The celebration of the Epiphany leads us to see the light of the star which points to God’s love for us known in our Lord Jesus, a light which is ours for guidance and help, should we remember to look for it and know what to do with it.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, The Epiphany of Our Lord; texts: Matthew 2:1-12, Ephesians 3:1-12; Isaiah 60:1-6

Sisters and brothers, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

I used to lock up the building each night at St. John’s, my previous parish.  It was a separate job we hired out, but traditionally one of the staff had it.  It got so that I knew the building so well I could and would walk through it without a flashlight and check all the doors, even in pitch darkness.  One night Hannah, probably a junior in high school at the time, was locking up with me, and we were heading through the social hall.  Now someone had moved some of the chairs around, and one was where it shouldn’t have been, and I smashed my shin against it, hard.  I might have said something I didn’t want my teenage daughter to hear.  I straightened up, walked on, and not two steps later I hit another chair that wasn’t supposed to be there, even harder.  Remarkably, for any of you who have come to think I possess a modicum of intelligence, I repeated this event a third time.  Each time, it was harder to hold back not only language, but anger and irritation at whoever hadn’t put the chairs back.  As I stood there in pain, rubbing my shin, wondering at the coincidence that it was the same shin all three times, my very intelligent daughter said quietly, “Um, Daddy, maybe we could turn a light on.”

I thought of this last week when I read Isaiah’s powerful promise we just heard.  “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.  For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.”  If you are walking in thick darkness, “gross” darkness, as the King James version has it, it is good news that light is coming, and if the darkness is the darkness of a world without God’s love and grace, then light from God arising is also very good news.

Unless you persist in walking in darkness and banging your shins against the evils of this world.  On Epiphany we celebrate the bringing of the light of God in Jesus to people who were not of the chosen people of God, broadening the Good News of Jesus’ birth beyond just one race of people.  Magi from the east, outsiders, foreigners, see a star and follow it to the place where Jesus and his family are.  And they see the gift of God to the world in that little child.

The only problem is, too often we don’t emulate the Magi, and so we miss the star that leads us to our Lord Jesus.  Even though Epiphany is about the light of God shining into our darkness, we end up wandering in the darkness of our lives without the benefit of God’s light.

The gift of light into darkness is an important image of the seasons of Advent and Christmas, but it becomes the main focus of the season of Epiphany.

The image of light in darkness is so powerful.  Think of absolute darkness.  Then think of lighting a single candle.  Isn’t it amazing how the darkness dissipates?  How when you open a door in a room that is pitch black and there is light on the other side of the door, the light removes the darkness, not the other way around?  Little wonder that John’s Gospel speaks so hopefully about the Light which the darkness cannot comprehend or overcome.

The promise we’ve been celebrating is that God has come into the thick darkness of the world and brought the light of Jesus:  a Prince of Peace to lead us away from violence and war; a Great Physician to heal our pain and suffering; a Savior to free us from our sinful ways and make us new; a risen Lord to give us life eternal in the face of ever-present death.

There is no question that we know darkness in our lives, that the world seems often shrouded in darkness.  And no question as well that we want the light of God to dispel that darkness.  But somehow we still miss out on it.

We so often live our lives from moment to moment, without a clear purpose or direction, or desire to change.  Our lives get busy and complicated, so we just take things as they are, and as they come, even though light is available should we want it.

We allow ourselves to fall into bad habits of not praying regularly and seeking God’s will and wisdom.  We don’t stay connected deeply to God’s Word and try to learn how it can and should shape and guide our lives.

We seem to run after all sorts of things in this world that don’t satisfy us, and don’t take the time to stop and look for God’s direction or light.  We too easily fence God off from the bulk of our lives, our decisions, our planning, our introspection, even our resolutions for a New Year, as if we can live most of our lives without God.

And then we wonder why the darkness confuses us, harms us or others, pervades our world.  But we don’t change our daily existence very often.  It’s sort of like we just keep banging our shins and hoping it won’t happen next time.

If things are going well, we might not notice that this is a problem.  But when darkness comes, we can find that we’re unprepared, and lost.  When a loved one falls ill, people don’t know what to do, don’t know where God is, don’t know where hope is.  When our bad choices lead us to problems, individually or collectively, we blame others, or God in our fear.  When a job is taken away, or a house is foreclosed, people are terrified and confused.  When tragedy strikes close to home, and in our modern world, even when it strikes folks far away, people are angry and lost.  Where is God in all this darkness? we wonder.

