A: Lent I (10 February 2008)

Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11
Genesis 2:4b-9,15-17,26–3:7

I am the oldest of seven siblings, so Brenda and I were also the first to present my parents with grandchildren, and to make uncles and aunts out of my brothers and sisters. When our kids were young, our own home was, of course, “child proofed”—anything that was dangerous, or especially valuable, was placed more than four feet off the ground and off the edge of the counter. But when we would visit one of my siblings who was married, but as yet childless, it was always a little bit stressful, because their homes were not similarly attentive to the strange idea that you have to put something in your mouth before you can be sure it really exists. And among all the forces of nature, an unattended two-year old has more destructive capacity per pound per minute than anything else I can think of! So Brenda and I would always be on edge, lest the natural curiosity of one of our offspring should lead to disaster or embarrassment.

Those days are long gone, of course, and we were long since been able to turn the tables on my brothers and sisters—as well as on some members of Brenda’s extended family who have from time to time been in our house—as we watch them squirm while their small children—and now, even my brother’s grandchildren— prowl around our decidedly non-childproof home! But it occurs to me that, while most of us grow up to know how to behave ourselves in polite company, there is a sense in which we are still marauding toddlers, roaming around in search of something poisonous to put in our mouths or something expensive to break. Only in our case, it’s not the poison that goes into our mouths that causes the trouble, but the poison that comes out. And the things we break are not made of porcelain or crystal, but of intangible qualities like trust and hope and affection and security. And they’re not expensive because of the rarity of the materials, but because of the costly effort that goes into building and sustaining a relationship between two human beings.

As individuals, we wound one another with our words, spreading poison with gossip and innuendo, creating webs of deceit and treachery that are beyond imagination in their complexity and subtlety. As a society, we consume natural resources with scarcely a second thought for the effects of our behavior on future generations. Surely God must see us sometimes the way a parent sees a two-year old loose in grandmother’s living room.

Now take that image, and put it on a mental shelf, because I want to come back to it. But for the moment, shift gears with me, and try on another scenario in your mind. Think of your favorite sweater. Now imagine that you snag it, gently but firmly, on a rose bush or a low hanging tree limb. The snag starts out small. “Maybe no one will notice,” you think to yourself, because you really like the sweater. But every time you move, the snag gets bigger. It starts to spread. Pretty soon, you’ve got six inches of loose yarn dangling from your sleeve. But you notice that there really isn’t a discernible hole, so you think, “Why not just take a pair of scissors and go ‘snip’ here and ‘snip’ there, and all will be well?” So you cut off both ends of the offending loop. But your attempt at sweater surgery only compounds the problem. The hole you couldn’t find rapidly appears, and grows whenever you look at it. You realize, to your horror, that your favorite sweater is both unwearable and beyond repair.

Have we not all felt at times that this unraveling sweater is a perfect description of our lives? We make a small mistake. We experience a lapse in judgment. We certainly didn’t mean to, and would be more careful if we had it to do over again. But we don’t know quite what to do, and there doesn’t appear to be any tremendous harm done, so we do nothing. But the damage grows, and grows, and before we know, we’re neck deep in a disaster, and we feel desperately hopeless.

Once again, I invite to take your sweater with the dangling yarn, and put it up on that mental shelf next to the rampaging toddler. Then move with me to one final image. You’re a lover of antiques, and you acquire a fine oriental ceramic vase that you place on a pedestal in the corner of the entry hall in your home—the entry hall with the polished slate floor. But one day, the cat, who normally lives outside, gets into the house, which utterly delights the dog, who normally lives inside. In about 1.5 seconds, the dog and the cat do what dogs and cats do, and your antique vase is in a thousand pieces evenly distributed over the area of your polished slate floor.

In one sense, I feel safe about this, because I don’t own anything as expensive and fragile as that vase, though we do have a hard floor in our entry way, along with a cat who prefers to be outside when the weather permits, as well as a dog who goes outside only under supervision. But figuratively speaking, I have personally broken a number of these vases myself—with no help from anything four-footed —and have witnessed the destruction of many more. I have seen relationships—between husbands and wives, between parents and children, between brothers and sisters—relationships bearing such a load of bitterness and resentment that there doesn’t seem to be enough forgiveness in the whole universe . . . to cover it. I have seen dreams of a lifetime shattered beyond recognition, indefatigable hope drowned in disappointment.

Now, take the shards of your antique vase, and scoop them up, and make a pile on your mental shelf next to the unraveling sweater and the curious toddler. What I’ve been describing, of course, can wear many different labels—alienation, estrangement, enmity, corruption, perishability—but ultimately, it’s just garden-variety Sin. Garden of Eden variety, that is. Sin is a condition, an experience, a tendency, that we are all born with. We are both victims of it and perpetrators of it. The time-honored story from the book of Genesis paints the picture for us in bold and unambiguous strokes. Adam and Eve chose to trust themselves more than they trusted God. They attempted to become gods unto themselves. For all the ceramic vases that we break, for all the dangling sweater yarn we try to neatly clip away, for all the two-year old tantrums we throw, we are simply giving expression to this fatal flaw that infects human nature: We want God to hand over the controls—until we fly into a tailspin, that is, at which point we will beg Him to take over long enough to set everything right.

God is, of course, in the business of setting everything right, though rarely according to our specifications. Jesus came to save us from the “garden variety” Sin that will otherwise be our undoing. The very name “Jesus” means “God saves.” This is much more easily said, however, than done. We should not underestimate the gravity of the task, or think that it was somehow “easy” for Jesus just because he’s, you know, the Son of God, that all he had to do was somehow “will” it to happen, to really want to save us, and then endure a few painful hours on a cross, and that’s that, and we all live happily ever after.

To understand the price of our salvation, to truly comprehend what saving us costs Jesus, let’s look back at that mental shelf where we’ve been setting things. When Brenda and I lived in California, and were able to have her extended family over to our house during holiday times, it was pretty much a full-time job to keep track of each one of the pre-school children who were there. They are miniature destruction machines, and a parent or grand-parent or benevolent volunteer from a neighboring branch of the family tree has to hover over them like a guardian angel, preventing disasters from happening and cleaning up the ones they can’t prevent. Meanwhile, the child is essentially oblivious to the work it takes to provide this escort service, and completely uncooperative in trying to make the task less of a burden.

