11/27/2023
Begin Again: Closure and Anticipation: Lectionary Preview December 2023, Luke 1-2, Year B
by Rev. Dr. Neal Presa

A war still rages in Ukraine. Survivors in flooded Libya and earthquake-shaken Morocco are literally picking up pieces of whatever remnants of home can still be found, mourning loved ones, and figuring out what the future might be. Weapons of bullets and of words blanket our body politic, threats to democracy loom as we in the United States head into what promises to be a tumultuous 2024 election. Racism persists, gender injustice and violence continues, socioeconomic disparities widen, relationships fracture, death and its shadow are ubiquitous. Such is the real plight of our existence, of 2023, of 2024, no matter what year or season it is.
God, help us.
These brief snippets belie our collective sense of wearied souls, worn-out hearts, a desire for deliverance, groans for justice, plaintive cries for help, bewilderment, anxiety, wrenching pain, laughter (not of joy) that is actually belting out palpable weeping because all is not well. This is not gloom and doom, but reality. I have read on social media among ministry colleagues, family, friends all over the world, and complete strangers who are all expressing a deep desire to turn the page. Like hurricane-force winds, this year, like any year, has been another downpour of unrelenting upheaval to our collective experience, a reckoning with the truth if we paid any attention. Let’s enter this Advent season, not with the utopia that bobbing reindeer on the front lawn nor the glittering lights seem to announce; rather let’s regard this Advent season as the Gospel narratives describe Jerusalem in the first century C.E., as did the psalmists, with soberness, circumspectly, with humble anticipation but an eagerness of God’s promises because of hearts and souls desirous for deliverance. While nicely, neatly wrapped gifts will still find their places under Christmas trees, this year 2023 calls for an Advent and Christmas celebrations that ought not to be same old-same old. Many of the realities underlying the political, social, racial, cultural, historical, natural, and climatological unrest that we have experienced have been here for a very long time; these are not new.
These previews for the December 2023 lectionary texts see a dual combination of desire of God’s people separated by centuries but longing for closure to one set of realities in hopes of anticipating what awaits in the future while still grappling with the present. As people of faith who serve communities of faith and who also serve people with no faith or whose faith has been deeply challenged in these times, we all sense a need, a desire to begin again. In Eddie Glaude Jr.’s bestseller, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown, 2020), Glaude shared how the title of his book borrowed from a passage of the last novel of the late African American author James Baldwin who averred how to survive and find the strength to fight for justice even when things appear to be desperate and lost:
When the dream was slaughtered and all that love and labor seemed to have come to nothing, we scattered. . . . We knew where we had been, what we had tried to do, who had cracked, gone mad, died, or been murdered around us. Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.[1]
Let us receive and embrace the promise of Advent and Christmas which our faith confesses and which we pray and sing. As we close out this year and look to the next, empowered by the Spirit of Christ, to begin again. Amen.
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December 10 Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 Mark:1-8 |
December 17 Psalm 126 John 1:6-8, 19-28 |
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December 24 Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26 Luke 1:26-38 |
December 24 & 25 Psalm 98 John 1:1-14 |
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December 31 Psalm 148 Luke 2:22-40 |
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[1] James Baldwin, Just Above My Head in Eddie Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own (New York: Crown, 2020), p. xxix.