"I see you": Sermon for Epiphany of Our Lord 2019
Sermon for Sunday 6 January 2019
Epiphany of Our Lord
Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem
The Rev. Carrie N. Ballenger
Grace and peace to you from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
20th
century German theologian and priest Karl Rahner wrote this prayer to the mysterious
and hidden God he longed to know more deeply:
O God,
“You must
adapt Your word to my smallness, so that I can enter into this tiny dwelling of
my finiteness—the only dwelling in which I can live—without destroying it. If
you should speak such an “abbreviated” word, which would not say everything but
only something simple which I could grasp, then I could breathe freely again.
You must make your own some human word, for that is the only kind I can comprehend.
Don’t tell me everything that You are; don’t tell me of Your Infinity—just say that
You love me, just tell me of Your Goodness to me.”
Amen.
Fr. Rahner’s
prayer speaks to our human longing to know the unknowable; our shared desire to
grasp that which remains always just out of reach. How can we ever comprehend the
Creator of the universe? How can we ever fully know the Ground of all Being, or
have any hold on the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end?
By contrast,
Holy Scripture says God knows us intimately and completely. As it is written:
“O Lord, you
have searched me and known me.
You know
when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search
out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.” (Psalm
139)
Of course, books,
blogs, and podcasts abound for those who are seeking a closer relationship with
God. Especially at the start of the New Year, you have probably been advertised
many recommendations of how you, too, can achieve closeness and intimacy with
God in 2019—if only you breathe more deeply, pray more effectively, seek God more
diligently. To be fair, breathing, praying, and seeking are not terrible spiritual
practices. But any time someone says in my presence, “Have you found Jesus?” I always want to respond,
“I didn’t know he was lost!”
Dear
siblings in Christ, God is, in many ways, unknowable. Some of who the Creator
is will always remain hidden from us, until that day when we join the saints at
the heavenly banquet and finally see God face to face.
However: It’s
Christmastime, and today is Epiphany. Today we celebrate that God who is greater,
God who is first and last, God who is more than we can comprehend, did in fact come
near to us—and is nearer now than when we first believed.
(Romans 13:11, and
“Amazing Grace”)
Theologian Elisabeth
A. Johnson writes in her book “Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in
the Theology of God”:
“At the
heart of the Christian faith is the almost unbelievable idea that the
infinitely incomprehensible holy mystery of God does not remain forever remote
but draws near in radical proximity to the world.” (Johnson, “Quest for the
Living God” p. 39)
Yes, Jesus
is Emmanuel. Jesus is God with us. This is what we have been celebrating for
the last twelve days (and will continue to celebrate in Jerusalem until January
19!) While it may seem that the God of the universe is hidden behind theological
words and concepts such a creation, grace, resurrection, ascension, or
salvation, Christmas and Epiphany are the time when we remember God loves us
enough to transcend words and concepts, and to come radically near to us…as a
baby.
Maybe this
is why we love Christmas so much. Theologically speaking, Holy Week and Easter
are far more important to our faith. After all, other religions also feature
miraculous births as part of their origin stories. The Virgin Birth doesn’t so
much set apart Christianity from other religions as place it among accepted mythologies
of its day. The radical love shown on the cross, and the victory over death shown
by the empty tomb, are far more scandalous, far more noteworthy.
And yet, Christmas
and the Incarnation are critical to our faith, because finally here is something
we can comprehend. Here is a situation we can understand. Here is a mother, and
a father, and most importantly: a newborn baby.
There’s not
much that is mysterious about a baby, after all.
Babies make
themselves known. They cannot and will not be ignored! Have you ever tried to
ignore a baby—say, on a transcontinental flight, when the baby is sitting just
behind your head? Impossible.
Babies are
in your face. They are loud, and they are adorable. They are messy, and they
are perfect. They are vulnerable, and they are totally demanding of your attention.
Above all, when
babies are present with you—they are fully present. They are WITH YOU…like it
or not.
This kind of
immediate, in-your-face presence is probably not what the Magi from the East
were expecting to find when they arrived in Bethlehem. To be fair, we don’t
know exactly what they expected, but it seems they expected a king, since their
first stop was at Herod’s palace.
I imagine
they expected a throne and a crown.
I imagine
they expected an army and a kingdom to guard and protect.
I imagine they
expected a king who was a bit…Aloof. Stand-offish. Other.
I’m sure
they didn’t expect God manifest in a manger.
Or salvation manifest in a stable,
Or a baby, ruling
the world through love and mercy rather than by power and might.
On this day
which we call the Epiphany of Our Lord, we honor and celebrate the manifestation
of our living God as a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. We honor the wise
strangers who came to see him. We honor the star, which shown in the night and guided
them to the light of god’s love. We honor God, who spoke to the magi in a dream—although
they were Gentiles and foreigners and had no reason to listen—and warned them
to return home by a different road.
