Second Sunday After Christmas Year B 2009

02 Christmas B 09

January 4, 1009

Jer 31:7-14 (NRSV)
7 For thus says the LORD:
Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
"Save, O LORD, your people,
the remnant of Israel."
8 See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame,
those with child and those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
9 With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble;
for I have become a father to Israel,
and Ephraim is my firstborn.
10 Hear the word of the LORD, O nations,
and declare it in the coastlands far away;
say, "He who scattered Israel will gather him,
and will keep him as a shepherd a flock."
11 For the LORD has ransomed Jacob,
and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.
12 They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the LORD,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden,
and they shall never languish again.
13 Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy,
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.
14 I will give the priests their fill of fatness,
and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the LORD.

Psalms 147:1-20 (NRSV)
1 Praise the LORD!
How good it is to sing praises to our God;
for he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting.
2 The LORD builds up Jerusalem;
he gathers the outcasts of Israel.
3 He heals the brokenhearted,
and binds up their wounds.
4 He determines the number of the stars;
he gives to all of them their names.
5 Great is our Lord, and abundant in power;
his understanding is beyond measure.
6 The LORD lifts up the downtrodden;
he casts the wicked to the ground.
7 Sing to the LORD with thanksgiving;
make melody to our God on the lyre.
8 He covers the heavens with clouds,
prepares rain for the earth,
makes grass grow on the hills.
9 He gives to the animals their food,
and to the young ravens when they cry.
10 His delight is not in the strength of the horse,
nor his pleasure in the speed of a runner;
11 but the LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him,
in those who hope in his steadfast love.
12 Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem!
Praise your God, O Zion!
13 For he strengthens the bars of your gates;
he blesses your children within you.
14 He grants peace within your borders;
he fills you with the finest of wheat.
15 He sends out his command to the earth;
his word runs swiftly.
16 He gives snow like wool;
he scatters frost like ashes.
17 He hurls down hail like crumbs--
who can stand before his cold?
18 He sends out his word, and melts them;
he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow.
19 He declares his word to Jacob,
his statutes and ordinances to Israel.
20 He has not dealt thus with any other nation;
they do not know his ordinances.
Praise the LORD!

Eph 1:3-14 (NRSV)
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. 5 He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight 9 he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. 11 In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, 12 so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. 13 In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; 14 this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory.

John 1:1-18 (NRSV)
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified to him and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'") 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.


God’s Image Problem

God has an image problem. Have you heard about this?

On Good Morning America this week, there was a public relations guy on who has written a book about self-promotion. He started by saying, “We all know that in our time, what we think is more important than what is true.” I’ll let you think about that for a minute.

People think a lot of things about God, and I guess they aren’t shy about proclaiming what they think. Pastor Lew has taught a very popular class about all the different religions of the world. Some have images of God, some don’t really feature any idea of God at all.

What’s your image of God? Think about it for a minute. I’ve heard people in our congregation saying that God is unknowable. I can relate to that. So many conflicting ideas. It seems unfriendly to say anyone is wrong about God. It seems more polite to suggest that no one can know him, so it’s best not to argue about it, just let everyone think what they want.

I’ve heard others among us assert with great conviction that there is such a thing as truth, that faith is all about assenting to the right doctrines. I can relate to that too. There’s something satisfying about Judge Judy. People come in the courtroom trying to justify their shenanigans and she lays them out, tells them what is obvious to most of us. Certain things are right and certain things are wrong, period.

A study was done last year, we were talking about it the other night, trying to get a sense of what people thought about God. They identified two continuums that seemed to be in everyone’s mind when they imagined God. One had to do with nearness or distance, the other with approval or anger. This meant there were four possible extremes: God is close by and happy; God is far away and happy; God is close by and angry; God is far away and angry. Of course there were more moderate views. What the test didn’t measure was context over time. I would say the bible portrays God in all four categories, though perhaps the far-away-and-happy model rarely shows up. In the bible, strangely, God seems to take different attitudes and positions depending on what is happening.

I rather like the bible because the bible chooses mostly to tell stories, and what doctrine it lays out is largely commentary on the stories. I think most interpretation goes wrong when people read the doctrine but not the stories or read the stories but not the doctrine.

But one thing the bible makes very clear is that God has an image problem. And today’s lessons tell us, his people, what we are to do about it. He tells us to praise him.

God even tells us what to praise him for. We are to praise him, in the case of Jeremiah, for what he hasn’t done yet. We are to praise him for his intentions to rescue a rather small percentage of his people spread out over the world and bless them in some way that surprises the rest of the world. That seems a little odd.

