1-13-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Isaiah.

Thus says the Lord, He who created you, O Jacob, He who formed you, O Israel, do not fear, for I have redeemed you.

I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.

When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

I gave Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you, because you are precious in my sight and honored, and I love you.

I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life.

Do not fear, for I am with you.

I will bring your offspring from the east and from the west I will gather you.

I will say to the north, give them up, and to the south, do not withhold.

Bring my sons from far away, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.

Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made, the word of the Lord.

Psalm twenty-nine, we will read responsibly by the half verse.

Ascribe to the Lord you gods.

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due the holy name.

The voice of the Lord is upon the waters.

The voice of the Lord is a powerful voice.

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedar trees.

He makes Lebanon skip like a calf.

The voice of the Lord splits the flames of fire.

The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness.

The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees rise.

And in the temple of the Lord, the Lord sits enthroned above the flood.

The Lord shall give strength to the chosen people.

The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit.

For as yet the Spirit had not come upon them.

They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Then Peter and John laid their hands upon them, and they received the Holy Spirit the word of the Lord.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke.

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming, I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came from heaven.

With you I am well pleased.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Well, welcome to the second week in the season of Epiphany.

And just a reminder, last week we celebrated Epiphany not as a consumer discovery about which product is going to be most helpful in cleaning or the best flavor of Dorito, but rather an epiphany is to use the education word, a change in our schema, the lens in which we see the world.

In general, epiphanies are therefore irreversible.

They're not small things.

Total ways of being are changed.

We celebrated that with the magi finding the Christ child, and of course, for the audience as well, it was thinking about magi, magicians, being included in God's family.

Today, we're invited to consider the epiphany of the Lord Himself.

And I and I do want us to think about that.

In general, we often think, aha, this is something us to learn about Jesus.

The answer is yes, but I also want you to track with me about how Jesus at his own baptism might have had an epiphany.

Now we know a couple of interesting things, and the substance of our faith tells us that Jesus was like us in every way, but without sin.

This is why I love the book of common prayer.

The definition of sin.

Sin is separation from God.

Now I want you to think about this with me because it's a little bit enigmatic.

We say in our faith that God is omnipresent, right?

That means everywhere all the time there is nowhere that God isn't.

So how could you ever be separate from God?

Is a state of sin actual or is a state of sin something we perceive that has no reality to itself?

If that question bothers you, good.

It bothers me.

The interesting thing is Jesus comes to be baptized.

He's like us, and I'm sorry about that, we're working on this.

Jesus comes to be baptized, and he comes to what John is doing, a baptism of repentance.

And maybe you're wondering, if Jesus is without sin, why does he need to repent?

And um I want us to consider that question.

And if you were here in Advent on Advent 3, the Rose Sunday with the with the red, with the rose-colored uh bits, we talked about joy and we talked about repentance specifically, and I just want to rewind that really briefly.

There's four kinds of repentance in the Bible, and we usually think repentance is when just saying I'm sorry.

Um in Hebrew, uh the first word, this is the word shoev, it means to change direction.

All of you repented when you turned into the parking lot today.

You changed trajectory in your vehicle, or if you came in here on foot, you also changed direction.

The second word is the word in Greek metanoia, meta like metaphysics, metadata.

It's a way, uh metaphysics, right, is a reality beyond the physical world.

So metanoia, noia means mind.

It really is just sort of having a way of seeing or interacting with the world that is above what you had before.

I mean, it's it's an epiphany, right?

Metanoia is having an epiphany.

The Latin word, you may say, Mike, the Bible's not written in Latin.

Well, thanks to Saint Jerome, it was for about 1500 years, 1200.

Um, the word in Latin for repent is the word poena.

That's where we get the word penance and hence the word repent.

Poena means making up for what you did that was wrong and feeling contrite about it.

So if I steal money from you, I repent when I give you your money back with interest and have actual sorrow over what I did to our relationship.

Does that make sense?

And the last one, uh, this is interestingly the other Hebrew word, it's the word nicham, and it means to have the substantial grief, to be caught up in a structure that alienates other people from God's real presence.

Maybe that only happens in experience, not in reality, but I think we all know what it's like to feel alienated from dignity.

And again, I think the easiest examples of these are things like the isms: ageism, sexism, heterosexism, racism.

If you've ever experienced one of those realities, you know what it's like to feel alienated from the dignity that God intends for you.

Interestingly enough, those isms are so big that the Apostle Paul calls them powers and principalities.

They are things larger than any individual can change.

They're these structures that no matter how much we don't appreciate, we find ourselves sort of wrapped up in.

Like when I went to Total Wine with my 17-year-old, and they thought I was his big brother trying to buy him some alcohol.

And they told him he had to leave the store as if that would fix the problem.

It was very, very strange.

I thought it was really sweet that I looked like I'm 18 and they had to look at my ID three times.

I didn't think it was sweet at all.

I was really mad.

And that's just an easy one.

Sorry.

I mean, the other ones are actually, frankly, degrading and isolating and terrible.

