By now, Christmas decorations are packed up and stored away, waiting for another year. Christmas celebrations and travel are over. We've moved on. Some of us moved on as we followed the cultural calendar. The gifts were barely unwrapped and the mess cleaned up before we were already talking about the New Year, the next celebration on the calendar. Others of us held on longer, seeking to follow the liturgical calendar with its twelve day reflection on the meaning of Christmas. Celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas is indeed hard when everyone around you has packed Christmas away for another year, when everyone and everything around you has moved on.
As we move on from our Christmas celebration, I pray we do not move on from the hope Christmas proclaims. Hope is about what will be, but is not yet. Hope calls us to rejoice in the longed-for fulfillment of God's promises. It calls us to pursue that fulfillment today, in the here and now, in what is. Our Christian hope is not something to be boxed up and stored away to be used some other time. It is to be lived today. It must be lived today or it is not really hope.
I identify two dimensions in the hope Christmas proclaims. The two are inseparable. One leads to the other. The other is dependent on the one. Christmas stirs the hope of God-shaped lives that help to create a God-shaped world.
Christmas, in celebrating the birth of Jesus, proclaims the mystery of the incarnation, revealing what God is doing in it. Christmas celebrates how God wrapped the Divine Self in human flesh ... how God became what we are so that we can become what He is (i.e., possessing his character of self-giving, servant love) ... how God shared our experience of life so that we can share His quality of life (i.e., eternal life ... here, now, not after we die). The incarnation is about God's work of creating God-shaped lives ... God's work of creating a family of sons and daughters who possess His nature and live his ways ... God's work of creating Spirit-transformed and Spirit-empowered children who are His partners in creating a God-shaped world.
The ancient Hebrew prophets proclaimed this hope of a God-shaped world: the lion and the lamb lying down together ... the sword and spear beaten into plow shares ... a time when the nations turn to Jerusalem (i.e., God) for instruction ... a time when negotiation and arbitration replaces domination ... a time when war will no longer ravage the nations ... a time when all people will enjoy the abundance of the peaceable kingdom. In short, a God-shaped world ... a new world to replace the fractured world created by our fear-based thinking and living.
And that's where Epiphany comes in. The Feast of Epiphany celebrates the arrival of the magi as told in Matthew 2. It celebrates the inclusion of the Gentiles in the Kingdom. It anticipates a oneness restored (see Ephesians 2:11ff - Christ is our peace, breaking down the dividing wall). It, like the Christmas celebration, proclaims hope ... hope of a God-shaped world.
Epiphany celebrates light ... light that shines in the darkness ... light that drives the darkness away ... light that enables us to see what we could not see before ... light that reveals what we were too blind to see ... light that helps us know God and the ways of God ... light that shows us the way. The prologue to John's gospel, John 1:1-18, identifies the Word made flesh as that light. "In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ... The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. ... The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. ... No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son who has made him known," (John 1:4-5, 14, 18).
Jesus is the Light we celebrate on Epiphany. As we walk in his light, learning and living the ways of God that he lived and taught, the Spirit transforms our lives into God-shaped lives. Our lives reflect his light. We live as God's partners in creating a God-shaped world.
God-shaped lives. A God-shaped world. Certainly, such hope cannot be boxed up and packed away. It must be lived ... here and now, in what is.
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