January 13, 2008 First Sunday after Epiphany,
Baptism of Christ Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Isaiah 42:1-10; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3
Today we celebrate the recognition of Jesus as the manifestation of God on
earth. We have heard how John the Baptist and the Holy Spirit and the voice of
God all marked him as the long awaited one, the one the prophets foretold who
would establish God’s realm on earth. We heard the disciple Peter say in the Book
of Acts that Jesus came as God’s messenger, preaching forgiveness and freedom
and peace. We heard Isaiah talking about God’s servant, who from the early days
of the church was identified as Jesus.
Isaiah prophesied that the servant would be nonviolent yet would not grow
faint or be crushed until he established justice on earth. He would be a light to the
nations. He would open the eyes that did not see. He would set free from their
prisons those who sit in darkness. All these beautiful promises—no wonder Isaiah
said, “Sing to God a new song! Sing praise from the end of the earth!”
And yet here we are, thousands of years later, at one of the ends of the
earth, and where is the peace? Where is the justice? Where is the light to the
nations? Where is the healing of vision and the release of those imprisoned in
darkness? Where is the servant whom God sent to accomplish these things?
Where is Jesus now?
Justice and peace have never seemed so far off. The forces of greed and
war have grown inconceivably powerful in the last seven years. Materialism and
the myth of violence blind our society to the vision of God’s realm that Jesus
preached. The whole world is imprisoned in a deepening global darkness, and
some are deeper in the dungeon than others. The poor are getting poorer with no
good way out of poverty; our own nation holds people in prison with no trial or
rights or hope of justice, and tortures them with no regard for human decency or
international laws; and the nations that live at peace and free from fear are few.
Where is God’s servant? Wasn’t Isaiah talking about Jesus? Isn’t Jesus the
one to bring justice and liberation and light? Well, yes and no.
Yes, it is Jesus Isaiah is talking about, say some scholars. But no, it is not
Jesus say many other scholars—in fact, most scholars outside of the
fundamentalist church. If you read the book of Isaiah you can see for yourself
why they say it is not Jesus. One chapter after today’s passage God says to the
people of Israel, “You are my witnesses and my servants whom I have chosen.”
(Isaiah 43:10)
If you read the servant passages in context it is plain that Isaiah was not
thinking about Jesus or any single messiah. He was saying that God was putting
the messianic task on all the faithful people of God.
Several hundred years later, a strictly observant Jew named Simon,
nicknamed Peter, had an epiphany that went against his will and his better
judgment. He had a vision where three times God presented a banquet before him
of clean and unclean foods and said, “Here, Peter, eat.” But Peter said, “No, God,
I will not eat anything unclean.” And each time God said, “What God has made
clean you must not call unclean.”
When Peter came out of his vision, two messengers stood before him
calling him to come visit a Gentile who asked to be included in Peter’s ministry.
And that is when Peter got the point and said, “I truly understand that God shows
no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is
acceptable to him.”
Peter’s epiphany was that God is the God of all who follow God’s ways. In
other words, when God says through Isaiah, “Here is my servant,” it is not just the
people who live in Israel, it is not just the Jews, it is all who follow God’s way of
love that Jesus taught.
Who is the servant? To quote an old saying from times of crisis gone by,
“If not us, who? If not now, when?”
We are the ones called to bring justice and liberation to a world imprisoned
in the darkness of global materialism and militarism. We are the hope of those
trapped in poverty and violence. We are called to be the light to the nations.
We the tired, weak, sick, stressed, none-too-wealthy, none-too-powerful,
little people of a little church in a little village here at the end of the earth—all that
weight of Isaiah’s prophecy is on us. You must be kidding, Isaiah, we say, just as
the people around him undoubtedly said at the time, because Israel in Isaiah’s day
was even weaker and more exhausted that we are. You must be kidding. How can
we bring justice and peace to the world?
That is where Jesus and the mystery of epiphany come in. Even if Isaiah
was not talking about Jesus, no one has ever fulfilled the role of God’s servant as
faithfully and powerfully as Jesus did. And those who receive him as an epiphany
and believe in him and follow his ways have felt what Isaiah said about God, “I
have taken you by the hand and kept you.” Those who believe and strive to follow
the way of Christ have found that the Holy Spirit that filled him can fill them, too.
