William Yagel
Grace Radford
January 8, 2022
1 Epiphany, Year A
Even before we call on Your name to ask You, O God, when we seek for the words to glorify You, You hear our prayer; Unceasing love, O
unceasing love, surpassing all we know. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Even with the darkness sealing us in, we breathe Your name, and through all the days that follow so fast, we trust in You; endless your grace, O endless your grace, beyond all mortal dream. Both now and for ever, and unto ages and ages,
Amen.
One of the great realities of our church, and our faith, is the depth of complexity bound into one volume in our scriptures, our traditions, and our liturgies. If you joined us for the book study this Advent you may well have heard me say that nothing is accidental, everything, it seems, speaks to deeper meanings and deeper truths. We have multi-valent layers of love and faith that can go unnoticed for a lifetime and then that one time a professor reflects on the Nicene Creed, for example. She points out that Light from Light is symbolic of a candle. When the light passes from one to the next, as we did a couple weeks ago at our Christmas Eve service, neither light is diminished by the other. They are the same light, neither is inferior, neither is derivative, they are both fully light. This is the nature of Christ the Creed says. In my, then 46, years, I never even thought about it. Now the imagery is embedded in every candle I light. I can’t shake it.
This is a tiny example of the fullness of our tradition, which stretches back to the year 325 at the council of Nicaea which I think may have been one of the last times that the Christian faith reached consensus on much of anything. The absence of this depth of meaning and spirituality from a person’s life is one of the great losses of the decline of our churches in America and Europe. It is a rare pair indeed who can approach the depth of reflection and meaning embedded in the smallest of our rituals at a Sunday morning coffee at Starbucks or standing on the sidelines at a club baseball game in another town. Not that these things are bad in themselves, in fact I love them, but seem to me a poor substitute for the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reality of immersing oneself in a life of faith.
And this doesn’t mean the journey is linear for any of us. Many a faithful Christian has greater fulfillment in our faith by embarking on an individual journey. Maybe it leads them to Zen Buddhism whose practices of mediation and mindfulness allow a new expression of our faith. But always we have that depth or that scaffolding, as many of Seminary my professors liked to call it, that allows us to return to our Christian pilgrimage. Just yesterday I went to the Ordination of my classmates from Seminary Cara Modisett and Samson Mamour, now both priests in our church and I hear the words of Pilgrims’ Hymn by Stephen Paulus. These were the words I opened with this morning, and again:
“Even with the darkness sealing us in, we breathe Your name, and through all the days that follow so fast, we trust in You; endless your grace, O endless your grace, beyond all mortal dream. Both now and for ever, and unto ages and ages,”
These are impossible words outside of a Spiritually active and faithful life. These words like so many that we hear in our liturgies draw us out beyond ourselves, into the fullness of faith.
The cycles of our church year are no different. We have come through a
time of waiting and watching in Advent. And we have celebrated the incarnation, the coming of God into the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And this week, we passed the twelfth day of Christmas, marking Epiphany, and today we find ourselves celebrating the Baptism of our Lord. This week we mark the manifestation of our Lord. We mark moments in our scripture when the fullness of Christ became clear and apparent, publicly, to the world. These two readings are interesting in how they are used, the telling of the 3 Magi and the telling of the Baptism of our Lord.
You see in our branch of faith, from the 11th century officially, but arguably from the sixth century, our church split into the Eastern Orthodox Christian Faiths and the Western faiths of the Roman Catholic churches. We, being western, mark Epiphany with the story of the 3 Magi, or Wise Men. Eastern Churches mark the day with the story of the Baptism of our Lord. So, you can see we hold onto that shared history in our readings for this Sunday. Always with more depth of connection, of meaning.
So we mark this week three incredibly curious men who were Zoroastri-anists. Part of an ancient faith group who read the stars, literally, but they were not Jewish. They were an ancient sect from the East, mysterious and curious traveling to find the truth. And they followed that celestial map to at stable in Bethlehem. Creation literally putting up a billboard and saying here it is. Here is the One you are seeking, the key to the fullness of life is right here.
So a quick review-First Mary, the teenage mother our of wedlock. Then her betrothed, Joseph. Next Elizabeth and Zechariah who doubted their God’s. And then a group of unclean men called from their sheep in the fields. And note here, not unclean like they hadn’t had a bath. These men were fundamentally unclean as they were too close to the blood and waste of these sheep. Rabbis would stand on tables to keep themselves clean in dealing with shepherds, not wanting to step on the same ground as them. And then these 3 Magi. And depending on the Gospel account, leading to a man dressed in Camel skins, eating honey and locusts and offering baptisms.
This is how the saviour comes into the world. Not raised up for all the world to adore, but in humility, in the presence of the unclean and the unworthy. Christ is then found by these seekers who travelled God knows how far just to get a glimpse. They affirmed their faith and ours by their own pilgrimage of faith.
This faith of ours is not simplistic, it is not linear. It is complex and challenging. It calls to our very souls and gives a lifetime of wonder. So go deeper into the mysteries of our God, through our calendar, our scriptures, our sacraments, and liturgies, all of it. Seek, and find, and wonder in it all.
Amen