What God Is Doing in the Shadows

I’M NOT SURE where I thought we would be by now, but I didn’t think we’d be here. A global pandemic has ravaged and killed too many of our loved ones to name, though we could have contained it through collective measures. Climate change continues unabated despite decades of warning and appeal, and we may have missed our window to prevent its worst impacts. We’re experiencing perils that are unnecessary and completely caused by our selective will.

Christmastide and the Epiphany season are opportunities for us to recall and perhaps draw hope from the story of God’s inbreaking into a desperate human condition. But we must also remember that, despite God’s extraordinary proximity to humanity in those days, trouble persisted. Jews were still under a repressive occupying power. They were worshipping in a temple built by a leader invested in his own oppression, put in power by their oppressor. Very little seemed to change. If anything, it appeared to get worse.

As with the people in those times, so it is with us today. We who read the text get a peek behind the veil of worldly power to see what God was doing in the shadows. We see what was obscured from those who cried to their Creator or who’d perhaps run out of tears to shed. We see what they could not see at the time. The preacher and teacher will need to pull back anew this curtain for the people—and for self.

January 2

Light Sensitivity

Sirach 24:1-12; Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 1:1-18

“THE LIGHT SHINES in the darkness,” says the writer of John’s gospel, “and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5). Light and darkness are morally neutral, and humans need both. Together, they regulate the rhythms of our sleep. We who are blind and can’t discern between day and night may find staying awake during waking hours difficult. We who are sighted may find too much light interferes with our sleep. Overexposure to ultraviolet light can burn us, while too much darkness can trigger depression. Scripture’s light/dark dichotomy isn’t about the moral preference of one over the other; it’s an acknowledgement that some things are imperceptible unless they are physically (or spiritually) illuminated.

Think of when you last went to a cinema to see a movie and the feeling of leaving the dark theater and walking into daylight. You recoiled because your eyes had adjusted to being in a dark space. John’s gospel proclaims that Jesus came into a world that did not receive him (verse 11). Perhaps they were so accustomed to how they’d been that new illumination felt intrusive.

Whenever light seemed to break forth on our nation’s racial iniquity—when Jim Crow ended, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, when the first Black president was elected—we also saw severe resistance to that inbreaking. Wisdom springs from “the mouth of the Most High” (Sirach 24:3) calling every nation in every age to awake and get to work. Will we recoil or readjust?

January 9

New World Order

Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

EPIPHANY AND THE baptism of Jesus signify the revelation of who Jesus is and what God has been up to among us. At his baptism, we are made aware that God is among us. But what does that really mean?

For a people who’d been battered by an imperial superpower and with no claim to their own land, the coming of the Messiah meant they’d be liberated from their oppressors. It meant that the prophet Isaiah’s words would be realized, and God would “bring [their] offspring from the east, and from the west” (Isaiah 43:5). Their hard-earned wages wouldn’t be stripped to line Caesar’s pockets, and the Lord would again give “nations in exchange for your life” (verse 4).

The military victory that was to have accompanied the Messiah’s arrival was nowhere to be seen, however. What came instead was a winnowing fork. John’s proclamation prepared the way for the Messiah with a call to repentance and right action because this reign would be different. It would reject pomp and circumstance, fancy vestments, and other markers of influence. It would challenge notions that strict adherence to the law necessarily marked one as wheat among chaff. Its seat would not be in a palace or complex, but in the hearts of every person through the Holy Spirit.

The reign of God brings with it a wholesale revolution of values reshaping the hearts and realities of oppressor and oppressed, and all will be called to bear fruit.

January 16

Walking in Light

Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

IN 1960, SELMA, Ala., and the surrounding Dallas County had a voting-age population of nearly 30,000 people, and more than half of that population was Black. Due to violent voter suppression, however, only a few hundred Black people were registered. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 still didn’t guarantee that Black people wouldn’t be impeded at the polls, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was invited into Selma to strengthen the voter registration movement. At the helm of the SCLC at the time was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Initially, King didn’t envision becoming an activist. He wanted to be a professor, but in 1954 he began a pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. He would soon become the reluctant leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and later the face of a freedom movement.

The story of the wedding at Cana has Jesus somewhat humorously put on the spot by his own mother. Consider the juxtaposition of that story with the 1 Corinthians 12 discourse on spiritual gifts. What gifts lie beneath the surface of the community, waiting to be exhumed? As it was with King and his parishioners, who can see the greatness in us before we can? The Isaiah text is post-exilic, but pre-second temple. It casts a vision of a glorious future in the face of loss and ruin and dares the hearer to take hold of that vision. Our texts shine light on a world that could be, if only we’d walk toward it.

January 23

Shine on Us

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31; Luke 4:14-21

CULTS OF PERSONALITY aren’t reserved for the entertainment industry; they exist in church and movement spaces as well. Sometimes we’re attracted to these spaces because of a leader’s celebrity. One danger of that is we may forget the role of each and every person in the work of liberation. I come from a tradition that acknowledges the ability—and responsibility—of the whole community to be ministers. We believe in a priesthood of all believers, but that doesn’t stop us from inadvertently creating formal and informal hierarchies. Our best attempts at parity still leave some out or imply that only the person in the pulpit is “special.” We similarly create idols of our rituals and writ.

Psalm 19 extols the beauty of the Lord’s ordinances, and the Nehemiah text describes the seriousness with which those who’d returned to Jerusalem after exile entered their new epoch. The priest Ezra—literally elevated above the people—reads the text as they all stand to their feet. Something special is happening, and the Luke and First Corinthians texts show it happening in the body. Jesus reads (and sits) in the fulfillment of the law that is his corporeal self. Paul reminds the church at Corinth that they are, together, parts of a unit, none more important than the other.

Whatever the law and logos of God wish to show us cannot be fully understood outside of community and healthy interdependency. Our individual lights shine far brighter in tandem.

January 30

Power Struggle

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

CONSTRUCTS OF POWER in our society are exclusive by design. The powerful are those with currency, whether monetary or social. We create social currencies like race and gender to determine who commands respect and who can be commodified. We are attracted to power and seek or create it for ourselves.

Our texts contain some power struggles worth examining. There’s Jeremiah’s struggle with his call and the struggle between Jesus and the people in the synagogue. Jesus’ hearers could not deny he was gifted, but they also couldn’t get past the fact that he was the son of a local carpenter. Human ideas of power deal in the superficial. We have preconceived ideas of what power is and who should have it, which does us a disservice. If we learn anything from the texts’ stories, it’s that God alone qualifies the called.

Jeremiah was just a boy. He was also appointed over nations and kingdoms. Jesus was just the son of a local carpenter. He was also the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of restoration for Israel.

It is ultimately God who empowers us. Yet, as Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 13, power is useless if it is devoid of love. Jesus healed and taught not out of ability, but love. The psalmist trusts God’s power amid peril (Psalm 71:5) because of God’s abiding love. Power without love is tyranny.