 If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
by lay preacher, Will Harron One of the things that I most appreciate about the Bible - our scripture - is the riches that can be teased from the passages and stories we sit with when we engage the text with our lives. This isn’t a feature unique to the Bible - for many of us various key books, films, or pieces of music, affect us all the more deeply because of how they intersect with our lives. Our commitment to the Bible in our worship and devotion as a key part of our life in church means that we have the opportunity to come back to it across days, weeks, and years. This week’s gospel passage, like many, contains ambiguities and challenges that make it worthwhile to return to again and again; to read from various modes of analysis. When reading the Bible, whether our weekly lectionary text, or daily devotional reading, or other encounters with this library of stories and traditions, poems and songs, we can find ourselves closer to God through the gifts of our life experiences alongside the blessing of the context added by centuries of previous readers and interpreters. God’s Holy Spirit is with us as we read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Bible, just as she accompanies us through the most joyful and the toughest times in our life. And so, our Gospel passage today takes us from our festive fifth Sunday of Easter, back in time to Jesus’s last evening with his disciples - the night before his crucifixion. Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet, and told told them of his upcoming betrayal, and Judas has left to carry out that betrayal. Jesus is aware that his time with his disciples is limited, and he gives them a message of strength and courage. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Courage, the word, means heart, and it strengthens my own heart to hear Jesus comfort his dear friends. It is a similar admonition to that given by angels throughout the bible - do not be afraid. Jesus then says that in his Father’s house there are many dwelling place, and that he is going to prepare a place for his disciples. The Common English Bible translates this in a way that touches my heart. In that translation, Jesus says “my Father’s house has room to spare”. The welcome, the care, and the love that Jesus invites his disciples - us - into is into the welcome, care, and love of a family. Just as a parent cares for a child; just as God the Father has provided for Jesus with welcome, care and love, we are also to be provided for through Jesus. Family can be complicated. Not all families are welcoming, not all families are caring, not all families are safe. Families can be “all of the above” - and navigating those ambiguities can make the metaphor of families challenging at times. Similarly, the concept of home can be complicated. Whether or not our family is safe, the home we are in also may or may not be - and in a world shaped by capitalism, racism, sexism, and other forces of oppression, keeping a home that is safe and welcoming is not always possible. “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places, many rooms, room to spare, room to be at home.” The notion of home, just like family, can be challenging. Home has certainly been a challenging notion at times in my own life. Soon after I turned 18, during the same summer I moved to Massachusetts to start college, my home life in Delaware disintegrated. My mother and brother ended up in California, my sister spent most of her senior year of high school living with friends in Delaware before joining my mom and brother in California, and my father ended up with my grandmother in Texas, and then in New Jersey. When asked by friends at college, “where is home,” my answer would be “I grew up in Delaware” - an answer to a different question, because the answer to the question I was asked was so much harder to articulate. Was my home the foreclosed house in Delaware? Was my home my college dorm room, changing every year and stored in bins in a dorm basement during the summer? Was my home in California, in the home mom was creating with my siblings while I was away? Was my home with dad? With my grandmother? There were many rooms I could point to… but none were truly home. Much easier to say, “I grew up in Delaware,” and hope that my redaction of the question wasn’t noticed or commented on. And when “home” or “family” was used in a metaphorical sense - as something that could only ever be simple, good, and easily to relate to, I would bristle. My sense of home and family were not simple, good, or easy. And so, I empathize with the disciples who want a little more specificity from Jesus. “You say that you are leaving us tonight - and that you are going to the Father and preparing a home for us,” wonders Thomas, and so he asks “We don’t know where that is. How do we know the way?” Thomas does not want to be separated from Jesus, no matter what happens. Thomas has found a home with Jesus and does not want to lose that safety. Jesus’s answer here is relayed in the enigmatic style that I think of as a hallmark of John’s gospel: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” These are huge claims Jesus is making, about his relationship with God the Father, and about our relationship to Jesus and God the Father. And they complicate the passage. God the Father is has a spacious home for those in the family…and the only way to join the family is through Jesus. Half of this passage could be read to support the broadest of universalisms, and the other half seems to imply the opposite: a single narrow path of truth. What does that mean? Philip pushes against this ambiguity.