The Epiphany of Our Lord
Texts: Matthew 2:1-12;
Isa 60:1-6; Eph 3:1-12
YouTube: https://youtu.be/MZSCYicw7NE
Sermon Take-Home Notes
PARTICIPATING IN JESUS’ FAITHFULNESS: GOD’S MISSION
OF STANDING AGAINST NATIONALISTIC TYRANTS
Several years ago, there was a TV ad featuring pictures of a Latino family presumably from Central America on the move north to safety. Along with a number of photos, the script read:
There was a mother and a father who had a son. They lived in a small village and didn’t have much money. But they were happy. One day, they heard the head of their country was sending soldiers to their town because he thought they were part of an insurrection. The young family decide to flee. They grabbed only what they could carry and ran. They hiked for days wondering if soldiers might still be following them. They were scared. Hungry. And exhausted. But they were far away from the atrocities taking place . . . in Bethlehem. That’s all Mary and Joseph wanted . . . a safe place to call home.
The photos turn to blank screens simply with the words: “Jesus was a refugee. He gets us. All of us.”
Today’s Epiphany Gospel Reading from Matthew 2 serves two purposes. First, it sets up the Gospel theme of Jesus being a light not only for the Jews but also the Gentiles. Magi from the East come to worship the child Jesus. He will be the king that brings all peoples together.1
Second, this reading sets up the response of typical human empire. In part 2 of this story, King Herod responds with horrific brutality, sending soldiers to kill all the male children of Bethlehem. “Rachel weeps for her children.” Human tyrants like Herod find scapegoats to blame for their troubles. They create refugees. The child Jesus will finally be a king who welcomes refugees and calls his followers to work to heal the whole human family. In Matthew’s way of telling the story, it’s clear that Jesus is born and raised as a refugee from nationalistic violence. Jesus’ way of healing the human family begins by suffering the divisive powers of human tyrants. He himself is a refugee.
But by the end of Matthew’s story of Jesus, Jesus does not run away but takes the brutality head on. His way of healing us will climax by suffering on the cross the typical lethal violence of human tyrants. Finally, because of his faithfulness to God’s vision of healing the whole human family, he is raised from those deadly powers of human kings in order to call followers to that same way of faithfulness. God is healing the world through the faithfulness of Jesus which, through the Holy Spirit, is then passed on to others.
You and I, baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection, are to participate in that same faithfulness of Jesus to God’s mission of healing the human family. We are to stand against the divisive, harmful, and even lethal powers of human tyrants, even to the point of suffering these powers, just like Jesus. We never claim those same violent powers of the tyrants to try to stop the tyrants. Instead, we claim the creative power of God’s love, the power which created the universe in the first place, so that we can trust in the same power of resurrection. The power of love which created the universe is strong enough to persist in creating life, even when it suffers the violent powers of human tyrants. This is the faithfulness of Jesus which is available to you and I through God’s baptismal promise of the Holy Spirit.
In my newsletter column this week, I referenced again how much my faith has changed over the past 50 years since my confirmation. One of the biggest changes has come through biblical scholars who have fundamentally changed the way I read and understand St. Paul.2 Simply put, Luther was wrong. He got the Reformation movement off onto the wrong track by calling us to focus on the Justification language in Paul’s letter. That the Gospel is all about being justified to eternal life in heaven if we have faith in Jesus.
But I’ve been convinced by these recent scholars that the Justification language in Paul is actually a small part of his message which was aimed at a false teaching in the early church. Paul’s preferred language of proclaiming the Gospel is what these scholars call participatory. “In Christ.” “In the Holy Spirit.” It is the kind of language I’ve just been using, in talking about participating in the same mission of Jesus here on earth. What counts first and foremost is not my faith in Jesus for getting to heaven someday. That’s still a thing; it’s part of the promise. But what always counts first and foremost for Paul is Jesus’ faith, his faithfulness to God’s mission of healing the human family torn apart by human tyrants.
We can see this language through and through in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. This morning’s portion speaks about the mystery revealed through Jesus’ faithfulness. The mystery is that Jews and Gentiles alike are to benefit from God’s life-giving, life-enriching power of love. Paul uses the word mystery seven times in Ephesians. In chapter one, the mystery is revealed in its widest possible scope: “as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10). The unity of the whole creation! The healing of the whole creation! Including, of course, our bodies from things like viruses and strokes, from many things.
This is part, too, of healing the human family. That there is a priority, in fact, for this. Our sin is an obstacle, so through Jesus’ suffering the violence of human tyrants on the cross, he is accomplishing nothing less than ‘God’s creating one new humanity to transform the divided humanity’ (Eph 2:13-16). Our healing helps lead to healing all things.
In today’s reading from chapter 3, Paul is making it clear what the revealing of that mystery means for ‘boots on the ground.’ It means that we finally understand that human beings are not meant to be divided but rather that we are meant to all live under the same promises for the richness of God’s powers of life. And we are to proclaim this to the current rulers and authorities in the places of power. How does anyone gain access to all this? Notice the language of participation in the last verse. Access is gained boldly and confidently through Jesus’ faithfulness.3 It’s his faithfulness in going to the cross which opens the way for everyone else to receive God’s healing of the world.
