“One of the big differences between us and our ancestors is that they lived in an enchanted world, and we do not. That is to say, they believed in gods and fairies; that the river had its own divinity; that relics and the bones of martyrs were charged with divine energy. The divine and human realms were permeable, always flowing and interrupting the other. Our world isn’t like that. Our world is disenchanted, un-magicked.”

“When we finally turned out the lights and went to bed, I discovered that there were glow-in-the-dark stars stuck all over their ceiling. I’d never noticed them all afternoon, but they’d been slowly getting charged up by the light around them, and now they were shining. Of course, I guess they’d been glowing all along. You just couldn’t notice it because of the bright lights, so it was only in the darkness that I’d realized they were there. The message, this first Sunday after Christmas, is simple: we are, all of us, glow-in-the-dark stars.”

“My generation invented the word, or acronym, ‘FOMO’ – fear of missing out, of being left out, say, of that group text planning a party. There is also, so I’ve learned, ‘FOJI,’ fear of joining in: “I would totally join in karaoking but I’m busy tonight”…Christmas allows us to dream dreams and risk and dare. Because, this evening, the Christ-child enters the defenses of our world, defenseless, and thereby disarms us. He disarms us of our fear of judgment. And his presence frees us up for what theologian James Alison called the ‘joy of being wrong.’ The Joy of Being Wrong: JOBW.”

“Some of you know that in my previous life before I was ordained I coached girls basketball. I would often stay up late and watch my favorite college and NBA teams play, and I’d record their plays in a notebook, and I’d use it with my team. The problem was that all the players I was watching on TV were very tall, very good, and could dunk. My JV Lady Eagles were not so gifted. And many a time I’d draw something up, telling which player would be Lebron, or who would be Kobe, and when it came time to execute, I’d be mystified, and I’d have the thought – that is not what I drew up. John is in a slightly more serious situation, but I imagine a similar thought coming to him now – Jesus, did you not see the play?”

“The Bible is not just one self-contained episode after another. It’s a huge narrative arc, told in different genres and languages across a millennium, a library of a thousand little stories that together tell one big story. And in Jesus, Paul claims in today’s reading from the letter to the Romans, God is writing us into the story.”