000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

Third Sunday after the Epiphany/Year C 221
LORD set his heart on you and chose you. . . . It was because the LORD loved
you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors” (Deut. 7:7–8). God’s
love for Israel is a decision of unfathomable grace. When the church understands
its faith appropriately, it confesses that it stands only on the unconditional
grace of God made known to it in Jesus Christ. It perverts and
denies God’s grace when it claims, as too often it has, to displace Israel in
God’s love because it did the right thing—believed in Jesus as the Christ—
when Israel largely did not. To say that is to take the gift of God’s unconditional
love and turn it into a condition apart from which God is not free to
love. That is the heart of what Luther called “works-righteousness.” It contradicts
the good news of God’s free and gracious love.
We celebrate the manifestation of that same loving grace in the season
of Epiphany. That is the pertinence of this passage to this spot in the liturgical
year.
Second Sunday after the Epiphany/Year C
Isaiah 62:1–5
For comments on this passage, please see the First Sunday after Christmas
Day/Year B.
Third Sunday after the Epiphany/Year C
Nehemiah 8:1–3, 5–6, 8–10
The book of Nehemiah, with its companion book Ezra, was written after
the exile when some leaders of Israel had returned there to find cities in
disrepair, the Temple in ruins, the wall unfinished (meaning that security
was compromised), and the residents who had remained behind unhappy
with having to accommodate the returning exiles into the lives they had
developed while these exiles were in Babylon. Persia, which liberated the
exiles, made Israel a colony. Jewish men who married non-Jewish women
had children who spoke the languages of their mothers (rather than Aramaic
or Hebrew) and thereby made it easier for foreign influence to upset
the local economy and social arrangements. Therefore, Nehemiah urges
Jewish men to divorce their Gentile spouses. 65
Nehemiah 8:9 describes Ezra as priest and scribe (cf. Ezra 7:6) and
Nehemiah as governor. However, both were approved by Persia and both