Part of Jesus' ontinuing saving activity on our behalf is to hover around us to prevent . . . and clean up after our destructive behavior. Where Adam and Eve disobeyed, Jesus obeys. Where you and I disobey, Jesus obeys. We still may get swatted on the behind when we throw a tantrum, but it is done always in love and never in anger. The important thing is that even if we spill grape juice on the cream-colored carpet, Jesus knows how to get the stain out. What we make bitter through our sin, Jesus can turn sweet with his obedience. The grudges that we hold on to because of our sin, Jesus can pry loose from us because of his obedience. The trust that we lose though our fickleness, Jesus can recover through his faithfulness.

Now let’s deal with that snagged sweater. Before taking scissors to that offending loop of yarn, why not take the sweater to a master weaver? Jesus is a master weaver. He can painstakingly trace the snag to its source, and then re-weave the yarn with unimaginably complex labor and great skill. This is a slow process, so we’ll need to be patient. And it takes a professional—it’s not something we should try at home. But Jesus’s saving ministry on our behalf includes patiently and laboriously re-weaving the fabric of our lives after it has been snagged by Sin. It’s something we could never do ourselves.

But what about that antique vase, shattered into a thousand pieces? If the shards are entrusted into the care of an expert, the vase can be not only restored, but made stronger than it was in its original condition. But every tiny piece must be carefully collected, examined, sorted, cataloged, and finally re-fitted into its precise location. And when it is a human life that is shattered, no one but the Creator of that life has the expertise to put it back together. When it is hope that has been shattered, only the Source of that hope can reconstruct it. When it is love that has been shattered, only the Author of love, the one who is himself love in his very nature, can restore it.

So let us never use the expression “Jesus saves” as a mere slogan. That trivializes the cost of our salvation. Saving us is a tremendous labor of tremendous love. The nature and extent of that labor is illustrated for us on this First Sunday in Lent through the gospel account of our Lord’s temptation in the wilderness right before the commencement of his public ministry. The first temptation, at first blush, seems harmless enough. Jesus had been fasting and he was hungry. If he had the power to turn stones into bread, why not do it? The second temptation seems rather fanciful. Satan wanted Jesus to jump off a high building just for the exhibitionistic thrill of watching a pack of angels come to his rescue and set him down gently. The third temptation is a no-brainer: Why would Jesus want to fall down and worship Satan for the sake of a few kingdoms that weren’t Satan’s to give in the first place?

But the real significance of the temptations is not in the temptations themselves, but in Jesus' replies. In each case, he quotes Old Testament scripture, and each quotation refers back to a particular act of disobedience that the people of Israel had perpetrated during their 40 year wilderness sojourn. In responding to the Evil One this way, Jesus is going about his arduous task of laboriously piecing back together what human sin has shattered, of systematically undoing the damage that sin has done, of going back and finding every petulant “No!” that has been shouted at God, and substituting an obedient “Yes” in its place. Jesus doesn’t save by executive decree, by waving a wand, by telling his aides “Make it so,” but by getting down and taking care of the messy details himself, one at a time. Every time I make a mess by my apathy, Jesus is there to clean up with his compassion. For every wound that I inflict through angry or sarcastic words, Jesus is there with the soothing ointment of forgiveness and reconciliation. Every time the fabric of human society starts to unravel through violence, Jesus is there to weave it back together through peace. I cannot put it any better than St Paul does in his letter to the Romans:

“...as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.”

And as we sing in the hymn text by John Henry Newman:

“O wisest love! that flesh and blood, which did in Adam fail, should strive afresh against the foe, should strive and should prevail.”

Amen.

Ash Wednesday (6 February 2008)

The beginning of Lent, for most of us, triggers a series of associative responses from the past. This chain of associations is rarely the same for any two of us, since we each come with our own unique perspective. I was brought up in a Baptist household, so Lent was something other people did. But I did live in the suburbs of Chicago, so I went to school with a lot of kids whose last names ended in s-k-i or w-i-c-z, and whose Roman Catholicism was constantly, if quietly, evident. I remember them showing up at school on Ash Wednesday with curious black smudges on their foreheads. I also distinctly recall looking at the food supplement of the Chicago Daily News and noticing a lead article on “creative ideas for Lenten meals”, and feeling rather out of the cultural mainstream.

If you were raised Roman Catholic, you probably remember a noticeable change in the menu in the school cafeteria and at home, and a fair amount of pressure from various authority figures to identify just what it was you were giving up or taking on as your Lenten discipline. Now if you're one of the few, the proud, the cradle Episcopalians, then there's no telling for sure what Lent might mean to you. There's a good chance it meant being in church on Ash Wednesday, though there's an equally good chance that the only ashes to be found were on the wicks of the altar candles after they were snuffed! If nothing else, it meant that church services were a little more somber, with hymns sung more slowly and lugubriously than usual. Whether or not Lent affected your home life depended on the level of churchmanship that your parents and your parish adhered to.

But anyway ... here we are, gathered together in Saint Anne's Church, in Warsaw, Indiana, on February 6th, 2008—gathered together with our various backgrounds, associations, experiences, and pre-conceptions. This year, I myself don’t feel quite ready for Lent, perhaps because it's so early in arriving—it seems like Christmas was just last week. In other years, I’ve been more than ready, already in Lenten mood by the time Ash Wednesday rolls around. But time, as we learn sooner or later, waits for none of us, and the rhythm of the year unfolds in glorious ignorance of the rhythms of our personal lives. For some of you here this evening, Lent could hardly have come at a more appropriate time, for you are truly experiencing desolation in your life. I may not know who you are, but you do. The tone of your life is dark and austere, and the austerity and restraint of our liturgy this evening is an altogether appropriate expression of the condition you find yourself in.

Others of you come to this service with an acute sense of your own sinfulness. You know exactly what it is that you should justly be feeling remorseful for, precisely what it is that is separating your soul from God this evening. I may not know who you are, but you do. And when, in a few minutes, we pray the Litany of Penitence together, and, then, after receiving the ashes, pray the fifty-first Psalm, what flows out of your lips will truly fit with the condition of your heart: "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offenses."

Others who worship with us this evening, however, find that, while the calendar tells them it's Lent, their hearts tell them it's Christmas or Easter—or at least Valentine’s Day! Maybe life has never been better for you than it is right now. Maybe you've just achieved a long-cherished goal, and are still savoring the sweetness of accomplishment. Maybe you're overwhelmed with feelings of gratitude and joy over the many blessings that God has showered upon you. I may not know who you are, but you do. You want to cry out "Alleluia!" just when that word is supposed to be banished from our vocabulary for the next several weeks. For you, what we do this evening will be slightly jarring, slightly unsettling. It's not that you'll be able to disagree with anything that's said, but it just won't be ... from the heart.

