GIVEN THAT WE'VE ALL just had a face full of Christmas lights, most folks would be surprised to learn that in the church, Epiphany is traditionally the season of light (not lights—you can put them away). Epiphany is designed to put us in the position of those who first met Jesus on whom light slowly dawns. What? You mean the carpenter’s son, Mary’s boy? He’s the one to redeem Israel and bring justice to every last human being on earth?! There is so much light here it is hard to see all at once. Epiphany acts as a light dimmer, waiting for our eyes to adjust, trying to keep us only slightly uncomfortable, but not overwhelmed.
Some churches have a practice of announcing a sermon series for January that can attract new people—something on sex or politics, for example. Advertise it at Christmas and then deliver with your best in the new year. That’s when folks are open to new things, and best of all for us, God illumines us at Epiphany. Learning who God is throws light on who our neighbor is—one in whom divine light shines, who is therefore endlessly deserving of our respect and adoration.
Embrace Church in Sioux Falls, S.D., talks about money in January. It seems suicidal. But folks are financially hungover from the holidays, and need help. And the gospel’s words about money are good news all the time, not just in “stewardship season” or at the year-end budget rush.
[ January 1 ]
All Rachel's Children
Isaiah 63:7-9; Psalm 148; Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23
NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS don’t often last. They are born in good intentions, but we are weak, fragile creatures, and habits are hard things to break.
This is why God becomes everything we are, to make us everything God is.
These passages’ commonality is the presence of angels. Ancient Christians and Jews were convinced that creation is crammed with far more creatures than the eye can see. The psalmist plays cosmic choirmaster, commanding the angels to praise. An angel appears to Joseph to protect his precarious holy family. But angels are lamentably absent before the Slaughter of the Innocents, leaving Rachel without consolation.
We can see desolate mothers of all kinds here. Conservatives see it in our abortion industry; liberals in refugee mothers and mothers of lost brown and black sons in America. Both are correct. Where are those helpful intervening angels again?!
God came as a person, not an angel. Some say Satan objected to God becoming a weak human instead of a magnificent angel. Hebrews makes clear God became a person to suffer, and so to redeem. Angels are spectacular, comforting. But God couldn’t save us as an angel—only as one of Eve’s children, Mary’s only son, to save all of Rachel’s lost children and all the rest of us.
[ January 8 ]
Lord of All
Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17
A RENEWAL OF baptismal vows where everyone gets wet is ideal for the Sunday of Jesus’ baptism. But if you’re tired of a Jesus’ baptism sermon each year, there are endless other riches here.
Reflect instead on the Messiah’s character according to Isaiah. He’s tender, gentle, and yet the God who made everything and everyone gives him as a covenant with us and all people. The psalmist says God’s voice smashes trees, throws off sparks, and, most miraculous of all, makes even mutes like us cry “glory.” And then there’s Peter’s sermon.
It can be a moralistic trap to say that God shows no partiality (Acts 10:34). The gospel is not that God is nice so that we should be nice too. It’s that God chooses one people, Israel, through whom to bless everyone else. Peter realizes that now is the “everyone else” time. Yet light dawns slowly. His hosts first try to worship him. He says Jews don’t normally mix with Gentiles. Amy-Jill Levine’s Jewish Annotated New Testament argues that Jews and Gentiles weren’t so neatly divided as that, but hey, light is dawning slowly. Peter’s sermon says too much, but our sermons have to focus. Choose one arresting phrase—he’s Lord of all, not some. His nature is to free the oppressed. They hanged him; God raised him. We ate and drank with a resurrected man.
Each of these is the whole church in a single bite, a single drop of water.
[ January 15 ]
Thick Living Words
Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-11; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42
EVER FELT LIKE your preaching was worthless? I had a preacher friend complain to me that his listeners were like deaf and mute tree stumps, for all the listening they did.
