January 5, 2025 - The Second Sunday after Christmas
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. It has been a busy week since last we met; it’s 2025, now, and though some cold drizzle kept our family from the beach ball drop and fireworks in downtown South Haven on Tuesday night, we still celebrated the new year well. It was sweatpants and sledding and hot chocolate for us this week, with a few movies and a lot of rest thrown in; I hope your beginning of the year was a good one as well.
However, sadly, there have been a few difficult stories in the news to start this new year. Last Sunday, 179 people died in a plane crash in South Korea. An attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve left 15 dead and dozens injured. Renewed Israeli airstrikes this week killed at least 80 Palestinians in Gaza. Russian strikes in Ukraine increased on Christmas Day and several more civilians were killed in their homes on Thursday. I’m sure I have missed a few stories, but there always seem to be reasons for despair, even in 2025.
Former president Jimmy Carter also died this last week, last Sunday afternoon, at the age of 100 years old, making him the longest-lived president in US history. Mr. Carter served as president before I was born, from 1977-1981, as both a Democrat and a Southern Baptist, which these days might be a bit more confounding than it was back then. He was born and raised in Georgia, served in the U.S. Navy, famously revived his family’s peanut-growing business, and then entered politics, where he was a state senator, a governor, and then a surprise presidential candidate. Whatever your opinion of his time in office may be, if you have one, Jimmy Carter is likely more well-known now for what he did after his presidency, establishing the Carter Center for human rights, winning a Nobel Peace Prize, and of late, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, an organization he began working with in 1984, in his “retirement,” and one he worked with for forty years.
I started reading Carter’s 2006 book “Our Endangered Values” this last week. I was a political nerd myself in college, a double major in political science and American history. Politicians have always intrigued me, though in a very different way after working on staff for a self-obsessed congressman in the early 2000’s. But though he was president, few would label Jimmy Carter as self-obsessed. In his short 2006 book, Carter spends one brief chapter on his own life in the context of the American story, and then another on his own faith. And then, he spends 14 chapters touching on key American values that he argues were at risk of falling apart 18 years ago. You might not be surprised to hear that he was correct on nearly all fronts, that our society is still struggling (and struggling mightily) with the issues he points out, issues like the rise of religious fundamentalism, the growing danger to our climate, and our nationalistic love of war over peace.
Now this would be a bleak sermon for us to start the new year if it ended there, that the now-deceased Jimmy Carter saw this all coming twenty years ago, and we just wouldn’t listen to him because his unpopular presidency was defined by high gasoline prices and a hostage crisis. But of course, this sermon doesn’t end there, and neither did Carter’s life end in 1981 or in 2006 with his book about the breakdown of values. In the face of that particular despair, Carter instead lived out one of his famous quotes: “I have one life and one chance to make it count... my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have, to try to make a difference.”
Lest you worry that I’m going to preach at you this morning just to make a bunch of new New Year’s resolutions to make sure that you’re also making a difference in 2025, I’m going to pivot away from President Carter for a minute and turn to the lectionary texts. As you might know, this is the last day of the liturgical season of Christmas, day twelve, and tomorrow begins the season of Epiphany. I hope you’ll join us tomorrow at 9:30 when I’ll preach specifically on this gospel passage, the story of the Magi. But being that it’s still Christmas today, I want to focus on the words of the prophet Micah written here in Matthew’s gospel: “From you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.”
Scholars seem to agree (though as I often mention, you’ll always find some disagreement with scholars), they agree that most of the words in the Old Testament book of Micah were written in the late eighth century BC, as political pressures were mounting on Israel after a long period of peace, and yet before their exile, before the infamous and devastating Babylonian captivity. Chapter five of Micah, however, where these verses are found promising a ruler who would come from Bethlehem, these words, these prophecies are now dated to the sixth century BC, during the exile, when the Messiah was so longed for, when life was so despairing that the people of Israel cried out to God for deliverance.
Regardless of the specific historical context, this use of Micah here in the gospel of Matthew connects the birth of Jesus to centuries-old prophecy, to Jewish tradition, to a story that dates back centuries, to the Jews’ coming Messiah, to a God that is faithful and ever-present and is now coming to be with humanity in a new and unbelievable way. Matthew’s gospel was written specifically to Jewish Christians, and this shepherd, this ruler they’ve longed for since at least the days of Micah was just born in Bethlehem, in the land of Judah. This God who was faithful to Micah continues to be faithful to Matthew, but now, at the first Christmas, in human form.
The shepherd was prophesied in the book of Jeremiah too, in our first reading today. Also written during the exile in the 6th century BC, Jeremiah writes, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd keeps a flock.” Sing aloud with gladness, you exiled people of Israel, suffering under foreign rule... raise shouts of joy for your God. Your mourning will be turned to joy, the young women will rejoice in dance, the young men and the old shall be merry. Your God is faithful to you, hearers and readers of Jeremiah, even when all feels bleak, even in exile, even when you have reason for despair. God is with you, oh Israel.
And of course, God is with us, oh humanity, oh South Haven, Michigan oh Church of the Epiphany. God is with us in little baby Jesus, God is with us in the Holy Spirit still today.
Through Jesus and the first-century church, all of humanity came to be included in those ancient Jewish narratives of God’s faithfulness and deliverance; there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but all of us are one in Christ Jesus, no exceptions. The covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, extends to us today, the shepherd prophesied in Jeremiah and Micah was born in Bethlehem and sent to rule, to bring peace and joy and love forevermore.
He is our shepherd, today. May we live like that is so.
Now, Jimmy Carter did live like that was so, not to make this sermon all about him, because it’s really about God and about Jesus and about us. President Carter was just a man and all of us have our faults, but probably more than any of us in the room today, presidents have a front row seat to the horrors of the world. They are elected to make decisions that literally mean the life and death of countless people, they live under a constant microscope, they have access to intelligence that would make our heads spin, that would break people with tender hearts.
But Carter’s response in the face of despair, in the face of worldwide brokenness, was at least in part to lean fully into his faith, into his belief that God is faithful and that Jesus is with us and that we are called to love our neighbors, as he said, doing whatever we can to make a difference. He did so in the big things, with his Carter Center, and in the little things, like putting on a construction helmet and building a home for someone who needed it. He had hope in a different way of being, thanks to his deeply held faith, and he lived it out loud, whenever and wherever he could.
I told our liturgy group this week that I really have just one New Year’s resolution this year. I did get an exercise bike, and I joined a gym, and I made a goal on Goodreads of reading two books each month, and I hope to drink less caffeine and more water, so there are some standard resolutions in the mix, but I really just have one good resolution. It comes from a quote from Welsh writer and activist Raymond Williams, who wrote this in the 1980s: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”
I believe, and I think I can say that we believe here at the Church of the Epiphany, that there is a hope bigger than our despair, a hope based in the incarnation of Christmas and in the faithfulness and the abundant love of the almighty God. May your New Year’s resolution simply be to live a life that makes that hope evident and possible for those around you in a world of convincing despair, to be a light in the darkness, a light that points toward Jesus. Amen.
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