Online Sermons
The First Sunday in Epiphany: January 11, Claudia Whitney
Welcome to our website. You are here: The Word --> Online SermonsToday we are still contemplating the wonder of the stars-and especially that of The Star of Epiphany that illuminated the coming of the Christ Child to the greater world beyond Bethlehem. We also remember Epiphany as the traditional date of Jesus’ baptism by his cousin, John. Have you ever wondered about Jesus baptism? As a small child in Sunday School I was always pondering just why Jesus needed to be baptized anyway. I thought to myself that when we are baptized it is to seal us as members of the Christian faith. Since Jesus was himself at the heart of the faith, it seemed rather odd that his cousin should feel the need to baptize him. As part of the Trinity, I reckoned, he was about as sealed in the faith as it was possible to get. But as an adult I thought more about the story.
Cousin John was the archetype for the zany, eccentric relative if there ever was one. I mean, the man wore camel skins, had a wild hairdo and ate locusts. But Jesus was not his first baptism. And this is a key element in the story. John had been baptizing people into repentance and the faith even before Jesus began his ministry. John was called to create a community of faith into which Jesus could be deployed as his sacred vocation unfurled. He was the advance man for Jesus and had been since he leapt for joy in his mother Elizabeth’s womb thirty years earlier when his mother and Mary so joyfully met during their miraculous pregnancies. God had a very specific role for John and it was to be a community organizer for the Kingdom of God on Earth to be founded in Jesus.
When we baptize today we are still doing just that-welcoming a new member of our Christian family into our local branch of the Earthly Kingdom. But it goes beyond that. Baptism isn’t just a rite of membership for the person being Christened but it is a recitation and reemphasis of the responsibilities of the community of faith to the newly baptized member and those already well on their Christian journey. We all enjoy greeting the newest member of our Church, usually an infant, being escorted proudly up and down the aisle. And we all dutifully recite our beliefs and our commitment to lovingly foster our new brother or sister in Christ. But how seriously do we take that commitment? Or do we leave the remainder of the Christian formation process to the Sunday School staff?
I would suggest that the commitment is meant to be a great deal more personal than that. If we really took a personal interest in each other to the degree that our formal commitments elude, we would not need name tags to remember who we are and we would genuinely inquire as to one another’s health, happiness and quality of life as a part of keeping the faith. And furthermore, we would do our level best to be an active part of assuring one another’s feeling of being loved and included in our fellowship. Epiphany is a good time to start delving in to the faith in a new and invigorating way. We have plenty of newly baptized to help us sharpen our mettle.
Another question that always bubbled its way to the surface of my thoughts around Epiphany was ‘why only three years?’ Why did God only give Jesus three years to complete his ministry? It is widely accepted that Jesus baptism by John marked the transition from Jesus’ secular vocation as a carpenter to that of the prime minister of the ages. Did Jesus know his time of ministry was to be so short? I personally don’t think so. I think that as part of Jesus’ human nature, he related to time just as you and I do. We feel its pressure, we hope there is enough of it to accomplish our tasks and we are only allowed to see it as a ticking stop watch counting the minutes from our birth but we are not given a glimpse of the flip side of time. We don’t have one of those clocks like the ones so popular just before Y2K that counted down the days, hours, minutes and seconds left until the millennium arrived. A countdown clock for life would be a solemn and intimidating but handy motivational tool. Procrastination would be hard to justify and we would know just how to manage our time so that we could accomplish our goals before we ran out of time.
Epiphany is a good opportunity to consider the mysterious aspects of time, as this is the short but quiet winter interlude between our two great liturgical journeys of the church year: the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany cycle and the Lent/Easter/Pentecost cycle. Within this time we experience profound change from waiting in joyful anticipation to waiting in sorrow only to have our sorrow transformed to boundless life by grace. It is a time to learn about the way that time supports change and teaches us not to fear it.
Following Pentecost we abandon ourselves to what the church paradoxically calls Ordinary Time, the weeks between Pentecost and the next Advent cycle. Paradoxical, because to my mind there is no such thing as ordinary time;-all time is the stuff of wonder, a Godly gift, the invisible but palpable crucible in which we live our lives here in this universe, whirling along with the suns, galaxies and planets fashioned by our creator, just as we ourselves were fashioned.
So here we are in star time, sidereal time for you sailors, astronauts and astronomers among us. In order to tell time by the stars you need instruments such as a sextant or an astrolabe. You can both navigate and tell time in this manner with charts and the appropriate knowledge. The wise men would have used this pre- GPS type of navigation technology when following that star of wonder to find the infant Christ child. I see no cumbersome sextants or astrolabes strapped to anyone in the pews today for timekeeping or for navigation, and for the sake of your immediate pew mates to whom you should be passing peace and not pain, this is a good thing. No, today church sextants have brooms and tools and their focus is on service not sidereal calculations.
Alternately, to tell time by the sun we can use a sundial and many of us have those gracing our gardens. They are lovely but I rarely consult mine regarding the management of my daily schedule, for wearing one about the neck would be a burden indeed;- although Henry the VIII did have a pendant sundial invented for him. Needless to say, it really didn’t catch on. For me and for most of you, I would guess, clocks and watches are how we parse our time into meetings, activities and schedules. Some of you have no doubt gazed at your watch in the past few minutes and will probably do so again shortly for it has become habit. ‘How long will this last? My God, she does go on! I need to get on to this or that event; will church be over sooner rather than later?’
