4th-sunday-of-epiphany-winnsboro

Epiphany 4 02/04/2019

Homily: St. John’s, Winnsboro

Opening

When my brother was in college in Santa Fe, he had a teacher who was introducing the class to music. He gave them a cassette tape of a piece of music that he had bought in Germany. He said it was unavailable in this country at the time. The teacher described the tape as the most beautiful piece of music ever written.
When my brother played it I agreed with him. I even tried a few years later to get a copy of the music in order to learn to play it on the piano. Then I began to discover and later I heard over and over again the piece of music that at one time was unavailable in this country was the famous and sometimes infamous Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. Now of course that piece of music can be found virtually anywhere and heard from department stores to church to commercials. It is beautiful, but it is so familiar, so often heard, that it is exceedingly difficult to hear it as if with new ears.
I still like the music. But I liked it far more when it was unknown in this country. When it was new. When one could listen to it fresh, with new ears.
I would like to be able to listen to the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians with those kind of ears. To read the words as Paul originally wrote them with their power and their beauty. Their Simplicity even.
What the text has become is almost like a cliché. What some married couples shy away from for their wedding because one hears it at practically every wedding. As if hearing the words was all that was required of us to put these words into action.
I think we need to hear it with new ears, a new heart, … hear it with God’s ears even.
It’s about love. Not the kind of love we’re familiar with, but the kind that binds us together instead of pulling us apart. The kind that makes us all one family, not us and them.

Jeremiah:

We have in today’s readings a running theme about hearing words in contrast to hearing the word of God. All too often our ears are tuned to everyday ordinary words when God is trying to get our attention.
Jeremiah had in mind simple, human, words – the words of a mere boy – as he the word of God speaking to him.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” … he was just a boy being asked to do a man’s job … “I don’t know how to speak” … but the Lord touched him and put God’s words into his mouth, leaving his boys words behind.
Note that this is what a prophet is – not a predicter or soothsayer, but one who speaks with the authority and Clarity of God’s own words.
When God speaks, the words are powerful. Beyond imagining. They have the power to pluck and to tear down. They have the power to build and to plant as well as to destroy and kill what we have tried to construct without God’s help.

Today’s passage from Luke

Today’s Gospel passage from Luke picks up where we left off last week.
Jesus was speaking from the bema (the podium or platform in a synagogue from which the Torah and Prophets are read.). He has spoken with power and the authority of God, but the people have only heard the words of the hometown boy. Just like Jeremiah it was a boy’s words that they heard, not the words of God.
Jesus is rejected by the home crowd. Jesus almost mocks them as he says in response: “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
Jesus (and prophets) sent to the obscure, not the obvious. … Elijah, Elisha … That’s the point of Jesus’ references to the book of Kings. The difficulty of the hometown crowd hearing the word of God over the common words of local folks is often too hard to overcome. so Elijah and Elisha had to go elsewhere, to the unexpected, really to the least expected.[1]
This theme for the day is a fundamental one for anyone who would seek to listen to God, to follow Christ, to seek to be faithful to the one, true God.

Aren’t we all representatives of the hometown crowd?

I know I am. From a very early age I preferred comfortable surroundings to the unfamiliar. Even to this day, after lots of practice overcoming my preference for the familiar, I still find it difficult to go into a group of people I don’t know.
People like me practice ways to protect us from the unfamiliar. It is helpful, e.g., to be vested in special clothes and standing up here like I am – the one in charge. Of course, I have been to St. John’s often enough that the people and the place are in fact familiar by now.
But how often, I wonder, do we keep ourselves from encountering the Lord because we push the strange and unfamiliar away? Jeremiah knows the situation. Paul would know what we were talking about if he had seen how his letter to the Corinthians had been turned into a Hallmark card.

Listen again, with new ears.

That is I believe what the prophets of old, what Jesus himself, and what teachers and holy men and women have said down through the ages. Let go of fear. Let go of narrow expectations.

Why perhaps God is even coming to South Carolina?

It’s highly likely, I believe, that if he were here he wouldn’t look anything like we expect and might even look like what we despise. ** Of course, I’m being ironic. God was in South Carolina long before any of us arrived and will be here after we’re all gone.** But I wonder how often we have missed him?
In one of the prayer books I use every night, once a month the following song appears:
When I look at the blood all I see is love, love, love. When I stop at the cross I can see the love of God.
But I can’t see competition. I can’t see hierarchy. I can’t see pride or prejudice or the abuse of authority. I can’t see lust for power. I can’t see manipulation. I can’t see rage or anger or selfish ambition.
I can’t see unforgiveness. I can’t see hate or envy. I can’t see stupid fighting or bitterness, or jealousy. I can’t see empire building. I can’t see self-importance. I can’t see back-stabbing or vanity or arrogance.
I see surrender, sacrifice, salvation, humility, righteousness, faithfulness, grace, forgiveness, love! Love … love…
When I stop! … at the cross I can see the love of God.
Godfrey Birtill

Closing

To see the love of God which is around us all the time, hidden in plain sight. That’s the call of scripture today as I hear it. Learn to expect the unexpected. Find grace in the graceless. Ask forgiveness of the unforgivable. Smile at the beauty that belies the common definitions of beauty.
Love the unlovable.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Appendix

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany Color: Green Assigned Readings Lesson 1: Jeremiah 1:4–10 Psalm: 71:1–6 Lesson 2: 1 Corinthians 13:1–13 Gospel: Luke 4:21–30
  • Yesterday was Presentation (Candlemas)
  • Lectionary

  1. https://www.gotquestions.org/Elijah-widow.html  ↩

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