The psalm seems to make a little more sense. We are to praise God for creating the universe and everything in it, and we are to praise him at the same time for particular attention for us, his people, attention he does not lavish on everyone. Are we to celebrate that we’re in and everyone else is out? Is this really worthy of praise?

Paul carries this idea forward and says that yes, we bless God because we were chosen before we were even born (meaning we, God’s people), chosen for adoption as children of God.

And John seems to be making the same claim, that we praise God because he who created the world has come among us so that some of us, apparently rather few of the world’s inhabitants, might receive him and thereby be reborn, taken from the world of people born in the ordinary way because a couple of parents want to have some children, into the kingdom of heaven where we are born anew as God’s sons and daughters.

Does God have a self-esteem problem? It seems unlikely. But God does have an image problem. The world he made, John’s gospel says, apparently doesn’t know him, and doesn’t want to. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who takes the biblical witness seriously. The book of Genesis, which the Gospel calls to mind with its opening words, makes clear that humankind from the very beginning rejected God. God’s strategy in dealing with this problem was first to destroy the world, or most of it, a strategy he decided never to repeat. He decided instead to work with what he had.

This he chose to do through creating a people for himself, a nation of priests called Israel. He did this over the course of many generations, treating his people as a parent treats an unruly child. Remember, the world, the whole world, had already rejected God, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the people God chose would have a hard time adjusting. He therefore gave them a law, a fairly strict law. He hadn’t read Dr. Spock, so he used punishment as liberally as he used rewards, he spanked them and sent them to their room without their suppers and took away their privileges and even kicked them out of the house for a while. But like most parents, he also never really abandoned them, and he always relented and forgave them. They eventually became somewhat obedient, albeit resentful, adults, a people who strived to please a God they were actually pretty scared of. At the same time they were a pretty entitled lot, always saying, “Look at all we’re doing for you; you better reward us like you promised!”

The problem was that this didn’t work for God’s image problem. The world, for the most part, did not look at Israel and say, “Wow, those people have an awesome God! Look how happy they are, look how wonderful their culture is! Maybe we could learn from them!”

There’s a tradition in the twelve-step fellowships that reads, “Our public relations policy is one of attraction and not promotion.” God’s strategy is one of attraction and not promotion. His goal was to create a nation rich in justice and peace and life and wholeness, a nation that rejoiced to be his, that wouldn’t dream of living any other kind of life, of having any other king but God.

The amazing thing that all these scriptures are saying to us is that all of the work God had done with Israel was simply a prologue to his real plan. What no one knew was that Israel was a staging ground for the real strategy, one that began with the birth of a new kind of person, a new kind of king, one born of God’s own Holy Spirit, but made out of the same old materials, human flesh and blood. God’s image problem was solved by Jesus. Christ is God’s perfect image, because Christ is God.

It’s hard to say even now why some people open themselves up to Jesus Christ and some people don’t. The scriptures we heard this morning suggest that it is somehow part of God’s hidden plan, and this has led some Christians to believe in predestination. I can’t say that such a doctrine, whether it is true or not, is ultimately very helpful, particularly if we adopt the view that people who are not predestined for heaven are therefore predestined for hell. I don’t hear Paul or John suggesting this and thinking too much about it has never seemed to help anyone. It certainly doesn’t do much for God’s image problem.

I think Jeremiah might help us here by describing the experience of exile as a kind of prerequisite for becoming open to God’s call in Jesus Christ. Most people I have known who have been drawn to the new birth in the Holy Spirit are people who in one way or another find themselves outside the gates of this or that human community, who somehow just don’t fit in the usual social groups. Jeremiah speaks of the blind and the lame, the ones who somehow feel incomplete and separate from the world.

However we get here, it seems we are drawn to the peculiar community of praise and joy, of equality and love, of forgiveness and generosity that is God’s church. Jesus, by opening the way for God to pour his Holy Spirit among us, has perfected Israel, so that we can be that nation the world looks at and says, “Wow, they worship an awesome God! Look how happy they are! Look how they love one another! Look at the justice and peace and love that fills their community! Maybe there is something we could learn from their God!”

The whole church on earth, with its many denominations, is the largest single religious movement in the world. Still as a percentage of the world’s population, it is relatively small. We also know that it is terribly imperfect, and that God’s intention, that the world might join us in praise of its creator, is far from realized.

But we, surprisingly, wonderfully, have been chosen to deal with God’s image problem. We are being equipped with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, so that we ourselves might manifest God’s presence in the world. We can’t do it without his Spirit and the things we do here as the people of God is all about opening ourselves and asking for that Spirit, so that we can love God from the bottom of our hearts the way humankind was made to do, so that we can praise him, and mean it, so that a world that doesn’t know him might just join in.

Amen.