So we have this disjunction between what we know and what we do, between this reality of the modern world and our proclamation today that God has come into our world to bring light to our darkness.

We say we believe that this light brings hope in every place of darkness in our world.  Hope in the face of all the difficulty and tragedy that fills the world, that God has come to transform that and heal it.  Hope also that this light of Jesus shines on our pathways of life and leads us to a new way of living, a way that is the way of God, re-directing us and guiding us to a life of meaning and purpose and direction.

The distressing thing is, the Church has known this for 2,000 years, and we have more Christian people lost than ever before it seems.

It might be worth our while to look at the Magi today, since they’re the main actors in our story.  It turns out they’re very important to us, because they remind us to look for the star.  To turn on the lights instead of stumbling in darkness.

What the Magi teach us is to look for the light and know what it means.

They say to Herod:  “We have seen his star in the East, at its rising, and have come to worship him.”  Remember this: there were lots of people who saw that star who didn’t know what it meant.  The Magi studied the stars and believed they gave signs and direction to people on earth.  When they saw the star, they knew what it meant: a king for the world was born to the Jewish people.  Many others who saw that star didn’t know what it was about.

You see, all the light in the world isn’t going to help us if we don’t know where it shines, and don’t know what it means for us.  The headlights on our cars are most useful when we know they are intended to light up the road in front of us, instead of leaving them off, or thinking they’re decorative lights to be used to brighten up our garages.  This means knowing where our light, our star is, and knowing what to do with it.

There are several stars, several lights which God gives us to shine in our darkness, and all are powerful if we only know to look for them.  We are given the Word of God, the Sacraments, the gift of each other, the Body of Christ, and all shine God’s light in our lives.  But let’s just consider the one of these three which teaches us about the others, the light to our path that is the written Word of God.

The Magi teach us today to know our light.  Study it, so we know what it is telling us.  So they would say, study God’s Word.  Read it regularly.  Worship regularly also, so we hear it (a key way Martin Luther believed the Good News comes to us).

Will it always enlighten our lives?  Not in obvious ways every time.  But study and learning takes time.  The Magi studied the stars for years before finding one which led them to God’s life and light.  And so it is with God’s written Word.  There are passages that made little sense to me ten years, twenty years ago that now seem very clear and helpful.  And I hope in another 10 years, or 20 years, the Word will be even more clear to me.

And the more we are immersed in God’s Word, the more we meet the Living Word of God to which it points, our Lord Jesus, and the more we are shaped.  It becomes less a proof text kind of thing where we’re looking for a direct answer to a specific problem, and more a shaper of our lives, a light for our path, as Psalm 119 says, a direction for us to follow, and the voice of Jesus our Lord.  And since the Magi studied stars all their lives, we can expect the learning of God’s Word will take us at least that long.

But the Magi also teach us another, very important thing, the message my daughter gave me in the dark: if you know where the light is, then do something, follow it.

The Magi said, “we have seen his star in the East, at its rising, and have come to worship him.”  The second half of that sentence teaches us this second thing we learn from the Magi.  Once you see the light, you follow it.  There were probably other astrologers in Persia, or wherever the Magi came from, who understood what the star might mean.  But it’s doubtful they all came.  And only the ones who came saw the light of God in that little child.

So, too, it is with us.  There are plenty of Christians who have heard the truth about God, and own Bibles, who come to worship, but who are lost in the darkness of the world.  Ourselves included, sometimes.  So the challenge of the Magi is that once we have begun to be immersed in the study of God’s Word, we then must learn how it can and will change us, lead us somewhere, lead us to see the true face of God for us.  The Magi call us to let God’s Word truly guide us to change how we live, how we walk in this world, how we know God.

This is the mark of a Christian who knows where the light of God is: that person lives in the light.  Their lives are different, shaped by God.  They make choices based on the Triune God’s will for their lives and based on what is good and right in God’s eyes, not based on spur-of-the-moment thinking, or selfishness and greed, or anything else.  They don’t stumble aimlessly through life, but live always seeking God’s light to brighten the path ahead.  Which means that though they still might stumble from time to time, because they can see they’ll know where to walk to get out of the mess.

And they live in the presence of the God the star-revealed Child now reveals to us all, in the love of a God who loves us beyond death.

