Again, it has been a while since I posted anything.  That is largely because since August, I have not been preaching from a text.  This past Sunday I learned that I could record my sermon on my i-phone and I ended up with a record of what was said.  The problem you will see as you read this is that I don't talk in very writable form.  I apologize in advance for the punctuation in the following transcript.  I have tried to make it readable, but a proper edit would take me all week.  One of these days I'll figure out how to let you listen on the church's web site.  For now, here is the sermon.

Sermon Preached on the Second Sunday after Epiphany

January 15, 2012

Ok.  I’m looking for a show of hands here.  How many of us would like to improve the quality--the living of our lives?  How many of us have some idea that we would like to be better people?  How many of us have imagined a life where our living reflects our deepest, most heartfelt values even better than it does now?   Now, how many of us think we can get there on our own.  Yeah.  Welcome to Christianity.  

Welcome to the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, the story about the God who intervenes in the world in lives of people who long to make it to a better place, often a better place they can’t imagine.   They just kind of have this intuition, this hint.  They know there is a better place; they somehow know they can be more than they already are.  We are talking about a God who meets those people and says, “let me help you make the journey to that new place, let me get you out to that new place.”   Welcome to Christianity.  Welcome to our faith in which there comes a time in the history of God and people when God says, “you know, it’s time for a new way of joining you and leading you to the next new place, one that will be a surprise to you but that is really what your best heart desires.  I’m going to do that in a new way.”    

And so we get to the season we celebrate now, the season of Epiphany, where the new way of being among us to help us, to lead us, to help us make our way to the new place is a very up-close and personal way.   No longer are we aided by a God who has to be sought in a temple or has to be begged to come near--a God we only see as fire at night or something like that.  Our God is very near and comes among us in a very personal and up-close way, and that personal and up-close God has a name.  And the name of the personal up-close God is, of course, Jesus.

Now I’ve got to tell you that Jesus has not always been a word that comes quickly to my lips.  I was raised an Episcopalian.  I heard a lot and thought a lot about God.  I eventually began to get interested in the Holy Spirit because I knew there was something going on here but I didn’t know what that was about.  I didn’t use the word Jesus very much because I had heard that name used in a lot of ways that were sort of problematic.  When I was a kid and I would hear the other kids ask, “do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?”  I would say something like, “I’m an Episcopalian.  I don’t think we do that.”   That’s just where I was.  That’s what I grew up with.  That kind of talk just didn’t sound good to me.  Growing up there was always a draw to have that kind of a friend that these people were talking about, but it was coupled to what I always took as an off-putting rigidity about ways to understand the Bible and ways to behave, and I wasn’t sure I could do those two things together in any kind of way, so I just quit using that kind of language because the “J” word used to signal hard stuff.

As I grew up in the church I began to understand this evangelical business, you know, the people who say you have to have some kind of rousing experience of Jesus in your life--and you probably have to have a controlled and tight understanding of theology--I began to put that over in a category I wasn’t going to mess with.  I certainly never would have called myself an evangelical, wouldn’t call myself that today, but I’m not sure about what I’d say next week or next year.  Because what I am coming to understand more and more, the longer I stay with this business, is that Christianity is about nothing else really, nothing else but relationship with Jesus in which we travel with that up-close and personal God to the next place in our lives.

Now as much as I have tried to separate myself from all that evangelical stuff, it’s funny.   I was thinking this morning about this sermon and what I was going to say and decided to take a break from sermonizing and check e-mail.  There was my friend John, my life-long priest buddy John, whose theology I have shared since teen-hood.  He said, ‘we just had this guy come to our area and speak.  He caught my interest. He seems to be a progressive evangelical, have you ever heard of him?’  Even John’s getting into this stuff.  I wrote back and said I have one of his books on my shelf and I haven’t dusted it off in a long time.  Maybe I should take another look.  It seems this Jesus stuff is converging on me these days.  