Those who trust and follow the way of Christ can find the wisdom and power and
love of God flowing into them and through them. They find they can rise above
their fear and do what they could never rationally have expected to do. Not all the
time, of course but sometimes.
Why? Because something miraculous and mysterious happened when
Jesus came to earth. In trying to describe it some of the wisest early church
leaders put it this way. Clement of Alexandria said, “The logos of God became
human so you might learn from a human how a human may become divine.” A
hundred or so years later in the fourth century Athanasius of Alexandria put it
more simply, “God became human that humans might become God.”
People may have different ideas about who exactly Jesus was and how it is
that he leads us to union with God, but the practical experience of people who
believe and follow his way cuts across the theological divides. Few experience in
this lifetime full, transforming union with God where they become radiant with the
light people see in the greatest saints. But most of us experience at least the
occasional glimmer of a light within us that we know comes from beyond us—
some goodness or power or capacity for forgiveness or a peace that passes all
rational understanding that comes when we expect it least and need it most.
Next week we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday. He was only 26
years old, in his second year of ministry, when the Montgomery clergy turned to
him and elected him to lead their response to the arrest of Rosa Parks. He had
talent, he had gifts, but he was certain that he did not have in him what he needed
to fulfill his role. It was beyond the limits of his wisdom, power and courage.
That first night, he turned to Christ in fearful prayer, as he would throughout his
ministry, and found coming into him and through him something of God that
moved him beyond fear to servanthood.
In those first days of his involvement in the Civil Rights movement he and
his wife and baby daughter were receiving as many as forty death threats a day.
The police began harassing him. One night they arrested him for speeding and
threw him in jail. The next day, released on bail, he found himself in the darkest
pit of despair, praying again in fear and confusion. Later he wrote,
And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying
to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for
justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even to the
end of the world.” I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to
fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone…
The week after Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday is our Annual Meeting
Sunday, and again we will celebrate the manifestation of God on earth, because
Jesus does not leave us alone, either. Year after year we work together as a body
in a way that seems to be a manifestation of the Spirit’s presence. Year after year,
someone asks just the question we need, or has just the insight, or has the ability to
put the discussion in perspective or balance. We overcome all that could hold us
back and we move forward into another year of servanthood.
The more completely we give our life over to follow Christ’s way in trust
the way Martin Luther King Jr. did, the more completely we become one with
God, and the more God’s will becomes our will and the Holy Spirit guides and
empowers us and fills us with life and light and love.
Then, God says to those who are imprisoned in darkness and crying out for
justice and peace, here is my servant. Here is the one I choose to liberate my
beloved who are suffering. The hope of the world is that we will become the light
of the world that we are called to be and capable of becoming. All that stands in
the way is whatever blocks each one of us from giving up our old ways of being
and giving our lives entirely to follow the way of Christ in whom God became
human so that we might become God.
The world is crying out through the darkness for help. Who will rise like a
light to the nations? Who will serve like Christ? If not us, who? If not now,
when?
Let us pray in silence…… Amen.
We may know the who and when, but the question is how. I will end with
a postscript from Martin Smith, the Anglican monk who wrote the book, A Season
for the Spirit, that the Prayer of the Heart will be reading this Lent. Smith
observes that the moment when God filled Jesus with the Holy Spirit was when
Jesus joined the masses of repentant people in the River Jordan, when he gave up
any pretense of being special and better than anyone else and plunged into the
waters of repentance turning his entire life over to serve God and serve those
people. Smith draws this lesson:
The barriers which hold us back from one another in fearful individuality
are the identical barriers which block the embrace of God and insulate us
from the Spirit. It is one and the same movement of surrender to open
ourselves to intimacy and personal union with God in the Spirit, and to
open ourselves to compassion and solidarity with our struggling, needy
fellow human-beings…To be open to the Spirit is also to be open to
humanity in all its fractured confusion and poverty and its ardent reaching
for fulfillment. To be open to the embrace of the Father is necessarily and
inevitably to be open to the whole creation which is held in that embrace.
Sermon 01/13/2008