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Today, we continue exploring the theme of “manifestation.” What does it to say that we are called to “manifest” God’s presence – individually and collectively?

Today’s Old Testament and Gospel readings focus on how the presence of God is manifested in and through the reading of Scripture.  In the reading from Nehemiah, Ezra the priest stands up on a wooden platform and reads the law in the square before the Water Gate in Jerusalem. This would be comparable to a modern day preacher climbing up into a pulpit in a huge cathedral to preach to a large crowd. The people who were listening to Ezra were exiles from Mesopotamia who had returned to their ancestral homeland. When they returned to Jerusalem, their city lay in ruins. Solomon’s temple had been looted of its treasures and then burned. The same thing had happened to the royal palaces and the city’s defense walls had been demolished.

The situation is not all that different from what we have witnessed with the recent devastation in Haiti. Although it’s impossible for us to understand the magnitude of the loss and the suffering that has and will continue to take place there, we can understand that, out of this chaos, the Haitian people will eventually come a new understanding of themselves and their identity as a nation. This is what happened following the devastation of Germany in World War II. This is what happened when the Japanese people rebuilt after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what has begun to happen for the people of New Orleans. The task of rebuilding is more than the reconstruction of buildings. The spiritual foundation of the people has to be restored as well.

The people of Jerusalem had been living among foreigners and they had flirted with losing their religious identity. Many of them had married foreigners and had risked forgetting the teachings of the law. Fearing the spiritual collapse of the people, Ezra and Nehemiah resolve to set before the people the revealed way of life that was God’s intention for them. The people will need to recommit to life as it was set forth by Moses and the Commandments if they’re going to avoid repeating the same apostasy that had led to their destruction. And when the people understood what Ezra was reading they wept – wept out of fear and sorrow for what they had lost, and wept for joy for rediscovering their identity as God’s people.

What does this passage have to say to us today about how we make God’s presence known to others? We are not living in chaos. Our church has not burned down or been devastated by an earthquake or a tornado. But, if we look around us, we could say that the danger for us of losing our identity as God’s  people might be more likely to come from the fact that, like the exiled Israelites living in Babylon, each of us lives amidst a culture that, in subtle ways, questions and even undermines many of the things that we value.

What exactly is our identity as God’s people? And what makes the church distinctive? For example, what makes it different from a social or civic organization, like Rotary, or Toastmasters, or a school PTO? And why is it important for church communities to develop a clear sense of purpose or mission that spells out why they are different from any other community? In a time when mainline churches are losing members and people are less and less inclined to seek out a church community, maybe we should be asking this question of ourselves.

If we move to the Gospel reading, we see something similar going on, but there’s also something very different from the Nehemiah reading. In the Hebrew tradition God is manifested through the power and reality of the spoken word – at creation, God spoke and it was so.  But with the coming of Christ, this changes. The Word takes on a fuller dimension as the “word became flesh and lived among us,” to borrow a phrase from the Gospel of John. In this reading Jesus is giving his first sermon and it sets the agenda for his entire ministry.  As he speaks, Jesus proclaims the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God and he is acutely aware that the kingdom of God has come into the world in a radically new way. God’s kingdom is not something far off. It’s not something that will be fulfilled only in the future, at the end of history, when the Messiah comes, as any faithful Israelite would have believed. God’s kingdom has broken into the world in Jesus, in his words, in his actions, in his life.

This means that we are not to look for the Kingdom of God in rules, regulations and religious duties, as did the scribes and Pharisees. We are to seek the Kingdom of God within our selves, within our own lives. The kingdom of God, Jesus says, is like a mustard seed. It starts out as something very small and grows to become the tallest tree. God’s kingdom starts out as a quiet call to listen to God’s voice within us, and then it grows as we become more attentive.

If we listen patiently and stretch ourselves to discern God’s will in our lives, we will be drawn to identify ourselves with Jesus and with the things that he does to bring healing, freedom and renewal to people.  Jesus was called to confront the things that imprison, bind and restrict human life from becoming whole and healed. And so our spiritual journey that begins in patient listening to the growth of God’s kingdom within, leads to our willingness to confront the things in our society and in our community which restrict and block the kingdom of God.

