Fourth Sunday After Epiphany

This Sunday is the fourth Sunday after Epiphany. It's the last Sunday in "Epiphanytide," which culminates on February 2 (the Presentation of Our Lord). Here are resources to prepare you for the coming week.

Lectionary

This week's lectionary readings remind us that Christ's ministry and the church's mission are not about strength and power, but about justice and mercy, meekness and humility, about turning the world upside down. The way of Christ is often counterintuitive.

• Micah 6:1-8: "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
• Psalm 15: "O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill? He who walks blamelessly and does what is right."
• 1 Cor. 1:18-31: "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
• Matt. 5:1-12: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

Prayers

God our deliverer,
you walk with the meek and the poor,
the compassionate and those who mourn,
and you call us to walk humbly with you.
When we are foolish, be our wisdom;
when we are weak, be our strength;
that, as we learn to do justice
and to love mercy,
your rule may come as blessing. Amen.

- Revised Common Lectionary

Reflection

There is a besetting paranoia that plagues the superpower mentality and it is most often manifest in an anxious obsession with security. Anxiety over security is the price the aggressive pay for clawing their way to the top—they are fated to live in constant dread that someone will take away their position of privilege. They worry about who might be hot on their heels. But Jesus, endorsing the psalmist, says there is another way, a way that is blessed and peaceful—the way of radical trust. The meek are not the driven, self-assertive, hyper-aggressive, grab-my-piece-of-the-pie people—they are not the winners and go-getters, the movers and shakers, the large and in charge. The meek are the ones who believe in God and are willing to trust God for their portion and their security. The way of violence and aggression is the way of Caesar. The way of meekness and trust is the way of Christ. And they are in contradiction to one another.

- Brian Zahnd, "Blessed Are the Meek"

Music

"Open Up" by The Brilliance is based in part on the Prayer of St. Francis. The chorus is:

Make me an instrument of Your peace
Where there is hatred let me sow love
Where there is darkness let me shine light and
May Your love cause us to open up
Cause us to open up our hearts
May Your light cause us to shine so bright
That we bring hope into the dark

Art

The sculpture below is a detail of the Sermon on the Mount, part of Joseph Chaumet’s Via Vita sculpture, consisting of 138 gold and ivory figures representing scenes from the life of Christ. France declared the work a National Treasure in 2000. (Bible Odyssey)

Joseph Chaumet, detail of Via Vita, 1894-1904.

 - Grace & peace

Dr. King and unity through justice

The church season often called "Epiphanytide" runs from January 6 to the Feast of the Presentation on February 2. In this time, Christians focus on the revelation of Christ to the world and His universal mission: to Israel and to all nations. Christ came for all people — rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female — because, as the Apostle Paul tells us, we “are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

This week, too, many Christian churches will observe the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity beginning on January 18, an ecumenical celebration that recalls Jesus’s prayer for unity in John 17: "that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me." 

Whether by chance or providence, Americans celebrate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the third Monday in January, a date which invariably falls during Epiphanytide. It is a perfect occasion for reflecting on what unity within the church means.

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Dr. King's 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is one of his most famous works. It was a response to an open letter by eight Alabama clergymen entitled "A Call for Unity," which branded Dr. King an "outsider," urged "a realistic approach to racial problems," and, in response to peaceful civil rights demonstrations across the South, called for "law and order and common sense."

Dr. King rejected this false sort of unity, condemning those who were "more devoted to 'order' than to justice" and those "who prefer[red] a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice." For Dr. King, true unity was possible only through reconciliation, and reconciliation was possible only through justice. He lamented Christian leaders who did nothing but "mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities" from the sidelines of the civil rights movement. And he "wept over the laxity of the church":

But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

Dr. King followed up with one of the most convicting passages in the letter:

There was a time when the church was very powerful – in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent – and often even vocal – sanction of things as they are.

Dr. King pleaded for a true Christian unity – unity defined by a commitment to justice – praising those Christians who were "active partners in the struggle for freedom." "I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour," he wrote. He concluded his letter in that same spirit, expressing his hope to meet each of the clergymen who wrote him "not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother."

"Let us all hope," Dr. King wrote in the letter's final paragraph, "that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty."

View an original early draft of the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and listen to audio of Dr. King reading the letter here.