Our hope on Epiphany is that we have the chance to let God’s written Word do what God wants it to: lead us to the Lord of life, and to a life of following the Lord.  A life lived in God’s light, even in a world of darkness and pain.  A life which shows us God’s grace in all things.

It’s a miraculous gift that God brings light into our lives.

Epiphany, the season of light, always reminds us and recalls us to that gift.  If we ignore and neglect the gift of God’s light, we will stumble in darkness.  And there is no need for us to do that.

So today, let us ask God to make us like the Magi of old: people who each day learn more and more about God’s Word and plan for us, and so know God’s light in our darkness; but also people who then follow that light and are changed by it.

We have seen his star.  Let’s follow it and worship him, and walk as children of light.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The coming of the Son of God into the world as a human child signifies not only the coming of God to be one of us, among us, but also begins God’s process of bring us back to be with God and like God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, The Name of Jesus; texts: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21

Sisters and brothers, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

There was an article in the Star Tribune on Sunday that disturbed some of our members, who mentioned it to me after worship.  I hadn’t read it then, but I did when I got home.  It was about a nationally-known local pastor who was retiring, and who has a reputation for fiery preaching, for proclaiming God’s wrath on people in order to call them to confession of their sin.  Included in his preaching over the years has been his attributing of disasters, tragedies and attacks to God’s just wrath on those who suffered them.  For this pastor, this theology is rooted in understanding the sovereignty of God.   God is in charge, therefore all things are attributed to God’s will and plan, even such things some might classify as human evil or natural disaster.  This is in keeping with his theological tradition, and we certainly have heard that from others of that tradition.  Also central to his preaching has been his belief that, according to what he said to the interviewer, “if you try to throw away a wrathful God, nothing in Christianity makes sense.  The cross certainly doesn’t make sense anymore, where [Jesus] died for sinners.” [1]  In this, he’s in line with one of the theologies of the atonement the Church has sometimes held, that Jesus’ death appeases the just and righteous anger of the Father in our stead, substituting for our punishment.  Without Jesus, according to this theory, then the wrath of the Creator would pour out on us like flames of destruction.

C. S. Lewis reminds us that theories of the atonement aren’t necessary to receive the benefits of the work of Jesus in his death and resurrection, just as one doesn’t need to understand how food is good for us to be nourished by eating.  While this is true, how we understand God’s attitude toward us and the world is an important part of how we live our faith.  If we believe God’s attitude and reason for coming among us was love and a desire to bring us back through love, then we might also be open to the possibility of a relationship with God, that is, if God wants such a thing.  If we believe the coming of Jesus was to deflect from us the just wrath and anger of the Father, then we’ll love to be with Jesus, but God the Father might possibly remain a frightening presence to us, which raises all sorts of questions about faith in a Triune God, or at least loving a Triune God instead of one of the Three apart from another.  So while we don’t need to know how the Triune God effects our salvation through the life, death and resurrection of the Son as long as such salvation is accomplished, it might affect our lives as disciples profoundly to try and understand just what God was and is doing.

To that end, listen to this alternate understanding of the reasons for the coming of the Son of God among us, in this ancient antiphon sung by the Church on this day, the eighth day of Christmas, the day of Jesus’ circumcision and naming:

“O admirable exchange: the Creator of human-kind, taking on a living body, was worthy to be born of a virgin, and, coming forth as a human without seed, has given us his deity in abundance.”

O admirable exchange, or as the Latin would say, “admirabile commercium,” a marvelous transaction.  Here the understanding is that there is a deep mystery in the coming of Jesus which entails an exchange, a transaction: the Creator takes on human flesh, and in turn, gives us divine attributes, divinity itself.  Echoing Paul in Romans 3, who said that God’s righteousness becomes our own righteousness when God takes on our sinfulness, this is a view of God that is very different from a wrathful Father who is appeased by the Son’s death.  And on this feast day of Jesus’ naming, the Church chose to sing about this wonder, this mystery, that the coming of the Son was God’s loving attempt to restore us to what we were meant to be.  Eight days after Christmas, where we celebrated God’s coming among us as a human child, now we are reminded of the second half of the transaction, that we in turn are given deity, are made godly, by this coming.

Of course, beautiful or no, the question for us is, is this true?  Does the wrath of God have anything to do with us?