The Bible gets it. Isaiah complains that he preaches in vain. This even though Isaiah was chosen in the womb, and the prophet’s word is like a sharp sword or arrow. God has to talk him down—surely it’s reward enough to be God’s servant? And anyway, take heart. Though you’re abhorred now, like a slave, one day kings will bow to you. In Epiphany we remember kings already have bowed—to Jesus, whose own words mostly fell to the ground. By human standards of accounting, anyway.
For the discouraged, St. John offers a mini-primer on preaching. John calls Jesus the “Lamb of God,” and listeners with nothing better to do mosey after him. They ask him a doozy of a question: “Where are you staying?” (Really? Is that the best you could do?) Jesus replies, as he often does in John, “Come and see.” In John, things are not just as they seem. The word translated “stay,” as in a hotel room, can also mean “remain,” “dwell,” “abide.” Jesus, John will later tell us, abides with his Father, and also with us, like a vine and branches. No wonder preaching is hard. This word is thick, mysterious. But there is nourishment in this soil, life in these tree stumps, abundance in this strange dwelling place.
[ January 22 ]
Factions Are Forever
Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 4-9; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23
ON JAN. 20, we’ll inaugurate a new U.S. president. From where I sit writing pre-election, both candidates face historic levels of antipathy. On Jan. 20, half our populace will be revolted, the other half perhaps relieved, but not likely ecstatic.
Isaiah had much higher hopes for the new king in his prophecy. Probably Hezekiah, this king would take back the historic lands of Zebulon and Naphtali lost to Tiglath-Pileser’s invasion in 733-32 BCE. He would, to coin a phrase, make Israel great again.
But then the church does something strange. We attribute this prophecy in Isaiah 9 to Jesus’ peculiar way of making Israel, and the world, great. Matthew 4 describes Jesus’ decision to move in to a fishing village by the coast as a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. His call to fisher folk to follow is quite a different reconquest than Isaiah might have imagined. His ministry of preaching and healing disease and casting out demons doesn’t reclaim territory for a king so much as it shows God’s intention to cure the world.
There will always be factions among us. Just look at Hillary and Donald, and Chloe’s report of divisions in Corinth—Paul and Apollos and Cephas and Christ (top that!). Corinthians baptized by Paul are no better than those baptized by anybody else. Paul was not crucified for them and Christ is not divided by them. The foolishness of the cross is the power of God to save.
That’s a worthy word for a bitterly divided people, then and now.
[ January 29 ]
Heroic Sacrifice?
Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 15; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12
A FRIENDS TELLS a story of being outside a nuclear missile site, candle in hand, protesting alone except for the guard. “Why are you doing this? It won’t change anyone’s mind.” He replied, “I’m not doing this to change anybody else. I’m doing it to change me.”
The Sermon on the Mount is perhaps Jesus’ most quoted and least heeded teaching. It is easy to pillory—in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, his hearers think he blesses the “cheesemakers.” It’s easier to make jokes or debate these beatitudes than it is to practice being poor, meek, hungry for righteousness, pure in heart, or reviled. Western middle-class discomfort notwithstanding, Jesus tells the wretched of the earth that they are, in fact, blessed. Jesus is not pleading. He’s just saying the way things are.
It’s almost too much to have two all-time-favorite social justice passages on the same Sunday. Micah describes a plaintive God, whining almost—what more do I need to do, Israel? I sent you liberators and miracles and laws. Do I want heroic sacrifice? No! Just justice and kindness and humble walking with God. Paul is equally unflattering: Consider your own status Corinthians! I mean, y’all were not impressive. But God chose you. Foolish right? And maybe most foolish of all—the psalmist praises those who don’t lend money at interest. Good luck with that, capitalists.
With material like this it’s no wonder preaching is so difficult. It’s a miracle anybody believes it at all. Hand me a candle.
Preaching the Word, Sojourners’ online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.
Jason Byassee is pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, N.C., and a fellow in theology and leadership at Duke Divinity School. He holds the Butler chair in homiletics and biblical hermeneutics at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia.
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