What is this passage saying to us today? I think it raises a question about the purpose of the church.  Is the church an institution that exists largely for the benefit of its members….to provide a place where people can come together to socialize, or to support and encourage each other, or is the church a group of people who have dedicated themselves to carrying out  specific ministries that do what Jesus suggests we should be doing? Do our ministries actually change lives by healing people, freeing people from what binds them, confronting the things in our society that restrict human life from being whole?

Listen to what the well known Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says about the church today and about how churches receive the gospel message:

     We preach mostly to believers. Yet the gospel is too readily

     heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no  unsettling news

     and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the gospel is easily assumed,

     slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having heard, but without

     noticing the urge to transformation that is not readily compatible with our

   comfortable believing that asks little and receives less. The gospel is thus a truth

   widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened,

   trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us,

   neither valued nor questioned.

Brueggeman’s words remind me of an old New Yorker cartoon. Two yogis are show sitting at the lip of a cave on top of a high mountain, presumably in the Himalayas. Pictured in the lotus position, looking skyward, they were obviously meditating but have been interrupted by a loud 747 passing overhead. One of them looks at the other and says, “Ah, they have know-how, but do they have know-why?”  In this gospel reading Jesus answers the know-why: In so many words he says, “The spiritual reality of the Gospel is to be manifested in physical reality on earth.”

This past week we have seen no better example of the “know-why” of the Gospel then the incredible relief efforts going on in Haiti. Today in Haiti, even as I speak, we are witnessing the Gospel happening….we are witnessing the Spirit of the Lord being brought to bear on human suffering.

Of course, as the situation in Haiti moves off the front page, as it will, and as our attention turns elsewhere, we will be left with these questions about our identity and about how we are manifesting the gospel in our ministries here at Good Shepherd. 

Jesus came to his hometown and preached a sermon that probably made people’s hair stand on end. At first, his listeners were complimentary, but then his audience got so mad that they tried to drag him to the edge of town and stone him. 

A few weeks ago, a woman came out of church and said, “Craig I didn’t like your sermon at all.” I smiled, looked her in the face and said, “That’s a good thing. It probably means you’ve been paying attention to the gospel.”

As we go forward this year, let’s not just content ourselves with being a people who know “how.” Let’s strive to be a people who know “why.” Amen.

sermon-jan-17-2010-mp3 (To hear an audio version of the sermon click onto this link.)

Several years ago, my father presented my brother and sisters and me with a very special Christmas present. He had gathered up forty years of photographs and old home movie clips, and put them together on a video cassette – a sort of travel log of the MacColl family with voice-over narration.  The high point of the twenty minute film for me was a segment recording my brother’s wedding in 1972. What made that event so special were the simple and ordinary things like the funny expressions on my sister’s face as she walked down the aisle as one of the bridesmaids. Or the scene of my father dancing with my then- five year old sister. Or the part that shows me mugging for the camera as I’m eating a huge piece of wedding cake.

Weddings have a special place in our lives. They have a special place for the church too. Weddings, along with funerals, may be one of the few places today where people acknowledge that the church has some role to play in their lives.

Why is this? If we look at our gospel story, John’s account of Jesus changing water into wine at a wedding in Cana, we get an idea. The first thing that we notice is that this is not just a story about changing water into wine. According to John, this is supposed to be Jesus’ first public miracle. Why would so much be made out of such an ordinary event? No one is sick; no one is dying; there is no critical need here.  And why does Jesus transform so much water into so much wine – enough wine for the entire village to drink in a year of weddings?

Clearly, there is more going on here than meets the eye. I think what is going on is that Jesus’ first miracle is a statement about the new life which Jesus has introduced. We call this the Kingdom of God. Jesus is demonstrating that, in the Kingdom of God, God is continually present in the ordinary tangible, visible things in life, like a wedding celebration.  Last Sunday we saw how, at Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in bodily form, as a dove. Throughout the Bible and throughout history God comes to us in this way – in bodily form. And much of the time the Holy Spirit comes looking nothing at all like God or Christ, or the Spirit.