But there’s another problem. Because we Christians got off-track with Martin Luther’s overfocus on justification language, overfocus on the fate of individuals for the afterlife, I’m afraid that we’ve missed out on a lot of the power of the Christian message. We’ve missed out on participating more directly in God’s mission of healing the world through the power of Jesus’ faithfulness. So I’d like to end this morning with an example of the Holy Spirit working through other means, through other people. In short, I have in mind people who are following in Jesus’ footsteps without even being aware that they are, because the wind of the Holy Spirit blows where it will (John 3:8). If people who claim Jesus’ name are not joining God’s mission of standing against tyrannical empires — and, in the case of Christian Nationalists, instead joining the side of the tyrannical empire — then the Holy Spirit is going to work through other folks.
Here’s an example. In her recent six-hour podcast, Rachel Maddow tells the shameful story of how America treated Japanese Americans during World War II.4 Tens of thousands of Japanese people had fled the tyranny of the Empire in their homeland. They had found a haven as refugees in America and embraced their new home as citizens. But when their former country attacked their new homeland at Pearl Harbor, their new American neighbors behaved shamefully. Without any evidence of their wrong-doing — in fact, there was good evidence to the contrary — and without any of the due process written into our constitutional contract with those who live here, they found themselves rounded up and forced to live in concentration camps for two years.
Maddow simply tells the story, for nearly six hours, of this nightmarish crime of America against its Japanese-descended citizens. But’s she tells the story for sake of confronting what we are doing right now. Today. She means to confront the nightmarish crime we are committing against our most recent immigrant neighbors, rounding them up in concentration camps and deporting them without due process, even when an increasing number of them have already achieved citizenship. They’re losing their citizen-status and being deprted anyway. The usual behavior of human tyrants.
But — and this is why she tells the story — who have been among those protesting the loudest against these current actions? Some of the Japanese Americans who endured the American concentration camps of World War II, along with their descendants. Maddow says, “In 1942, when Japanese Americans were rounded up, purely on the basis of their race, forced from their homes and put in prison camps, there were no mass protests by other Americans. People just watched it happen.” But then she begins to tell stories of those Japanese Americans who had suffered tyranny and are now protesting it. In particular, there’s the story of Satsuki Ina, who had endured an American interment camp as a child with her family.
Satsuki Ina’s voice joins the podcast, recorded speaking out at a recent protest of which she herself is a leader: “When we were removed, there was no mass protesting what was happening to us. We don’t want to be a part of that again. So, we are showing up where we can. We’re raising our voices. . . . We’re here today to protest the repetition of history. We were in American concentration camps. We were held under indefinite detention. We were without due process of law. We were charged without any evidence of being a threat to national security. We hear these exact words today regarding innocent people seeking asylum in this country.”
Siblings in Christ, you and I are called to be like Japanese Americans who suffered at the hands of typical human tyrants but are now standing against today’s tyranny of mass incarceration and deportation. How did we suffer like those Japanese Americans, you might ask? Answer: When we were baptized into Christ, we were granted participation in his suffering, in his death, and in his resurrection. We died and rose with Christ so that we can continue in his way of faithfulness to God’s healing the world from human tyranny. Maddow concludes her six hours of podcasting by quoting Mitsuye Endo, whose resistance in 1943 helped to end the two-year nightmare of illegal mass incarceration. Endo says in an interview, “I don’t think it would ever happen again. They would think twice.” But Maddow wonders, “Would they? Is she right? That’s up to us now.”
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, January 4, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/MZSCYicw7NE
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. This video is still listed at the “He Gets Us” website: https://hegetsus.com/en/featured-videos. Even on that webpage, access to this video links to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEEq5VTfmic
2. The key figure is Duke Divinity School New Testament scholar Douglas A. Campbell. He began his proposal of putting Justification theology behind us in 2009 by first working to convince other scholars through a 1218-page book that uses extensive analysis of the Greek New Testament texts: The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans, 2009). He works to make the case to a wider audience with co-author Jon DePue in the book Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (Cascade Books, 2024; 296 pages). For a recent retelling of the thesis by parish pastors, see Keith Giles and Matthew J. Distefano, Reading Romans Right: Correcting Common Misreadings, Restoring Paul’s Original Intent (Quoir, 2025).
3. The NRSVue still translates Ephesians 3:12: “in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him.” The last four words in English translate the last four words in Greek: dia tēs pisteōs autou. It is a genitive construction most literally translated, “through the faith(fulness) of him,” or, using a more common word order in English, “through his faithfulness.” It is a legitimate choice to translate the genitive construction objectively, “through faith in him,” where “him (autou)” is the object of our faith (pistis). But this is the less frequent usage. And so it has become more clear over the past 40 years that choosing the objective form of the genitive is influenced by Protestantism’s 500-year emphasis on having faith in Jesus. But what did Paul originally mean? Over the past 40 years Pauline scholars have begun to argue that Paul’s emphasis was on Jesus’s faithfulness, not the believer’s faith in him. So, for example, the NRSVue now translates other instances of this genitive accordingly, such as Rom 3:22, “the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe.” But it lacks consistency in not doing so for Eph 3:12.
4. Rachel Maddow, “Burn Order,” can be accessed at: https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-presents-burn-order. I am drawing from the sixth and final episode, “A Reckoning,” which can be accessed with a complete transcript at: https://www.ms.now/msnbc-podcast/msnbc-podcast/maddow-burn-order-podcast/episode-6-a-reckoning
