During this time of the church calendar the focus shifts from the joy of the Incarnation to the needed response to Christ's birth in the new year. For the next five weeks the church is asked to consider its response and how it will take the revelation of Christ into its local community--and ultimately the world.
Quite simply we are tasked with evangelism--and it is not a passive call.
As I think about this mandate from God and ask I consider the responsibility for the church, I remember the words Albert Outler wrote. He said:
"Give us a church, whose members believe and understand the gospel of God's healing love of Christ to hurting men and women. Give us a church that speaks and acts in consonance with its faith – not only to reconcile the world, but to turn it upside down! Give us a church of spirit-filled people in whose fellowship life speaks [of eternal] life, love to love, and faith and trust respond to God's grace. And we shall have a church whose witness in the world will not fail, and whose service to the world will transform it."
This past week, I asked the children here at Bethesda if the Christmas season was complete, and amidst jokes about snow marking the end of Christmas, we discovered that Christmas is not complete. It is not complete because we have the evangelistic responsibility placed before us by God to share the miracle with our community.
The decorations may be put away, but the message should not also be put away.
The Christmas season is not complete because you have the opportunity, and the call, to pass on what you learned and experienced from the Messiah. To paraphrase what Oulter was saying in the above quotation: we will transform the world because we witness to the power of God in our midst.
I wonder if that is something that we as the Body of Christ will do during this Epiphany season?
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