2026 — Lectionary primer

The Second Sunday after Christmas

Out of Egypt I Called My Son · The Sunday after New Year

One-year lectionary · Genesis 46:1–7 · 1 Peter 4:12–19 · Matthew 2:13–23

The Second Sunday after Christmas stands within the Twelve Days of Christmas, which run from December 25 to January 5, before the Epiphany on January 6. A second Sunday after Christmas Day appears only when the calendar places two Sundays inside that window. Older Lutheran hymnals, including The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941, called it the Sunday after New Year. Our Saviour keeps the historic one-year lectionary, which reads Matthew 2:13–23 on this day: the flight into Egypt, the slaughter of the innocents, and the settlement in Nazareth. The day is a hinge between the joy of the manger and the first shadow of the cross that falls across the infant Christ. Christmas proclaims the Word made flesh; this Sunday proclaims that the flesh the Word assumed was subject to exile, to a tyrant’s rage, and to the tears of grieving mothers, and that God’s saving purpose carried His Son safely through all of it.

Lectionary Primer PDF

Coming this Sunday: The Second Sunday after Christmas.

The shape of the service

The Color. White, as on Christmas Day, carrying the purity, joy, and light of the Incarnation forward.

The Old Testament. Jacob goes down into Egypt on God’s promise, “I myself will go down with you.”

The Epistle. Peter tells the baptized not to be surprised at the fiery trial, since they share Christ’s sufferings.

The Holy Gospel. The infant Christ flees into Egypt, Rachel weeps in Bethlehem, and the Holy Family settles in Nazareth.

The Hymns. Two hymns of Paul Gerhardt, a Victorian carol, and Isaac Watts’s paraphrase of Psalm 98 carry the day from the manger to Christ’s reign.

The readings at a glance

Old Testament

Genesis 46:1–7

The narrator calls him Israel (Yisra’el), the covenant title, for this is the covenant nation on the move in embryo. He stops at Beersheba, the “well of the oath” on the southern border of the Promised Land, and offers sacrifices (zevachim) before he will step outside it. God answers in visions of the night and calls him by his old, humble name, “Jacob, Jacob,” and Jacob answers, “Here I am” (hinneni). God speaks the salvation oracle later spoken to Mary and to the shepherds, “Do not be afraid” (al-tira), and promises, “I myself will go down with you to Egypt.” The Hebrew makes the return emphatic: “I will most surely bring you up.” That promise reaches Jacob’s burial at Machpelah, Israel’s Exodus under Moses, and the resurrection of the dead. All Jacob’s offspring go down, seventy souls, the number of the nations in Genesis 10, a sign of the blessing meant for the world through the coming Seed. At Christmas God went down again: the Son took our flesh, went into Egypt as a refugee child, and descended into death, so that He might bring us up.

Epistle

1 Peter 4:12–19

Peter calls suffering Christians “beloved” (agapetoi) and forbids surprise (me xenizesthe, from xenos, “stranger”), as though something foreign had intruded. The “fiery trial” (pyrosis) is the refiner’s furnace of Proverbs 17:3 and Malachi 3; Luther remarked that fire does not impair gold but purifies it. Christians rejoice as they share (koinoneite) Christ’s sufferings, and when they are insulted for His name, the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon them, words drawn from the Septuagint of Isaiah 11:2, where the Spirit rests on the Messiah. Peter draws a line: suffering as a murderer, a thief, or a “meddler” (allotriepiskopos, a self-appointed overseer of another’s affairs, found nowhere else in the New Testament) brings no glory. To suffer as a Christianos, a name first coined as a sneer in Antioch, is no shame. Judgment begins at the household of God, as in Ezekiel 9:6; for God’s children it is a Father’s refining discipline. The reading ends with a banker’s word: “entrust” (paratithesthosan) your souls to a faithful Creator. It is the verb Jesus spoke from the cross: “Father, into Your hands I deposit My spirit.”

Holy Gospel

Matthew 2:13–23

Matthew tells three movements, each sealed by a prophet. An angel tells Joseph in a dream to take “the child” (to paidion) and His mother and flee, for Herod seeks to destroy (apollymi) Him, the verb that returns at the Passion. Matthew translates Hosea 11:1 from the Hebrew, keeping the singular, “Out of Egypt I called My Son”: Israel, the first son, proved faithless; Jesus is the faithful Son who relives Israel’s history and completes it. Herod kills the boys of Bethlehem, and here Matthew writes “then was fulfilled” instead of “in order that”: God foreknew Herod’s evil but did not cause it. Rachel weeps at Ramah, yet her verse in Jeremiah 31 opens onto the promise of the New Covenant. After Herod dies, the angel’s word, “those who were seeking the child’s life are dead,” echoes God’s word to Moses in Exodus 4:19: Jesus is the greater Redeemer. The family settles in Nazareth, and “He shall be called a Nazarene” gathers the prophets: the netser, Isaiah’s Branch from Jesse, and the despised one from a village held in contempt. Christ enters our tears, flight, and exile, and walks the road ahead of His people.

