Sermon for the Feast of the Epiphany

January 6, 2019

So I want to begin this morning by having us do something we should maybe do more often around here.  I want us begin by giving each other other a blessing.  We will use a very ancient blessing.  I want you to turn to the person next to you and look them in the eyes and repeat after me. “May you be covered in camels.”  That blessing is embedded in our reading from Isaiah this morning and I just couldn’t leave it alone.  Being covered with camels may seem a little strange so far out of its moment and context, but Isaiah saw it as a really good thing.  It must have been a good thing for somebody sometime, so may we all be covered with camels.  

As recently as this Friday we had a camel in the neighborhood. Some of you may know Aladdin, the camel that comes to Mount Vernon every year at Christmas time.  The Baker clan walked down to visit Aladdin on the day after Thanksgiving and found him just recently arrived and still settling into his holiday shelter.  In fact, when we arrived, there was just a simple fence, no warning signs, no one around to tell us not to, so we made friends.  The kids fed him leaves and everyone marveled at the softness of his big nose which he was happy to rub against a friendly face.  Daughter Margie got a couple of good selfies cheek to cheek with Aladdin before he got too playful and decided to nip her on the shoulder as she tripped the shutter.  If we had a projector here in the church I would be sharing a great picture of a surprised photographer and a laughing camel.  Hanging out with Aladdin was certainly a high point in our holidays.  We felt connected with George’s camel.  May you be covered with camels.

And I was surprised just two days ago, so long after Christmas, to find Aladdin still around when I took a walk down to Mount Vernon for a little exercise.  There he was in his shelter, guarded by two fences and lots of “no touching signs.” No one talking to him or interacting with him.  It was clear and kind of sad that shortly after our Thanksgiving visit the powers that be had gotten their fencing finished and their signs up and thousands of people had passed by that camel and seen nothing but a mangey looking hay eating machine.  They would never know the softness of his nose, or the smell of his cheek or his love of stealing the show in a selfie.  Some things you just have to experience.  They can’t be appreciated from a distance. 

Ah well……I really didn’t mean to talk so much about camels this morning.  What I really wanted to talk about was the experience of God, what it can be like to have an encounter with the divine, what it is like to be reminded in a moment that there is more to the universe and the cosmos and our lives than we are normally aware of.  I want to talk about epiphanies on the feast of Epiphany.  So I’ll move from Isaiah to Matthew, from camels to wise men—who may well have been riding camels, but enough about camels.

As I think about Epiphany and epiphanies and those wise men discovering Jesus, I am thinking we don’t talk much in church about what it is like to experience the divine breaking into our world.  We certainly don’t talk much about what are often called “religious experiences,” which if we have them we tend to keep to ourselves, and if others start talking about them, we are not sure what to think of such intimate information.  Some Christian communities thrive on sharing and seeking and celebrating such experiences, but Episcopalians and most main-line protestants, and Catholics tend to shy away from any public airing of extra-normal or mystical experiences.  We participate in a religion that grew out of those sorts of experiences—life changing encounters with the numinous or with angels or with the risen Christ—but if such things are still happening, we don’t hear much about them.  We’re not sure we want to hear about them because we haven’t been taught to expect them.  Religious experiences can be messy.  They can change our direction, our focus, they can make us ask new questions and altar us in ways that might make the people around us uncomfortable.  I’m thinking of the oft repeated movie scene where the two pilots in the cockpit encounter a UFO and look at each other and say, “I didn’t see anything did you?”  “Nope. I didn’t see anything either. Let’s go home.”  I could ask us to look around the room at each other again, and wonder who has a story they aren’t telling.  What does it mean, all these years after Moses and the desert and after Jesus, what does it mean to experience God?  Is that even possible in our time so far removed from the original stories?  Can we really expect to have some sense of what started this whole God thing anyway?  I think we can, and we do experience God all the time.  And noticing that experience has to do with how we think about experiencing God.   

I have been talking just now about what are commonly called religious experiences, and yes, people still have such experiences, but those are not the the most common experiences of God.  We don’t all follow a star to a once-every-other-millennia show of God’s light shining from the hay.  We aren’t all knocked off our horse on the way to Damascus, we don’t all get licked by the camel.  If those were the only kinds of real connection with the divine most of us would walk away sad for having missed our chance.  Those experiences, when they happen, are a total surprise.  They can’t be forced, or made to happen.  They may happen once and never again, or not at all.  John says the Spirit comes and goes as it pleases and we don’t know about that coming and going.  What we can know about, what we can encourage in our lives and train our hearts to notice and appreciate are the everyday experiences of God that are available to all of us, the ones Jesus talked about when he said the kingdom of God is all around us.  

Many of our experiences of God are fleeting and fragile, sometimes no more than deep intuitions.  They are experiences of the possibility of God, or the otherness of God mingled somehow into our everyday lives.  They have to do with feelings, the feeling of being touched by love, or by a greater reality, by truth, by feelings of awe or of participation in nature and the cosmos.  They are reported as moments of vision, insight, glimpses into another reality.  We don’t have to be mystics to have such experiences.  Where do those qualities of the God experience surface in your life?  The reality of love.  The feeling of connection to something more.  The surprise of being lucky enough to notice something that brings a smile and makes you forget yourself for a moment.  We don’t have to wait and hope for those fleeting moments of connection.  Jesus suggests that an awareness of God’s presence is possible for all of us and is very near to us. And, we can practice listening and watching and being attentive to that presence in our lives and it will make a difference.  

We’ve all had the experience, I suppose, of having a subject in mind, or being involved in a particular bit of life journey that we begin to notice all around us just because it is on our minds.  The realm of the divine can be like that. The more we hold open the possibility of noticing God’s presence, the more we will notice that presence.  Liturgy, silence, meditation, long walks, sitting on a porch and watching the birds, listening to music, being around art, can all open our hearts to the possibility of God’s presence.  We can make time for any of those things in our lives.  The more we notice the experience of God among us, the more we will notice the experience of God among us.  I mean, sure, I’m glad the wise men didn’t know this, but the place to make ourselves available to God, to meet God,  isn’t on some mountain top, or across some far desert, but right in our own back yards.    

So I leave you with the you with what I hope will be some helpful advise. Never pass up a chance to rub noses with a camel…..and I leave you also with this reflection from one of my favorite preachers, Mary Oliver.

Every day 

   I see or hear 

      something 

         that more or less 

kills me 

   with delight, 

      that leaves me 

          like a needle 

in the haystack 

    of light,  

       It is what I was born for—

            to look, to listen, 

to lose myself 

    inside this soft world—

        to instruct myself 

             over and over 

in joy, 

    and acclamation.  

        Nor am I talking 

            about the exceptional, 

the fearful, the dreadful, 

     the very extravagant—

         but of the ordinary, 

              the common, the very drab, 

the daily presentations.  

     Oh good scholar, 

         I say to myself, 

             how can you help

but grow wise 

     with such teachings 

         as these—

             the untrimmable light 

of the world, 

     the ocean’s shine, 

          the prayers that are made 

              out of grass?