Reflection for the Second Sunday after Epiphany

“The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

What does it mean to follow Jesus? What does it mean for us, as children of God, to follow this strange man who comes out of nowhere and asks for our lives?

I often wonder what Philip, and the other disciples, expected when they first followed Christ’s call. I often wonder what it would have been like for them to get up and follow this one who knew them.

In some ways, we have it easy: we know where Christ’s path leads. We know that the end of Christ’s journey is resurrection and ascension, and we know that in order to reach Easter’s glorious victory, we must first travel to the foot of the cross: to death.

It may not feel easy, and it certainly isn’t comfortable, to worship a God who became so human that he died at the hand of human oppressors, having been tortured for his message, the same message we seek to share with the world today.

And yet, this is the God who calls to us, “Follow me.” This is the God we worship, this is the God we serve, and this is the God whose world we live in, and whose world we respond to with love.

What does it mean to you to “follow” Christ?

What does it mean in your life to have this incarnate, crucified, risen one as your leader?

The answers to these questions are as diverse as the creation that yearns to respond, but our God is the God of diversity, the God of finding answers in many different voices.

This is the God we love, who calls us out of our safe places into a life of following that is not always comfortable.

And this is the God who loves us, no matter how we seek to follow.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Reflection for the Second Sunday of Christmas

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through the Word, and without the Word not one thing came into being. What has come into being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people.”

It may come as a surprise to you, but this is one of the first sections of the Bible that students learn to translate from the Greek. You may imagine they’d start at the beginning of the New Testament, with Matthew, or that one of the shorter letters of Paul would be a good first exercise. But, no, these first verses from the Gospel of John contain some of the simplest Greek for translating. Actually, the entire Gospel of John is written in some of the simplest Greek in the New Testament, and so was what my second semester of Greek focused on translating.

If you look at the language of these verses, they contain simple sentence structure, clear conjunctions and transitions, and fairly basic vocabulary: Word, God, beginning, life, light, etc.

I find it wonderful that these verses, which some may argue as some of the most powerful, are written in the simplest language. Of course, the theological concepts that they relay may not seem simple, but really, it breaks down quite nicely:

            Beginning = Word

            Word with God

            Word = God

            Word = God = Beginning

            Word makes all things.

            Word makes light

            Light = Life

We may try to make it more complicated, and theologians may argue about what is meant by “beginning” or what is meant by “come into being,” but in the end, for all of us who don’t make our living by writing theological books, all that matters is that the Word, whom we know from later verses is made human in the form of Jesus Christ, is with God, and is God. All that matters is that the Word that was spoken in creation is the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus. All that matters is that the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus is the Word that spoke light into being, that spoke us into being.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.