And there is very little any one of us can do.

I think actually, if you put all four of those ideas together, changing direction, having a new lens, I don't know which one happens first, to be honest.

Do you get a new lens and then change, or vice versa?

Making right what you did wrong, and frankly grieving the fact that it is really hard to write the principalities and the powers of our world.

I think that's exactly what repentance is biblically, all of those things.

And don't you see then, Jesus did in fact repent when he heard his cousin preaching in the Jordan.

The first 30 years of his life, Jesus was a day laborer or a carpenter, and then he went to the Jordan and he changed his job.

He became a rabbi.

He gathered a group of at least twelve folks around him.

You know, the first 30-ish years of Jesus' life, we don't hear him changing much of the religion of his day.

There's really not much noteworthy.

And then, particularly in Luke, Jesus comes out of the Jordan and all of a sudden he starts associating with and even touching dirty people, like Samaritans and women.

He's changed his orientation.

He has a new lens for seeing the world.

He doesn't just necessarily write what he does wrong.

He tries to go about writing what the world is getting wrong.

Don't you see?

And maybe it's because Jesus has this interesting epiphany when the water's over.

Sometimes it happens later.

That's the story you read in Acts.

Some people got the water and they got the spirit later.

Jesus gets the water and then he's there praying, and he has this compelling vision.

Heaven opens and there's a voice.

With him I'm well pleased.

Now I know what you're thinking.

Of course, like he is the son of God.

But I want you to consider.

There's this interesting thing the Pope does.

I don't know if you've seen it before.

The Pope makes this little hand signal.

You've seen this before, maybe?

This is not the peace sign.

This is one of those complicated theological gestures.

These three come together because God is triune, three distinct personalities in one.

There's five fingers for the five wounds of Christ, and this is the most important one, the two natures of Jesus.

Completely human, completely divine.

Now, as a young boy, I thought, you know, if Jesus is God and He's all powerful, then He knows everything all the time.

But that's not human, is it?

Usually when I know everything is when I know nothing.

I often do know everything, I'm going to warn you.

There's this interesting thing that happens in the person of Jesus, where this divine nature submits to the limits of humanity.

I mean, that's what our faith promises us.

So what if this is the time Jesus discovers?

He's 30 years old.

What if he discovers on this day what it really means to be beloved by God?

What if Jesus, like us, has to learn?

And what might he have learned?

Maybe you've heard Desmond Toothhu say this radical claim about God's standards.

They're low.

They're really low.

There is nothing you can do to make God love you more.

And there's nothing you can do to make God love you less.

What if Jesus heard those words from heaven for the first time and really listened and had an epiphany, and as a result realized it wasn't just that God loved him that way, God loved Samaritans and women, Pharisees and Sadducees, righteous and sinner.

I'm just inviting you to imagine this with me because sure enough, after this, the course of his life changes.

Now you know we have this shell up here, and a lot of churches use shells for baptism, and there weren't shells in the Jordan River.

I want you to know this.

And John the Baptist did not sprinkle people either.

It turns out Baptist is a Greek word that means dunk.

In the Bible, this is John the Dunker, not John the Sprinkler.

Why that?

Well, you know, when King James made the English translation in 1611, the King James Version, the church, as a fact had been sprinkling infants.

There's a reason you sprinkle an infant instead of, well, submerging them in water, and that is mortal danger.

The earliest Christians did not sprinkle infants.

For the earliest Christians, baptism by full immersion was for adults only, and it took at least a year.

More often than not, it took two years as a candidate for baptism to pass the strict scrutiny and be worthy of the right.

You may not know this, but all of that sort of changed with a philosopher-theologian named Saint Augustine.

St.

Augustine decided that baptism was the right by which God washed off original sin.

Augustine decided that there's something inherently wrong with human beings.

He made that up.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters did not believe that.

Jesus did not believe that.

I want you to know, did not.

Augustine decided we are born sinners and all of us will go to hell unless the waters of baptism wash that off and then we become acceptable to God.

Now, if you're a mom or a dad and you just had a baby who has a 50% likelihood of making it to the age of 12, you are unlikely to want to wait for that child to get baptized as an adult.

Do you see how this is going?

This is when we started sprinkling.

And we do it as quick as possible so that our children can escape that fate.

We don't do it for that reason anymore.

We don't.

But that's where it came from.

The shell came from another interesting journey.

Again, John didn't use shells in the Jordan River.

There are actually a few little ones, but they are so tiny.

How many of you went to the some of you went?

There's some shells, they're like this big.

I mean, you'd be struggling to get a drop of water out of that thing and drop it on Jesus' head.

No, the shell actually comes from the coast of Spain.

See, around the 500s, the biggest pilgrimage route there was is still one of the biggest ones today, Santiago de Compostelo, right?

It goes through the Pyrenees from France into Spain, the way of St.

James.

The pilgrim would come from all over Europe, even from the Mediterranean world, and walk this pilgrimage of up to 500 miles.

