The Second Sunday after Christmas: Breathlessly awaiting the promise

Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 147:12-20; Ephesians 1:3-14; John (1-9)10-18

First, a note on the texts. Both the Old Testament and the Psalm readings for today have alternatives listed out of the Apocrypha. Sirach 24:1-12 is listed as an alternative for the OT, and Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21 for the Psalm. But, in the words of a preacher I used to know, "I'm a good Protestant," so I'm not going to bother with the Apocrypha.

I make New Year's Resolutions every year. Of course, mine are mostly the standard ones: lose weight, don't procrastinate, don't make my temper so great, and so on. I know I'll fail at most of them, or at least not have as much success as I'd like to have. But I make my resolutions anyway, perhaps because it is part of my somewhat breathless anticipation of what this future, this new year, will hold.

The text from Jeremiah is part of the Book of Consolation, the material that seems to turn toward the people in, well, consolation, binding up the wounds of exile and seeming to hold out a promise for the future. It is not quite correct to see the prophetic words turning exclusively from judgment to salvation with the exile, for there are oracles of salvation before the exile and oracles of judgment after the exile. But with Jeremiah and with Second Isaiah (Isa 40-55), there does seem to be an emphasis on God not wanting just to punish the people for their sins, but also to purify them in order that they can live a new life with him under the covenant, sometimes expressed as a new covenant, as later in Jeremiah 31.

Psalm 147, as part of the Hallelujah collection at the end of the Psalter, expresses a similar sentiment. God will strengthen the bars of Jerusalem's gates, making it secure forever. This is a nice promise that, while not necessarily worked out in experience, is still to be made and believed. It is not quite satisfactory, I'll admit, to push off the Ultimate Fulfillment of the Promise into the time of the end, but there is certainly something to be said for groups holding on to a particular promise increasing in membership and in fervency even when the prediction comes to naught.

Ephesians 1:3-14 is one of my favorite passages in the entire Bible. In Greek, this is one sentence. That's right. What gets chopped up into five or six sentences in most English translations, mainly because English teachers do not like run-on sentences, is one long string of participle after participle. It almost gives the sense of a speaker stumbling over the words in the excitement to get them all out. A negative picture of this is the series of servants reporting to Job on all the tragedies that have come on first his possessions and then his family: "While he was still speaking, yet another came up and said..." But Paul--or the one writing in the name of Paul; I am not qualified to take a position on that question--keeps stumbling over the excitement of the message, adding more and more to it to create as comprehensive as possible a picture of what it means to live in the promises of God.

John 1 seems almost not to fit amongst all these breathless, somewhat dreamy promises. True enough, the promise that it speaks of surpasses all of these others, but the language in which it is described is much more formal, almost staid. Yet even in the midst of all the stuffiness of a Hellenistic rhetortician, you can still hear the breathlessness if you listen closely enough. Take a minute to read these words from John in a staccato, catching your breath sort of fashion and you'll see what I mean: "There was a man, uh...sent from God, whose name was, um, John, uh. He came to bear...witness to the light, so that...whew...all might believe through him. Uh...he, um...himself, he was not the light, but he came to...bear...witness to the light. The true...light, the light which enlightens everyone, was...coming, um, into the, uh, world."

Breathlessness. Excitement. Anticipation. That is how the promise of God, which reached ultimate fulfillment in Jesus (see Heb 1) was treated by those who experienced it, or by those who learned at the feet of those who experienced it. And the turning over the leaf from the punishment of exile into the new hope of the life afterward expresses a similar kind of thing: God is coming back to us. Life will be different in this New Year. And as we stand just inside the door of a new year, our anticipation is not the same as what others anticipate. Sure, we're making resolutions and promises to do better with this or that, but the newness of life represented in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ ultimately renders all such resolutions important but not Important, significant but not Significant. In the light of this Christ, while we still live in the world, we are not of the world. In the light of this Christ, although we breathlessly await the fulfilling of the promise, we do not live aloof from the concerns of the world. This is the great tension, the great anticipation in which we find ourselves. Ultimately, we are so torn that we cannot adequately express it, but instead we keep getting tangled up in the breathless retelling of the promise. Amen.