And then, there are those who are here, who may not have a very clear idea at all as to why they're here. Perhaps you're a young person, and were not given a choice in the matter. Perhaps you were assigned something in particular to do and showed up in fulfillment of your duty. This time, I may indeed know who some of you are, but … what I can only suspect, you are certain of. For you, tonight's liturgy may be confusing and/or boring, something you'll have no trouble forgetting the moment you walk out the door. Then again, maybe you'll have an "Aha!" experience, and see something you've never noticed before. Maybe you'll always look back on this Ash Wednesday as the starting point of a lively and authentic relationship with God. Stranger things have happened.

But ... what I want to tell you … is that, in the larger scheme of things, the way any of us feels about tonight's goings-on is of passing small importance. What is important, is that we're all here, doing what we're doing. Now I wonder whether it strikes you as a little bit odd to hear me say that? I know it strikes me as odd! It challenges two of the fundamental presumptions that you and I are conditioned by.

The first of these presumptions is that what we do, we do primarily as individuals. Even when we do something as part of a group, we assume that the group is neither more nor less than the sum of its individual parts. This view doesn't square, however, with the way God seems to deal with mankind. When the world was destroyed by flood, the sure route to salvation was by being on board Noah's ark. The ark escaped the flood, and thereby the individuals who were on it. Under the terms of the old covenant, the fundamental basis of one's right standing before God was membership in the community of Israel, the nation with whom the covenant was made. The words of the prophet Joel that we heard read a few minutes ago spoke of the need of the entire nation to repent and return to the Lord. And under the terms of the new covenant, the covenant we have with God through Christ, we are saved by participation in the body of Christ, which is the community of the church. It is into this body that we are born in the sacrament of baptism.

And, you know, it could not be more appropriate that we are saved as individuals by sharing in the life of a group, because we are also sinners by virtue of being part of a group. Sure, many of the sins we commit are quite personal and individual, and those are the ones that are likely to make us feel the guiltiest—but, remember, tonight isn't about feelings! Pay close attention to the Litany of Penitence that we are shortly about to pray together. Most of the sins that we will confess are not offenses that would be of any interest to the vice squad of the Warsaw police! They're sins that we're guilty of as a whole society.

Who's responsible for the plight of the hungry and the homeless? No single individual, but all of us as a society. Who's responsible for the pollution of our air and water? No single individual, but all of us as a society. When I first moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana about twenty years ago, I very righteously decided to boycott Exxon in protest for the Alaskan oil spill. But then it occurred to me that that was the height of hypocrisy! I was biting the hand that fed me! My protest had not a shred of moral authority. I may never have spilled a drop of oil on God's green earth, but as long as I cashed my paycheck twice a month—a paycheck that is was as dependent on the Baton Rouge economy as the Baton Rouge economy was on the petroleum-refining industry, then I was just as guilty of environmental pollution as if I personally dumped toxic waste into the Mississippi River. There is such a things as social sin, and it needs to be repented of as surely as does individual sin.

So the Ash Wednesday liturgy challenges the presumption that the only behavior that counts is individual behavior. But there is another presumption—an even more important one, I believe—that is called into question by what we do here this evening. You and I are conditioned, in a multitude of ways, to perceive the exterior as an expression of the interior. In other words, what I do and say is a reflection of what I think and feel. This is by no means a false assumption, as far as it goes. In fact, it's probably the ideal situation, where our actions and our words are harmonized with our thoughts and feelings. But, it can also work in the opposite direction. Energy can flow from our actions to our beliefs and emotions, from the exterior to the interior. And this is one of the supreme benefits of liturgy, and of the cycle of liturgical time, with its alternation between feasting, fasting, and just ordinary living.

Tonight, the body of Christ, the community of the church, is repenting, expressing corporate remorse for things done and left undone. Any one of the particular cells of the body may or may not "need" to repent in the particular way and for the particular sins of which the body is repenting. But the body still needs the contribution of those cells. There are those weak cells, who, as individuals, need to repent, but are unaware of their need, or lack the ability to do so, and require the assistance of stronger voices confessing and stronger knees kneeling. For those weak cells of the body, tonight is a school of repentance. They will learn by doing, with the rest of the community acting as spiritual training wheels. In time, by participating in liturgies such as this one, the exterior words and actions of the "weak" cells will transform their thoughts and feelings, so that their outward aspect and their inward aspect will be in harmony. And the stronger cells, whose, who, as individuals, have no overwhelming need of repentance now, prepare themselves for the time when they will need to turn yet again toward Christ. By "going through the motions" this evening, even though the words spoken may seem to overstate the actual condition of their lives, they maintain their spiritual fitness the way an athlete keeps in shape by running or lifting weights during the off season.

So join me in this solemn assembly, and let us keep this fast together, regardless of whether we're ready for it, or in the mood for it. Receive, with me, the mark of our mortality on our foreheads, and share with me, once again, in taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the sacred gifts by which this mortality is defeated. Amen.

A: Last Sunday after Epiphany (3 February 2008)

Matthew 17:1-9


I want to begin today by being a bit more autobiographical and personal than I usually am in a sermon—not, I hope, for whatever gratification may come from talking about myself, but because the main insight I want to leave you with emerged from the gradual process that I’m about to describe.

As most of you know, I came to the Episcopal Church as a young adult, in my early twenties. The tradition in which I was raised happens to have been Baptist, but it could easily have been any of a number of different free-church evangelical faith communities. I am grateful for my upbringing. It taught me to love our Lord Jesus, to study the Scriptures, and to honor their authority. When we got together on Sundays, the place we gathered in and what we did there looked rather different than what we experience at St Anne’s and in other more liturgical churches. Rather than the altar being the focal point of the room, there was a raised platform in the front, with an imposing pulpit at dead center. Behind the platform were raised pews for the members of the choir. Behind the choir, discreetly hid from view, was a large tank where baptism by full immersion could be performed. In our church, there was a large wooden cross on the back wall—not a cruxifix, certainly, but just a plain cross—but there was virtually nothing else in the room by way of overt Christian symbolism. Even though our pastor tried to get us to call it a “sanctuary” rather than an “auditorium,” we certainly thought of it in functional terms, as a comfortable meeting place, not as the venue of an encounter with the Sacred.

