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A weekly sermon podcast from Ojai, California. Grounded in scripture and open to the world, these reflections invite you to listen, wonder, and live the story.
Have you noticed that God rarely starts things in the centers of power?
All through scripture,
God’s most important work begins in unlikely places.
Revelation comes not from palaces or capitals,
but from wilderness, borderlands, and borrowed rooms.
If you want to see what God is up to,
you have to look where you wouldn’t normally look.
Isaiah tells us that the light of God will shine in
“Galilee of the nations” --
contested land on the border of empires,
far from the religious and political center.
It’s a way of saying: look there.
Look where maps are complicated,
where stories overlap, where belonging is never simple.
That is where God begins.
So when Jesus begins his ministry in that very region,
Matthew is not just quoting scripture;
he is showing us how revelation works.
The light doesn’t just brighten what we already know.
It widens the horizon.
It reveals a world larger than our loyalties and our fears.
And then --
because revelation in scripture is never for contemplation alone --
then Jesus calls.
“Follow me,” he says, and faith becomes movement.
Those who see the light walk into the light.
Throughout scripture this remains the pattern:
God speaks, shows, interrupts -- and then summons.
Abraham hears a promise and goes.
Moses sees a bush blaze and is sent.
Mary receives a message and bears God’s own life into the world.
Revelation is not private enlightenment. It is vocation.
Which means that when Jesus calls
Simon, Andrew, James, and John,
he is not simply recruiting; he is reconfiguring.
Nets, boats, and fathers are not just props for the story.
They are the elements by which these men knew their place in the world.
Nets told them who they were: fishermen.
Boats told them where they belonged: on this lake, in this economy.
Fathers told them whose future they would inherit
and whom they would honor.
But Jesus says, “Follow me,” and suddenly those coordinates
no longer define the edges of what is possible.
He does not ask them to abandon fishing
so much as to imagine fishing on a different scale:
“I will make you fish for people.”
Their skill, their craft, their strength is not discarded –
it is transposed.
Their lives are widened to participate in God’s future for the world.
Which brings us to Paul and the rambunctious church in Corinth.
Paul’s concern is not that they have the wrong teachers.
It is that their imaginations are too small for the Gospel they have received.
“I belong to Paul.” “I belong to Apollos.” “I belong to Cephas.”
These are not confessions of heresy; they are confessions of faction.
The light has widened the world, but the Corinthians have narrowed it again.
Paul does not scold them for caring about truth or rightly ordered worship.
He asks a question instead: “Has Christ been divided?”
It is not an argument; it is a lament.
As if to say: the horizon of the Kingdom is so much larger than this --
why live inside something smaller?
And this is where Epiphany reaches into our own moment.
Because we, too, live in a time
when the world is shrinking into factions and camps.
When trust is thin and suspicion is thick.
When the first instinct is not curiosity but sorting --
who is with me, who is against me, and who must be watched.
We are seeing that on national display once again
as Minneapolis erupted in grief and anger after an ICU nurse
was shot and killed by an ICE agent.
Within hours – minutes, actually -- the story fractured:
rival explanations, conflicting footage, competing moral conclusions.
And beneath it all, a familiar ache:
mistrust of institutions, mistrust of neighbors,
mistrust of any narrative other than our own.
These fractures are not only political; they are spiritual.
They narrow the horizon.
They tempt us to believe that the world can be cleanly divided
into the trustworthy and the suspect,
the innocent and the guilty,
the allies and the adversaries.
But the Gospel insists that every human being,
however entangled in sin or conflict, bears the image of God.
And it entrusts to the Church – which, is to say, us –
the work of reconciling that divine image
within a human reality that obscures it.
Which brings us back to those fractious Corinthians -- and to us.
We live in a culture where everything pushes us toward sides.
Political sides, ideological sides, cultural sides, spiritual sides --
all organized around the voices that resonate most with us.
We learn to speak of ourselves through our alignments:
who we agree with, who we oppose, who we follow, who we critique.
Beneath it runs the assumption that the whole world is
divided into teams and righteousness consists in joining the correct team.
And I will tell you: I love my team; and we are indeed righteous.
The causes that move us most deeply --
care for migrants, protection of the earth,
racial justice, the dignity of queer and trans people, economic fairness --
I believe from the core of my being are “living Gospel.”
They arise from compassion, and compassion arises from the Spirit.
They reflect the heart of God, who always bends toward the vulnerable.
But what Epiphany reveals is not that these commitments are misplaced,
but that they are not the end of the Christian life;
they are the doorway into it.
Justice trains our hearts for communion.
Advocacy teaches us to stand with others.
But Christ stretches us to stand with others who are not like us.
Causes gather comrades; the Kingdom makes neighbors.
Because disciples are not called into a caucus;
they are called into communion.
They are not formed into a party; they are formed into a people.
Their mission is not only to stand with those who suffer,
but to bear witness to a Kingdom
where enemies are reconciled and strangers become kin.
This communion does not begin in grand gestures or geopolitical solutions.
It begins in the small and ordinary practices
by which Christ teaches us to live with one another:
not writing people off;
seeking the good of those who frustrate us;
staying at the table when disagreement would send us away;
praying for those we would rather defeat;
sharing bread with those we would never have chosen.
So the Epiphany question is not
“What do we believe?” or “Whom do we support?”
but “Who are we becoming?”
And even more: “Who are we becoming together?”
Because you can have righteous causes without communion.
You can win the argument without forming a people.
You can shine a light on injustice
without learning to share bread with your opponents.
The Church – which is to say, us -- is called to a harder work:
to be a sign -- however imperfect --
of the reconciliation God intends for the world.
Christ is not divided.
The light that has dawned is for all nations, not for one faction.
The Kingdom that has come near is for enemies as well as friends.
Epiphany gives us a beginning:
light that widens the world, a voice that calls us by name,
a summons that refuses to leave us where we are.
That Epiphany light comes to the borderlands -- the margins -- first,
and from there it spreads.
And it invites us not to watch, but to follow:
to cross boundaries, to risk communion,
to refuse to divide the One who would not divide us.
Christ is not divided.
And he calls to each of us -- to all of us -- together:
“Follow me.”
Amen.