A Sermon for Second Sunday after Epiphany

January 20, 2019

Many years ago Mary and I took a group of church folks to Greece to follow in the footsteps of Paul and learn about the early church.  A group of us ended up just wandering around Athens one morning and stumbled upon a cathedral where a service was in progress. The church was on  a large plaza and all the doors were open.  People were coming and going and music was coming from inside so we wandered in.  It was amazing.  Gold and icons were everywhere. Chanting and incense filled the air, and the players in the great procession winding its way around the nave wore vestments as ornate as the rest of the sanctuary.  We stayed and watched for quite a while and finally figured out, when someone started reading, that all that glitter was the gospel procession.  Ten minutes of elaborate liturgy to read a two minute story about Jesus. Just like at St. Aidan’s.  Right. 

In the adult class we are looking at the difference between Jesus as he came to be known in doctrine and dogma, and Jesus the first century rabbi.  It is only in the last century that scholars have tried to separate those two ideas of Jesus, and many of us have found the expanded view of Jesus very helpful.

With only the church’s Jesus in mind, we easily imagine a God-become-human who knows exactly what he is about in life, what his mission is, one who is surely up to the task of fulfilling that mission.  The Church’s Jesus focuses us on the idea of God’s son, the savior, a part of the Trinity.  When we hear stories of Jesus like the one we have today, it is difficult to hear anything besides a story about God.  Jesus was God, he must have known he was God doing what God would do in the world.  The Church’s story is laced with words about Jesus like “fulfillment”, and “as it had been written.”  Jesus is seen as God moving among us.  It can be difficult to imagine Jesus as just another human being trying, like we all do to figure out his life and find his calling.  And yet that is in our stories and our tradition too.  It is the stated heart of the tradition—that Jesus was fully human—but we have crafted so much doctrine around Jesus, that it can be hard to imagine Jesus as one of us.  

We hear Jesus’ story in sacred settings, places of worship filled with sacred music and holy books and ancient rites designed to make us aware of God…..we hear the stories in settings like this and it is no wonder that we end up hearing them as God’s story and not our story.  But the story of the God-become-human only works if it speaks to lives like ours, if we can find our lives in the human life of Jesus.  

The story of Jesus turning water into wine is a good example of a human story overpowered by the God side of the story.  It is a miracle story, so of course it has to do with God.  It is told today as the first miracle Jesus performed, and therefore as an early sign that there was more to Jesus than meets the eye.  It is told in the season of Epiphany because the season is all about the world discovering that God has come among us.  This story has all the glitter of a good church story.  And….it is the very human story of a guy who has to be nudged—by his mother no less—to take up his calling, to step into his life’s work. 

I am interested in how Jesus didn’t think it was his time yet.  He had to be encouraged to start doing what he was to do.  I am thinking about how he responded to the need of the moment and the needs of those around him. How many of us find our lives in community, in response to the needs of others, in being encouraged by others to bring forth what we might offer the world……..our gifts, our contributions.  Our people draw us out.  It is true for kids and colleagues in all kinds of settings.  Most of us have stories of someone who helped us find our way, our calling.  Maybe a teacher or parent or friend who saw something in us and helped us believe in ourselves, helped us believe that we had something in us worth sharing, someone whose vision of us made us want to be worthy of that vision by living into it.  

I was in Memphis this past week and I had a good visit with the junior high art teacher who encouraged me and helped me believe in myself in a time when that was not easy.  I was able to tell him that.  I needed to tell him that, to thank him.  He heard what I said but didn’t engage there.  He moved on to another story about some other part of life.  I came away from that exchange with the understanding that what I had thanked him for was nothing special.  It is just the way life is meant to work.

Epiphany is a season of “church” stories.  Last Sunday we heard a voice from heaven saying Jesus was God’s beloved son.  This week get the first miracle.  Next Sunday Jesus reads from Isaiah and tells the people in the temple that the reading has been fulfilled in their presence.  You can expect a great haul of fish and preaching on the mountain in the coming weeks.  

Epiphany seems to be all about God being revealed among us in awesome deeds and mighty acts. But it is about so much more.  It is about God being revealed as present in the daily work of just being human, of listening and discerning and being called again and again in community, through those around us into the fulfillment of our lives.  It is about our work in helping others find their gifts, their lives.  None of us becomes who we are meant to be on our own. We grow, become; we  are “saved” or made whole in community.  We need each other.  Just like Jesus needed his mom and all those people at that party hoping he’d come through or them. 

Today’s story isn’t the only one in which Jesus needs a little help from those around him to find his way into what he could be, what he was meant to be and do in the world, and that gives me great comfort and hope.  

It is worth remembering too that this season where the sparkle and magnificence of God is on display, follows the short season in which we celebrate the birth of a very human, fragile, vulnerable child. This season seems at times to be all about the magic, but it is also about the mundane.  In fact, one could say that it is about the magic in the mundane.  That give me hope as well. Amen