There’s no question that the Scriptures speak of God’s wrath and sovereignty.  Many times God is described as furious with our sinfulness and wandering.  You don’t have to look very hard in the Old Testament to find examples, going all the way back to the story of the flood.  God is described as hating human sin.

And likewise, God’s always making claims to be in charge, to be in control of the world.  As the Creator of all, the Scriptures attribute all things to God’s will and plan.  God punishes in Scripture, God forgives in Scripture.  But God does it.

Yet this only tells part of the Scriptural story.

It only tells half of God’s attitude toward the world and fallen humanity.  It misses the constant reminders of God’s love and grace toward us, even in our sin, as we see throughout the Old Testament, like when in Hosea God waxes greatly in anger and then ends with poignant love and forgiveness.  It misses the grief of God after the flood which leads to God’s new plan to lead a family into a relationship with God that will eventually bless the whole world.

And it only tells part of God’s sovereignty, missing the reality that God leaves us to choose our own sin or goodness and doesn’t always intervene.  Cain kills Abel, and that is not God’s will.  Human sin is so great, and not of God’s will, that the flood happens.  David has Uriah killed, against God’s will.  Talking about divine sovereignty is far more complicated than claiming all things, evil and good, to be part of God’s plan and will.  Sometimes, the Scriptures say, God limits God’s own sovereignty.

So the point would be finding an understanding of God’s view of us that encompasses all of what the Scriptures say about God and humanity.  That would require a great deal more time than we have for a sermon, so what if we just look at the readings assigned for today and see what we can see?

Today the message of Scripture speaks not of appeasing wrath, but of divine searching, divine loving, and divine inheritance.

Whatever we might say about God’s wrath over our sin, the psalmist this morning has a different view of God’s attitude.  The psalmist is filled with wonder that God loves us, even that God notices us at all.  Compared to the grandeur of creation, who are we?, we sang today.  Yet, the psalmist believes that in fact, we are so loved by God that we are lifted to the status of highest of the creation, higher even than the angels.  It causes us the same wonder and awe, but the first hint of God’s attitude toward us today is that somehow, against all odds, God loves and cares for us.

Paul takes us beyond awe into stunned silence, however, for Paul describes God’s action toward us as even more than exalting us to be above other creatures.  Paul says that we are in fact so loved by God we are adopted as children of God.  Paul addresses the wrath of God: we are under the law, we are under God’s judgement.

But for Paul, God’s answer is to send the Son, in the fullness of time, to redeem us by adopting us as children, not to appease God’s anger.  By joining us to the Triune God in such a way that we share the same relationship to the Father that the Son does.  So the attitude of the Father toward our sin is that it cannot stand, but the answer is not wrath which the Son needs to deflect.  The answer is sending the Son to work our salvation in order that we can be adopted as children of God.

Heirs of God, Paul says.  People who receive divinity as an inheritance, godliness from the Triune God, even as the Son receives humanity and sinfulness and brings it into God’s reality.  And now we begin to see the theology of the miraculous transaction, don’t we?

But let’s not forget the gift of our first reading, our blessing by God with a name.  When you adopt a child, you give it a name, and in Numbers that name is declared to be God’s name.

When we say, “The LORD bless you and keep you,” we are substituting, as do the Jewish people, the title “LORD” for the proper name of God as Israel knew it, Yahweh, thus avoiding even threatening to break the second commandment.  That is the name, however, God intends to be laid upon the people as a blessing.

But in Jesus we have revealed to us a deeper proper name of God, a name veiled in mystery because we cannot fully grasp it, but a name of life and hope for us: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  And even as the LORD, in giving a benediction to be used by Aaron and the priests, a benediction we use to this day, says that this benediction is the gift of the LORD’s name as blessing on the people, even so is this new name of God given us in blessing.

It should be no surprise that we receive it when, as Paul promised, we are adopted, for we receive it when we are baptized.  And in that baptism we are covered with the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and linked to the life and love of God in a profound way.

And we are entered into this commercial transaction God is doing, which is a wonder to us.

O admirable exchange, the Church has sung on this day.  Our joy is that it is not only a beautiful thought, but that it is also true.

It’s the only way to comprehend the full breadth of the message of the Scriptures about God’s answer to our sinfulness, about God’s reason for coming as a child among us, about God’s hopes for us as a result.

