Blessing Our Comings and Goings

JANUARY OPENS THE season of Epiphany: In the North, the light begins to last longer, and we reawaken to the world outside our doors. Each Jan. 6, my family performs the old European Epiphany ritual of “chalking the door” to our home. While I pray, my spouse hoists our kids up to write the blessing on our front lintel. This year the markings will look like this: 20+C+M+B+23. Twenty marks the beginning of the year. The letters recall the Magi (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar) whose visit we celebrate and also the Latin prayer: Christus mansionem benedicat (“May Christ bless the house”). The final number closes out the year. The markings are strange. We’re asked about them often. We recall the great light that led the people out of Egypt, the great star that guided the Magi, and the Holy Family’s hospitality. These signs keep evil spirits out and invite God’s Spirit in. And that’s a lot to explain to the FedEx guy.

But Epiphany is a lot! It invites us to explore the complex roles we play in God’s redemption: our complicity in evil as we reach for the good, our relationship to violence, and how we’ll practice hospitality post-COVID.

In this season we also travel with the community of Jesus-followers at Corinth. Much like them, Christians today have become increasingly divided — even among those who agree on the values of compassion, community, and caring for those most vulnerable. The pandemic has made it difficult to find a vision for how to live out our shared values. What striking illumination will this season bring?

January 1

From Songs to Screams

Isaiah 63:7-9; Psalm 148; Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23

THE WEEK AFTER Christmas in lectionary cycle A is tough to preach. In year B, Simeon sings and Anna prophesies. In year C, the child Jesus is found teaching in the temple. But this year, the innocents get slaughtered. From Newtown to Uvalde, Sanaa to Kyiv, Kinshasa to Kabul: This story in Matthew 2 feels too familiar.

I wonder how Jesus felt when he learned that his birth had led to so many infants’ deaths. Herod gave the orders, certainly. But was Jesus complicit? As his follower, am I?

Of course, Jesus’ life wasn’t struck through with original sin — as is ours. Pondering his “complicity” might not be theologically sound. But could it be theologically generative? God sparing Jesus’ death until the appointed time meant others died in his place — others who we name as “innocent.” Surely that nagged at him a little. Surely it should nag at us too.

Year A replaces songs with screams and teaching with terror. It makes us face evil and discern the complexity of our relationship to it. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more (see Romans 5:20). But that doesn’t mean the sin gets erased: not on this side of the veil. If anything, the slaughter of the innocents should remind us that erasure is not the same thing as being redeemed. And complicity is always complicated.

January 8

A Surprising Invitation

Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17

IN THE FINAL season of the British spy thriller Killing Eve, the psychopathic assassin attempts to remake herself through baptism. There’s a strange authenticity to her desire to be good, even though (spoiler) her churchy attempt ends horrifically. The problem (beside her unquenchable thirst to kill) is that she tries to instrumentalize baptism rather than submit to it. She tries to instrumentalize God.

Many Christians believe that baptism is an outward expression of an inward conversion. Others believe it is a particular manifestation of God’s grace within Creation. I have believed each and now believe both. We do not have to be baptized to follow Jesus, but we do have to recognize that his own baptism (as described in Matthew 3), mattered to him — that something world-changing happened through it.

When Jesus submitted to God in baptism, he opened the door for our submission too. Christian antisemitism (conscious and unconscious) makes us forget that Christ adopts us into God’s plan for Israel, not the other way around (see Isaiah 42:1-9). These readings invite us to ask what forms of hospitality would arise if Christians remembered that we are not only supposed to “welcome the stranger,” but that we are the stranger too.

January 15

From Rights to Justice

Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-11; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

THE NEXT THREE weeks of readings reveal the division in the church at Corinth. The community there achieved what many of ours have not: a genuinely diverse community. But they struggled to live fully the ideal. They began following leaders who increased their polarization. Sound familiar?

A phrase from Isaiah 49 — “who formed me in the womb” (verse 5) — has been over-deployed in U.S. culture wars on abortion. I’m among those who grieved at Roe v. Wade’s overturning in 2022. But I’m also among those who want to shift the “pro-life versus pro-choice” conversation away from reproductive “rights” to reproductive “justice.”

Reproductive rights are predicated on a European human rights model that prioritizes individualistic, white, Western ways of knowing and self-identity — an insufficient approach, as many Indigenous scholars argue. Reproductive justice — designed by BIPOC women — requires a holistic approach: one that accounts for colonialism’s power to define family; the relationship between individuals and communities; the value of life; and the relationship between medicine, ethics, and agency.

As I explore parallels between the divisions among believers in Corinth and our contemporary political ones, I must resist thinking it’s only those on the Far Right who need to change. I ask myself how a fear of losing my own rights — as a white-passing, middle-class, cis woman — makes me ignorant of how the game is rigged in my favor. Before charging on, I need to listen to those who haven’t yet been heard.

January 22

The Refugee Christ

Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 4-9; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23

THE PHOTOS OF Alan Kurdi, the boy washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015, shook many Christians out of our complacency about the global migration crisis. My first daughter was turning two years old. My second was in the womb. It took a day to discern whether I should even look at the pictures. When I did look, I realized that it had been foolish to think I could have been prepared.

Anyone attending a church that wasn’t sponsoring refugees in those years at least knew someone who was. Initially, it seemed everyone wanted to resettle a Syrian family — Syria had woken some of us up. Over time, we learned that people fled their countries for an extensive number of reasons, as well as learning how many countries people were fleeing from.

In readings from Matthew this month, we find a hidden character: Jesus the refugee. He flees to Egypt to escape Herod (Matthew 2:14); he flees Nazareth upon an angel’s warning (verses 22-23); he flees Capernaum to avoid arrest (Matthew 4:12-13). This is the same Christ whose gospel we’re called to preach later in Matthew 28: a refugee who never got to settle. What difference would it make in how I preached Jesus’ gospel if I paused long enough to help resettle him first?

January 29

Threshold of Terror

Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 15; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12

LECTIONARY READINGS RARELY open with a repetition of the previous week’s final line, so listen carefully to the wisdom from our divided Corinthian community: “The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). The popular last two verses of Micah 6:1-8 are to followers who might want — but are failing — to “do what God requires” (verse 8). When I skip the first five verses, I fail to recognize how much I’m perishing. I don’t realize I’m a fool. So, I can’t grasp wherein God’s power lies.

Here in Canada, we open public gatherings with what we call a territorial acknowledgment. We recognize together that the land on which we settlers live is stolen — whether through genocide, broken treaties, or the ongoing encroachment of settler colonialism.

And this recognition takes me back to Epiphany on my front porch. We mark our lintel with a blessing that has traveled from the days of slavery in Egypt through the Magi’s gifts and the innocents’ slaughter, all the way to the east end of Toronto where I live on land illegally obtained via Treaty 13 between the British Crown and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

With one breath I acknowledge this theft. With the next, I bless what the theft allows me to have — with no idea how to reconcile the two. My only route to the kingdom is through the foolishness of Christ’s cross. The good news of Jesus should terrify those of us who seem blessed. Epiphany makes me face this fact each time I walk through my front door.