Preaching Helps: First Sunday of Advent-Transfiguration of Our Lord, series B

John Rollefson

Second Sunday after Christmas

January 5, 2003

Psalm 147:12-20

Jeremiah 31:7-14

Ephesians 1:3-14

John 1:[1-9] 10-18

Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem!
Praise your God, O Zion!
For he [God] strengthens the bars of your
gates; ... blesses your children within you;
... grants peace within your borders;
...fills you with the finest wheat.
(Ps 147:12-14)

First Reading

One needs think only of contemporary Jerusalem to sigh in response to our psalmody, "Oh, were it only so!" Yet it is no novel experience for God's people to hear these words of promise as encouragement to praise God even and especially in the midst of insecurity, poverty, and violence done to children. Jeremiah in his day was surrounded by utter destruction. God's word of unrelenting judgment was a fire in his bones consuming him. And yet even he, the prophet of doom and destruction par excellence, sings of the One who "has redeemed Jacob's people from hands too strong for them" and of the promised time when "their life shall become like a watered garden" where "they shall never languish again" (Jer 31:11b, 12b). Sing today the tuneful setting of Jeremiah's words found as Canticle 14 in LBW, "Listen! You Nations."

The reading from Ephesians contains the same language we encountered last week in Paul's letter to the Galatians when we heard "that we might receive adoption as children" with the resulting "So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God" (Gal 4:5b, 7). The writer of Ephesians puts the same thought this way: "God destined us for adoption as children through Jesus Christ" (1:5a), "In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance" (v. 1la), and "this is the pledge of our inheritance" (v. 14a). David Bartlett in his recent Beecher Lectures at Yale suggested that, despite our legitimate focus on Paul's use of justification language and his legal metaphors to describe God's redemptive purpose, we would benefit by paying more attention to Pauline use of adoption language and its cognates of being made God's children and thus heirs. Bartlett illustrated the user-friendly nature of the image of adoption as metaphor for redemption by retelling a story told him by a friend. The f riend had taken great care to explain to his adopted child how special he was to his parents and how he, in contrast to his unadopted younger brother, born to his biological parents, had been specifically singled out, chosen, waited for, and welcomed by his parents into their family. The adopted son chewed this news over, looked deep in thought for a moment, and with a smile spreading across his face enthused: "Well, can't we adopt him too?" ("What's Good about This Good News," audio tape, 1 October 2001.)

Being brought into the family of God as adopted children, being specially chosen siblings of our older sisters and brothers, the Jews, and being fellow heirs with Jesus the Jew, communicates the good news of our redemption in language and images accessible to people of our day.