If it sounds familiar to some of you, it may be because Luther was deeply fond of this image and used the expression on several occasions.  Though it is true that at least once he understood the exchange to be a little more like the substitutionary model, that Jesus takes our punishment and we go free, in Luther’s theology the predominant way he understands this is the joyful reception of God’s righteousness that we receive in exchange for God taking on our sinfulness.

The beauty of this is that it also takes into account the Trinity as being one God, not Three individual actors who are not of one mind, one will.  This idea not only accounts for the love of the Son for us, it also accounts for the love of the Father, and the gift of the Spirit to make our adoption alive, real, to give us our inheritance fully.

And it becomes our joy this morning on the octave of Christmas, that we begin to have our eyes opened to the full truth of what God is about for us: coming to be with us as one of us that we might come to be like God, as children of God.

It is a wonder, a marvel, a miracle.  And it is the source of our joy now and always.

Now, in the fullness of time, this is our hope and our life.  May God continue to work our adoption in us, working in us that which is good and pleasing, giving us the godliness we need to look more and more like the children of God we are, more and more like this Son of God who began the transaction, who began God’s plan to bring life to us and to all the people of this world, so that God’s joy might be fulfilled.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] “Fiery pastor leaving the pulpit,” Star Tribune, 30 December 2012, section B, p. 4.

The twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple spoke of his Father, and meant God; his gift to us is that we also can know our heavenly Father through him, and like him, model our lives and our witness after our true Parent.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, First Sunday of Christmas, year C; texts: Luke 2:41-52; Colossians 3:12-17; 1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26

Sisters and brothers, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Joseph always seems to me to be a little pushed off to the side in the Christmas story, like all those Nativity icons and paintings which have him off in the corner.  He is remarkably faithful and determined to do the godly thing, but we know little about him, save that he acted as father to Jesus.  One wonders if he sometimes resented how his life was sort of taken over by this child who wasn’t his own.

It’s hard to imagine that he felt good about the episode Luke records which we heard today.  Jesus, now twelve years old, is lost to him and Mary for 3 days, and when they finally catch up to him in the Temple of all places, arguing theology and Scripture with the elders and priests, of all people, he claims he’s in his Father’s house, or as it used to be translated (and perhaps would still be better understood), “doing his Father’s business.”  His Father’s business?  Joseph wouldn’t have to be a genius to understand that this child whom he was raising as his own wasn’t talking about a house in Nazareth or building tables.

But this becomes an important moment for us, we who see the crucified and risen Jesus as Son of God and Lord of the universe.  Here, before he’s done any teaching, while he’s still a child in the eyes of the law, Jesus shows us two things: that he is imbued with the Word of God and deeply invested in knowing the written Scriptures, and that he knows his relationship to God as one of son to father.

John’s Gospel tells us that since no one has ever seen God, it is God the Son who makes the Father known to us, in ways we never could have known otherwise.  That seems to be what Luke is doing here as well, telling us that if we watch this Jesus we will see what we need to know about God, even when he is just a child of twelve.  Remember that in Luke’s Gospel there is no secret between the author and the reader about who Jesus is.  From the beginning Luke declares Jesus’ divine parentage.  But this episode not only underscores previous claims by Luke, it for the first time in this Gospel begins to draw out the implications of what it means for God to be born among us as one of us.

It may not have been pleasant for Joseph to have to face this reality, at least if it seemed a rejection of him.  For us, it means the world: Jesus not only shows us our heavenly Father; he also shows us what it means to live in such a way that we, too, are about our Father’s business.

So, though Luke and John write very differently and have different goals, this is a truth they both would have us know: Jesus shows us our heavenly Father in ways we’d never have seen otherwise.

It’s a common theme throughout both of these beautiful Gospels, but if we simply stick with Luke, from whom we hear today, it’s a major part of his focus in writing.  Throughout this Gospel, Jesus witnesses to the truth about God, his Father, in the face of a world which imagines God to be very different.

So Luke, and only Luke, tells us that Jesus at the start of his ministry linked himself to God’s servant announced in Isaiah who is anointed to bring Good News to the poor, the blind, the lame, and to bring them all life and healing.

Luke is the one who tells us of Jesus’ stories of a God who so desperately wants to bring wandering humanity back he will do whatever it takes, like a shepherd who’s lost a sheep, a woman who’s lost a coin, and powerfully, a father who’s lost a son.  Jesus in Luke shows us the love of a heavenly Father who will stop at nothing to find us, welcome us, bring us home.

