Fifth Sunday after Epiphany Sermon
Isaiah 40:21-31, I Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:21-28
Set us free O G’d from the bondage of our sins and give us the liberty of that abundant life, which have made know to us in your son our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of he Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.
You know, I was thinking yesterday that the disorganization with the transition of all my work-spaces, all of them, has my mind full of static. You probably know what that’s like if you’ve ever moved, or made a big change in your life.
It made me wonder, thinking about this sermon: Is Epiphany, as a season in our liturgical calendar, a kind of transition?
We move so quickly from birth to death in the human expression of God. In three short months we walk the thirty-three some-odd-years of the Christ’s life, reimagining the events of the very foundation of our faith.
Advent, before Christmas—
waiting in anticipation for the birth of God in Christ.
Lent, in a week and a half, already – A walk towards what we know is death; another waiting in anticipation of Easter and the resurrection of new life, not just for Jesus; but for all of us…
Epiphany comes right in the middle of all that march from birth to death. It’s both an enlightenment and it’s a transition.
Transitions can be tough. They bring a LOT of static, at least for me they do –
I am in the midst of transition from three work-spaces…
-My office at St. Paul’s in Seattle, which includes weeding out all my “stuff” both personal and professional;
-My home office in the section of the living room behind the couch, created during the pandemic;
-And recreating a space here at St. John’s for the work, -the beautiful work- going forward among you!
It’s a LOT of noise in my head, like an orchestra tuning up, not yet in sync. It’s transitional. It’s kind of like the readings for these five weeks of Epiphany, where we find ourselves in several places, at least in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures; what I like to call the First Testament.
The First Sunday after the Feast of the Epiphany, the Magi coming from afar,
we have Genesis: God creating light and separating it from darkness.
Then the next week we have Samuel, the boy who would become a prophet, with God calling him, and by-passing Eli, the priest-in-charge. And his sons.
The following week we have Jonah, another recalcitrant preacher-prophet, doing his duty perfunctorily, while everyone else, namely the sinners of Nineveh, obey. Willingly.
And from there we jump to Deuteronomy, last week’s passage, where God, through Moses, promises to raise another prophet after him from among the people. But he charges them strongly to discern between the true prophets and the false prophets.
What this transition, this multifaceted focus throughout the season of Epiphany
says to me is that it’s not enough that the light has come, and that we are drawn to the one who would become the Messiah. It is that, but, it’s important that we take care in this liminal space, this in-between space between birth and death, to discern carefully:
Light from dark
Truth from error
Love from hate
It’s present in each of these weeks.
I remember when I was in a liminal space years ago, and my world literally came tumbling down. It was a time for discerning light from dark, truth from error, love from hate, in every single area of my life. Past, present, and future. It was ten long years of a trauma-filled clinical depression where the rubber hit the road, and I had to decide whether to live or to die.
My mother, who I was at odds with, who was not the most devout woman in the world… created a work of cross-stitch for me. I still have it, framed and hanging.
On it was the last verse we read today from Isaiah. The impact on me is that it has turned out to be her blessing on my life. It drew me back to the truth we hear today:
Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth,
has it not been told you from the beginning?
The Lord is an everlasting God.
He does not faint or grow weary;
His understanding is beyond us.
AND. He gives power to the faint—
He strengthens the powerless—
Even youths will faint and be weary and fall exhausted.
BUT,
And here is the blessing my mother stitched and gave to me, and I say now to you:
That, “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint…”
I can tell you, thirty years later, this is true.
Friday night I had dinner with a group of Seattle colleagues and clergy, invited by the Pastor of St. James Roman Catholic Cathedral. The dinner follows an Ecumenical Service of Christian Unity. I have attended this service each year as Chaplain for the Mental Health Chaplaincy, and the people who have come and gone over those years include a wide cross section of Christian traditions.
But the strong steady strand that wound through all those years was this Pastor, Father Michael Ryan, a man I deeply admire. A man who, I learned Friday night, was in Rome doing his graduate theological work during the years of Vatican II, when the Catholic church made huge historical changes. It was the second Vatican Council, in the years following the end of the WWII. He was a young man, listening to the voices and wisdom of the likes of Karl Rahner, who’s version of the Lord’s Prayer in his bombed-out church in Munich, was one I shared with you last year.
I stand in awe of Father Ryan – this man who acts and moves like a young man in his forties, though he’s nearing ninety, if he’s not passed that already. He has had times—years—of waiting on the Lord. And God, our God, the God of everyone here, has renewed Father Ryan’s strength, time and again, time after time.
And he, God, has renewed mine; and here I stand, with you, in my seventies now, as a young woman.
I tell you this because we are a congregation full of people, young and old, who have had long years of waiting, and even now may feel they are waiting…
Waiting for a change, for good to happen, for ease of trouble.
I assure you that in trouble times, times of change, and static, and transition,
that God is an Everlasting God;
God does not grow faint, or weary,
And the promise is~
The blessing is ~
That those who wait on God, even when we don’t understand,
will be strengthened,
and they shall walk and not faint…
May this be for you a deep encouragement,
as we walk towards times ahead of us, as we move along towards Lent, and a time of reflection of the good and bad, of the right and the wrong, of times of blessing and times of struggle.
Have you not heard? The Lord, God, is among us. Everlasting.
And he is not tired.