And on this day
of Epiphany, we remember that the baby in the manger is not the end of the
story.
God is manifest as Christ in the manger and as Christ on the roads of
Galilee.
God is manifest as Christ on the cross and the Risen Christ on the road
to Emmaus.
The Epiphany of Our Lord didn’t happen on just the one night when
the Magi followed the star to where it stopped. The Epiphany of Our Lord, the manifestation
of God’s love in the world, continues to this day. Every day is Epiphany…when
our eyes and hearts are open to see Christ manifest in the Other.
Not long
ago, I was walking through the Christian Quarter with my arms full of grocery
bags, and I stopped to catch my breath in the chairs set, as always, in front
of the “Humble Shop in the Name of Pope Francis.” Surprisingly, the chairs—which
are usually occupied by not-so-humble smoking and pontificating men—were empty.
I sat with
relief and dropped some bags, but the load was heavy enough that a few still
hung from my fingertips and balanced on my lap.
Just then, a
little girl of no more than seven came bouncing toward me down the street. She
wore a plaid skirt and pigtails and held, in front of her face, a cone of pink
cotton candy bigger than her head. School was out, sweets had been acquired,
and she was HAPPY.
My first
thought was “OH MY GOODNESS I NEED A PICTURE TO PUT ON SOCIAL MEDIA” and my
second thought was “Ugh. My hands are full.”
I wasn’t
even sure where my phone and its camera were hiding among the heaving jumble of
grocery bags in my lap, so instead of taking a picture, I just smiled at the girl.
Her joyful
bouncing propelled her to just past where I sat, when she abruptly stopped. She
turned quickly on her heel to look at me.
With the
pink cotton candy partly stuck to her face, and her mouth wide open, she stared
at me with something like amusement. Or was it confusion and curiosity? I wondered
what it was that caught her attention. Was it the clergy collar, or the silly
number of grocery bags by my feet, or the fact that I was sitting where I
wasn’t supposed to be?
In any case,
it seemed appropriate to say “Marhaba!”
“Marhabteen!”
she said back.
“Is that
tasty?” I continued in Arabic.
“Oh yes! I
just got it after school! It’s COTTON CANDY,” she replied.
Now she was
smiling at me, as well as staring at my ridiculous grocery bags, almost as if
she were thinking “I wish I could do something about this situation, but my
hands are full right now.”
(“I know the
feeling!” I thought.)
A few more
pleasantries (my Arabic can only take me so far, even with a 7-year old) and
then with a little wave, she bounced away from me and down the street.
I stood up
with the groceries re-positioned and set out toward home. I was smiling now,
too, but still mourning the loss of the photo of this encounter. If only my
hands hadn’t been full!
But then I
thought—what if my hands had been empty? Would I have sat down to really see
the street, and the people walking on it? Would I have talked to the girl with
the cotton candy, or would she have become yet another piece of Jerusalem to
consume—like the little plastic baby Jesuses and the postcards they sell at the
“Humble Shop in the Name of Pope Francis”?
A local
friend once said to me, “Everyone prays for the peace of Jerusalem, but what
they really want is a piece of Jerusalem.” This speaks to a painful truth about
Jerusalem, but I wonder if it also speaks to the truth of how we approach life
in general.
All too
often, the people in our day are just part of the scenery. Our lives are busy,
our hands are full, and our encounters with others become just one more moment
to manage, to capture, to post, to consume.
When we approach
life like that, when we approach people like that, we can miss the daily Epiphanies
in life. We can miss the manifestations of God’s love that come unexpectedly,
in the most mundane places—like on our commute home. Or at the grocery store. Or on the streets of Jerusalem, or Chicago, or wherever you’re from.
Or even in a
manger, in a cave, in no-account town like
Bethlehem.
And so on
this Day of Epiphany, as we honor the wise travelers who came to see Jesus, I want
to say to the girl with the face full of cotton candy and joy:
I see you.
I see Christ
in you!
And thank
you for seeing me, too.
Let us close
with a new year prayer from African-American theologian Howard Thurman:
“God,
Grant that I
may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart. There will be much to
test me and make weak my strength before the year ends.
In my
confusion I shall often say the word that is not true and do the thing of which
I am ashamed. There will be errors in the mind and great inaccuracies of
judgment.
In seeking
the light,
I shall
again and again find myself
walking in
the darkness.
I shall
mistake my light for Your light
and I shall
drink from the responsibility of the choice I make...
Though my
days be marked with failures, stumblings, fallings, let my spirit be free so
that You may take it and redeem my moments in all the ways my needs reveal.
Give me the
quiet assurance of Your Love and Presence. Grant that I may pass through the
coming year with a faithful heart. Amen.”
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