And when they got to the edge of Spain, they thought the world was flat, and there they were at the edge of the world, literally.

They had walked to the end of the world.

And they took a souvenir from the end of the world.

They grabbed a shell and they brought shells home.

And that was this emblem of spiritual significance of having gone to the end of their world.

And then they came back.

They brought them to their parish priests and said, I've got a shell from the end of the world.

We should do something with it.

And that's probably your shells.

Because really, isn't that what baptism is about?

Coming back from the end of the world with a new vision, a new hope, a new faith.

The other thing that's really lovely about the shell, and this isn't why we use it, if you've ever seen this, the birth of Venus, have you seen that painting?

Famous theologian named Athanasius said that God became a human being so that human beings could become God.

So it's really interesting, isn't it, to think that we're pearls in God's oyster.

But baptism is this moment in which we recognize God's beloved.

And I want you to think about this, because I think there's really something very beneficial about the fact that we baptize infants.

I don't think the epiphany is for them.

I think the epiphany is for everybody watching.

Which is why we do it as a group, don't you see?

It's very easy for me to see that babies are beloved children of God.

It gets harder around the age 10 or 12, depending on your baby.

And I think that's why we do it when it's easy and right.

And it's one of those beautiful things about being in a parish for 15, 25, 30 years and seeing the beloved child of God that you knew when they were an infant.

You made that affirmation.

We'll do all in our power to raise that child in faith and hope and love.

You see them grow up and become 10.

And you say, I remember you.

Hard to see now.

Let me just wipe the mirror a little bit.

I remember that day when we said, You are a pearl in God's oyster.

I remember that day.

Easier to remember when we're about 25.

Something magic happens.

I'm sorry about the sputtering.

Again, we're we're we're working on this.

Um I think that's what's really magic about this right, and I think the opportunity for us.

The epiphany that we might be invited into is to think, you know, golly, those people that are bringing me to the edge of my world, whether I'm related to them or I work with them or they're on TV or they're doing things politically that drive me nuts, those people who were bringing me to the edge of my world, are somehow pearls in God's oyster.

And that an interesting thought.

You know, the way that oysters make pearls is they take things that irritate them and they cover them with stuff.

And maybe that's what we're invited to do.

Cover them with stuff like grace and hope and faith.

Maybe that's one of the things we get invited to do as an epiphany and as a renewal of baptismal vows, is to say, God willing, I am going to cover you with grace, especially when you irritate me.

Maybe that's one of the things we get to do when we reaffirm the baptismal covenant is we get to say, Lord God, there are people bringing me to the end of a flat world and I'm about to fall off.

Exactly in that moment, I could use the Holy Spirit.

Spirit.

Could be breath, could be wind.

You know, the truth is baptism is not something, it is something we do once for all, but I want to tell you grace is renewable.

There are days in which I breathe like this all day because I'm living on the edge of the world.

And then there are other days.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Where for some reason a holy breath comes into me.

It's not normal, it's holy, it's special.

It brings me back from the edge.

See, if you know somebody who's an alcoholic or addicted to narcotics, let me tell you they have a shell in their sobriety every day.

Addiction takes you to the end of the world every day.

Only by God's grace and sobriety do you come back with a shell.

We do something really neat because I just, you know, I think this has become really, really important.

You know, we often say that baptism is like what washes your sin away, but please consider how we started.

If sin is this moment of alienation from God, it isn't just stuff we do wrong that alienates us from God.

If you're a parent or you've ever been one, you know what it is like to think, if I'd only done that in the second grade.

I had that chance, I could have gone to private school, and what if I'd just done that?

Oh, there was that time with the iPad, and I could have done this, and I just I blew it.

Those aren't even morally wrong decisions, they're opportunities.

You wonder what would have happened if you'd engaged.

I'm a parent.

I find myself alienated from God when I contemplate those things.

I'm also a child.

And I think, what if when my parents were so mad at me, what if I'd been cool instead of the way I was?

Those moments, those regrets, those grief moments alienate us from God's presence.

We get so caught up in them we can't see that God is there right with us.

That's what the scriptures say today.

When you go through the waters, I'll be with you.

Water.

We're so used to water being calm.

Where Jesus lived, water was a symbol of chaos and even evil.

If you've been to the desert, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The rainy season is two weeks.

Flash floods.

They're not called rivers, they're called wadis.

They will wash you away.

Most people at the time of Jesus had no idea how to swim.

And there is John in the middle of Hurricane Harvey shoving people under Clear Creek, which, by the way, rose 12 feet in my backyard.

God says, when you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

God does not say, if you pass through the waters.

God does not say you might pass through the waters.

God says, take my presence for granted because it is there.

We have that opportunity when we think about Jesus' epiphany, to think about, frankly, an invitation into our own, that Jesus is fully present in those chaotic waters that are parts of ourselves, our loved ones, and people we don't even know that drive us to the edge of the world.

And here's our chance to start with an epiphany this year, to think about covering those irritants with grace so that we, like them, can continue to be pearls in God's heavenly family.