This is not what we usually expect of God, or imagine.  All-powerful gods in human history tend to demand vengeance and punishment.  They don’t sit on the front step day after day looking down the road waiting for sight of their lost ones so they can welcome them back with song and feast.

When the Son of God is brutally crucified, the way the world would write the story is that an all-powerful God would destroy those who dared touch his Son.  Jesus in Luke asks the Father to forgive those who did what they did.

Again and again in this story Luke tells, Jesus reveals to us the love and heart of God for us and for the whole world, a love which crosses racial and social and gender and ethnic and religious lines, a love which is forgiving and offering life even as we are killing that love.

And even Jesus’ use of the term “Father” teaches us something unexpected about God.  There are many in the Church today who have legitimate concerns about this, people who object to using “father” to refer to the First Person of the Trinity, not only because of its exclusively masculine nature (when of course the First Person is neither male nor female) but also because there are many awful fathers in this world, who hurt or abuse, or worse.  The argument is that the word is irretrievably damaged and unusable.  But consider this: Jesus actually was and is opening up a new vision of the love of the Creator for the world, inviting us to see the Creator as a loving parent, reinterpreting the idea of parent, of Father, and showing us the possibility of a relationship of such love with the God who made us, a Father better than any earthly father or parent we’ve ever known.

And when Jesus rises from the dead, Luke tells us of his efforts to show his followers that this is exactly the way of God and always has been, throughout Scriptures, and tells them that they will be sent to witness to this love, this grace, this Good News for the world.

So for Luke, Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, affirmed by angels and by Jesus himself, gives us confidence that his revelation of the truth about God is valid and true.  We can trust what he says about the heart of God because of who he is.  At age 12, and even after he has risen from the dead, Jesus, shaped by his identity as Son of God and close to the Father’s heart, teaches us how to see and know God.

But Luke also believes that this parentage is ours to claim as well, through the work of the Holy Spirit.

Just as Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, so we are born anew by the work of the Spirit.  This is another connection linking the theology of Luke and John, where what Jesus claims in the encounter with Nicodemus in John 3 is exactly what happens in Acts 2 when Luke tells of the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost to all the believers.  So when we look at this little boy speaking with great confidence about God’s Word to aged teachers, and we see his identity as Son of God, we are seeing also our possibility, our potential, our call.

So here is what we have: Luke wrote a Gospel to tell the world of the coming of the Son of God, conceived by the Spirit, revealing the heart of God to us and living it fully in his life and teachings, his death and resurrection.

And he wrote the sequel, Acts, to tell the world that we all, through the power of the Holy Spirit, can be born as children of God ourselves, and so, too, can fully live God’s way in our life, our teaching, our witness, our love, our action in the world.

And that’s part of Paul’s grace in this reading from Colossians.

Paul urges the believers to be clothed in Christ, clothed in the way of the Son of God.

The two boys of our readings this morning embody what Paul is talking about.  We talked about Hannah and Mary near the end of Advent; now we see their sons as young boys, and what we see is that they are so embued with the Word of God, so shaped by their relationship with the Father, that it flows in their words, actions, life.

And people notice.  Even teachers of God’s law.  Both Samuel and Jesus are described as growing up in divine and human favor.  People saw these boys, even before they were fully grown, and saw the hand of God in them, saw who they were, and were admiring of them.  As was the LORD God, according to both 1 Samuel and Luke.

And Paul joins Luke in urging that we be open to the same possibility.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, Paul says, like Samuel and Jesus.  Have this word so deeply embedded in you, Paul says, it shapes you into godly people.

It’s like putting on new clothes that make you and me look different.  So we are to clothe ourselves with all these characteristics of God’s love that shaped Jesus, and so can shape us.  Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Forgiveness and love.

The model of Samuel, and even more importantly, Jesus, is that if we devote ourselves to understanding God’s Word for our lives it will, through the work of the Spirit, shape us and make us children of God.  So that, in fact, we live into our true inheritance as children of our heavenly Father.

The remarkable thing about Luke’s message is not that Jesus was remarkable, though that’s important.  He was the Son of God, and lived it fully, even at twelve.  So much so that he could confidently speak with elderly teachers and teach them.  So much so that he, even before his ministry began, could confidently claim God as his Father.

