Interaction with the Divine

Happy New Year. And, have a happy new year–we sure need one.

The scripture this week—officially the second Sunday after Christmas—is designed to focus our attention on the critical nature of the life of the newborn Savior, who is God with us. Jeremiah, one of the prophets of the great exile, breathes joy. So intense is his faith in God who will bring people back to normality “weeping” with joy, they will “walk by brooks of water,” they will “sing aloud” and “be radiant” and “their life shall become like a watered garden” and they “shall be merry.”

Merry. What a concept.

The metaphorical importance of the use of the prophet Jeremiah is directly relevant to us now I think. Jeremiah (31:7-14) prophesied to people who had been exiled, who had suffered loss of homes and family, who had been isolated and oppressed in foreign lands, who suffered to endure corrupt leaders. God’s people in Jeremiah’s day longed for a return to “normality” in their own homes. It was Jeremiah’s role to prophesy the message, the promise that God had given, which was the promise of return, not to the former life, but to a better future.

How we long to embrace such a promise. How we long to embrace each other once again. How we long to be reunited after being separated by a pandemic. How we long for just leadership. How we long for the society of friends, for our gathering places, for human warmth, for health and security. How we long for just one day with no more worse news.

In the letter to the Ephesians (1:3-6,15-19a) Paul reminds us that despite everything, we must remember that God has chosen us to be “holy and blameless … in love.” In other words, God has given us the power we need to create a restoration like the one prophesied by Jeremiah. If we can embrace the power of God’s love, we can shift into the dimension where we reside as God’s own children, adopted through Christ, to reside in grace freely bestowed. We are reminded to see the world not with our backs up but “with the eyes of [our hearts] enlightened.” Oh my …

It is into the dimension created by this enlightening of the eyes of the heart that we find the riches of the glory of what God has given us, which, is love.

And that is the eternal and profound meaning of Christmas—that love is eternally within our grasp, that we “may know what is the hope to which” God calls us, which is the power of a universe created in love, powered by love, ruled justly by love.

It is no simple task we have been given. It is easy enough to lose hope, to dwell in the doldrums of the constant thrum of worse and worse news, to begin to forget the warmth of the embrace of those we love, the aura of their smiles, the breeze of their laughter.

Like all things spiritual, it is action to which we are called. To love is to live in love and to do that is to banish the absence of love from our hearts. The scriptural example we have is that of Joseph’s actions in Matthew’s Gospel (2:13-15, 19-23). Joseph arouses his family to escape danger not once but three times. But an interesting fact about the scripture is that Joseph never makes a decision without divine interaction. Everything he does follows from “a dream” in which “an angel of the Lord” appears. But it is not only the appearance of the angel but rather it is Joseph’s interaction with the divine, it is Joseph’s response, to go in love.

It is to this kind of divine interaction that we now all are called. It is to the power of the action of love, which begins with the active banishment of the absence of love, to restore God’s will and God’s kingdom among us. Like Joseph, we are called to be active, to act in love, to react by love, to fulfill the prophecy with love.

Happy New Year. May we be merry, may our lives become like a watered garden, may we learn to walk in a new dimension of love.

2 Christmas All Years RCL 2021 (Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84:1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23 ©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.