Sermon Epiphany 1

1/12/20

(Isaiah 42:1-9; Ps. 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17)

            Some years ago, I was at a wedding at a Roman Catholic church, and just before the eucharist, the officiating priest announced to the congregation that all baptized Catholics could come forward and receive Holy Communion.  Not long after that, I was at a funeral at another Roman Catholic churh, and at the same point in the service, the priest said to the people, We believe this bread and wine are the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.  If you feel drawn to that understanding, you are welcome to join us at God’s Table.

            Now, I’m not saying that one is wrong and the other is right.  But which do you think better represents the Spirit of Christ? 

            And I don’t mean to beat up on Roman Catholics. Christian exclusivism can be found in every corner of the church. When I was in the ordination process, I was at a work session with a number of other candidates for the priesthood,  and  we were going over the baptismal covenant.   And at one point, one of the candidates started talking about that covenant as a means by which we distinguish ourselves from other people.  He was talking in a way that I thought smacked of a kind of exclusiveness, so, being a loudmouth, I said something about that.  And jabbing a finger toward the open prayer book in front of him, he answered, “We are exclusive!  We say, This is what we believe!”

             I didn’t go further with it – we weren’t there to argue – but I’ve thought many times since about what I might have said to him.  Probably it would have been something like, I think you’re confusing being exclusive with being specific.  Because what we say in the baptismal covenant – like a lot of what we do as members of the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement – is specific. But there’s a difference between saying, This is what we believe: if you don’t like it, take a hike; and saying, This is what we believe: if you have questions or confusions or disagreements, let’s talk: because we here have found this stuff to be life-giving.  And in that engagement with other people’s lives, there’s a very good chance as well that we can deepen our own understanding of just what it is that we believe: of the reality of God’s presence among us.  

            In fact, as people of faith, that’s part of our call: that’s what we are to spend our lives doing. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and great Christian writer, once described a theological discussion he was having with a Buddhist, and said he realized midway through the conversation, this man is being more catholic than I am.   

All of this is a function of the basic fact  that God is alive and at work in this world that we live in, and is doing new things, all the time.  And you could say that a lot of the work we do here in church on Sunday morning is for the purpose of opening our eyes to that truth. Exclusivism – insisting on our way – is one of the ways we shut our eyes, that we ignore God’s presence.     

We have a wonderful example of someone recognizing this problem and, by the grace of God, working through it, in today’s reading from the book of Acts.  The passage that we heard today is the conclusion of one of the greatest stories in the New Testament.  This story, which takes up a whole chapter in Acts, describes the turning point of the great debate in the early church, which was: is the good news of God in Christ intended solely for the Jewish people, or is it for Gentiles – the rest of the world – as well?   Peter was the leader of the first group, Paul was the leader of the second.  They, and their respective factions, had fought long and hard about this – and in the speech we heard today, Peter acknowledges that he’s been wrong, that – because of what’s just happened in his life – he’s come to understand things differently now.   

The story from Acts that precedes this speech is about the encounter between Peter and a Roman centurion named Cornelius.  Cornelius is a Gentile, but nonetheless, the Bible tells us that he, together with all his household (his family and servants), fears God. In the language of the Bible, the fear of God does not mean being scared of God, afraid of what God might do to you if you do something wrong.  It means rather to have a true sense of the unimaginable greatness and power of God: to live in the knowledge that God shows up in our lives not only in ways that we don’t expect, but in places we’re positive God could not possibly be. By means of this fear of God, Cornelius has a vision from an angel – a messenger from God – who tells him, God has heard your prayers; there’s a man called Peter, staying in a nearby town; send for him.  

Meanwhile, staying in this other town, Peter has himself had a vision: a vision of certain animals which Jews were forbidden to eat, under their dietary laws.  These are in the book of Leviticus: part of the Torah, according to Jewish tradition the laws given to Moses by God.  But during this vision Peter hears a voice saying, What God has made clean, you must not call profane.  So the vision is about God doing something new: breaking down boundaries which God had Godself created.  And if anyone could claim to have irrefutable evidence that God does new things, it was the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.

            So Cornelius and Peter meet at Cornelius’ home: Peter and his people, all Jews, and Cornelius and a crowd of his relatives and friends, all Gentiles.  It’s quite a scene: the first thing Peter does is remind the people everyone there that they all know it’s unlawful for a Jew to visit or associate with a Gentile.   

            But Peter’s standing there nonetheless. Because his vision has shown him that God may be leading him in a new direction, as a disciple of Christ: and – because he fears God – he’s going to trust God, and take the next step, not knowing what’s going to happen.  He asks Cornelius, Why have you sent for me?  It’s not hard to imagine the trembling energy that must have been in that room, the sense among all of them that they were on the threshold of a new world.

            Peter asks, Why have you sent for me; and Cornelius tells him of his vision of the angel, and what the angel told him; and then he  says, Now all of us are here in the presence of God to listen to all that the Lord has commanded you to say.

            And when Peter hears this, he sees the connection to his own vision of the animals, and the voice saying what God has made clean, you must not call profane.  Peter’s own faith is deepening, he is receiving a teaching from God, right there, as we heard him say in the first verse of today’s reading: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  

            And once Peter has absorbed this teaching – which he does right away, because he’s ready – he opens the door to Cornelius and his household, opens to them the door of the household of faith, because he now sees that God has already included them.  And we should not fail to note that Peter does this, opens this door, not by laying out a system of beliefs, or a code of behavior, that they now have to abide by; as we heard in the reading, he does it simply by telling them the story.  The story of Jesus Christ is the seed of the Holy Spirit, which grows in each of us in its own way: it’s between each of us and God.

            Today is the first Sunday in the season of Epiphany. Epiphany is a word that means a showing, a manifestation (the literal meaning is “light shining out of”.)   In Christian usage, the word “epiphany” is taken to mean an appearance of the presence of God, some way or other.  

            I think epiphanies happen all the time, in all our lives.  I think we probably miss almost all of them; because they occur in ways we don’t expect, or in places we’re sure God could not possibly be.  We miss them, in other words, because – in the biblical phrase – we don’t truly fear God.  We deny God’s unimaginable greatness.  We limit God – the very idea of which is absurd, of course; and I hope God at least gets a good laugh out of it.

This Epiphany season, let us pray that God open our eyes to all thse place, right in front of us, where love is being spread around, where peace is being made, where justice is being done; that we see God’s presence there, we see the light shining out of darkness; in order that we might the more truly spread God’s word, not only with our lips, but in our lives.  Thanks be to God.