First Sunday After Christmas, Year C

He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in the house of my Abba?”
~Luke 2:49
 
The Majesty of the Heavens said that God would dwell in thick darkness.
~1 Kings 8:12
 
Where does God live?
Jesus and his relatives go to the temple (Jesus is already 12?) for the Passover festival and in this familiar story, when he is not with the group on the way home, the frantic parents go searching for him. “Did you not know that I must be in the house of my Abba?” is his mystified reply to them. But Solomon understood, along with the ancients, that Araphel, thick darkness is God’s familiar home. (cf. Deuteronomy 4:11, Psalm 18:9, Job 38:9).
 
Where does God choose to live?
 
The writer and activist Kelley Nikondeha reminds us that Jesus’ birth occurred in occupied territory—that God engaged with “human trauma of a specific place and specific people. God experienced the excruciating reality of empires and economies from the position of the weak and powerless ones. God absorbed loss and pain in that body.” From a distinctly disadvantaged stance, “Jesus lives out God’s peace agenda as a counter-testimony to Caesar’s peace.”[i]
 
This Christmas story of God’s incarnation, God’s advent appearing in flesh and blood in our midst is a story of concreteness and particularity. God hears and is here in the very midst of our human struggles and hopes. God’s advent is of a different kind of peace than Caesar’s. It is a peace resistant to empire and power, a peace that comes to be in the practice of hospitality and solidarity. It is an appearing in the specifics of our own world where we need it most.
 
​Enter into worship.
 
Readings: 1 Kings 8:12-13, 27-30, 41-43 † Psalm 68:15-17, 19-20, 24-27, 31-35 † Revelation 22:10, 22-27 † Luke 2:41-51
 
 
About the Art: The art for this Christmas season is shaped around the theme of “Many Pieces, One Story.” Each week the art will feature a quilt that holds meaning within the community. The quilt pictured today comes from the Resor family, received from his grandmother and dating to the Spanish American War. Note the very fine hand quilting detail.


[i] Kelley Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2022), 182–183. 

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