You will not insult me if you consult your watch during my sermon. I am also a watch-watcher, much to my chagrin! It is a genetic thing with me. I have always loved watches as my mother, father and brother have also. I have more watches than I need, one being adequate to the task as they all tell me it is the same time. In fact, because I live in a small rural community, even that is somewhat of a luxury as the town whistle still orients me and my neighbors to the essential day parts. Yet I remain fascinated by timepieces nevertheless. However my mother, Barbara Hepker, who was born on Epiphany seventy eight years ago, loved clocks and watches even more. She always referred to the grandfather clock in the foyer as singing, not striking the hours and with the exception of music boxes, I do not think there was anything she more enjoyed collecting and living amidst. She had antique clocks, grandfather clocks, modern clocks, cuckoo clocks, artisan clocks, and often gave watches and clocks as gifts. She was not a slave to time though. For her, it was more a matter of the awareness that time was a precious commodity to use mindfully. If it was time to play, then play with zest. If it was time to work then work with diligence, and if it was time to rest, then it was time to be still and know that God is at the controls. In this way she was way ahead of Jon Kabat-Zinn in the enlightened practice of mindfulness.
Time was a kind of Zen concept for Mom, she enjoyed it as a constant, not a pressure. It was the space in which to be human, and to exercise our freedom to change and grow. It was another metaphor for the uncarved block of the Tao. Perhaps for this reason change did not rattle her. She did not yearn for the past with nostalgic pangs and did not live in the future with angst, although she looked always forward with anticipation to the possibilities it held. Primarily my mom lived in the present moment and puzzled over those of us who could not see time in its essential simplicity.
I found Mom’s sentiments echoed in this poem that was rendered as an art poster in the Tulsa building where I had my professional offices. I saw it daily for years. It was written by Helen Mellincost and is entitled ,I AM:
I was regretting the past
And fearing the future.
Suddenly my Lord was speaking:
“My name is I Am.”He paused. I waited. He continued,
“When you live in the past with its mistakes and regrets,
It is hard. I am not there.
My name is not I Was.”“When you live in the future,
With its problems and fears,
It is hard. I am not there.
My name is not I Will Be.”“When you live in this moment,
It is not hard.
I am here.
My name is I Am.”My frivolous partiality to clocks and watches aside, the best time keeping device to make us mindful of the inestimable value of the here and now is not a watch or a clock but an hour glass. People often find hour glasses quite intimidating, illustrating with unforgiving clarity the way that time is always literally ‘running out’. But if you spend a little time getting acquainted with an hour glass I hope you will see time in a more Godly light. An hour glass marks the transition of the future into the past. The future and finite quantity of time remaining is in the top chamber while the time past, seemingly never to be reclaimed builds ceaselessly in the lower chamber. Most people watching an hour glass keep their eyes on the upper chamber and feel greatly pressured as the sand trickles relentlessly down. But time is not to be found in the bottom chamber or in the top. Time is in the narrow passage between them where all relevant things happen. You can stop the pressure of an hour glass by laying it down on its side and from that perspective see what has transpired and what is yet to come through the narrows. But while you have laid it down you are more out of time than you are when the sand is running and accumulating in the bottom of the glass because you are not moving with time which is the essence of the animation of life.
Time is that Godly space in which we move and live and have our being. It is the ethereal realm we dance through to the rhythm of our heart beat and the pulse of the universe. And what’s more, you can always choose to turn the glass over and mysteriously time is reversed, the sands of the past become the sands of the future and vice versa. Turning the glass over is called transitional change. It affirms that we are carrying forward, continuing in the dance with the Lord of the Dance himself, who has promised us that Lo, He will be with us always, to the very end of time -into eternity.
The hour glass can even remind you of eternity for when you turn it upon its side it comes to resemble the symbol of infinity,-- a place where joy which is God’s own creative medium, will forever leave space and time in the dust….stardust that is.Ah, and we are back once again to sidereal time, -- stars, comets and meteors twinkling and shooting through the universe in joyful worship. For in eternity all creation will sing and dance and praise without end in a beautiful choral and symphonic ballet of unity gleaned from diversity and we will be part of it all. It is our inheritance through the grace of baptism and the living out of faithful love, employing our God given talents in our daily lives by continuing to turn the hourglass, to change, to live on in the now in the service of God and neighbor.
I would love it if you would all begin to look at time with an hourglass, but they are so much bulkier than your watch, your blackberry or your filofax. In order to get a 24 hour day crammed into one it would be so large you would have to tow it behind you on a cart , so do hang on to your watches but be mindful of the message of the hourglass. For this moment you do not need tons of sand in your hourglass to have a meaningful life. You need but one grain to have time enough to change, time enough to live, time enough to love, time enough to dedicate that changed life, full of the love of Christ to God and to one another. That one grain, as William Blake once told us poetically, is enough to glimpse the world and all eternity in an hour.
May God fill your earthly hour glass with many grains of ‘now’ and may you learn to enjoy them as the free space in which our Lord has gifted you with the will to change, to live, to love, to move and to have your unique being. And may you remember that at the end of time there is not an empty vacuum to recoil from in horror but rather the bliss of eternal peace and the joy of Heaven which it is our Creator’s greatest pleasure to gift us with.
Enjoy your own Epiphany experience. Two millennia ago Jesus looked up from his baptism and saw a dove descending and heard the voice of God. When you look up at the stars tonight, jettison the pains of your past and the fears of your future and revel in this time and space we call ‘now’. Listen and you will hear Gods voice reminding you that it is not hard. He is with us. His name is I AM.
Amen.