hatred to be seen through God's lens - to carry with us the celebration, the joy, and the hope and to let them be our guides though our life's journey

Throughout the Bible, the word of God has come to disconsolate, oppressed, or even misbehaving people and promised that they did not have to remain in the sort of despair they saw around them. "Come home," God has said to them - and to us.

And in the Christian story - the one that begins with Christmas (and doesn't end with it!) God promises, "I've come to be with you - and I will always be".

So the invitation of this day - through word and actions, through scripture and baptisms - is to hold onto this joy and this hope and this promise of God - not just at Christmas-tide but every day. Amen.