The Rev. Josephine Robertson
All Saints, Bellevue
Second Sunday after Christmas
How many times in the last week did you find yourself saying “wait, what day is it?” I may have lost track of the number of times I had to check my phone to be sure.
You aren’t alone, and if today’s lessons make you feel like you’d skipped ahead a few days you also aren’t alone. This Second Sunday in Christmas is always weird. It doesn’t really have its own identity, instead stealing the story from Epiphany or skipping straight over epiphany for either the flight to Egypt or Jesus as a kid in the Temple.
And there are years that really bugs me. I love liturgical time specifically because it makes us wait. Advent is Advent right up until it isn’t anymore. Easter cannot be rushed, and once here it hangs around, and hangs around. The reliability of that calendar becomes a sort of anchor for our lives. It keeps us grounded if we let it and that’s good in a world that’s often too fast, too chaotic, or during a pandemic that’s too much all the same day in and day out.
But this Sunday is the weird exception to that carefully regimented, predicable rule. There are not good Gospel readings for this Sunday. It is always an awkward, out of time, insert into the last 1/4 of the Christmas season. And I wonder if that isn’t its gift.
Because time isn’t always predictable, measured, logical.
Sometimes, and 2 years of pandemic might be the best example ever, time just stops making sense. That weird period between Christmas Day and New Years when no one can quite remember what day it is, those long blurry days of summer vacation that are over too soon. And the Second Sunday of Christmas, hanging on awkwardly.
The rest of the world has moved on from Christmas, but we’re still here. Singing carols, eating cookies, maybe even baking new cookies. Our Christmas trees still glow against the long night for a few days yet. This long awkward Christmas season that has seemingly fallen out of step with the rest of the world is a reminder, yet again, that God’s time and our time are different.
There isn’t a neat story for this week, the way God moves, and the way we move doesn’t always line up. And I wonder if perhaps God isn’t extending to us an invitation. To both imagination, and to stepping out of time, just for a bit.
After all, we’re still hanging about in a season the rest of the world doesn’t even acknowledge exists. It’s still Christmas loves. And there isn’t a nice neat story for this week. After all, there’s really only one Christmas story in our scripture, Luke’s. Mark isn’t interested in Jesus’ birth or childhood at all and Matthew tells us the Epiphany story. Jesus isn’t born in our story today, he’s 2 to 3 years old, the whole story takes place after his birth.
And John, well bless him John does his own thing.
And so there is quite a bit of room for imagination. The non-canonical Gospels have a few birth or childhood narratives, weird ones. If you’ve read the modern novel Lamb you’ve got a taste for some of them.
But perhaps this time if for us. There isn’t a neat story for this week of Jesus’ life but there are stories of our lives. Of the way that God is still being born into the world year after year. Of the way we’ve each and together met Jesus in this community and others from other seasons of our lives.
Maybe, just maybe this little odd Sunday is the right time for us to ponder our own little gospel stories, our own encounters with God made flesh. To fill in the story a bit. To create with God, by becoming sacred storytellers. Here in this time out of time.
The rest of the world has moved on to resolutions and productivity and goals. And we’re invited to sit down with Jesus who is smiling for the first time, or learning to laugh, or maybe starting to crawl (we are close to Epiphany after all). To spend some time in the expansiveness of what isn’t said in the Gospels and maybe to find ourselves in that story that is just waiting to be told.
And bring to God our frustrations, our weariness, our sorrow, our just straight up it has been 2 years of this weirdness. And let God hold it with us, because God has been there, and done that. In a body, in the body of Jesus. And that, even if this week is weird, is good news.