The hymns and their stories

Opening Hymn

“Come, Your Hearts and Voices Raising” · LSB 375

Paul Gerhardt’s Kommt und lasst uns Christum ehren appeared in 1667 in Johann Georg Ebeling’s edition of his devotional songs. Gerhardt joins the invitation of Psalm 95, “Oh come, let us sing to the Lord,” to the shepherds’ resolve in Luke 2, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see.” The congregation does more than recall the story; it goes with the shepherds to the manger and sees the Incarnation with the eyes of faith. The German hymnologist Christian Bunners summed up Gerhardt’s art: “singing allows something to be seen.” The tune, QUEM PASTORES, comes from a fifteenth-century Bohemian Latin carol, Quem pastores laudavere, “He whom the shepherds praised.” In older Lutheran churches it carried the Quempas custom: four groups of singers, often schoolboys, stood in four corners or balconies of the church and traded stanzas and Latin refrains, surrounding the congregation with the song of the Nativity. The English took decades to settle, from John Kelly’s 1867 version through a 1937 draft in The Lutheran Witness to the composite of The Lutheran Hymnal (1941), which Lutheran Service Book keeps, using six of Gerhardt’s eight stanzas.

Hymn of the Day

“See, Amid the Winter’s Snow” · LSB 373

Edward Caswall, an Anglican priest who became a Roman Catholic in 1850, published this carol the next year in a collection for Catholic schools. Its first tune was, in the judgment of later hymnologists, “a rather dull tune,” and the text might have been forgotten had John Goss, organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, not written HUMILITY for it in 1870 for Bramley and Stainer’s Christmas Carols New and Old. Goss built the tune on contrast: quiet verses for a single voice, then a full four-part refrain, “Hail, redemption’s happy dawn!” The carol became a fixture of Lessons and Carols services such as those at King’s College, Cambridge. Caswall wrote seven stanzas; Lutheran Service Book keeps four. One stanza left out was a Victorian lesson in good behavior, ending “Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as He.” Dropping it keeps the carol on the grace of Christ’s birth instead of moral instruction drawn from His childhood. Lutherans came to it late: Christian Worship (1993), then Hymnal Supplement 98, then Lutheran Service Book in 2006, a century and a half after it left an English Catholic schoolroom.

Hymn

“All My Heart Again Rejoices” · LSB 360

Paul Gerhardt wrote Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen in the years after the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, and Johann Crüger printed it in 1653 in his Praxis Pietatis Melica with a tune he composed for it. Reformation hymns had spoken mostly as “we” and “us”; Gerhardt wrote as “I” and “my heart,” putting words on the believer’s own lips about what the Incarnation means for one soul. Catherine Winkworth, who translated it, called it “a song of joy at dawn.” English hymnals have never agreed on the first line: The Lutheran Hymnal sang “All my heart this night rejoices,” the Lutheran Book of Worship “Once again my heart rejoices,” and Lutheran Service Book “All my heart again rejoices.” Gerhardt’s original ran to fifteen stanzas proclaiming the Incarnation, the defeat of sin and death, and the peace won for believers; Lutheran Service Book uses six. The full text rewards slow reading, line by line, through the Twelve Days of Christmas and beyond.

Closing Hymn

“Joy to the World” · LSB 387

When the young Isaac Watts complained about the stiff, literal psalms sung in his church, his father told him to write something better. He did, and went on to write hundreds of hymns, earning the title father of English hymnody. “Joy to the World” was not written as a Christmas carol. It is Watts’s 1719 paraphrase of Psalm 98:4–9, printed under the heading “The Messiah’s Coming and Kingdom” in a collection meant “to teach my Author to speak like a Christian.” It sings of both of Christ’s advents. Every heart is to “prepare Him room”; fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy; His blessings flow “far as the curse is found”; the last stanza looks to His rule in truth and grace. The tune, ANTIOCH, was named and arranged by Lowell Mason in 1837. Hymnals long credited it to Handel on the strength of a few phrases that resemble Messiah, a credit hymnologists regard as a nineteenth-century misattribution; the composer is unknown. It closes this Sunday at the hinge of the season, looking back to the manger and forward to Christ’s reign.