Episcopal Church of the Messiah

Worship Service Sermons

Epiphany 3A,  January 27, 2008

 The Reverend Doctor Ellen R. Hill

Epiphany: A Call to Manifest Christ to the World

We’re in the midst of the Epiphany season, that season of the church year which stretches from Christmas until Ash Wednesday. In one sense Epiphany is the festival of dreamers: of people who hear voices and see visions, of people who follow stars and whose intuitive way of knowing often earns them the label naive or childlike.

In Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera Amahl and the Night Visitors Amahl at one point turns to his mother and says, "Oh Mother, come and see! There’s never been such a sky! Damp clouds have shined it and soft clouds have swept it as if to make ready for a king’s ball and hanging over our roof is a star as large as a window and the star has a tail and it moves across the sky like a chariot on fire!" And his mother wearily responds, "Oh Amahl, when are you going to stop telling lies? All day long you wander around in a dream and here we are with nothing to eat, not a stick of wood for the fire and all you do is worry your mother with fairy tales!"

And who but imaginative, naive, childlike persons would go in search of a child who would build a kingdom on love alone. A child who would become a man whose pierced hand would never hold a scepter, whose hallowed head would only wear a crown of thorns and whose kingdom would belong to the weak, the powerless and the oppressed. It’s precisely that sort of visionary quest which is at the heart of the mystery of the Epiphany season. That’s why we began this season of the church year by remembering the journey of those three wise pilgrims who were led by a star through deserts and hazardous unmapped wilds in the hope of finding that longed for ruler of heaven and earth whose coming had been predicted for hundreds of years by prophets and seers of many different religions.

But all of that notwithstanding, it’s still principally God’s story that we tell during Epiphany because Epiphany represents the manifestation of the showing forth of Christ to the world. And because of that fact, Epiphany touches your story and my story in a way that only Easter equals. That’s also probably the reason why it was the second greatest festival of the church year during the first few centuries of Christian witness. For the reality is, if we consider ourselves to be Christians, then we are also pilgrims. Pilgrims who are searching for holiness and justice and righteousness. And in that sense, we’re really no different from those three wise men whose naive childlike faith enabled them to keep looking for God’s kingdom. The incredible thing is that they actually found it! And they didn’t find it by reading books or by listening to people in positions of authority like kings and rulers but simply by obeying the foolish wisdom of their imaginations. They found it by acting as if their dreams were reality. They found it by paying no attention to the way things really were. And most of all they found it by being willing to risk making a long and dangerous journey in search of an impossible dream.

What they did was to let their intuition overpower their intellect. They allowed their imagination to overcome their reason. I’m sure they were considered ridiculous by their families and friends.

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And I suspect that’s what Menotti wanted us to see in the figure of Amahl. For that’s always the way it will be for anyone who has the courage to follow the longings of her heart and perhaps even more importantly to act on his dream. But that’s so hard to do in our enlightened and highly technological age. Most of us prefer to live with certainty. We have trouble accepting and coping with chaos and surprise. You and I just don’t like dealing with things which aren’t predictable or expected. I think that’s why we find it almost impossible to give our lives to anything that we can’t be sure of. We’ve been acculturated to focus on the practical and the things which are a necessity in our everyday affairs. That’s why it seems so ridiculous, even frivolous to place our confidence in the inexplicable much less to surrender our lives to something that we can’t see or to live for some impossible dream. So we dismiss that longing within us by saying "Oh that’s impossible or foolish or impractical or irresponsible."

And I really think that’s why we find it difficult to express our faith. Why it sticks in our throats when we try to say "Sure I’m born again!" For isn’t that really what our baptism was all about? I think that’s why it’s so hard for us to acknowledge out loud to someone else the lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives. And because of our cowardice and our reluctance you and I, along with most of the rest of liberal Protestantism, have allowed the radical religious right and the fundamentalists to run off with Christianity and to claim Jesus and the Bible as their exclusive property. And because they are the ones who do stand tall and speak about their faith, they are the principal interpreters of the Christian faith to the other 75% of the world’s population who aren’t Christians. That’s why most of our non-Christian brothers and sisters assume that the things the conservative Christians say is really what Christianity is all about.

