In July 1985, after two years in Dallas, I moved to my second job in the church as curate for the then-new rector of Saint Luke’s Church, Baton Rouge, and later bishop of Louisiana, Charles Jenkins. In the large parish in Dallas, I was one of five priests, in Baton Rouge, one of three. More Sunday preaching came my way. That fall, I bought the first of a series of short books—collections of articles—written for clergy and adult education, by Father Raymond Brown, for many years a professor at Union Theological Seminary here in the city. He died in 1998 and was widely regarded as the leading American Roman Catholic New Testament scholar of his generation. The small paperback book was: An Adult Christ at Christmas: Essays on the Three Biblical Christmas Stories.[1] These essays were based on one of Brown’s major works, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.[2] Brown’s approach in these articles helped make preaching on the gospel come alive for me.

Jesus is still in the wilderness, where the devil had tempted him, when he learns that John the Baptist has been arrested. So he leaves the wilderness and returns to Galilee, where he had grown up in Nazareth. The Greek verb here translated as “arrested” can also be a gentle one, meaning “give, deliver, entrust.”[1] But in a judicial context it means “handed over to the authorities.”[2] It’s the word behind our English translations of what Judas Iscariot did—he betrayed Jesus.[3] It’s the word used when the chief priests and the elders decide to send him to Pilate.[4] If I’ve counted correctly, it’s used 31 times in Matthew and always carries a sense that something is wrong, dangerous. As I often am, I gained this insight from Dr. Mark Davis’ scripture blog, “Left Behind and Loving It.” [5]

Some of you share with me fond memories of George Blackmore Handy, to use his full name. He was born in 1918. He died on May 9, 2012. He was ninety-three years old; in less than a month, he would have been ninety-four.

This glorious season of Epiphany opens us up to new opportunities for God’s love. We look once again at places where the Spirit flowed, focusing on times when God’s approval of earthly events brought light to the world.

The Magi—the Wise Men—do not arrive in Bethlehem until this evening, when we observe the Eve of the Epiphany. But for this morning, our lectionary has borrowed from our Roman Catholic friends what they call “The Feast of the Holy Family”—the story of the flight of Joseph, Mary, and the child to Egypt and their return after the death of Herod.[1] What is left out by our friends, and officially by us, is the heart of Matthew’s story. But we heard the omission: the three verses that tell of the killing of the young boy children in Bethlehem, a terrible story by itself, but made more terrible by the evil afflicted on Jews by Christians and others through the millennia.