Christmas
The Season of Life and Light
By Emily Hunter McGowin
IVP Formatio, 152 pages, $20.99
Epiphany
The Season of Glory
By Fleming Rutledge
IVP Formatio, 176 pages, $20.99
The seasons of the church year have long been a way to marinate one’s life in the story of God’s redeeming love. This pattern of discipleship has increasingly been adopted by non-liturgical churches so that some of our Baptist and evangelical neighbors are discovering the benefits of Advent and Lent. InterVarsity Press has created its five-book Fullness of Time series to open the ancient practices to more people seeking this pattern of life. I found the volumes on Christmas and Epiphany to offer a depth of insight in slim volumes on seemingly well-known anchors in the calendar.
Emily Hunter McGowin neatly separates the sentimentality of Christmas from the reality of the Incarnation. In doing so, she does not toss out the sights and sounds of the cultural traditions that have attached themselves to the Holy Day. Instead, she reveals the connections between wrapped presents under a Christmas tree laden with decorations and the joy of the second person of the Holy Trinity coming to live among us.
McGowin also separates fact from fable in how common practices emerged, showing that bringing an evergreen into the house was not a pagan practice. This is no soft-focus nostalgic view of a familiar feast, as she connects Herod’s slaughter of the innocents to the shooting at Sandy Hook, pointing not to easy answers, but the promises of God. This wise little book lets the light of Christ pierce the darkness to offer a new way of seeing the most commercial of sacred days.
Making a compelling case for full immersion into the seasons of the church calendar, Fleming Rutledge offers nothing less than the glory of God through the more ancient feast of the Incarnation, Epiphany. Through the traditional scripture readings of the feast day and the weeks that follow, we see, in the words of the hymn, “God in Man Made Manifest.”
While there is much here for every follower of Jesus, Rutledge is always a gifted teacher of preachers. Here she lights the path toward sermons that can express the ineffable so that parishioners come to their Savior as more than merely a good teacher. The challenge to move beyond the superficial in our practice of baptism is an urgent call to ground our understanding in the world-changing deliverance from the dominion of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved son (Col. 1:13). There is so much to glean on the wedding at Cana, the Sermon on the Mount, and more that this book lends itself to an annual re-reading.
Having been raised in the Pentecostal tradition, I wish I had the Fullness of Time series when I hungered to learn more through the wisdom of the church year. I point others to these five volumes even as I absorb their sagacious texts for my own edification.
The Rt. Rev. Frank Logue is Bishop of Georgia.