As people came together, there would be soft organ music in the background, but instead of a reverent hush, there was a good bit of visiting and socializing in the pews. The service itself usually began with the choir singing a short “Call to Worship,” followed by a congregational hymn. Then there would be about twenty or thirty minutes of an informal routine of announcements, a reading from Scripture, a musical solo and/or choir anthem, and a long prayer improvised by the pastor. But this was all pretty much just a warm-up for the main event, which was the sermon, lasting anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes. This was the high point, the real reason we came to church. After the sermon, there would usually be a closing hymn, often something kind of slow and sentimental, hopefully motivating us to continue to take to heart the pastor’s message. Then there was a benediction, and then the organ played again—more loudly this time—as everyone left the church.

This routine . . . does many things well. I learned a great deal from the sermons delivered by the pastor who served that church during the mid-to-late 60s, while I was in junior high and high school, and I am very grateful to him to this day. My heart was stirred . . . and my devotion aroused by guest preachers, many of them fresh from the foreign mission field, who challenged me with the invitation to commit my life totally to Christ, to surrender the aspirations of my own ego and to yield completely to the biddings of the Holy Spirit. I marvelled at, and was inspired by, the example of their sacrifice, and gradually began to see myself as destined for—as they would have described it—“full-time Christian service.”

At the same time, I also knew, albeit “pre-consciously,” that there was something missing. Even now, I can scarcely find the right words to name what was going on in my soul, but there was, deep within me, a desire and longing to connect with the Eternal, the Transcendent, to know God in His surpassingly beautiful glory. But as a child and teenager, I wouldn’t have been able to use those words. I wouldn’t even have known that the yearning I felt was religious in nature, that it was God who was seducing me with His glory. The only outward sign in my experience of what I intuitively felt within myself was the pomp and pageantry associated with royalty and the military. So I was drawn to stories and moves and TV shows that depicted such ceremony. I fantasized about living in a country with a monarch who required that his subjects prostrate themselves upon entering his presence, and leave the throne room walking backwards, so as to never turn their backs on the sovereign. I fantasized about being in combat, and following orders with such abandon that I did not care an instant for my own safety.

What I was looking to do, of course—though I certainly didn’t know it at the time—was to worship the Almighty and Everliving God, to give appropriate expression to my avowed intention to serve and follow Him. And I was looking for it because what I experienced in church on Sunday mornings did not give me that opportunity. We were good at talking about God, but we didn’t have a clue how to actually worship God.

Now, lest you continue to wonder where I’m going with all this maudlin self-disclosure on the Last Sunday after Epiphany, it’s because of the Transfiguration. In all three years of our lectionary cycle, this Sunday before the beginning of Lent confronts us with the Transfiguration of our Lord. This year we hear about it from Matthew. Jesus takes Peter and James and John up to the top of a mountain, and sometime during the night, he starts to glow—Matthew tells us, “like the sun,” so it was no mere nightlight—and two of the heroes of Israel’s history, Moses and Elijah, show up for a while beside him. In that moment, in that mountaintop experience to define all mountaintop experiences, the three disciples found, concretely and tangibly, that which the youthful Dan Martins was unknowingly looking for. What I have seen, what most of us have seen, only in shades and intimations, fleeting shadows and sidelong glances, Peter and James and John saw straight on, dead ahead.

And what, we might ask, was their first response? What did they do before they even had a chance to think about what they should do? “Lord, this is wonderful. Let’s make three tabernacles: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Now, in their accounts of this incident, Mark and Luke give the impression that Peter’s offer was inappropriate—he didn’t know what he was saying. But not in Matthew. The way Matthew tells the story, it was a perfectly plausible response. The word which most translations render as “booth,” and which I have just quoted as “tabernacle,” and which we just heard read as “dwelling,” is the same word which, in the Old Testament, was used for the special tent which housed the Ark of the Covenant during the wilderness wanderings of the ancient Israelites. It was the place where God’s glory dwelt, the place which Moses would enter to commune with God, and when he came out his face would glow so much that he had to wear a veil in order for anybody to look at him. Later, when they settled down permanently in the Promised Land, they built a temple in Jerusalem, which became the permanent home of the Ark. The Psalmist would say of it, “Lord, I love your house, and the place where your glory abides.” A tabernacle serves a very useful purpose. It transforms God’s glory into an intensity which might not actually kill us if we look at it, the way an electrical transformer takes power from the high-voltage lines and turns it into something you can use to light your house without exploding your breaker panel.

And what, we might ask yet again, was the disciples’ second response to the Transfiguration? They hit the deck. They fell to the ground prostrate, noses in the dust, lost in utterly pure and abject worship. It’s the response my young heart wanted to make, but didn’t know how. It’s the response we all would want to make if confronted with such an overpowering vision of majestic glory.

How, then, can we begin to approach the experience of God’s glory—glory that virtually compels us to prostrate ourselves in front of it? Well, God has given us a gift which enables us to take the next step. He has given us a transformer. We call it the Liturgy. In my Baptist youth, as you might imagine, liturgy was not a positive word. It was used disparagingly of those pseudo-Christians who don’t know how to really pray so they have to use a book. Needless to say, I was conditioned to be suspicious of liturgy. But as I grew into my college years, that suspicion began to melt, and that melting, over time, turned into a warm and joyful embrace. I discovered that the liturgy—and I refer here to the whole complex of words and actions and material objects that symbolize our encounter with the Transcendent and Holy God—I discovered that the liturgy supplies both the experience of Divine Glory and the transformer, the “tabernacle,” which enables us to bask in the light of that glory.

Some years ago, I was shooting the breeze with the rector of a parish nearby to the one I was working in at the time, and he told me about a conference that one of his parishioners attended—at a nearby seminary of the Episcopal Church, no less—at which the idea was put forward that the churches that are really enjoying substantial growth have a very informal and passive worship style, with music that was written only last month, where every Sunday is Praise Band Sunday, and that if Episcopal churches want to grow, then we need to do the same thing, and sit very loosely to the Prayer Book and make the inside of our church buildings much plainer and simpler,
and let go of the traditional music that we’re accustomed to. My clergy colleague and I agreed in our reluctance to accept this advice. It’s not that we don’t think new music in a popular style has any place in our piety and worship—it does, and it certainly does at St Anne’s—but we were both of a mind that, rather than blurring and downplaying the edginess of our liturgical inheritance, we need instead to accentuate it. Rather than trying to be who somebody else is, and do a poor job of it, we need to be who we already are, but do a better job of it.

