Sermon for the 7th of January - Feast of the Epiphany
Epiphany is a season of light and revelation, a season of searching, discovering, finding, and knowing. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, it’s when baptisms take place. We, in the Western tradition, often do this at Easter. And the emphasis is about dying and rising with Christ. Dying to our old or false selves and rising to our true selves. Which is why the font is understood as a tomb, with its themes of dying and rising. Great theology here.
The focus is different in the Eastern tradition. The font is viewed as the Divine Womb in which we are birthed into the mother church. Ambrose, the 2c church father said, ‘You cannot have God for your Father if you do not have the church for your mother’. We receive life through our mother, and a mother is one that nurtures and nourishes.
In the Orthodox tradition, babies are plunged fully naked under the water three times, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – it’s no wonder they re-emerge from the water screaming! They rise to become fully part of the church. I really dislike the phrase I sometimes hear: ‘children are the future of the church’. Not so with Orthodox theology – they are fully members from baptism. And they receive communion from baptism, often using a tiny spoon for the wine.
At baptism, we discover, like Jesus at his baptism, that we are God’s dearly beloved children. This is the voice we need to hear among other competing noises that fill our lives – voices that tell us we’re not good enough, that we’re failures, that we’re not holy enough, that we’re bad Christians. Or voices that praise the powerful, the successful, and the wealthy, things that our culture highly values. We need to develop ears to hear and be attentive what God really says about us. You are my precious child in whom I delight, with whom I am well pleased.
Like our sense of hearing, seeing is always selective. We make choices about the things we see. We also make choices about how we present ourselves to the world, and how we present ourselves is multi-layered and messy.
It takes both love and patience to sift through those layers and find what lies at the core of us. And there is great power in that sifting. Healing begins to happen to us when we are deeply seen, known, named, and accepted.
This is in contrast to one c.18 evangelist call Jonathan Edwards…. we are NOT (to quote him) ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’. What dreadful theology. No wonder people give up on Christianity if that’s what they think about God.
Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer and author and has written a book, entitled Just Mercy. He looks at the blight of mass incarceration in the United States. It’s something we have huge problems with here too of course.
He insists that “each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.” ‘Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done’. Each of us benefits from a second look, and a third, and a fourth. To offer that second look, a look that is deeper, kinder, and more penetrating, that is what’s called grace. It’s the gracious vision of Jesus, and it’s the vision we are called to practice in a world that judges and condemns too quickly.
Is there anything, after all, that feels lonelier than the experience of being unseen, misunderstood, and prematurely dismissed? And is there anything more life-giving than the experience of being lovingly seen for who we really are, deep down, beneath the fragile defences we project out of fear?
I love that quote by Paddington Bear: ‘if you look for the good in people, you will find it’.
Perhaps the challenge at the beginning of this New Year is to develop grace-filled eyes. To learn to see ourselves and to see others as Jesus sees them.
Today’s invitation is to leave our comfortable vantage points, and dare to believe that just maybe, we have been limited and wrong in our certainties about ourselves, each other, about God, and about the world.
To embrace our baptismal identity is to approach all of life with a grace-filled curiosity, to believe that we are holy mysteries to each other, worthy of further exploration. It’s to enter into the joy of being deeply seen and deeply known. And it’s to have the very best that lies hidden within us called out and called forth.
Reference:
Come and See, Debbie Thomas, Sunday January 14, 2018