One of my favorite preachers, John Vannorsdall, puts it this way. “The form of God becomes stained glass windows portraying androgynous saints in long robes and the memorial names of our forbearers. The Spirit takes the sound of a bell, the reeds, the trumpets of the organ. God comes in the smell of a church shut up for a week, the sight of long robes, in the hope that the choir will be able to complete the anthem. The form is hard candy dropped on the bare floor on a Christmas Eve. God comes as scripture read and preached with all its grace and thunder. Almighty God, and the Son of God, manifest in the sights and sounds of a congregation at prayer and at play. This is the dove we see, the vine into which we are grafted. In such ordinary things God comes to claim and to shape our lives.”

In our gospel, John seems to be emphasizing the presence of God in ordinary events when the identity of the person who is responsible for saving the day at the wedding banquet and producing this vast quantity of fine wine – Jesus – is kept secret. The wine steward compliments the bridegroom when he says, “everyone serves the good wine first. But you have kept the good wine until now.” It seems that only Jesus’ disciples who were at the wedding understood that he was the one responsible for the miracle of changing the water into wine.

What does this mean? It means that, despite that fact that Jesus goes around the countryside performing powerful miracles of healing and transformation, the majority of people don’t understand who he is or what he’s about. They don’t understand because, for many of these people, the miracles don’t bring about faith in Jesus. They don’t bring about a powerful desire for people to want to get to know him and associate with him. They’re just amazing acts of power.  But it is only the people who move beyond the miracle to a faith and trust in Jesus, who really understand what the miracle is about.

The wedding going on in this gospel story is not just the marriage of a bride and groom. It’s the “wedding” of Jesus and his disciples. It’s the creation of a community of faith, a community of people who are committed to trusting that Jesus’ life and love is the only true way to live. It’s a community of people who have begun to taste the “new wine” of life lived out in faith. But if we think about this “new wine” experience that takes place in a community of faithful people, what would be the signs that we, here at Good Shepherd, had taken this story to heart and had trusted in the promise of new life that we experience through our relationship with Christ?

I think there are two signs. In our gospel, Jesus comes into a situation where the wine has run out and the wedding party is in danger of closing down. And he turns the whole thing around. How many times in our lives have we faced such a situation – where we have said to ourselves or to others, “the wine has run out?” In difficult relationships with colleagues at work? In our marriages when things got rough? In our families, when we have tried to confront our siblings or parents with behavior that we perceive is unhealthy or unhelpful? In church communities, where there never seems to be enough money or leadership to do what we feel God is calling us to do?

The problem is that, when this happens, we tend to get anxious, frustrated and fearful. We also tend to look for someone to come in and rescue us – some expert, some new program, some financial windfall.  But when we do this we forget that God has already given us everything we need to face our fears. God has given us the gift of faith in the power of Jesus Christ to change water into wine, to change death into life, to bring the new out of the old.  God has given us the Holy Spirit in baptism to empower us and to strengthen us. God has given us all the leaders we need…..all the ideas we need….all the money we need. The question is can we trust the gift? Because if we aren’t people of faith than we will eventually run out of energy, run out of love and run out of everything.

The second sign of what it means to be a community of faith is to realize that this gift of faith has a cost attached to it.  Speaking of wine at weddings, have you ever tasted a really fine wine?  I once had this opportunity. A priest friend in Chicago was a bit of a wine connoisseur. He received as a gift from a wealthy psychiatrist, a case of what many people believe was the finest vintage of red wine of the last century – Chateau Lafitte Rothschild ’64. One night my friend decided to open the case and share his bounty with a group of dinner guests. Once I tasted the wine, I realized I was experiencing something I would never forget. But, after drinking a glass of the wine I began to wonder how my friend could be so generous as to share something so wonderful with me and his guests.

This is true of anything really sublime and precious isn’t it? When we experience something so special we begin to wonder if we are worthy enough to receive it. We ask ourselves, “what have I done to deserve to sample one of the greatest vintages of all time? We could ask the same question about our life as part of a Christian community. What have any of us done to deserve being part of this life of faith and trust – a  life of living in communion with Jesus Christ, the one whose love redeems and saves us; the one who offers us the “new wine” of love and fellowship in him that can never be replaced or improved on? Like anything really sublime, we can’t ultimately do anything to deserve it; it’s given to us as a gift. But, there is a cost isn’t there? The cost is that our lives are so changed and transformed by that gift that we feel compelled to share the gift with others.