People are, I am convinced, hungry for a vision of God’s glory, yearning for an encounter with the awe-inspiring majesty of God. They want an experience that will induce them to fall down flat on their faces, and then get up and walk out of the room backwards so as not to show any disrespect to the Holy One. Ought we not to employ every means at our disposal to encourage and facilitate such an encounter? We have this wonderful treasure in the Liturgy, and it is capable of both evoking and providing the vehicle for responding to the glory of heavenly beauty. This is done through architecture and the arrangement of sacred space, it is fostered through an environment of worship that invites reverence, it is nourished by the finest music—old and new—performed with excellence and attention to detail, it is encouraged by the artistic use of glass and paint and fabric, it is accomplished through movement and posture and symbolic gesture, and it appeals richly to all the senses: taste and touch and vision and hearing and smelling. It is our liturgy, the true “work” of the people of God.

“The Lord has shown forth his glory: Come, let us adore him.” Amen.

Year A: Epiphany III (27 January 2008)

Matthew 4:12-23

I have a fairly enormous appetite for spy movies and suspense thrillers. One of the frequent plot ingredients for such films involves a time bomb—sometimes even a nuclear time bomb. The hero, usually after several minutes of strenuous hand-to-hand combat, finally makes it to the bomb, which, invariably, is set to explode in just a few seconds. The hero is, of course, a hero. But he is not usually a bomb expert. Should he cut the red wire first, or the blue wire? Or the yellow wire? Or the green wire? If he guesses wrong, the device will explode in his face.
If he hesitates too long, it will …explode in his face anyway. He simply has to make a decision and plunge ahead, without the benefit of sustained analysis or reflection.

The authors of these fictional scenarios may well have taken their inspiration from the fourth chapter of St Matthew's gospel. Jesus is walking along the lake shore, having just arrived in Galilee after his baptism and forty days being tempted in the wilderness. He sees Peter and Andrew, two fishermen who happen to be brothers, busy plying their trade. He says to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And they drop their nets and follow him. A little further up the beach, he runs across another set of brothers, James and John, who were fishing from a boat with their father. He calls them, and they also follow. Matthew doesn't give us any evidence that Jesus asked if they were enjoying the weather, or how they were feeling that day. He doesn't mention anything about Jesus having to ask twice, or any of these four early disciples responding, “Follow you? What precisely do you mean by that?” Nowhere do we hear anything like, “Think it over. Take all the time you need” or “Sleep on it and get back to me in the morning.” It's a very sparse, very clear, very uncluttered narrative: “Follow me . . . Ok.” Pick a wire and cut it; there's no time to commission a study.

Even a New Yorker…would find their exchange exceedingly abrupt. Abruptness doesn't really play well with us, does it? We consider it rude. We consider it an invasion of our rights. We like to make our own decisions, and we don't want anyone telling us when we have to make them. The pressure is unwelcome. It makes us feel like we're losing control.

Losing control.

If there's anything that throws a citizen of the early 21^st century into a panic, it's the idea of not being in control.
We have Federal Express and next-day-air and the internet to supply us with a constant stream of information, information that we need to stay in control. I want options, choices, alternatives. I want to find what works…for me. I don't want anyone forcing my hand prematurely.

Guess what, folks.

We're not in control.

Each of us is here today, here in church today, here in St Anne’s church today, because Jesus is calling us.
Maybe you're aware of that call and are consciously responding to it. Maybe you haven't heard anything resembling a call from Jesus, and think you're here because you chose to be here, because…you're in control.
Either way, though, you're here because Jesus is calling you. What does the voice of Jesus sound like to you?
What is he saying? Maybe you've been spiritually hungry for some time, searching for the kind of meal that will satisfy the deepest possible kind of human hunger. Jesus is saying, “Come. Follow me. Let me feed you. Be satisfied.”

Maybe you've been wounded by the changes and chances of this life, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Jesus is saying, “Come, follow me. Find healing and rest for your soul.” Maybe you've been spiritually complacent, a little lax. You've stopped praying, you're stingy with your time and money. It isn't that you've become an atheist, but you've allowed yourself to be consumed by the things of this world, and you've pushed God to the margins. Jesus' voice comes to you today like a slap in the face, the kind you respond to with, “Thanks, I needed that.”

Maybe things have been going swimmingly well for you. You're doing just fine and you have every intention of staying on course. Jesus’ voice saying, “follow me” is an abrupt intrusion, an unwelcome interference with the status quo.

Whatever position you find yourself in, you can identify with Peter and Andrew and James and John, because Jesus is coming to you from out of the blue, into your world, finding you where you are, doing what you do, and saying, “Follow me.” He isn't presenting us with a proposal, or the results of an opinion poll. He isn't saying, “Give it serious thought and get back to me.” He's saying, “Cut the wire.” Cut the wire, because the bomb's about to explode. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Follow me.

Follow me today.

What might it mean for you to follow Jesus—to follow Jesus today? For starters, if you have never consciously acknowledged the lordship of Jesus Christ over your life, if you have never said to him, “Jesus, you are my savior and my Lord, and I will obey and follow you wherever you lead me”, it might mean doing just that.

Maybe, if you feel yourself weighed down by guilt and shame and a haunting sense of your own sinfulness, following Jesus today means asking for the courage to face those areas of your life that you keep in the dark.
The fourth of the twelve steps in the Alcoholics Anonymous movement calls for a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of our lives. Like lancing a boil, it's painful in the short run, but necessary and therapeutic in the long run.

Or, maybe Jesus's call to you to follow him involves, not seeking forgiveness for yourself, but you yourself forgiving someone who has wronged you. Are you harboring a grudge, nursing a resentment, cherishing an anger that, even as it feels good to wallow in, is eating away at your soul? Even as Jesus told those first four disciples to drop their nets and follow him, Jesus is telling you, “Drop that grudge, let loose of that resentment, cast that anger aside, and follow me.”

Maybe following Jesus today is as simple as beginning to pray, or beginning to pray again. Do you pray daily?
Do you know how to pray? There's no shame in not knowing how to pray. Maybe no one ever taught you!
It's ok! You can ask me, or some other mature Christian for help. Nothing would make us happier than to receive and respond to such a request.

Perhaps following Jesus today means coming to grips with the idea of stewardship, realizing that you're a renter, not an owner, that you're a tenant, not a landlord. In all seriousness, there are those for whom following Jesus today means writing an uncomfortably large check to advance the work and ministry of Christ's church. Or maybe your growing edge in stewardship is not stewardship of your finances, but stewardship of your mind.
Maybe answering Jesus' call to follow him today means joining a class or a study group and becoming more mature in your understanding of the things of the Lord.

