Sermons

Now and Forever

Preached by The Reverend John Porter on Second Sunday of Christmas (Sunday, January 4, 2009)

Eph 1: 2-6, 15-19a; Mt 2: 13-15, 19-23

Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous, it is good for the just to sing praise. That is what the Alleluia verse said for us.

In the grand scheme of things, the second Sunday of Christmas is kind of an anomaly. Defined as the "Feast of the Holy Family"—which the prayer book does NOT do, it is a true youngster. But the events it puts before us are among those things recorded in the Gospels for us to learn from, hear as part of our own story of faith, and as the Alleluia verse does say, through them, we "rejoice in the Lord." And we "sing praise" to God.

As you just heard, the Gospel story tells us about Joseph's dream and the quick movement of the Holy Family from Bethlehem into the safety beyond Israel's borders. There certainly are similarities with today. This Gospel passage in Matthew comes directly in front of the introduction of John the Baptist as the preacher of repentance. It also is the end of the Infancy narrative in Matthew. It gives us the gap then of Jesus as a newborn infant and the introduction of Jesus as coming from Galilee to the River Jordan for the baptism. This is a big gap of time—nearly thirty years more-or-less—and lets us wonder about Jesus' childhood, teen years, and the preparation for his ministry. We of course get none of that in Matthew's writing. He just lets us wonder.

A liturgical celebration, in many respects, takes a moment in time and enlarges it. We see this in the Easter events where the things that happen on Easter Day are strung out for 50 days in our rites of celebration. There is an expansion and a contraction in the liturgy. We see this too in Advent, which we have just been through: the first weeks we concentrate on the prophetic nature of John and the meaning of God's identification with our human condition. But then, when we get to 17 December, the liturgy makes a sharp turn towards the birth events that we are in the midst of now. Someone asked me a day or two ago, "Well, just how long DO you think it took to get from the Wise Men's starting place to Jesus' crib?" When the Magi came onto the horizon, no one really has any idea. The point of it is, of course, that they came and with them brought enormously powerful symbols: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

At the end of today's passage, Matthew uses a sort of pun (or joke?) when he says, "Joseph and his family went and lived in Nazareth, to fulfill the prophecy "He shall be called a Nazorean." Pun you say? Well, the deal is this: the second word has been translated and spelled "Nazarene", as in "the Church of the Nazarene." But Hebrew scholars refute this mightily. And our more modern translations give us a better word: Nazir or Nazor. And the pun is exactly what the translators fell into: it doesn't mean someone who came from Nazareth, it means someone who is NAZIR—someone who has taken an ascetic vow, lives a consecrated life, is separated by his ascetic practices: no alcohol, no hair on his head (which is the obvious sign of the vow of NAZIR), and avoiding at all costs corpses and places of burial. As well, the person who is Nazir makes three offerings: a burnt offering, a sin offering, and a peace offering. And sometimes a grain drink offering. I would think all of this will sound pretty familiar to you even if you didn't know it already. This ascetic practice is based on a text in Numbers (6: 8-21) and is has enormous echoes even in Christian practice down to our own time.

We daily make the grain and drink offering to God in Jesus Name: the holy Eucharist—what we are doing here this evening. We offer burnt offerings to God as a sweet smelling symbol of our desire to be pure in our lives and in what we offer to God at the altar. We offer sin offerings, in our confession of sin and in our prayers for the whole world. And we constantly pray for peace and make the symbolic gestures of peace to one another, again in the context of the great offering to God in the Eucharist.

None of us is from Nazareth. But each of us, whether we are aware of it or not, at our baptism makes the vow to become NAZIR in Jesus’ Name. We vow to remain steadfast in the breaking of bread and the prayers, in our belief in the Catholic Creeds.

The wonderful part of this is that our commitment to Jesus as Lord as our savior and redeemer is a personal commitment, and made in the context of the Christian community in which we live.

St Leo the Great says:

"The child whom God's Son deigned to become grew to full adulthood, and once his passion and resurrection were over, his human actions for us were in the past. Yet today’s commemoration of Jesus' birth from Mary the Virgin renews for us our own sacred beginnings; in adoring his birth, we celebrate our own origin. For the birth of Christ is the source of the Christian people; the birth of the Head [of the Church] is the birth of the Body. Each person whom Christ calls comes at his own point in the flow of time, yet the whole body of the faithful, which comes forth from the baptismal font, was born along with Christ at his birth, just as it was crucified with him in his passion, raised up in his resurrection, and established at the Father's side in his ascension. For every one among the faithful is reborn in Christ and becomes a new person in him who became the Son of Man that we might be come children of God."

The Holy Family is our family. We are members of that little band that fled to Egypt in fear and returned with boldness. What else can we do but Rejoice? Alleluia.

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