But the truly remarkable thing is that Luke claims we have the same inheritance, the same possibility to be remarkable ourselves.  The child Jesus begins to teach us today, and we will continue to learn this from him throughout his ministry and throughout our lives, of the true nature of God and God’s love for us and the world.  And in inviting us to claim God as our Father, he invites us be like him, to witness by our lives, our wisdom, our love, to the same relentless love of God who searches for ever more lost ones to welcome home.

This is our joy this morning: that we can also, like Jesus, be about our Father’s business.

Because we know, through him, and with the help of Luke, that God the Father is our Father as well, that we belong to God in love that cannot die, love that will always forgive, love that will always welcome us back.

But also we know this from Jesus, that we also can be and need to be about our Father’s business.  We have a calling, a job, a life to live, shaped by this identity, clothed in the way of Christ, in compassion, kindness, forgiveness, patience, to continue Jesus’ witness to the world the truth about the God who created all things and loves all things.

I like to think that Joseph understood this, too.  That he saw himself through this boy he held as a baby, saw himself as a child of the heavenly Father, who also had an inheritance to claim and live.  But whether he did or not, that is our gift from this boy Jesus this morning, and for the rest of our lives.  May our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit so move in us and shape us into our identity that we, too increase in wisdom and stature and so reflect the truth of God’s love to a world deeply in need of it.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The Triune God’s song has been playing since the beginning of time. John tells us that Jesus has always been a part of that song, and through this child who came to came to us in a manger, we learn to sing along.

Vicar Neal Cannon, The Nativity of Our Lord (Day); texts: John 1:1-14

Sisters and Brothers in Christ, grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

The phrase, “In the beginning” is all over the Bible, but only two books in the Bible begin with this phrase. They are Genesis one, which I have just read to you, and the Gospel of John. Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth with God’s Word. I like to imagine God’s word being a song. And that Song creates light, and life. And I quote this because this is the image that John wants us to have for Jesus when we read our gospel lesson.

John wants us to know who this Jesus person is. He wants us to know his song.

In the Jewish tradition, the infinite Word of God is contained in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and the Torah is the centerpiece of the Jewish faith. Now, the Torah contains 613 laws and rules for living interwoven with the stories of faith and history of the Jewish people.

So for the Jewish people, the Torah is the centerpiece of faith, it’s the tune that they sing to. It’s the song that they sing. The Torah is the Word of God, and the Word of God brings light and life into the world as in the Genesis story.

And now John comes along, and he makes a new claim, or rather, a very old claim. He writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John’s claim, the Christian claim, is that Jesus is the Word of God, and the Word of God brings light and life into the world.

So according to John, in Jesus all the law, the prophets, and the history of Jewish people are contained within Jesus. Jesus becomes the centerpiece of faith, the tune to which we sing and orient our lives.

Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. This claim is incredibly important because it tells us who Jesus is and that helps us perceive God in a new way.

The traditional way we perceive God is through Scripture. When I was researching for this sermon I came across an article from a Jewish scholar on the incarnation of God. Now, incarnation comes from the Latin word, incarnatus, which essentially means in the flesh, in caro (flesh).

The scholar who wrote the article was making the case that for the Jewish people, God becomes incarnate when we study and learn Torah. The more we learn, the more knowledge we have, the more God’s Word becomes incarnate in our life. It helps us to see things in a new way that we haven’t necessarily seen before. As Christians, we make the same claim about Jesus in scripture. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate from the beginning.

But how can this be?  How could Jesus have been there all along?

Think about it this way, is there a song you’ve heard a hundred times and then all of a sudden you notice something new about that song you’ve never noticed before?  When I was a kid, I used to swear that the song had changed in some way. But over time, I realized that I was hearing it in a new way. Before it was background music, but now new part of the song emerged and it changed the way I heard the music.

I think John is saying that Jesus is like this. He says that Jesus is like the part of the song that nobody noticed before, and when Jesus comes into the world, at first it seems like a new thing. But what John is saying is that Jesus has always been there, and has always been a part of God’s song.

John goes on to tell us that this song takes on flesh.

Jesus is the Word of God incarnate, literally in the flesh. He writes, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” If the Word lives among us, then the Word of God is not just something we study or hear. The Word of God is a child that came to us in a manger that lives and acts in this world, a person that creates light and life. In other words, the Song is life.

