Thoughts on this coming Sunday's lectionary readings - Christmas 2

The readings appointed for this Sunday after Christmas do not rush us back to sentiment or sweetness. They linger instead in a space the Church knows well: the space between promise and fulfillment, between homecoming and continued wandering, between joy that has been announced and grief that has not yet been fully healed.

Jeremiah speaks to a people who know exile from the inside. Jerusalem has fallen. The temple is gone. Land, memory, and identity have all been fractured. And yet—precisely there—Jeremiah dares to speak consolation. Not denial. Not nostalgia. Consolation. He summons the people to sing before there is any visible reason to do so. He speaks of gathering before the scattered have actually returned. He imagines abundance while the trauma is still close to the surface.

What matters is not simply that God promises restoration, but how that restoration is imagined. God does not gather only the strong, the fit, or the spiritually impressive. The prophet is explicit: the blind, the lame, those who are pregnant or in labor—all those for whom return would be difficult or risky—are not left behind. They are at the center of the promise. The path home is described as gentle, marked by water and made straight, not because the journey is easy, but because God’s compassion, rather than human strength, defines the character of salvation.

Jeremiah’s vision refuses to spiritualize hope. Grain and wine and oil appear alongside singing and dancing. Priests are satisfied. Life becomes like a watered garden. Grief is not erased, but it is transformed—not privately, not silently, but communally. The exile is not undone by willpower or religious effort. It is undone because God refuses to let loss have the last word.

The psalm appointed today gives voice to a related longing, though from a different angle. Psalm 84 is a pilgrim’s song—spoken by someone who knows what it is to be away from the place where God’s presence feels most tangible. The psalm does not pretend that desire for God is a purely spiritual thing. “My heart and my flesh rejoice,” the psalmist says. Longing here is bodily. Faith engages muscle memory, geography, and exhaustion.

What makes this psalm so striking is its tenderness. Even the sparrow finds a home near God’s altar. Even the swallow makes a nest. The image quietly dismantles hierarchies. Holiness is not reserved for the powerful or the articulate or the ritually accomplished. Nearness is what matters. Belonging is what matters. And those whose hearts are set on the pilgrimage are called blessed not because the journey is pleasant, but because the journey changes them. Valleys of dryness become places of springs—not because hardship disappears, but because trust reshapes experience itself.

The psalm imagines life with God as movement rather than arrival. Strength to strength. Height to height. The goal is encounter, not control. Zion is not a possession; it is a place of meeting.

When we turn to Ephesians, the scale suddenly widens. What Jeremiah imagines historically, and what the psalm imagines devotionally, Ephesians imagines cosmically. The letter opens with praise so expansive it almost overwhelms the sentence structure. Before the foundation of the world, we are told, God has already acted in love. Election here is not about exclusion or anxiety. It is about belonging. God’s choosing is not a sorting mechanism; it is an act of grace that gathers a people into holiness and love.

The metaphor of adoption makes the point concrete. Adoption confers full status and inheritance. It creates family where there was none. And it does so not out of obligation, but delight. Again and again the phrase “in Christ” appears, insisting that salvation is not an abstraction. To be “in Christ” is to be located within a story—his life, his death, his resurrection—and to discover that our own fragile lives are being drawn into something larger than we could secure on our own.

The prayer that follows is not a request for more information, but for perception. Enlightened hearts. Wisdom that allows the community to see hope already at work. Power that is not domination, but the quiet, sustaining force that holds faith together when circumstances remain unresolved.

All of this theology—restoration, pilgrimage, belonging—comes into sharper focus when we return to Matthew’s Gospel. There is nothing triumphant about this part of the Christmas story. The magi have left. The danger remains. And the child at the center of the story is not safe.

Matthew places the holy family squarely among the displaced. They flee by night. They cross borders because state violence makes staying impossible. Jesus’ earliest biography is shaped by fear, urgency, and exile. The incarnation does not begin in stability. It begins in vulnerability.

Joseph, notably, is not given a grand vision. He receives only enough instruction to act faithfully in the moment. Go. Stay. Return. Divert. Obedience here is not heroic. It is responsive. Careful. Attentive.

Even the return from Egypt is incomplete. Herod is dead, but danger persists. The family settles in Galilee, far from the centers of power, in a place easily dismissed. Matthew calls this fulfillment—not because a prediction has come true in a simplistic sense, but because Jesus is now embodying Israel’s story. What God once did for the people, God is now doing again, in and through this child.

Read alongside Jeremiah, this complicates our theology of return. God gathers, but not always directly. Consolation comes, but not all at once. Read with the psalm, the dwelling place of God is no longer a fixed sanctuary, but a life carried from place to place. God’s presence travels with those who cannot yet come home.

Christmas, then, is not the denial of displacement. It is God’s decision to enter it.

The promise of restoration is real. The joy is real. But so is the waiting. So is the indirect path. So is the ordinary courage required to keep listening, keep moving, keep trusting when the route home is unclear.

These texts will not allow us to imagine salvation as safety, or faith as insulation from fear. They insist instead that God works precisely where life is most precarious—among the wounded, the displaced, the watchful, and the quietly faithful.

And that, perhaps, is the deep wisdom of Christmas 2. The child is born. The promise is spoken. The journey continues. God is with us—not only in arrival, but in exile; not only in joy, but in the long work of consolation still unfolding.