Second Sunday of Christmas: Grace wins!

 Second Sunday of Christmas: Grace wins!

Psalm 147.12-20

Jer 31.7-14

Eph 1.3-14

John 1.1-18

Prayer of Invocation

Father, you wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of humanity.  Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Proclamation

Have you ever had the experience of coming out of a deep sleep in a room that is pitch dark, and not knowing where you are? You don’t know what day it is, you don’t know what time it is, and you don’t even know where you are?

I remember this happening to me about five years ago. I had just finished a grueling  nineteen-hour flight. I was recovering from Leptospirosis. I was wracked with panic attacks. I didn’t sleep on the plane. When I got to my hotel room, I made sure the curtains were tight around the window so that no light could penetrate. When I woke up that next day, it was pitch dark in my room. There was not even a ray of light. I woke and had no idea where I was; no idea what day it was; what I was supposed to be doing. It was bizarre and terrifying. I needed an apocalypse--a revealing. I needed to know where I was. So, I did what all moderns would do. I reached for my phone and clicked the side. It said it was Sunday, Jan 24, 8:30am. That was helpful, but it still didn’t tell me where I was! So I opened the weather app: Colombo, Sri Lanka, 89 degrees! Sri Lanka? What was I doing in Sri Lanka? It took me several minutes to orient myself and remind myself why I was there. My weather app was an apocalypse. It revealed where I was.

Our New Testament texts this morning orient us in a similar way. They offer us an apocalypse, a revelation. They answer for us the question we all must ask and come to terms with--where are you?

“Where are you?” It’s the first question that comes to us in the Bible (Gen 3.9). It is not a question God asks us because He doesn’t know the answer. In other words, it is not a question for Him; it is for us. Where are we? Christmas is a time to remember where we are. It is a time to awaken from our darkness and be reminded of why we are here.  

Where are we? Fundamentally, our Scripture readings for this Sunday point us to the fact that we are in a three-agent drama: God, humankind, and the powers of darkness. As Genesis 1-3 alludes to, we are on the one hand in God’s good world, a delightful world that is a gift given to us that we might share in God’s delight. But mysteriously, and in a way that we may never comprehend, that world has been invaded by an Enemy, what Paul in Ephesians calls the cosmic powers over this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil. God and the Devil (Eph 6). These are two agents working in the world, battling for our allegiance. That is the most basic reality of where we are: there are two powers stronger than we are; and we can only serve one. We are either exponents and instruments of the true and Good Lord of the world, or we have been enlisted in the work of the Enemy, the false lord, who seeks to take order and turn it into chaos. 

In the Good News of Christmas God awakens us from our darkness, announces that He is the true Lord, that we belong to him, and that that darkness has not overcome the light which gives light to everyone. This malevolent agent that has invaded God’s good world will not, cannot overcome His will. The cosmic forces of evil will not have the last word. Grace wins. Creative, unpredictable, regenerating, life-giving, light-making grace wins. In this three-agent drama, we are saved by God’s self-giving power manifest in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit. We are recaptured, redeemed, conscripted into God’s mission and work in and for the world. 

Our Psalm and OT readings remind us that God is committed to providing for us what we cannot provide for ourselves. Unlike our parents, Adam and Eve, who were deceived by the Enemy in the garden, we will be satisfied with God’s goodness (Jer 31.14). For He “sends out his word” (Psa 147.18), his apocalypse, his revelation, which makes known to us our deliverance. And that word is the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ (John 1.14).

But our New Testament readings illuminate for us just how dark our present age is. “He came to His own and his own people did not receive him.” Read in the context of the entirely of John’s Gospel, and with reflection on Paul’s letters (and in particular Romans 3-8), we see that our inability to receive God in the face of Jesus is not just an anthropological problem (that is a problem of our own depravity), but that it is a result of a cosmological problem (namely, that agent working in the world to deform and distort our knowing and out wanting). Christmas reminds us that our problem is not just our sin and rebellion  but more comprehensively that the world has been invaded by an evil agent who is working to conform us to its anti-God, anti-life ways by making rebellion to and distrust of God normal, a default of our being. 

In Ephesians, Paul says it like this: “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience--among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of humankind (Eph 2.1-3).” This is why, left on our own, we will not, we cannot receive the light that has come. Grace must intervene and overcome our darkness. 