Jesus is life.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at me now, but as a kid, I didn’t particularly like going to church. It was a chore to get me out the door. I whined, I pouted, I kicked at things, and generally I tested my parent’s patience at every turn.

To me church was a lot of words that blended together. We read the Word of God, we sang the Word of God, and every Sunday, we listened to the Word of God in one really long boooring sermon. Some days it was all I could do to keep my adolescent brain from exploding and running out the back doors to play basketball, go skiing, or sometimes just sleep in the car.

But there was one part about church that I used to always love and still do to this day. That part of church was communion, the Eucharist. It was always odd to me because almost without fail, after taking communion, I felt alive, I felt new.

So I’d get in line, and here the words, “body of Christ, given for you, blood of Christ, shed for you.” And after receiving the Eucharist, I’d feel, new, better, lighter than before.

Then I’d sit down and I’d tap my little sister on the shoulder and look away, she’d laugh. My brother would step on my foot, and we’d smile, and laugh together. All the while my parents did what they could to hush us up, but even they couldn’t help joining in. Our whole family seemed lighter afterwards as the worries of the morning washed away. And for whatever reason, I’d leave church as if I’d loved the whole experience all along.

It’s like I was hearing a totally new song.

Now, I have a lot of theories on why this is. The first theory that I adopted was because the Eucharist, is at the end of the service. And I knew that we were almost done. So close to freedom!

While there might be an element of truth to that the more I thought of it, the more I realized there were other reasons why I loved communion. I found, and still find, that the Eucharist is the tangible part of the service. It’s the part of the service that you could touch, and taste, and hold in your hand. It requires nothing of you but to receive.

Later, my theological training in seminary would teach me that this experience was the Word of God coming to me, and giving me life. But growing up, I just knew it as that feeling of being made new. Or as John would say, being born-again.

Throughout the Gospel of John, the idea that Jesus is the Word of God is weaved through the narrative. Later in John Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

I think what I encountered in the Eucharist growing up is this very principle that the Word of God gives us life. I was hearing the song through the bread and wine. As I grew older I learned to appreciate how the sermon, and music, and liturgy dwell in us and give us life in the same way that I received it in the Eucharist. But at the time, the Eucharist was the way that God came to me and made me new.

“Body of Christ, given for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you.”

I love this idea because that means that the Word of God is not just about words. Like we experience in the Eucharist, the Word of God is something tangible that we can hold on to. It’s a tune that’s carried in our arms as well as our hearts and minds.

On Christmas Eve, we are especially reminded of this, as Mary carries this Song of God, not only in the Magnificat, but also in her arms as she holds Jesus.

I like to imagine Mary holding the Song of God in her arms, caring for him, feeding him, and singing him a lullaby as he cries. I like to imagine Mary being in awe of her son’s song as he sang it with his life. I also imagine that Mary sang a song of lament as Jesus hung on the cross.

In the Eucharist, we participate in this song. We hold the body of Christ in our hands. We remember his life, death, and resurrection and in that we are connected to Word of God that gives us life, the beginning of all things. And we like Mary, become, intimately connected to the Song as we learn to sing along. As John says, we become God’s children. We are connected to the Song that was in the beginning all things.

And as we learn to sing God’s song, the Song becomes incarnate in us.

Have you ever been in a situation where a friend or family member is sharing a deep and personal truth? Maybe they’ve just revealed to you that they are dying or admitting they have an addiction. When we are able to sit there, and comfort them, and support them, we’re singing God’s song.

Sometimes we don’t have to say a thing. Sometimes a hug, or tear, or just your presence is enough to assure someone that God’s song is playing in the background.

It also doesn’t have to be a sad situation. Maybe someone is telling you for the first
time that they are getting married or they just got an A on their test or they just got a big
promotion. Sharing joy together is an experience of incarnation as well. It’s another way to sing.

That’s what Jesus is for us in the incarnation. He’s a song that comes to us as a child in a manger, as bread and wine, and gives us the Word of God without saying anything. Jesus gives us his presence. And through this experience of the bread and wine we are given a new light and life to see and experience the world.

So who is Jesus? He is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate. Jesus is light and life. Jesus is the bread and wine. But most of all, Jesus is the song that that has been playing since the beginning of time. Let us sing along.

Thanks be to God.