Sermon on The Second Sunday of Epiphany - Fr Sam Rossiter

Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. May it be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Please do be seated. Well, it may feel like the festivities are long gone and over, but believe it or not, we are still in epiphany season. It's not quite time to pack away your cribscene yet.

This is still the season in which God shows us who he is through stars and magi, the waters of baptism and the wine of new creation. Epiphany is the season which promises that whoever we are, if we ask to know God, he will reveal himself to us. As encouraging as this promise is, it also confronts us with a question.

When God reveals himself, will we be willing to see what he shows us? Because very often what we want from God isn't quite a revelation, but an explanation. Explanations are comforting because even if they're complicated, we trust that we will eventually get our heads around them. They encompass the thing we want to know and they leave nothing unknown.

Revelation, by contrast, gives us what we need rather than what we want. No less, but certainly no more. Revelation is a gift, not a demand, and it always leaves room for questions and for mystery.

Yet because God is creator, not created, because he stands outside of time and space, not within it, revelation is the only way we can know God. We won't reach our way to explaining God because he is more than our minds can hold by a factor of infinity. All we can do is ask him to reveal of himself what we need to know and trust our questions to the eternity he has promised us.

For the longest time, this frustrated me about faith more than anything else. As a theological student, even as an ordinant, I was determined that if I just read enough, if I studied enough, then I could explain the Christian faith. The idea of mystery, whenever it was posed to me, felt like a cop-out, especially when faced with the difficult questions of life, questions of suffering, or unanswered prayer, or the existence of sin.

But other than the sheer unknowability of God, as if this wasn't problem enough, I eventually discovered another challenge, another challenging truth in the quest for explanation. Proper theology isn't found in books, it exists amongst people. John's gospel explains this with a simple affirmation, the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

God is not a theory, he is three persons, and his revelation is not a book but a life, a life lived not amongst the educated or the powerful. Jesus, the word of God, become human being, chose to live amongst labourers, prostitutes, peasants, tax collectors. He made himself known, not through abstract arguments, and there was plenty of them at the time, but through presence, through touch, through conflict and love.

So, if we want to ask who God is, and there is no greater question at Epiphany than that, then we need to be prepared to get our hands dirty. And there's nowhere that our hands get dirtier than at the cross. So, if we want to embrace the fullest revelation of God's nature, that's where we need to begin.

The cross is the moment when God showed us who he really is, and who we really are, without flinching from either truth. The cross is the Epiphany. In our gospel reading, as Saint John the Baptist saw Jesus, he proclaimed, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

By so proclaiming, he was reaching for a title big enough to hold the truth of the revelation that he instinctively knew Jesus had come to bring. Most directly, the Lamb of God, as a title, draws on the memory of the Passover lamb, the lamb sacrificed by the Hebrew families, whose blood marked the doorposts during the final plague which released them from slaves in Egypt, saved their firstborn from the angel of death. This sacrifice, the sacrifice of a lamb, the spilling of blood, opened the way for God's people from slavery into freedom.

The title also evoked prophecy, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 verse 7 says, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. Isaiah 53 is called the Song of the Suffering Servant.

Isaiah 53:7

It's one of the greatest messianic prophecies. Saint John, whose entire ministry had been calling out the ways that God's people had fallen short of his goodness, saw that his ministry was at last fulfilled as Jesus walked by to begin his work. And so he named Jesus, he named Jesus's ministry Lamb of God, thus appealing to the past sacrifice of the Passover, the future prophecy of Isaiah.

In a single title, Saint John proclaimed that Jesus would bring together past and future and they would meet at the cross. He was saying that salvation, that Jesus's ministry would come to bring, would be the sacrifice of God. The cross, the place of sacrifice, would be the place of salvation.

It would be the place where the brokenness of humanity manifested itself most fully and encountered God's love as its response. And so we see it to be true in the passion narratives. Teachers who believed they knew God looked him in the face and spat, screamed insults, threw punches because he taught what they could not bear to learn.

At the cross, Jesus met the pride of human sin, which insists that it knows better than God. Crowds who had days before shouted, Hosanna, save us, lined the streets to watch Jesus's broken body dragged to death. At the cross, Jesus met the duplicity of human brokenness.

Soldiers beat and tortured an innocent man simply because it was their job. At the cross, Jesus met the antipathy of humanity, separated from grace. One crucified man hurled insults at Jesus out of pain and bitterness.

Another quietly admitted his guilt and whispered, remember me when you come into your kingdom. At the cross, Jesus met the pain and shame of human beings who know they've made a mistake and can't find a way out of it. To understand what was revealed at the cross, we need to understand that God doesn't merely love.

God is love. From all eternity, God exists as relationship, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One life, one will, one communion of self-giving love.

Creation itself flows out of that love. We exist not because God needs us, but because love longs for us. Love longs to share itself with us.

And that means that sin, the choice to act apart from God's love, is the destruction of relationship. It is a turning away from love, insisting on independence, on control, on life apart from God. Our reading from Isaiah names this reality with uncomfortable clarity.

The prophet speaks to a people who claim God's name, but refuse to listen to God's voice. A prophet convinced they always know what is right, resistant to being shown the truth about themselves. But elsewhere, Isaiah also reminds us that our salvation will come as a light to the nations.

Salvation will come as revelation, first of our brokenness, and then when we understand our need for grace, then of God's response of love. So at the cross, Jesus exposed the truth of human brokenness, pride, antipathy, violence, pain, shame. And he met it not with condemnation, but with forgiveness.

To the one who believed in him just enough to ask to be remembered, he said, today you will be with me in paradise. Yet even for those who didn't believe, those who mocked or abused or abandoned him, for them he prayed, father forgive them, because he refused to allow their brokenness to be the last word. But understand this wasn't a shallow or easy grace, a response to human brokenness that felt comforting, but changed very little.

A shallow or easy grace would have a say of the cross, that it remarks of sin, sin doesn't matter, Jesus has dealt with it, just get on with your life. When you sin, say sorry and move on. That kind of grace leaves us untouched and therefore unhealed.

Now the cross says something harder but truer. It says you matter so much to God that the only answer to your brokenness was for him to meet you in it and to carry it with you and for you through death into life. The cross is the place of revelation, the meeting of human brokenness with God's love.

And it is the reason why the sacraments that Jesus gave to the church matter as much as they do, because the cross isn't merely a thing to understand, an explanation of what Jesus has done, it is a revelation, a call to participation. In baptism, the first sacrament, water is poured out on us, we sacramentally die and rise with Christ. The Holy Spirit ends one form of existence for us and starts us on a journey to another.

At the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit takes bread and wine and through his work, Christ places it into our hands. Into our hands goes the cost of our sin, a broken body, blood outpoured. We eat and drink the very cost of our salvation with grief and thanksgiving, seen as we are transformed into what we are called to be.

And so as we come afresh to the altar, this epiphany, as we ask, as we must always in epiphany to meet God, let us ask for revelation, not explanation. Revelation of the full complexity of who we are, our repentance and our gratitude, our grief and our hope, our guilt and our longing to be free. And as we kneel, let us hear his response, the response to a repentant robber.

You will be with me in paradise. Hold out your hands and receive the host. Know that you are receiving love.

Drink from the cup and as you do, remember that you are tasting love. Be sent out to love and serve the Lord. Know that you are sent out to love, to call to the truth all those who you meet on the way.

Amen.