Epiphany Sermon for Jan 6, 2013

The Rev. Aron Kramer

Epiphany

January 6, 2013

The word 'epiphany' means 'showing' or 'shining forth.' It has to do of course, with the manifestation of God in human flesh, the revelation to the world of God’s love for all of us. It is, to put it simply, a tectonic worldview shift in our perspective of how God is at work in the world.

Think about it, this God of ours has acted out of the ordinary since the very beginning. For most cultures the deity that is at the center of their religious landscape tends to burst onto the scene, kind of like Thor and Loki from the movie Avengers, and Thor. This idea of our Gods, our deities exploding into our lives is one that we embrace quite fully to this day, yet is contrary to our own biblical understanding of how God is at work in our lives and in our world.

Even in our Hebrew Scriptures God never explodes on to the scene, God is always functioning behind the scenes. Ours is a God who chooses not to make God’s self fully visible to the very people chosen to be God’s children. Think about Moses and his vision of seeing only God’s backside, that is the closest humanity has ever come to actually and really seeing God.

God is always functioning in the lives of human beings, Abraham, Moses, David, the list is long, and of course includes the prophets as well. But at no point does God burst onto the scene, change the course of history and then leave. No, God subtly and gently works with the human race God has created to make changes and bring about justice in the world. As Martin Luther King Jr said, the Arc of the universe is long but bends towards justice.

Of course, the day we celebrate today, the arrival the Magi, the wise men, the kings, their arrival to the stable, this story is at the center of who we are and shows us once again that our God chooses not to work in the world in an ostentatious and explosive way. Our God chooses to work in the world through a little baby, a human, weak and mortal, just like all of us. This model, this way of being is different from all other understandings of theophany, and is probably the reason that so many people through the past two thousand years have called Christianity their home.

This has got me to thinking a lot about how we use Scripture, how we understand the Bible to be at the center of who we are as Christians, and so in my reading I looked for what theologians were thinking about revelation, epiphany, and scripture. And then I stumbled across this little nugget, “It is not possible to build the Church on the Bible, but rather it is necessary to place the Bible in the Church, in fact to place it on the altar.” Mind blown. The author of that quote is N.F.S. Grundtvig, a Danish Theological Educator. No one here knows who this is, but in his work to redefine Adult Education, he looked closely at the primacy of Scripture and particularly our sacraments, Baptism and Eucharist.

To put the Bible into the Church, rather than build the Church on the Bible is probably nothing too revolutionary, until you begin to think about our understanding of Sola Scriptura, Scripture Alone. Phyllis Tickle has said over and again that the final rung on the reform of our own current Church is the understanding of the authority of Scripture.

We often place the Bible in a context where even those of us claiming to be liberals try to establish it as some sort of unchanging, absolute and definitive understanding of a way to live. When in fact, this book, this library actually, has been given to us more as a tool, as a map, as a way to understanding our context, understanding who we are and how we are loved.

Douglas John Hall, one of my favorite theologians wrote, “There are very good reasons for the reformation’s sola Scriptura principle. But it is one thing to make the testimony of the original disciple communities of Israel and the church normative and something else to regard them as being absolute.” He goes on to talk about how our work of understanding God, the work of theology is not to imitate word for word or act for act the ministry and mission of the disciples, our work as Children of God is to explore the manner in which the disciples of Jesus and the great leaders of our Old Testament went about their own quest for meaning, their own struggle to understand the world they lived in and what they were called to accomplish by the Spirit.

In short, to make the journeys and words and acts of the Disciples absolutes that must be spoon fed into our theological gullets makes a mockery of our understanding of authority and who we are as Disciples of Christ. This story, the story of Epiphany is first and foremost a story about following stars and paying attention to dreams. When did following stars willy nilly and paying attention to our dreams ever land us in any kind of certainty about our futures and our own moral framework?

Our dreams, our journeys are vitally important to building the Church, and when we place the Bible in our Church, upon our altar, we see its ability, its desire to shine forth in our lives, to shine forth as our own Epiphany star, leading us deeper into the dreams we have, giving us the courage to share our hopes for the future.

Our everyday actions, our everyday humdrum, mundane life is vitally important to the God we know and love. Our lives, each minute detail is vitally important to the creation of our communal theology and way of life in God. There is a poem by Louis MacNiece, called “Fanfare for the Makers”, a portion of which goes:

A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not notice when we die,

Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

Today we will baptize Eden Jean Vinton, for her we are the cloud of witnesses, we are the stars to help shine upon her life and her journey in Christ. We are the ones who will bless her life and all that she does. We will notice for her the things that lend each moment words and wings.

We are stars, we are the stars meant to shine forth in the world, we are the baby born in a manger. We are the wise men, the kings, the magi bearing gifts. How, you may ask, it is in the blessing of our lives and the blessing of the lives of others that we become the Epiphany star, the Epiphany revelation, what we do matters, because what we do, no matter how small, changes the world.