One of the great challenges that we face right now – not only here at Good Shepherd, but throughout mainline American Christianity, is that church life has become dominated by our consumer culture. Rather than coming to a Christian community to receive the gift of faith and it’s life-transforming effects, people increasingly are seeking some program, some entertaining worship experience, some attractive fellowship event. Rather than asking what they can do to share this sublime “new wine” with others and gratefully accepting that there is a cost associated with the gift, people want to know what more the Church can do to meet their needs.

Before you leave here today, look around you and take a deep drink of the “new wine” that is poured out on each of us each time we step through the front door.  I don’t mean the communion wine. I mean the “new wine” of the new life given to us in Jesus Christ.  It’s not just in the chalice on the altar….it’s all around us. It’s in the everyday, ordinary things and events where God’s grace and love is poured out on those who have faith to taste it.  Amen

sermon-jan-10-2010-mp3 (Click here for an audio version of this sermon.)

During the 2004 presidential race, Democratic contender Howard Dean, an occasional Episcopalian, was asked, “Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation to eternal life?” Dean answered,
“I certainly see him as the son of God. I think whether I’m saved or not is not gonna be up to me.”

I think I know what Dean was trying to say in his response. He was being put on the spot about his personal faith stance and he didn’t want to alienate anyone by making what some might perceive as exclusive claims about faith in Jesus Christ leading to salvation. So he made the simple claim that his salvation is in God’s hands, not his.

In fact, the Christian faith is a journey made of several stages or steps, and, yes, we can and should respond to God’s invitation to take these steps so that we can continue to grow in our relationship with God….grow in the continual process of surrendering our wills to God and becoming followers of Jesus Christ.

Today, the First Sunday after Epiphany, we celebrate the baptism of Jesus by John at the river Jordan. When Jesus underwent baptism, we understand that he wasn’t doing it in order to be cleansed from sin, since he was without sin. We believe that when he underwent baptism, Jesus was beginning the process of submitting himself to his vocation to be the Savior of the world. In this sense, for us, baptism is the beginning of our Christian journey…our surrender to the Spirit of God, as a symbol of an entire life of change and spiritual growth.

But, in light of Howard Dean’s comment, what are the actual steps we need to take if we are to advance in our growth toward salvation? In our gospel story we can see three steps that Jesus takes. First, he steps into the River Jordan to be baptized. Then, he steps out of the water and enters into prayer. Finally he steps into the light of God’s love and approval.

Let’s look at the first step. As I’ve mentioned, Jesus didn’t undergo baptism in order to be cleaned from sin. When Jesus stepped into the muddy waters of the Jordon he did so because he wanted to identify himself with our sinful and broken world. Jesus chose not to separate himself from sinners, but just the opposite. He identified himself completely with our sinful and broken humanity.

But what does this mean for us personally? Do you remember how afraid you were of the dark as a child? I’m sure many of us have memories of being alone in an empty room in the dark and crying out for our parents. Darkness means being alone, cut off, and vulnerable. This experience of the dark seems to be built into our psyches, and we long to escape this loneliness.

But here’s our hope. God cares enough about you and me in our separation and in our isolation to enter into our darkness and reestablish that deep-rooted sense of belonging that transcends all human relationships.  God can’t rest until each of us knows at the deepest well of our being…that we belong. God, at this moment, is coming into whatever darkness you may be experiencing to make a connection with you.  This is the Good News of Advent and Christmas – Christ is coming into our world of isolation. At Christmas we celebrate the fact that Christ entered into our world of human experience, our human condition. When God became flesh in Jesus he did this to give us a sense of belonging. He entered into our darkness because he knew, as we know, that unless we can identify with another person and accept that person as he or she is, we will never allow the compassion of God to flow through us as a healing agent. 

