Pondering the Holy Name of Jesus
Sermon for Christmas II, the feast of the Holy Name Text: Luke 2:15-21 Christmas is different this year, different from other years. It’s not because we’ve emerged from the COVID pandemic, or that there’s a war in Europe for the first time in at least 75 years, or because we’re in uncertain economic times. It’s because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year as has New Year’s Day (happy new year, by the way). This is the second Sunday after Christmas when we would usually read the Prolog of John, the first 18 verses of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But because this is also the Feast of the Holy Name, we heard the reading from Luke this morning. The reading ends with a single sentence recounting when Jesus was circumcised in a ritual called a bris, and he was named in the eyes of the synagogue and in the eyes of God. We have a similar naming ritual in the Episcopal Church. For those baptized with the 1928 prayer book, the