There is a fellow here in town with whom I talk about prayer.  We pray and we get together every month or so to talk about how that is going.  We were talking this week about how it is only in the last year or so that we have both begun to use the name Jesus and to see Jesus as the one with whom we speak as we walk along through life--as we make our journey.  I have, for years, spoken to somebody that I have called God or Spirit, but I have been reluctant to use that Jesus word, but now, here my friend and I are in this place Jesus seems to work.  What I am finding as I go through my life and I live with this God whom I meet in all kinds of ways, is that I’m beginning to have a little different take on all this stuff.  Maybe the person I pray to is Jesus.  Maybe this person I walk with is Jesus, and maybe Episcopalians can know Jesus in some kind of up-close way.

I understand that you may think I’m strange for ever having said I didn’t pray to Jesus. You may also, though--and I think it is likely true for more folks in this place--think, oh,oh.  Baker’s going off the deep end.   Well Baker isn’t going off the deep end, but Baker is discovering, as life goes on, that Epiphany--the discovering Jesus among us--Epiphany is not a one time event.   It doesn’t happen all of a sudden.  It can happen slowly and gently over time.  Until one day you look up and say, by golly he is right here.  He is nearby.  He is close.  

Now there are all kinds of ways for us to know Jesus, and that is part of what I like about this story of Nathaniel and Jesus we have today.  Nathaniel kind of had this idea that one day someone would come along who could make things better, who could lead him to a better place.  He gets talked into--invited into--going to meet this Jesus and Jesus says, “yeah, I know you.  You’re a straight up person, you’re all right.  I saw you under the tree over there.”  And Nathaniel says, “that’s incredible.”  

Now think about that.  The beginning of this friendship is nothing more than a little bit of awareness.  Nathaniel is kind of aware of Jesus and Jesus says, “yeah, I have kind of noticed you too.”   Isn’t that how friendships--life long friendships--begin.  First there’s this, “yeah, I kind of have you on my radar, ok, I know who you are.”  And then you run into each other again and then maybe at work or in school, maybe someplace you begin to have some more interaction and the relationship changes.  And as soon as you’ve had an experience or two together, then the relationship deepens some and in talking with each other you can refer to those other experiences and it just gets richer and richer and deeper and deeper.  

I think that living with this up-close and personal Jesus who comes among us, whom we celebrate in this Epiphany season, I think living with that Jesus is about moving from one level of friendship and acquaintance to another as we grow and become more and more of what we might be able to be.  And I find that in that friendship there are wonderful little changes.  This is the Jesus who loves us, forgives us before we can think about asking for it, who is just extravagant in the way he offers himself for us, and is also the one who challenges us--is also that little voice of conscience, is also that other little voice in the conversation in our head that comes up with a bit of wisdom or a nugget or something we needed to remember, and in that way, manages to change us.  Not in huge ways, I never change in any huge ways, but a little bit.  Maybe a little realization about compassion, maybe a little realization about how to take something that people say to you, maybe a little realization about how to give the tiniest bit of love back.  Little changes that may not seem like much to the people around us if we told them about them, but that seem like scaling some big mountain to us because we’ve done something we didn’t know we could do until that friendship helped it to happen.

I’ve known Jesus in all kinds of ways.  Back when I was a kid taking bread and wine, I knew something important was happening there, I just didn’t call it Jesus.  When I hear that voice of conscience sometimes--I used to try to get it to shut up--now I may try to listen to it a little differently.  I’m beginning to understand there’s more here than I thought.  In exchanges with some of you, in exchanges with others, in receiving love, affirmations, hope--and challenges-- from the people around me I am beginning to understand that’s who’s been there all along.  

And so I guess my message to you this morning is this Epiphany business, this Jesus who becomes manifest among us as God up close and personal--I know that’s a little weird for some of you--but up close and personal, that Jesus becomes known to us over and over again in brand new ways so that maybe at some point in our lives, if someone comes up to us and asks, “do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and savior?” you can just substitute for personal Lord and Savior a word like friend and say, “oh yeah.”  Or companion and you can say, “sure.”  Or mentor, tutor, coach.  Any of those will do.  But the goal I think for us in Epiphany is to end up in a place where we can all say, “yeah, I know this one.  I know this one who showed up among us, who bears God to us in a new way and who is leading you and me to the new place that we can only barely imagine.”   Amen