To be here today, gathered to give praise and thanks to God for His deliverance in Jesus Christ; to be here, gathered to receive God’s welcome in Christ, is to take part in God’s victory of the powers of darkness. For in Christ’s coming, he has not only dealt with our sin; he has also dealt with the powers of darkness that distort our wanting and knowing, that have taken us captive. This is what our New Testament texts celebrate this morning:

“He came to his own and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1.12-13) It is regeneration, rebirth, an act done entirely by God that enables us to overcome darkness; it enables us to no longer be children of wrath, and instead be children of God. The coming of Jesus is the coming of grace--grace that awakens us to God and enables us to receive Him as the true Lord of the world. 

For this reason we gather together this morning to give thanks and praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We bless his name because in Christ He has adopted us as his sons and daughters. We have been blessed in the Beloved. His belovedness is ours (Eph 1.6). And what is more, we have been conscripted in His work of uniting and reconciling all things in Christ (Eph 1.10). 

Towards the end of our Ephesians passage for this morning, Paul explains all that has happened to us in Christ as God inheriting us as his own, making us His! There are some translation issues that I would like to point out beginning in Eph 1.11. The ESV renders it as “In Him we have obtained an inheritance”, but the phrase could, and I would argue should, be translated “in Him we have been inherited”. The point the Paul is making is not that we have made Christ our inheritance, but that in Christ God has made us His! In Christ, God has stepped into our darkness and enlivened dead people, people who belonged to the prince of darkness, people who followed the course of this world, and made them his own. This is redemption--not just the forgiveness of sins, but liberation from the cosmic forces of evil that enslave us! As Paul says in Colossians 1.13, “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.”

How does this happen? How do dead ones come to life? How do we overcome the oppressive powers of darkness at work in this present evil age? The Word and the Spirit! In a complex sentence in Eph 1.13-14, Paul makes the point that you were sealed by the Spirit, by which he means that the  Spirit marks us out. The Spirit says to us “you belong to God”, “you are his inheritance”. And the Spirit does this in coordination with the preaching and hearing of the gospel. The word of Jesus Christ is enlivened, made powerful by the witness of the Spirit. In Titus, Paul says it like this: “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, who he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” (Titus 3.4-7).

The Spirit, Pauls says in Ephesians 1.14, is the guarantee of His inheriting of us (note that this is different from the ESV rendering, but more to Paul’s point). 

To be inherited by God means that we have a new Lord, For Paul in 1 Cor 12.3 reminds us that no one can say “Jesus is Lord” apart from the work of the Spirit. To know that you are the beloved of God is not a human achievement. It is the very work of Christmas. It is the work of God coming to save us; and by saving us, he has conscripted us in His work. 

This apocalypse of Christmas, this revealing of God’s lordship and our belonging to His kingdom does not relieve our tensions in this world. In fact, in many ways it only exacerbates things, makes our place in this world more complicated. Why? Well, when we awaken and understand where we are, we understand with greater clarity that our world is shaped by corrupting patterns of life; we come to be more aware of the ways that we are played by powers, structures, and systems (political, social, technological) that seek to destroy, distort, and discourage us. To be inherited by God, to be transferred into His kingdom, to be born again to His Lordship, is to become more aware of this battle for life. It is, in one sense, to be at odds with the world, to feel at enmity with the world as it presently is. To be made alive from the dead and conscripted into God’s mission and work only heightens our lament of the present contradictions of this world as it is and as it ought to be, as it will be. So, yes, Christmas producers angst and bewilderment. 

Christmas also calls us to sharpen our discernment. It calls us into deeper reflection about how it is that we ought to live in this three-agent drama. It raises the central question: what does faithfulness to the True Lord look like now, in this place, and at this time? It also calls us to two fundamental postures: resistance and anticipation. We no longer go with the flow; we are no longer conformed to the patterns of this world. If we do nothing, if we are not intentional, we are not being faithful. Instead, we rebel against the patterns of this world in all kinds of creative ways, ways that embody the weakness and humility of our Lord, Jesus Christ. We do not cast out demons with other demons. Instead, we resist and advance God’s work through self-giving, sacrifice, not asserting our rights, loving our enemies--just as Christ did!

But we also anticipate new creation, this radically new world that Jesus has ushered in. Like a drummer, we anticipate God’s next beat, his next verse and we live into the new song He is making. 

Joy, or delight, is the way we express all of this resistance and anticipation, for joy is both an act of resistance and an expression of our hope, the foretaste that we have in the Spirit. 

So, we end where we started: where are you? 

Benediction

The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and he shall reign forever 

Revelation 11.15