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2nd SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS

Our passages for this post-Christmas/post-New Year’s season offer excellent opportunities for proclamation. In the spirit of New Year’s beginning, the Jeremiah 31 lesson reverberates with joy and festivity-for God is at work re-gathering and leading people back home. Renewal and new life in Christ also provides a marker for the beginning of a new year, topics found in Ephesians 1. And in our gospel reading, we enter the theologian and poet’s domain to discover the Word who was with God became an enfleshed Word and who makes known to us the unseen God.

Jeremiah 31:7-14-Raise Cheers! Sing Praises!

"Shout for joy at the top of your lungs!" urges our lesson in the paraphrase of master phrase-turner, Eugene Peterson. Few words in any language can equal the power and joy that this text contains. Such exuberant words reflect the joyful return of the Exiles-a re-gathering, return, and redemption of Israel. This passage is peppered with "gladness" and "shouts" and invitation to give "praise," and "dance" and merry-making and "gladness." Jeremiah looks forward to the restoration of the united kingdom of northern Israel and Judah-both coming to worship Yahweh in Zion. God will be at the head of the line leading all of them back. What a vibrant and consoling vision in Jeremiah’s time or for any new year.

Ephesians 1:3-14-Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow

Verse 3 sets up the core of this lesson-Blessed be the God . . . who has blessed us . . . with every spiritual blessing. What follows is a summary of Paul’s overall understanding of what is included in God’s blessing of humankind-God’s initiative to choose, adoption, redemption and forgiveness, illumination into the mystery of God’s will, a God-bestowed inheritance, and the seal of the Holy Spirit. Such blessings redound with doxology and praise to God for such providing us with such a praising and glorious life!

John 1(1-9), 10-18-In the beginning . . . God

Enter the theologian, poet, and culturist who takes common words and fashions them into a beautiful lyric which forms today’s gospel lesson. The passage contains motifs that will reappear in John’s gospel: light, darkness, life, true, truth, world, born, blood, flesh. The lesson closes with the full incarnation that began in verse one: the Word became flesh and lived among us (verse 14), another testimony from John, and an intriguing statement about how all of us have received from his fullness grace upon grace upon grace . . . blessed with every spiritual blessing en christos.