Homily 2 Epiphany – St. Paul’s Monroe
Jan. 19, 2020
Opening
Last week you may have heard me say that one of the reasons I became an episcopalian was that this church had wine in a single chalice and it burned real candles. I actually associate that with a particular service, Feb. 2 or Candlemas. That used to be a commonly celebrated evening service that featured – drum-roll, candles.
I know that wasn’t the first time I had been in an Episcopal Church. My uncle was the organist for the Cathedral in Quincy, Illinois. My earliest memory from that time was that the priest spent the entire sermon explaining why the Episcopal flag was on a higher step than the American flag. I wasn’t impressed with that. Even as a 7-8 year old I had an intuition that the Gospel was about more than that.
But I remember from a later period the candles and the chalice. I thought, “Now that’s the real deal!” Light. Somehow real light as opposed to the artificial light of electric light bulbs.
It wasn’t a scientific thing or a reasoned thought. It was a gut thing. Being a light to the nations, as the prophet says this morning.
Collect
Light is a theme that is associated with the season of Epiphany. The collect for today begins with: Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world: …
The magi who began the season for us followed the light of a star to find the newborn child. And the season ends around the time of Candlemas, remembering the presentation of Jesus in the temple, 40 days after his birth.
Light serves as a beacon to light the way and to protect us from danger. Lighthouses.
Light illuminates the darkness both literally and physically as well as figuratively. Light bulbs are a shorthand sign for the illumination of a new idea, a piece of knowledge newly arrived at.
One view of the season of Epiphany is as a gradually unfolding manifestation of the Messiah to the world. From an obscure birth in a minor land of Mesopotamia, the world came to know the Messiah. It is an awesome transition. Epiphany is a time for noting particularly that unfolding and revealing.
The light of the world.
Readings
In today’s readings we do not hear that phrase first in the gospel, however, but from an author of many centuries before that time. The prophet Isaiah speaks God’s words to the people of Israel.
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
The prophet speaks to Israel as if the people were a single person, the “servant of the Lord.” You my people, God says, are my intimate friends and family. I have known you from before all time. I have watched you, says God to his people, I have watched you fall on your face, become a laughing stock to the nations. Yes, I’ve seen it all. I’ve witnessed your demise. But, I tell you, it’s not the end of the story.
Then God speaks with such poignance and rhetorical flourish. I love it when as so often is the case in scripture, that God’s voice is so filled with passion.
God says through the prophet, "just in case you let my love for you go to your head, I’m not going to just save you from the calamity you’ve got yourself into. No, though that may seem to you like an all but impossible thing, for me – for me – that is just a trifling thing.
No, instead and even bigger, vastly bigger, I am going to make you, the people who are my chosen, to be a light to the world. You will be the lighthouse to show the way for all the peoples of the earth that there is but one God.
The message we hear from Isaiah, coming from the time of the destruction of Israel by the Babylonians, is a landmark, totally outlandishly awesome, message to the world. No longer are the nations to imagine that there is one god for this people and another for that people. The message to the world is that there is only one God. For all people.
I think of the old Jewish story about Adam and Eve from the opening chapters of Genesis. The rabbi explains to the student why it is that God made at the very beginning just one human being. It is, he says, so that never will one person be able to say to another that “My father is better than your father.” We all, ultimately, have the same, one, father.
How quaint:
How is it that having heard the message that we are all one – at least 2,500 years ago – that we still don’t get it?
This Sunday we are in the midst of a week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It was originally proposed more than 100 years ago by a group of Christians who were inspired with an ecumenical vision of the unity of all Christians – even though we see everywhere the division.
It occurs each year between The Confession of St. Peter and The Conversion of St. Paul, the two mighty pillars of the early church, two traditions, often seeing themselves as at odds with one another. Such ecumenical work was a passionate vision for many earlier in the last century.
That vision didn’t last. Isaiah’s vision didn’t last. We still don’t get it. Today we live in a world of what some call tribalism, a time for standing alongside and defending one’s own particular traditions.
The message from God wasn’t “this group has my blessing and I hope that everybody will be just like them.” God’s message to us was, “I’m going to turn a light on and if you have eyes to see you will recognize in the new light that all people are my people.”
The saints we celebrate this week in our calendar span an amazing diversity – just within the Christian tradition. There is a Bishop from the 3rd century, martyrs from the 4th century, a Bishop from Britain in the 11th century, the author of the hymn “O little town of Bethlehem”, and the first woman priest ordained in the Anglican Communion, almost 80 years ago in Hong Kong.
Our calendar reminds us of the great expanse of saints who have lit the way for us – in the Christian tradition. But that’s not what the prophet was saying. He said, a light for all people – a light to the nations of the world. It’s too small a thing just to be a beacon of the unity of all Christians under one God. You shall be a light to all nations, he said. It’s a light to all people under one God, not a light to show the way for all people to become one of the nations.
This Epiphany light is a big deal.
The passionate call to unity
The world we live in is so divided. Our families, our neighborhoods, our cities, our nation, our world – they are divided into tribes, into us and them.
The words we hear today – and really throughout scripture – are so passionate when they tell us, “You want your own divisions to be healed? Your own local problems to be solved? That’s such a small thing. Wait til you see the big thing.”
We hear today from Paul’s opening of his letter to the Corinthians. First Corinthians. Like all of his letters – indeed like all letters in the ancient world – Paul opens with praise for his intended audience. He praises the saints in Corinth. He says he gives thanks to God all the time for the grace that has been shone through them. It sounds so pleasant – as far as we go in the reading today.
For the church in Corinth, you may remember, was fraught with deep and personal divisions. That’s why Paul’s writing the letter. His opening words of praise are a hook for his audience. They let themselves get hooked so that he can reel them in – to borrow a fishing metaphor.
Paul’s praise is filled with irony because he uses it as a hook to ask them, "What are you doing you Corinthians? You’re not bearing witness to the light of the world that binds us together. You’re filled with divisions. The light you’re shining intends to divide one faction from another.
And that’s not the gospel Paul has preached.
Closing
I am going out on a limb right now and I’m about to say something that some may find objectionable. But I believe it to be the truth in the depth of my being.
“There is only One God and God is God of all people, regardless of color, language, tradition, belief or any other thing that we can think of to divide us from one another.”
There is not a God for us and a god for them. There is one God for one people, the people of the earth. The message was proclaimed 2,500 years ago. It was true then. It’s true today. That we don’t get it or believe it or act on it doesn’t change its truth.
We fall short of being that light as the people fell short 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, and 2,500 years ago. That just serves to highlight our reliance on the grace which Paul preached. The grace that binds. The grace that heals. The grace that forgives. Amazing grace.
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