“Can you just show us the Father? Then we will be satisfied.” Jesus respond “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” Jesus explains, if you have seen him, you have seen his father. And Jesus goes on: if you can’t believe that, believe the works. If you don’t believe that the power of Jesus and the power of God the Father are intertwined, believe in the good works of Jesus - healing, casting out of spirits, feeding, raising the dead. All of these works of love can only come from the Father. That is enough. And this further complicates the message of the text. God has a spacious home prepared for the family - and one joins the family only through Jesus. And if one can’t believe in Jesus, if they can believe in the goodness of the works of Jesus that is sufficient to be included. Boy, family can be complicated! But the final line of our Gospel text helps me to navigate my way through the ambiguity. “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” Through college and the five years after, both my mom and I put together homes under various trying circumstances. I moved into and out of a series of temporary housing situations across Massachusetts, North Carolina, and upstate New York as I worked my way through a succession of temporary and seasonal jobs. I found ways to distill “home” into a few cherished possessions that travelled with me, a few cartons of books and clothes, and the web of relationships I carried into a new place and that I built while I was there. My mom built a sense of home for my siblings (and for me, when visiting during holidays) in a series of apartments while figuring out how to support our family on a single income while living with severe disabilities. California was never “home” to me… and yet, I also knew that no matter the circumstances, my mom’s love both followed me wherever I went, and would make a place for me with her when I needed it. A letter with money to help me through a lean season would arrive unasked for; a gift from my Amazon wish list would appear unexpectedly in the middle of the year. I knew that if I ever asked my mom for anything, no matter how hard it would be, no matter how bad I was at returning phone calls or staying in regular touch, she would find a way to make it so for me, even across three thousand miles of distance, even as she was doing the same for my brother and sister. And so, when I read Jesus tell his disciples that, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it,” I have a context from which to imagine and interpret that unconditional love. And that unconditional love, that resolution to find a way to make a home, to make a family, to invite wholeness, helps me to understand the fuller passage. When Jesus says, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it,” I think of the love my mom showed in those hard years. And if that sort of love is at all reflective of God’s love for us, then I think that God’s love in making a home, and inviting us into family and safety and wholeness in that home, is a love where God will stop at nothing to make us welcome; that the works of that love are more important than understanding what it means for Jesus and the Father to be one; that the movement of God’s love is towards bringing us together into wholeness. This isn’t the only way I might approach the Gospel passage; in a different season I might find new meaning through different lenses; I could read it instead from the sense of home I built when my life found stability in Boston, or when Lindsay and I moved out to Western Massachusetts. If I had read it alongside our Acts passage or our Epistle from Peter I might find different answers to questions raised by the text. But that is the joy of our scriptures - that this library prepared for us by our forebears in faith can be returned to again and again; we can apply the tools of various fields of study to them, and we can find our lives reflected in these stories, and through it all we can find God’s love reflected back to us in our lives. Jesus tells his disciples, do not let your hearts be troubled. Have courage. When I can connect my experience of love to God’s love through our scriptures, I find that courage all the easier.
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 Lay preacher, Will Harron (he/him) by lay preacher, Will Harron
God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Good morning Saints! What a banquet of biblical texts to feast on this morning! We have Matthew’s beatitudes in the Gospel, a barn-burning passage from Micah, and sandwiched between is a passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that I think is particularly applicable to our times. What does it mean to walk humbly with God? What does it mean for God to thwart the wisdom of the wise? What does it mean for the meek to inherit the Earth? I think this morning’s set of readings is a gift. We can hear the various voices that make up our Scriptures, written and redacted across centuries and coming down to us through millenia of tradition, resonate in common themes. In each age that these scriptures were composed, they were written to a community that existed amidst great, world-spanning empires that claimed a religious mandate and that upheld a hierarchy of power, privilege, and wealth by virtue of overawing military and police power. Matthew’s Gospel and Paul’s Epistles are composed in the midst of the dominating Roman empire, while Micah is writing in a Biblical context where ever-larger empires are swallowing up smaller communities and turning them towards new and shocking hierarchies and oppressions. In each of those ages, the communities that first received these scriptures heard a message that said, “imperial power, domineering wealth, and implacable state violence are not how God calls us to engage in community with one another. Those templates of our societies do not reflect the image of God; the people and ways of being that our society treats as dishonorable and contemptible are in fact the places where God is and where God meets us. This is a revolutionary message in every age – revolutionary in that it inverts, rotates, the ordering of society, so that what was previously on the bottom is instead elevated and honored. And I think this message remains especially relevant to us now. ---- I want dig into Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, our second reading today. This is a letter written by Paul to a community of Christ-followers in Greece. This community, like many communities, is facing conflict and division. Among other issues, it turns out that the social division between wealthy members and poorer members has grown to the point that their Communion - for these Christ-followers, a full meal - has been impaired. Paul has baptized several members of this community, and he is writing to help them to work their way through these conflicts. This isn’t his first letter to them, although it is the first of two that were later shared widely. In his letter he gives instructions on how to be a community following Jesus, he develops a theology of love and spiritual gifts, and he gives us some of our earliest descriptions of the Holy Eucharist as it was practiced in the decades after Jesus’s ascension. And today’s passage from the first chapter introduces a framing that Paul will develop throughout the letter. This letter was so well beloved by the communities of Christ-followers that they shared it among themselves, and it was variously copied, redacted, and read and prayed over until