Preacher Don Wardlaw tells a story about his father, who was the pastor of a church in Louisiana.  The church’s custodian was named George. George was married to Alice and had six children. One afternoon, Alice, aged 34, was hanging clothes in the back yard and dropped dead of a heart attack. When Wardlaw’s father arrived at George’s home, George was stretched out on the bed staring at the ceiling, numb. Wardlaw’s father, said nothing at that moment; he just pulled up the rocker and sat by the bed. He lit up a cigar and started rocking. George drifted into sleep; night fell. Several years later, at Wardlaw’s father’s funeral, George told Wardlaw how, on the day Alice died, he awoke in the dark and instinctively reached out for Alice, forgetting momentarily that she was gone. When he touched that empty side of the bed, he was stabbed awake by the agony of his lostness and loneliness. Just at the pain of isolation was almost unbearable, George said he caught in the corner of his eye an arcing red glow, the movement of my father’s lit cigar as he rocked quietly. And George said, “I got through the night because your father was there!”

Multiply this simple human witness by infinity and you begin to understand what it means for Christ to come into our world. We can get through the long nights of loneliness because we know he is here with us, entering the silence and the emptiness of our isolation. And because he has entered our world, we understand how important it is for us to enter into the world of others by reaching out in compassion….by being present with those who are hurting….by letting people know that they are not alone.  

Let’s look at the second step Jesus took. After Jesus is baptized the gospel says that Jesus was praying and, as he was praying, “the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form.” If realizing that we belong and are not alone in our isolation is the first step of baptism, then the second step is realizing that, in baptism, we have each been given the gift of the Holy Spirit and that, through prayer, we begin experience the presence of the risen Jesus Christ in our lives.  So often, people think that prayer is about asking God for something. But this is only one small part of the story. In reality, each of us has been given the gift of the Spirit and the purpose of this gift is to help us to know the presence of God and the presence of the risen Christ in our lives. The problem is that, most of the time, we are so busy and distracted by life that we fail to carve out a quiet place in our lives …..a place where we can just listen and receive what God has to give us in prayer.

When asked about prayer, Jesus once said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

The Orthodox bishop, Anthony Bloom tells a story that illustrates what Jesus was saying.  An elderly woman  came to him for advice about prayer. She said that she had been faithfully saying the Jesus Prayer for years, but had never felt the presence of God in her life. Bloom told her to put her small, one room apartment in order and to just sit in her favorite chair, and for fifteen minutes every day, to knit silently before God. She came to him a few weeks later and said that, for the first time in her life, she had experienced the presence of God in the silence of her knitting. She had found God in the midst of the silence.

The third step of our baptismal journey seems as if it should be the easiest, but, in fact, it’s often the hardest for many people. In our gospel, the voice from heaven, the voice of God, says to Jesus, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The story of Jesus’ baptism is told in a strange order. It’s only after the baptism…. it’s only after the descent of the dove…. it’s only after the heavenly word of approval and love for Jesus, that his temptations in the wilderness occur and his earthly ministry begins.  Many people think that it should be the other way around…..that Jesus should struggle with temptation and the, only after he is successful in resisting it, should God have put his seal of approval on him.

When the 12 days of Christmas are over we settle down to our New Year’s resolutions of doing more of this and less of that and better of everything…..so that our lives, we hope, might, some day, really be like the ideal in our visions…so that we might receive some kind of seal of approval.  But, in the story of Jesus’ baptism it’s only after receiving God’s seal of approval that the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness.

Perhaps the hardest step for us to take in our Christian journey is to know and accept that in baptism we are approved from the beginning. For each of us, baptism is the sign that God cherishes us and delights in us without our having to do anything to earn or deserve God’s love.  

Today, and during this season of Epiphany, I invite you to consider these steps of our Christian journey…the journey that begins in baptism: First, we step into the water and discover that Jesus has entered into our world, that we are not alone, and that we can be present with others as Jesus is present with us. Second, we step out of the water and enter into prayer. Third, we step into the light of God’s love and approval.  I invite you to consider how God might be calling you to take steps to grow in your relationship with God. Yes, in baptism we are saved, but baptism also means that there are steps we must take if we are going grow in our faith and become mature and committed followers of Jesus Christ. Amen.