The list could go on, but you get the point. Ultimately, only you can answer the question—what does it means to follow Jesus today?—because you're the one whom Jesus is calling. And if he's calling you, don't expect him to go away. He's gentle, but relentless, in his love and his call. As we pray in the 139th psalm,

“Where can I go then from your spirit?
where can I flee from your presence?
If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand will lead me
and your right hand hold me fast.

St Augustine wrote about his experience of uneasiness before he answered Jesus's call to follow him: “My heart was restless, O Lord, until it found its rest in you.” Elsewhere he wrote, “I could never have found you, Lord, unless you had found me first.” One of the old gospel songs that remains in my heart from my Baptist upbringing contains the lines, “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me; … come home, come home, ye who are weary, come home; earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling, O sinner, come home.”

The clock is ticking, hero. Not to decide is also to decide. Cut the wire. Follow Jesus. Amen.

A: Epiphany II (20 January 2008)

John 1:29-42
Isaiah 49:1-7

Several decades ago a psychologist named Abraham Maslow got famous—at least among those who read psychology textbooks!—for publishing his theory about the “hierarchy of needs.” Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs says that human beings have certain universal needs which, if they are met at all, have to be met in a particular order. The most basic human need is for oxygen, and a person who is deprived of oxygen, after a very few seconds, is unlikely to be concerned about anything else.

After the need for oxygen is met, the next level of the hierarchy is immediate personal safety. If you're being chased through the forest by a wild bear, you're not going to care awfully much about the relative humidity. And so on up the hierarchy through the levels of warmth, water, food, and so on. Once a lower need is satisfied, there is an immediate drive and desire to meet the next one on the scale. If you're freezing to death, you think, “If I could just have a fire, I wouldn't have a care in the world.” Then, once you're warm, you realize you're thirsty, and the quest continues. Most human beings, wherever they are on Maslow's hierarchy, spend most of their waking hours looking for something, seeking something.

When John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him, some time after his baptism, he said to his own disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world,”
whereupon two of John's disciples, Andrew being one of them, up and followed Jesus. When Jesus noticed that they were following him, he turned to them and said, “What do you seek?”

What do you seek?

What are you looking for?

What need do you have that you're trying to meet?

The highest category of need on Maslow's hierarchy is something called “self-actualization.” Self-actualization is what you seek after, the need that you're aware of, when your material and emotional needs are regularly met. If you'll permit me now to leap across the crack between psychology and theology, I will suggest that what Maslow calls a need for self-actualization, a Christian —or, for that matter, a believer of almost any religious persuasion —would recognize as a need for God. We're talking here about a spiritual need. We're talking about one's hunger for one's true self, which is found only in the communion between a creature and its creator.

The disciples' answer to Jesus' question, “What do you seek?" was “Where are you staying?” The English translation doesn't really do justice to their question. They aren't just idly curious about Jesus' address and phone number. They want to know where Jesus lives, where he abides, where he dwells. They are seeking to fulfill their spiritual hunger, to experience that communion of creature and creator which they know will alone give them real “self-actualization.” They’re seeking to fill the God-shaped void that every human being is born with.

And Jesus responds, “Come and see.” Again, the English translation is a little bit misleading. Jesus isn't just inviting them to casually stop by for a cup of coffee and have a look around. He isn't saying, “Hey, check this out.” Rather, Jesus is inviting Andrew and his companion to really come and see. Come and have your eyes opened. Come and be enlightened in such a way that you'll think you were blind before that moment. Come and find self-actualization. Come and find what you've always been looking for even if you didn't know it. And Andrew and his friend came and they saw.

So what do we do when we've come and seen what we've been looking for, when we've experienced “self-actualization”? One option is ... to keep it a secret, to horde it like a squirrel gathering acorns as the chill of winter sets in. “I've got mine; you find yours on your own.” The first Episcopal church Brenda and I ever worshiped in regularly—35 years ago this spring—was apparently filled with such an attitude. We were there every Sunday morning for the better part of six months, and during that time not a single soul took the slightest interest in our presence. The Rector himself didn't so much as ask us our names. It's a wonder that I'm an Episcopalian today! There were apparently some needs getting met in that place, because it was a fairly good-sized church. But whatever it was they had, they sure didn't seem very interested in sharing it. I'm very pleased to say that I don't think a visitor to St Anne's would be in any danger of having a similar experience today.

The alternative, of course, when one has come and seen, is to share the news, to say, “Here it is. There's plenty more. Come and get it!” First, we would tell our family and friends. Then, if the news were important enough, we would want to tell everyone we could. If you happened to stumble over the sure-fire cure for cancer, you would want as many people as possible to know it as soon as possible! Remember those scientists in Utah about 15 years ago who said they'd found a way to create a “cold fusion” nuclear reaction? It turned out they really hadn't, but if they had, it would have revolutionized the world energy industry overnight. Assuming that they weren't complete liars, and at least thought they'd done what they said they'd done, their eagerness for the whole world to know of the discovery was quite understandable.

All this, I hope, is unremarkably self-evident, because now I want to relate it to our life together in the church. We say we have gospel—good news. To varying degrees, and in different ways, we have actually experienced it. We have come and seen, and we know what we've seen to be that which we've sought, what we've been looking for, that which meets our deepest—or, according to Maslow, our highest—needs. How do we respond?

If someone walks through our doors and makes the effort to become part of this community, I'm convinced that the gospel of Christ is somehow going to touch that person through the members of St Anne’s. But what if someone remains on the fringe? Or, horror of horrors, what if they never even turn into our parking lot? What if they drive right on up Market Street, wondering where they're going to meet their need for self-actualization? Where is our concern for them? If we have good news, do they also deserve to hear it? The very word “evangelism”—which, literally, means nothing more than “proclaiming good news”—and much more the thing itself, still scares and even offends many Episcopalians. At the very least, we're nervous about it. We sometimes say it's because we're put off by the methods that other kinds of churches employ—emotional manipulation and the like.

But I wonder. Could it be, at least in part, that we're nervous about sharing the good news because we're not all that clear on just what the news is, and why it's good? Try this on in your imagination: Write a one-half page summary of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, in a way that is both personal and attractive enough that someone who'd never heard it before would want to hear more.

Could you do it?

