Grace Appeared and Grace Emerging: 2021-2022 Christmas and Epiphany Sermon Seeds Series

“The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people.” — Titus 2:11

The story of both the season of Christmas and the season of Epiphany is the Word made flesh and dwelling among us. (John 1:14) Spirit takes on flesh and becomes visible. God’s grace was not initiated at the birth of Jesus; it was embodied in flesh.

Worship and proclamation of the Word during Christian seasons call us to remember but also to embrace and adopt the biblical narrative as our own. As we journey through these weeks, let us embody what Christ embodied. Let us reveal to the world what has been illuminated for us.

It is well to rid ourselves of misleading vocabulary, particularly that which speaks of Jesus as “God’s intervention into history.” Such language suggests that God was inactive, perhaps even uninterested, in the history of the world until a certain point at which drastic action became advisable or necessary. But what kind of God is it who creates a world and then walks off, becoming a passive observer until some crisis occurs that seems overwhelming? No, the Creator is ever active in the creation; but at points that activity is less obvious to humanity than at other times. The contrast is not between a God who is here and a God who is absent, but between the work of God that is sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden.
Laurence Hull Stookey (Christ’s Time for the Church)

Christmas Scripture and Themes: Grace Appeared

“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”
― Howard Thurman

Epiphany Scripture and Themes – Grace Emerging

The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Sermon Seeds Writer and Editor (lindsayc@ucc.org), is a local church pastor and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities.