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Reflecting on epiphanies
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, welcome to Commons. If we haven't met before, my name is Larissa, I'm on staff here as the youth pastor. A quick hello to all of my teens tuning in right now, I'll see you all in a couple of hours. In addition to working with our lovely youth group, I've also expanded my role the last six months fulfilling my internship as I enter the final year of a theology bachelor's. I'm so lucky to have been able to work and serve and commune with so many of you the last few years and more recently witnessed how this community has grown closer and also stretched across the country and even across the globe.
Speaker 2:Through though much of this internship has been spent over zoom, I look forward to all of the ways you will continue to creatively reimagine what community and relationships look like in COVID times. Now, Christmas has come and gone and we've all had to reimagine and reinterpret Christmas on a smaller scale. We've gathered with fewer people, we've celebrated over FaceTime or Zoom with family we haven't seen all year. We attended Christmas Eve services from our living rooms collectively we made do with what we have anticipating the birth of little baby Jesus and setting our sights on a 2021 horizon that leaves much to the imagination. It's been a big year to say the least but we've made it this far friends and I am so so proud of us all.
Speaker 2:So here we are, the last handful of days of 2020. You're so hard to describe. I'm going to try to do it in the next twenty five minutes or so. But first, let us pray. Loving God, we've waited and anticipated your arrival this season.
Speaker 2:We've prayed. We worshiped. We gathered with bated breath for the birth of the Messiah. You came in humbly and vulnerably, offering us grace and hope in surprising ways. This year, you've shown us in a myriad of ways that you are and have always been near to us.
Speaker 2:May we continue to see things the way that you do, that loving and considering one another is in itself the best way we can love and consider you. May this upcoming year be one we walk into with hope. Hope for your kingdom come. Hope for a kingdom of love offered to each one of us. Amen.
Speaker 2:On any given year, the days after Christmas are typically spent setting new resolutions and intentions. I'm sure we all did that back in 2019, right? And then we were shown that what we expect, what we anticipate is often wildly out of our control. Now the liturgical calendar can help to ground us with these end of year reflections. A cyclical consistent and predictable rhythm and surely we can all use a little bit of predictability and consistency, right?
Speaker 2:And moving out of Advent and Christmas tide, we anticipate the feast of Epiphany typically marked with the account of Jesus's baptism. The baptism of Jesus is a story lined with epiphanies and it's best understood in the light of the context from the chapters before it. So let's go back and start with the end. Oh, before Jesus's arrival on the scene, we find John the Baptist in the wilderness preaching of Jesus's impending arrival to the Judeans. John's role in the gospel is to prepare the way for the Messiah and John is taking his role very seriously.
Speaker 2:In Matthew's gospel, John is depicted as a scraggly man wearing a robe made of camel hair donning a leather belt feasting on honey and locusts in the wilderness. This description of John the Baptist is intentional. The camel hair and leather belt refer back to the prophet Elijah in the book of first Kings who sported a similar look as he prepared for the arrival of Elisha. And in fact, in Luke's gospel, this comparison is made outright. Luke says, John is coming in the spirit and the power of Elijah.
Speaker 2:These references are meant to establish John's authority and credibility through his own ministry and his relationship to Jesus. It's also important to note why exactly John is preaching in the wilderness. See the gospel John is sharing is controversial, it's subversive and it directly calls out the religious power structures of the first century and as much as John sets the path straight for Jesus, John calls out the current authorities in a bold unabashed boisterous way. John is baptizing Judeans left and right screaming for people to repent for the kingdom of heaven is near. There's this frantic energy to it all.
Speaker 2:This was set in 2020. This is a panic buying toilet paper and stockpiling non perishables part of the story. John however is about to be surprised. See John has taken his this Jewish tradition of bathing as a sign of a ceremonial cleansing and made it a symbol of repentance, a tangible way to wash the soul slate clean. In fact, John warns the Judeans that Christ is coming to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire or in other words Christ is coming to cleanse you with the with the spirit or judge your sins with fire.
Speaker 2:He admonishes the Pharisees and Sadducees telling them they have no idea what's about to hit them Christ himself is coming and they better repent before it's too late. With an authoritative voice John is proclaiming an eschatological end to things that judgment day is approaching and you don't want to be left unrepentant. The surprise John has in store is found in the first bit of dialogue with Jesus. We read in Matthew chapter three, Then Jesus came from Galilee to Jordan to be baptized by John but John tried to deter him saying, 'I need to be baptized by you and you come to me?' Jesus replied, 'Let it be so now, it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness. Then John consented.
Speaker 2:John is perplexed obviously, John was preparing for the end. John is anticipating Christ's ministry as a means to an end of the way things are but instead in typical Jesus fashion Jesus enters humbly not assuming the role of critic or judge but rather the role of a friend willing and wanting to walk beside his cousin. Christ comes alongside participating in the very sacrament of baptism that binds God and humanity But this isn't supposed to be how it ends, John thinks. Why are you being so chill? I can only assume he was thinking.
Speaker 2:John is so sure that the law warns of a God who will come down to separate the repentant from the sinners but maybe Jesus is starting to show John a new way forward, one rooted in solidarity even with those who haven't quite found their way yet. For Jesus, the purpose of this baptism isn't repentance. We all know Jesus is the one without sin. Instead, the purpose of this baptism is to fulfill all righteousness, which is pretty vague, I'll admit, but essentially Jesus is really driving home the significance of this moment. Jesus says, let it be so now and it seems to imply that this experience is the start of a new chapter.
Speaker 2:Things used to be one way but now things are going to look different. John may have thought that the only way to fulfill God's will was through individual repentance and Jesus seems to say that the way to repentance, the way towards God's plan for justice is through camaraderie, through collective humbling actions. This both surprises John by upending his expectations and invites John to a moment that will soften his heart. Now I'm not a big fan of surprises but I promise you this is one worth being a part of. So now let's move towards this mystery.
Speaker 2:We all experience epiphanies some big some small. I personally experienced them on a small scale I'll add through movies. I used to be ashamed about this but I've done some internal work and I think I'm ready to speak about it. I am the exact opposite of a movie buff. I have yet to and probably won't watch any Star Trek or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, any of it.
Speaker 2:I watched the Titanic and Legally Blonde basically on repeat and for the most part I'm okay with that but every once in a while I'll give in to the person who's like, what? You've never seen x? And then like thirty minutes into the movie I hear a quote that I've seen so many times and I finally got the joke. The cinematic sky is open up and I feel so relevant like I earned a pop culture badge of colloquialisms. Epiphany's man, they can be big and small, transformatives and at times fleeting but in this text John and Jesus and the Judeans have a much bigger epiphany than being in on the joke.
Speaker 2:So up to this point, we are introduced to John as sort of sociopolitical rebel and his initial understanding of what Jesus' ministry is set to bring. Then in comes Jesus in the span of a couple of sentences reveals to John, to the reader, to us what this upcoming baptism is really all about. But first, let's continue reading. As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water and at that moment heaven was opened and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, this is my son whom I love with him I am well pleased.' Now the very moment that this story hinges upon moves in a really quick narrative not much attention is paid to the actual baptism itself it simply says that Jesus is baptized and comes out of the water The attention is paid to what happens once Jesus makes it out of the water.
Speaker 2:The Greek word for and he saw is idu, a demonstrative particle that holds more weight than simply seeing or watching. It means to behold, to witness and observe and when paired with the Greek word kai right before it, it demonstrates that at the close of a narrative something new is being introduced. This word is used to get our attention for us to drop everything and pay notice to what's about to happen and what happens is the holy spirit manifested as a dove rippling the surface of the water and slowly revealing itself to Jesus, John and everyone witnessing the baptism that morning. This dove metaphor is intentional of course, it likely refers to the dove that signified deliverance for Noah in the book of Genesis. Noah routinely sends out a dove to let him know whether or not it was safe to emerge from the ark once God cleansed the earth with floods.
Speaker 2:The gentleness, the meekness and purity of the dove that visually represents the new righteous kingdom of God stands in stark contrast to John's initial expectations of a God aligned with the ones preaching urgent repentance and fire baptisms. Jesus takes the purpose of baptism from an individual act and turns us towards each other. The other thing Jesus does is he reminds us that sometimes the loudest voices who are preaching about judgment and division are not the voices that see the kingdom of God most clearly. Christ offers us this perspective that oftentimes the voices we need to listen to the most are the ones left to fend for themselves in the wilderness under the rule of an oppressive regime and now maybe John is experiencing something like an epiphany, a reckoning with how he thought the world was and how God is telling him it should be and that kind of epiphany, that kind of reckoning can be hard. The Eastern Church uses this passage to hinge the feast of Epiphany on for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2:There's these moments of illumination happening all around in these passages just as there are epiphanies happening all around us today. So what exactly was revealed in these short passages? What does beholding Christ the Holy Spirit and God as one mean for us today? If we learned anything this year it's that the way things are, the way some voices frame a world for us and tell us how things ought to be all of that is being re examined And that's the beauty with epiphanies. They simply refuse for things to be left as they are.
Speaker 2:They revel in blowing things wide open and revealing what's already been there, what's been hidden and invites us to walk towards something new. 2020 was definitely a year long epiphany for me personally and for the world as a whole thankfully. The last year we collectively engaged in epiphanies, we considered new voices to the present narrative, we worked towards tearing down the very walls that stood in place only to hoard power and undeserved authority. You witness countrywide protests stand in the gap towards meaningful and long overdue change individually we shed some light on things too like how sickness overruns a nation when it's not working towards a common good or how sickness can and loss can overrun our bodies stopping us in our very tracks but we've discovered new depths of our own personal resilience. 2020 was a year that reassured me that my lived experience as a black woman was no longer going to be silenced by the loudest voices in the room it would instead become one of them.
Speaker 2:The beauty about epiphany or revelation or light bulb moments is that they often have a way of quite simply revealing what has always been there and it does so in that way when you learn something new and you can't help but see it everywhere around you. For Jesus, a dove descends and a divine voice speaks but what God says is, this is my son whom I love in him I am well pleased. And remember this is before Jesus has done anything. Jesus is just loved and God is just love, always has been. Epiphanies can help us to see ourselves in new light but it also helps to see our neighbors and the beauty about these kinds of epiphanies in Matthew's gospel is it helps us to envision a world that God envisions too.
Speaker 2:He do or beholding calls our attention to what was previously unseen or underestimated and maybe that calls us to see how justice for all of God's creation happens in solidarity with those we didn't see before. So if epiphanies happen this year, what can the gospels tell us about where to go next? Well, the baptismal story ends but Jesus' work is just starting. Now Caitlin B Curtis in the intro to her book Native, a story about her journey towards finding herself and finding God writes this. In Heads Up, she uses the Potawatomi nation word Mamagosanan which translates to God or creator.
Speaker 2:Anyways, she writes, God the mystery, Mamagosanan walks our journey and lives our history and hopes our future just as we hope. We start at the beginning, we ask questions along the way, we arrive at ourselves, mystery is always there and then we start all over again. So let's imagine epiphany as a callback to something then a reimagination of where to go next. So let's finish with the beginning. A major part of the Christmas season is spent looking back on the year we've had in fact we must look back to know what has gotten us to this point because as much as we like to drag 2020 through the mud, 2021 won't look any different without making use of some of the epiphanies we've individually and collectively had this year.
Speaker 2:Jesus's baptism challenged everyone's previously held beliefs about who is welcomed in the kingdom of God and what it takes to even get there and comparatively the revelation of this year, the revelations of this year have challenged us in our beliefs of what makes a society flourish and hospitable for all. Moments of truth telling this year have challenged us to reimagine that the bottom line is a place where people existing on the bottom rung of the social ladder actually live. Revelatory moments have shown us that we are not simply entitled to a good life but we must work together to create one that we can all enjoy. Reality shattering moments have shown us that the least glamorous jobs and positions are actually the ones we depend on the most. So, what can we do this next year that would make God say, with you I am well pleased.
Speaker 2:Now don't let this be a burden, this is not a call to produce more, to become more, to consume more. Remember love is who God is and therefore it's who you are. But that realization can be what moves us to something as simple as reflecting on moments this last year that would have pleased God in finding God's grace and love in them and running with them. So this year, if you chose joy or finding delight in what you already have as a form of resistance, you had a God moment. If compassion has awakened you to the lived experience of a stranger this year, you had a God moment.
Speaker 2:And if you felt propelled into action on someone's behalf, you had a God moment. Take those moments and run with it this year. Let's take one more look back at the gospels. Jesus' baptism has come and gone establishing his messiahship and a new image of the kingdom is God of God is in our mind's eye. Christ's ministry is now beginning and the very next story is his wilderness experience a deeply formative and trying experience.
Speaker 2:An epiphany may not immediately proceed an easy and comfortable path epiphanies often proceeded with moments of formation of shutting off and taking on and this is what we face in the next year a collective moment of formation for the good in the face of what we've uncovered as destructive and unjust and evil at times but boy do I have hope and I've been saved by hope many times this year. Next year has tremendous capacities for hope. We uprooted the seeds that no longer nourished our world and its inhabitants and with hope now revealed to us, we can sow new ones that will bloom in a world God has always imagined for us. I want to finish off with this short excerpt from Oswald McCall's book, the Hand of God' that I've held on to so many times this year. He writes, Remember that while you are seeking, you are also being sought.
Speaker 2:You will be found, you will be led, you will enter in, look for that, expect it, expect to come to revelations of the Lord, expect shells to break in their season, expect boats to ride as the tide comes in, this is hope to desire and to expect let us pray God of enlightenment we thank you for your invitation to see more, to know more, to love more. We thank you for all the ways you've revealed yourself to us this year. It's been hard, it's been challenging, it has tested us, but you never leave us in this ambiguity. You keep inviting us to be guided by your light. Lord, please keep that light shining bright so that we may find you and be found by you this year.
Speaker 2:Amen.