When Andrew came and saw, and when he knew that the one he had seen was indeed the long-awaited Messiah, the hope of Israel, his first response was to run and tell his brother Peter the good news: “We have found the Messiah.” It was a completely natural and unself-conscious action on his part, as natural as one neighbor telling another about the station that's selling gas for under two dollars a gallon, or one fisherman telling another where the bass are biting.

The theme that runs through all the lessons today is that God chooses. By inviting them to “come and see”, Jesus chose Andrew and Peter as his disciples. At his baptism, God the Father revealed Jesus as his chosen one. In the prophecy of Isaiah, the “suffering servant” is chosen by God to be a light, not only to the nation of Israel —that would be “too light a thing.” No, the servant of the LORD is to be a light to the nations.

My friends, the same Lord is telling us at St Anne's that it is “too light a thing” that we should minister only to one another, that we should share the good news only among ourselves. He calls us as well to be a “light to the nations”, represented by the thousands of people who live within walking or driving distance of this church, and who are looking for self-actualization in all the wrong places.

We know what they seek, and we know where Jesus lives —he lives here. We have a story to tell.

Let's learn it, first. Then, let's tell it.

Let's invite those who are looking to “come and see.” Amen.

The Baptism of Christ, 2008

Matthew 3:13-17
Isaiah 42:1-9

Well . . . Christmas really is over, isn't it? Some poinsettias linger, just because they're still so pretty, and our festival frontals still decorate the altar. But garland along the balcony rail is departed, and the festive wreathes no longer adorn the windows. And, perhaps most significantly of all, the crèche scene is once again put away for another year. Jesus is apparently no longer lying in an animal feeding trough set in a hillside cave outside a tiny village in an obscure province of the Roman Empire. Between Epiphany and the Sunday after, we make a quantum leap in remembered time, a leap of about thirty years, from Jesus the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, to Jesus the grown-up, ready to embark on, as it were, his “career.”

The object of our attention in the liturgy for the First Sunday After the Epiphany is the Baptism of our Lord, in the Jordan river, by none other than John the Baptist. We celebrate this event because the church has always seen in it an Epiphany, a manifestation, a showing-forth of Christ, that is more arresting, and more indicative of his humility ... than even the circumstances surrounding his birth.

After 30-odd years of obscurity in the Galilean village of Nazareth, Jesus goes public. He makes his way down to the Jordan River, where that crazy man named John has been attracting hordes of people by telling them to wade out into the water, take a plunge, and come up confessing their sins.

None of the external circumstances of Jesus' life can explain why he did what he did. It was something internal. Something was drawing—or driving—Jesus to that river. He was responding to a call.

There are many reasons why it may have seemed inappropriate to Jesus for him to go and be baptized. And they all make a certain amount of sense, to me, at least. From the very first time I heard this story as a child, I've scratched my head, and wondered why in the word Jesus, of all people, would need to be baptized. It would not have bothered me for this passage of scripture to just disappear; I would not have missed it.

First of all, Jesus is greater than John. John was the one whose sole purpose in life was to announce Jesus' coming —“prepare the way of the Lord”, and all that. If any baptizing was going to be done, it should have been Jesus baptizing John, not the other way around. Second, with Jesus on the scene, they should all have said goodbye to the Jordan, because baptism with river water is only a warm-up act for the kind of baptism Jesus came to bring—baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Third, even though Jesus truly did share our humanity, there is one aspect of that humanity that he did not participate in, and that is sin. Jesus was sinless, which means that he was perfectly attuned to God's will at all times. Why should the sinless one undergo a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins?

These are some pretty strong reasons why Jesus might have thought twice about going ahead with his plan. Indeed, John himself was reluctant to perform the act: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” he said. Apparently the early Christian community, including the author of this gospel, was also a bit perplexed, if not embarrassed, about the whole thing. Matthew's account makes a point of telling us that Jesus got right up out of the water after being baptized, rather than staying to confess his sins, as would normally have been the case. But Jesus insists. He's thought it through, and he knows his mind. He's going to be baptized. He tells John, in the words of the Revised English Bible translation, “Let it be so for the present; it is right for us to do all that God requires.”

All that God requires.

Well, sure, we knew that much. Who else would have been calling Jesus away from his carpenter shop in Nazareth to get baptized in the Jordan River? But we still want to know why! Why does God require it? The selection from the prophet Isaiah that is appointed to be read along with Matthew's account of Jesus' baptism offers us a clue:

The Lord says, “Here is my servant...whom I strengthen, the one I have chosen, with whom I am pleased. I have filled him with my spirit, and he will bring justice to every nation. He will not shout or raise his voice or make loud speeches in the streets. He will not break off a bent reed or put out a flickering lamp. He will bring lasting justice to all. He will not lose hope or courage; he will establish justice on the earth. Distant lands eagerly await his teaching.

Here is my servant.

This passage is known among biblical scholars as one of the “servant songs” in the Book of Isaiah. Jesus, from the time of his youth, would have been well familiar with it. And in it lies the key to understanding the mysterious event which we remember today. In the act of accepting baptism from John, Jesus was accepting the role of a servant of the Lord. The Prayer Book collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas, of which there isn’t one this year, asks that we may “share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity.” If we are going to share, to participate, in Jesus' life, part of the deal is that where he goes, we follow. So if Jesus accepted a servant vocation, a vocation of humility, when he was baptized by John, then the path that lies ahead of us is the same one, the path of being servants to our God and Father.

We might be tempted, of course, to say, “That's beneath my dignity. Someone else should be serving me.” Jesus could have said the same thing, and insisted the he take the position of prominence and visibility as the baptizer. But he didn't.

We might be tempted to say, “Phooey on being a servant of God. I know a better way to improve the world.” Jesus, you know, could have said the same thing. He, after all, came to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Nevertheless, into the water he went.

And we might be tempted to say, “I would be wasted as a servant. I would be more valuable as one of God's executives.” Jesus, of course, could easily have said the same thing. He, after all, was the sinless one, and not only that, but was himself God from God, light from light, true God from true God, of one being with the Father. But that isn't what he said.

The purpose of Jesus' servanthood, understood in the light of Isaiah's prophecy, was to bring God's “justice” to the earth. The English word “justice” is really much too narrow in meaning for the Hebrew word which it translates. Mishpat implies much more than mere fairness, or equality, or the righting of wrongs. It implies God's universal and benevolent rule, the right ordering of all relationships. “Governance” might be a more accurate, though somewhat more obscure, translation.