Since we Episcopalians are educated and thoughtful and relatively non-emotional about our faith it’s not so surprising that many of us are too embarrassed to admit that Jesus is our Savior or that we might be interested in learning a lot more about what the Bible actually says and how it undergirds our faith much less to admit that we really believe in the promise of salvation and the hope of eternal life. I think we’re reluctant to admit those things because we’re afraid people will think that we also support that rigid and judgmental exclusivity that so much of the non Christian world has heard the radical religious right express so vigorously. So by our silence and our unwillingness to speak out about the things that Jesus really taught or to try to explain why it is that you and I struggle to follow his teachings, you and I have inadvertently allowed the gospel to be twisted. And more tragically, we’ve allowed it to be taken out of its socio-economic context and used to justify the perceptions of people who are more concerned with judging their fellow humans than with loving them which is ironically the precise reversal of what Jesus actually preached.

Christians are commanded to love their neighbors even their enemies and to judge no one! Judgement is to be left to God. But as you and I have listened to the shrill and strident voices of our fundamentalist Christian sisters and brothers how many of us have had the courage to speak up and disagree with them publically by being evangelists in our own right. And that’s what the Epiphany season challenges us to do. It challenges us to have the courage to reclaim Jesus and the Bible from the fundamentalists. It challenges us to remember that as Christians we’ve been admonished not to privatize our faith. Instead we’ve been called to be evangelists. To work

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actively to bring others into our community so that they can join with us in working for that kingdom of justice and righteousness and peace and love. For it rests on your shoulders and my shoulders to make sure that the Christ which is manifested to the world through the actions of his followers is in fact the true Christ who preached the Good News of inclusivity and unconditional love.

And the Epiphany season, that time of the church years which begins with the celebration of a journey, invites us to listen for the voice of God, both as individuals and as a community of faith. It implores us not to dismiss things which we know would be wonderful, things which we know would carry on Christ’s work, simply because they seem impossible or unreasonable or impractical. That’s what the Vestry is spending this week-end doing. Dreaming about our future as a community of faith. For if you and I are going to make Christ manifest in the world through our lives, then we can’t give in the "Oh that will never happen!" or "I couldn’t ever do that. It’s not my thing!" or "We could never do anything that grand!"

We began this season with readings that described Jesus’ own baptism and call to ministry. And what this season seeks to have each of us accept is the fact that Jesus’ call to ministry is in fact the same as our own call to ministry. God has made us a new people through our baptism and has called us to build a new wold by living in this world in ways that reveal to others the lessons Jesus taught. And there isn’t any time in the year when the implications of the Baptismal Covenant become more clear. Even if we were baptized as infants and argue that we weren’t responsible you and I reaffirm that Baptismal Covenant every time we witness a baptism. For when we join in saying that Baptismal Covenant we say that we promise to continue tin the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers. And we promise to persevere in resisting evil and whenever we fall into sin to repent and return to the Lord. And most importantly, we promise to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ as we seek to serve Christ in all persons by loving our neighbors as ourselves and by striving for justice and peace among all people and respecting the dignity of every human being.

Epiphany is the season to ask ourselves how well we’re doing in terms of those promises. But even more importantly it’s the time to recommit ourselves once again to the ministry of evangelism. Being an evangelist means inviting people to join us as we worship so that they can hear the story of why we work both individually and as a community to manifest the Gospel that Jesus preached. In other words, to understand why we try to live as we do. How you and I actually try to be sacraments of the Christ. Individual outward and visible manifestations of God’s spiritual truths.

Too many people think that the world is going to be converted through sermons and that simply isn’t true and it never has been. Because it’s only through our actions that we can ever convert people and bring them to Christ. Sermons may help them understand the reason or the motivation for our actions but what you and I must always remember is that the WORD of God doesn’t refer to the words we find in the Bible. It means the activity of God.. That’s the reason why social action and evangelism aren’t two different ministries of the church. And the Epiphany season makes that clear.

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There’s only one ministry which unites God’s story and our human story. It’s quite simply the way in which you and live our lives. We’re the only example of Christian living the world has. There’s nothing else but our lives that can offer people an experience of Christ’s truth! For as Sam Portaro observed "God is with us in very ordinary ways. In the midst and the substance of our ordinariness. There is the scandal. For faith in God’s ordinariness means an end to our distinctions and an end to our divisions. It means that all the world is God’s and everything and everyone is holy. That faith is rooted in our finitude. That love is the substance of our living. That hope is the very work of our hands and that ministry is every moment of our lives." Amen