THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY

January 13, 2008

Isaiah 42:1-9

Acts 10:34-38

Matthew 3:13-17

Year A

The first Sunday after the Epiphany always places before us Jesus’ baptism. While we know that Jesus’ baptism was the inauguration of his ministry, what most people don’t realize is that the early church was very embarrassed by it. After all, why would Jesus need to be baptized?

Matthew is the only gospel writer who gives us the curious dialogue between Jesus and John prior to his baptism; John’s reluctance to baptize Jesus and Jesus’ saying “Let it be so for now”. Many New Testament scholars contend that Matthew uses this dialogue to address how troubling Jesus’ baptism was to his early followers.

Jesus’ baptism is a puzzlement to us as well. A party we might have expected, a thoroughly noisy demonstration perhaps, but not this. Jesus, standing knee deep in the water of the Jordan, the cold chill he felt not just from the water, but from his stepping into a mission and path set in motion by God’s unique entrance into the human condition.

Until this moment Jesus had lived, as far as we know, a rather inconspicuous life. What was it that triggered his actions? Jesus’ self-consciousness; his certainty of God’s will for him, did not come via something like a heavenly cell phone call. It was something that developed and deepened gradually. No doubt he had wrestled with it for a long time. He had wrestled with it alone in the hills, that Presence, that Voice within him. As Marcus Borg writes, “Jesus was not simply a person who believed strongly in God, but one who knew God.”

The gospel says a Voice came from heaven and in Hebrew “Voice” means “echo”. Heaven knows our lives are full of all sorts of voices echoing and calling us in all sorts of directions. Which voice do we listen to? Which voice do we give credit for being the truth?

Matthew’s focus is on Jesus’ intention, in deciding to come to John for baptism. A decision had to be made. A direction had to be chosen. It might have been otherwise. It was the same for Peter.

We are given a brief synopsis in Acts today of a seismic shift in thinking in the early post-resurrection period. The focus is upon Cornelius; someone the Jews called a “God-fearer”; a gentile drawn to Israel’s God. While some Jews believed gentiles were the scum of the earth other Jews gave them the benefit of the doubt. Still, you didn’t exactly take one to lunch. Who knew what they might do; put shellfish into your kosher stew or add milk to your meat perhaps.

Cornelius was the first to have a dream. In it he was told that his prayers and offerings had pleased God; and to send for Peter. Peter was staying about forty miles up the coast in Joppa; today a suburb of Tel Aviv.

The next day the aroma of food being prepared for lunch wound its way to Peter, who was having a bit of a dream himself. It was more like a nightmare really. In it the heavens opened and something like a large sheet was lowered to earth. Inside was a banquet of every kind of food forbidden to the Jew, from shrimp to pot-bellied pigs. The voice in the dream said “Kill and eat.” Peter said “No”, he would not be tempted to do what was forbidden. But the voice was unrelenting and said “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Not long after this the men sent by Cornelius were knocking on the door asking for Peter to come. Still the faithful Jew, Peter said he could not possibly go. But as the men turned to leave, wondering why their boss had sent them on a wild goose chase, Peter said “Wait”. So they stopped and turned around. Then Peter, no doubt swallowing hard, said “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So whoever it is who has sent for me, I will come.”

This is how it came to be that Peter stood in the doorway of the house of Cornelius and said “I understand that God shows no partiality.” Peter had just said something no Jew would dare to say. He had just blown open the doors of the church with a mighty wind; or shall we say the Holy Spirit blew them open through him that day.

There was hell to pay when Peter got back to Jerusalem. His fellow disciples wanted to know what on earth had possessed him in disobeying the law. Peter told them that it actually wasn’t anything on earth at all, but heaven that had possessed him. He said what God had begun God had begun – and he would not interfere with it. A pregnant hush fell over the room. The earth turned on its axis and heaven and earth came closer together – as God had planned all along. It might have been otherwise.

What about us? Do we wish God made waves in our lives, in the church, like that? Truth to tell, God does make waves like that, but more often than not we ignore them. We don’t welcome God’s interference with the status quo. We forget Jesus could have ignored God’s intrusion into his life as well, but he did not.

No doubt the time that Jesus went forth and stood knee deep before John in the Jordan was at the beginning of the dry season. But there was another ‘season’ going on inside him; a season that stirred the center of his being sending him into a season of passage. A rite of passage that sociologist Daniel Levinson speaks about in his work, “The Seasons of a Man’s Life”.

Levinson says the Dream that God places within us; the Dream of how God speaks to us, often begins as a vague “imagined possibility”. It is more than pure fantasy, but not yet a clearly thought out plan. If we give it room to grow it develops and takes on greater definition, winding its way into actuality in a person’s life. If not given the opportunity, the oxygen if you will, to do that, it may simply die. We all know people to whom this has happened, and because it can happen in individual lives it can happen to the church as well.

Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon maintains that the church of today is bereft of gospel-centered astonishment. He says we have lost our capacity to be surprised by the living God and we have lost our capacity to respond to the living God. We are in danger of losing the Dream because we refuse to be moved by the Dreamer.

At his baptism Jesus acted on the Dream; this deep connection with God at the very center of his being. So did Peter. So have countless others. Their actions took place on this earth, in the flesh and blood of real life; real life that Jesus was not ashamed to own.

This is how God spoke to Jesus and it is how God speaks to us. As Paula D’Arcy puts it, “God comes to you disguised as your own life”. Or as one Roman Catholic priest declares, “Reality…is the primary revelation place of God.”

After three generations of exile the children of Israel were finally enabled to return home. That is what we hear about in the first lesson today. They learned God willed for them things they had only ever dreamed about. They learned this because the God who loved them was the source of their dreams.

Reality, your life, my life, our life with God in the here and now, is the ground of our mysterious relationship with God and every beautiful thing that God speaks to us about; even those things whispered into our dreams. That is why we can never separate or exclude anyone or anything, especially any actions or revelations of God, under the guise of religion. The danger is it can always be otherwise, for the world is full of people who have allowed exactly that; shutting God’s astounding and mysterious ways out – to their own and others detriment.

God is always speaking to us, asking us to pay attention. And when that happens, I pray that each one of us might surrender our will, as did Jesus, entering our own Jordan, and saying, “Yes” to God and God’s will; for the church and for each individual life within in; all those whom God delights in and speaks to - in the here and the now.

AMEN

The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Edwardsville, Illinois