The role of Jesus the servant, the baptized humble servant of the Lord, was to bring the world under God's governance. Our servanthood, as participators in the divine life of Christ, is to be an extension into space and time of Jesus' servanthood. The servanthood of the church is to proclaim—in what we say, in what we do, and, most importantly, in who we are—to proclaim good news to those who desperately need good news; to turn on a light for those sitting in darkness; to open the doors that imprison people in sin, sickness, and addiction; to give hope to those who know nothing but despair.

If the baptized Christ is a living reality for us, and if we're connected to his body, the Church, then we are indeed in possession of good news. And if we are in possession of good news, then our servant vocation is to make it known to others by any means possible, to extend God's justice, God's governance, wherever we go, to be living epiphanies, living manifestations, of Jesus, the baptized Christ. Amen.

Epiphany--6 January 2008

Matthew 2:1-12
Ephesians 3:1-12

Two weeks ago, I spoke of an experience that most people have at various times in their lives—an experience of a mysterious Presence, a Presence that, upon further reflection, is revealed to be God … “with us, God.” It was from St Matthew’s gospel that we heard about Joseph’s experience of the Divine Presence as he was called to serve as a surrogate father to the incarnate Son of God, and it is also from Matthew that we hear about a similar encounter between the LORD and a group of Persian (most likely Persian, at any rate, according to most scholars)—a group of Persian astrologers (there’s no concrete indication that there were three of them, nor is there any evidence that they were actually kings, though there’s nothing radically wrong with our traditional popular images of them)—we hear today from St Matthew’s gospel about these “Wise Men” or “Magi,” as they are often referred to, who felt an inexplicable invitation and urge to follow a strange and mysterious astral sign to an obscure village an hour or so (by camel, that is) from Jerusalem. But they didn’t really have a whole lot of solid material to go on, despite what we will sing about the symbolic significance of their gifts

We also feel “the presence,” but, like the Wise Men, we often feel like we have very little concrete to go on. Even if we come to a place where we are ready to recognize and name this presence as God, still “God” is such a large concept, an expansive and complex notion, that there are a great many ideas, many of them conflicting, about who God is and what God is like and what God expects of those of us who are “not-God.” It’s easy to feel like we’re in a game of “20 Questions”—Are you all-powerful? (Yes or No) Are you present everywhere? (Yes or No) Do you know everything, even before it happens? Do you love me? Would you get upset if I told a little white lie to my neighbor? etc. etc. etc.

One possible response to the mystery of God is to fall into despair: If God is unknowable, if God leaves so many unanswered questions, if it feels like God is absent, then what good is he? We like to think that God watches over us and protects us, but try telling that to the family of the Indianapolis woman who died, along with her three daughters, when their van slid into a pond during the ice storm the middle of last month. If some get spared but others don’t, then it’s nothing but a game of chance; it’s as if God didn’t really exist. What good is the “presence” that I feel if that Presence neither says anything nor does anything that I can see or hear or understand? I am trapped in my misery. There is nothing available to me but despair.

Another response is to fill in the blanks with information of our own making—as it were, creating God in our image, making God what we would like God to be. Some years ago I heard about a religion called Sheilaism. It had, at that time, precisely one adherent, and her name was—you guessed it—Sheila. Sheilaism was a designer religion worshiping a designer God. I’ll grant you, this is a rather extreme example. But it’s only extreme in the degree to which the logic is followed. Truth to tell, you don’t have to scratch the beliefs of even many conventional Christian churchgoers very deeply before you find an impulse to, if not make up a religious system from whole cloth, at least pick and choose various elements from the available options—according to taste, as it were. Left unchecked by any restraints of habit and societal approval, it leads inevitably to a virtually infinite numbers of variations on Sheilaism.

When the Wise Men finally reached Bethlehem, they saw the infant Jesus—the Word made flesh, the Messiah of God, the savior of the world—they saw Jesus with their own eyes. In the western branch of Christianity, of which we as Anglicans are heirs, this moment of seeing with their own eyes is the primary symbol—the “picture that says a thousand words”—of the Epiphany. But the reality of Epiphany is much larger than its symbol. In earlier versions of the Book of Common Prayer, the subtitle of this feast is “the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” The Magi represent all non-Jews, in other words, us! In that moment of face-to-face connection between these Persian star-gazers and a little Jewish baby boy, we see the key to our own redemption. For the first time, non-Jews are explicitly included in the promises of God. Through Christ, salvation is available not only to his own people, the Jews, but to all of us who are not born into the house of Israel.

Yet, there is more we can mine from this lode: “Epiphany” means, literally, to show, to demonstrate, to take that which is hidden and make it visible, to take that which is privately visible to the few and make it publicly visible to all. St Paul writes to the Ephesians about “the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit…” For us, the good news of Epiphany is that God is a mystery but not a secret. God is unknowable, but God has made himself known. Everything we need to know about God, God has told us—revealed, disclosed, manifested. Knowing who God is and what God is like and what God wants from us is not a game of 20 Questions.

Our observance of Epiphany also reminds us that we have no need to “design” God to our own specifications of what we think he should be like, what we would be like if we were God. Indeed, if we presume to do so, we are refusing the knowledge, the enlightenment, that God has graciously given us. We would be like the adopted child who, upon meeting her actual birth parents, and finding them not like she imagined, says, “Oh, no, you can’t possibly be my parents. My father is taller and darker, and my mother’s hair is curly, not straight.” She has the option of not having anything to do with her parents, but she doesn’t have any say-so over their appearance or personality or anything else about them. They are who they are. God is who God is. He has revealed himself to us, and we don’t have the option of sending him back to the drawing board.

Rather, with St Paul, we have the option of saying, “To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given…”—not found, not seized, but given--to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known…”—made known by God, that is, through the Church, not made up by any human mind or any human organization—“…[made known] to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.”

Our job—our job as the Church and our job as individual believers—is to ever go deeper into this mystery, to soak ourselves in what God has revealed, and to tease out the implications for each of our lives. The feast of the Epiphany comforts us with the knowledge that God is not aloof and distant, toying with us by creating guessing games and smiting us with thunder bolts if we get the answer wrong, and the feast of the Epiphany challenges us to humbly and gratefully receive and lay hold of that which God has revealed. The saving and life-giving truth about God that God has made available to us is simple and accessible so that any person can perceive it and make it his or her own. But it is also inexhaustible such that the greatest minds, the keenest intellects, among us are always called to mine fresh nuggets from its riches and to apply them in concrete and compelling ways to the lives of real women and men and children. The Lord has shown forth his glory: Come, let us adore him. Amen.