2026 Epiphany Series: Descending From Heaven
Year A 2025-2026 Seeds and Ways Focus and Roadmap: Stay Awake
Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
(Matthew 24:42 NRSVue)
The liturgical calendar calls us to remember expectation. While our memories of the days preceding Christmas may include anticipating gifts and festival gathering around meals and decorated trees, that is not the memory Advent amplifies. While Epiphany greets us at the dawn of a new year, memories of midnight toast and kisses does not frame that season. Lent may evoke shudders as we consider how difficult it may have been to forgo that favorite practice, menu item, or other thing in order to share in the sacrificial activity of Christ. Yet, if that struggle fails to generate empathy for the suffering of our neighbor on our block and across the world, the sacrifice was empty. A sunrise service on Easter Sunday morning may transport our imagination to the empty tomb, but that shocking moment led to uncertainty, discovery, and an empowered movement that launched on the Day of Pentecost and continues today.
The future of the church faces threats. While some have the reasonable fear of closing church doors, the more urgent and salient problem is the church that has lost its way, its voice, its witness, and its commitment to embodying good news in the world as Christ’s agents in the world.
The call to remember expectation is a call to hope, to agency, and to activation in a world in need of conduits and co-creators of good news. In the anchoring text for the liturgical year, Jesus cautioned and encouraged their followers to “keep awake.” The command encompasses attentiveness, alertness, and readiness. The context of the passage emphasizes the anticipated return of Christ, the Chosen One. Could the Body of Christ reclaim its mantle and mandate to embody God’s love and liberating power in the world? Could that be the return we expect…to the movement to follow the way of Jesus in spirit and in truth…not to give us an escape to heaven but to realize the kindom on earth through our collective, Spirit-led salvific acts in the name of Jesus? Are we prepared and willing to be that church?
That is the question we will ponder in Year A even as we heed the call to “Stay Awake.”
2026 Epiphany Series: Descending From Heaven
The season after the feast of Epiphany is considered Ordinary Time in the Liturgical calendar. Sandwiched between the Seasons of Christmas and Lent, these weeks may be overshadowed or neglected for their liturgical power and significance. During this time, we begin by remembering the Baptism of Christ and end on the high of the Mount of Transfiguration. The movement from the depths of the earth to the ascendancy of the heavens and back again reflects the creative and redemptive work of the Holy One dynamically demonstrated. During 2026, we center will the words found in John 1:32:
And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.
As we “Stay Awake” through the lens of Epiphany, we consider our faithful response to the gifts, encouragement, and possibilities that reach us…descending from heaven.
Scripture and Themes
Epiphany A – January 6: Isaiah 60:1-6 | “Lift Up”
Baptism of Christ/ Epiphany 1A- January 11:Isaiah 42:1-9 | “Stretched Them Out”
Epiphany 2A – January 18: Isaiah 49:1-7 | “Salvation May Reach”
Epiphany 3A – January 25: Isaiah 9:1-4 | “Make Glorious the Way”
Epiphany 4A – February 1: Micah 6:1-8 | “What is Good”
Epiphany 5A – February 8: Isaiah 58:1-9a (9b-12) | “Remove the Yoke”
Transfiguration Sunday/Epiphany 6A – February 15: Exodus 24:12-18 | “Wait”
Ash Wednesday A – February 18: Isaiah 58:1-12 | “Break Forth”
“Earth’s crammed with heaven…
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Minister for Worship and Theology, United Church of Christ, (lindsayc@ucc.org), also serves as a local church pastor and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities.