The Adventurous Lectionary – December 28, 2014 – the First Sunday of Christmas

Last updated on: December 22, 2014 at 2:01 pm by Bruce Epperly

The Adventurous Lectionary – December 28, 2014 – the First Sunday of Christmas 2014-12-22T14:01:04-05:00 Bruce Epperly

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The Adventurous Lectionary – December 28, 2014 – The First Sunday of Christmas

Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Psalm 148
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:22-40

In the midst of my Christmas shopping, I noticed an interesting coffee company ad announcing, “Revelation in a cup.” Today’s readings speak of our ability to notice God in our midst. God is abundant, providing hints and revelations everywhere, but do we have senses to notice? If we can notice God in a Bethlehem baby, perhaps we can notice God in all things, and all things in God. Perhaps, if we train our senses to discover God’s presence, every cup of coffee will become, as Joyce Rupp suggests, “the cup of life.”

The prophet Isaiah speaks of a new age in which the people are clothed with garments of salvation. The old order is passing and a new age of beauty and justice is upon us. There are hints of the “age of Aquarius” and the “new emergence” in today’s scriptures. Humankind is on the verge of a quantum leap in awareness, the prophet proclaims. Yet, though we have matured ethically in many ways, we still have a long way to go. We wonder, “Will we ever experience this age of Shalom and wholeness? Will we ever as a society love justice more than power and profit?”

Psalm 148 rejoices in the discovery of a universe of praise. Imagine the Psalmist’s ecstasy. All things praise God; God’s energy flows through all things, inspiring them to praise. We live in an animated universe. There are no dead zones, no senseless regions. All things experience holiness – what process theologians have called panexperientialism or panpsychism – in the intricate interdependence of life. Psalm 148 is rounded out by the final words of the Psalms, from Psalm 150:6, Let everything that breathes praise God! Praise God!” And, that inspires us to ask, “What if every breath was a prayer? What if every breath was a blessing?”

In the midst of Paul’s critique of members of the Galatian church for returning to a legalistic understanding of faith, he describes God’s Spirit speaking within us the words, “Abba! Father!” These words join the Jewish and Hebraic language and suggest a faith for all humankind. They also suggest that God is constantly speaking within us, not as an external reality, but as our deepest personal wisdom and energy. Divine revelation is not alien but internal and relational, and goes beyond the Christian community to encompass all humankind. The practices of faith and the acceptance of grace enable us to experience the love that animates all creation. Like the wind that Jesus describes in John 3, grace is always liberating, never legalistic, and animating all things, bursting through our limitations of doctrine, practice, and possibility.

The gospel reading describes two senior adults’ encounter with the baby Jesus. Simeon and Anna have waited decades for the anointed one, fasting and praying for insight to recognize God’s beloved. When the baby Jesus enters the temple, carried by his parents, they see what everyone else misses, God’s vision incarnate in a little baby. No doubt many others see the parents and their child, but to them he was just another baby coming to be blessed by the temple priests. In contrast, Simeon and Anna see more than meets the eye. Their active waiting has given them a deeper vision; their practices of prayerful expectation enable them to recognize the Messiah in their midst. They see a child clothed in garments of salvation and divinity in a little baby.

Today’s passages remind us that the world is more wonderful than we can ever imagine. Noticing is the heart of today’s scriptures along with the recognition that each moment is God-filled and each situation pregnant with divine revelation. In the spirit of William Blake we can proclaim that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to us as it is – infinite.”

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