it made its way into the scriptural canon, our Bible. A sidenote that is relevant - While there were some politics involved in the formation of the canon of scripture, for the very most part what has passed down to us passed down not because it was the will of emperors and kings, but because it was the spiritual food of the vast majority of Christ-followers in the Mediterranean world. Frankly, the kings and emperors would have removed passages like today’s if they could have. The fact that these anti-imperial passages have pride of place in the text is a sign that Paul’s words struck a chord with his hearers - with his congregations - and the powers that be had to follow the crowds. And our passage today highlights just how countercultural our scriptures can be. I find it hard sometimes to read and fully digest how world-changing these words can be. Centuries of Christian hegemony can make these feel like dead words. But imagine hearing this for the first time: But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. Imagine you are part of a community where there are powerful people, acting with impunity, declaring that people with less political, social, and economic power have no standing; that they can be taken away from their homes, killed, tortured, their families broken up, and all at the whims of those in power. Imagine you are a part of a society where great intellectual, legal, and philosophical apparatuses are put to the service of such powers, to justify the exceptional goodness and beauty and inevitability of those powers. Imagine you are part of a society where wealth and status and privilege are used to boast, to create a culture that says some people are valuable and others are low and despised. Imagine. Ancient Corinth, and the ancient Roman empire, was one such society. Paul is telling the Corinthians that no matter how much the Empire says “this is how the world is, ought to be, and always will be, and this is how God wants it,” that is not true. Instead - in the Corinthian church, no matter whether one entered a rich person or poor person, a wise person or a foolish person, a person with power and privilege or a person without, they are all made equal before God, and all receive new life - together- through Christ. Rich and poor, free and slave, men, women, everyone alike. -------- I don’t think I have to underscore that we are engaged in trying times as a local, regional, national and world community. The polycrises of authoritarian governance, environmental degradation, racial and gendered and sexuality-based oppression, and hypercapitalism are braided together to create an apparatus that says some people are more worthy than others, some people have dignity while others do not, some people can be kidnapped on the streets while others can kidnap with impunity; some people can be killed while others can kill, and that this is the natural outcome of the unfolding of the universe, this is good, this is right. Woe to that. Amidst that demonic babel that says might is right, Paul points instead to the weak; Paul points to the foolish, Paul points to the low and despised, and says this is what God chooses. In the context of his letter, Paul is doing a rhetorical trick to say, despite your differences, Corinthians, you are one together; being one together does not erase your distinctiveness but puts it level within Christ. In the context of the wider Scriptural canon, Paul is echoing the voices of prophets, poets, and evangelists. The gift of today’s readings is that we can hear Paul proclaim God choosing the weak, the foolish, and the low and despised just as we hear Jesus proclaim that the meek will inherit the world, the poor will receive the kingdom of Heaven, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will get their fill of it. And the gift of today’s readings is that we can also hear the Prophet Micah remind his hearers that they were once slaves in Egypt, delivered by God and yet they have grown rich from oppression - but what God demands is not an awesome sacrifice but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Or, to quote Leviticus, chapter 19 verse 18, to love your neighbor as yourself. Our scriptures rhyme, echoing across centuries, book by book, because in every age the prophets and poets who listen to God hear God telling us that the ways of power, of empire, of oppression, are not where God is; that these powers and principalities are not God and are not eternal; and that what God demands is justice, is love, is that humility that recognizes that we are all equally made in the image of God and that our fundamental dignity cannot be elevated greater than that. ----- Every time that word is preached, it gathers people, it opens up new possibilities, and it changes the world, because God is in it. United in our love, united in God, we are a witness and a challenge. Doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly, our presence proves that the way of empire is not the only way, despite the wise and powerful who declare otherwise, and in the presence of our witness, in the presence of God, the thrones of the powerful will tremble. Amen.  By lay preacher, Will Harron
Awake, O my God, decree justice; let the assembly of the peoples gather round you. Good morning, saints! I’ve been asked to give a teaching sermon this morning on church governance, and the gospel reading for our feast of Saint James gives such a touching entry to this issue. Because this reading is, in its own way, also about church governance. Governance and politics are very nearly dirty words in our society, especially when combined with “church.” And there’s very real and compelling reasons why this has become the case: The corruption that power, money, and human immiseration have wrought on our systems of government and governance, the way that “politics” has become a synonym for fecklessness, partisanship, and deadlock, and the way that systems and structures of power have become pathways of abuse. And so, what, is church governance? James and John’s mother is asking this exact question. Let’s think about this text, what’s going on in the moment. This mother knows her sons have been following this teacher, this potential king and deliverer, for some time, and giving up all they owned, all of the systems and relationship with power that they had previously been enmeshed in, to do so. She has an idea of what Jesus’s kingdom will mean - a new world where the Roman oppression has been overthrown, replaced by a power structure where Jesus will be at the top. She has faith that this will be an effect with cosmic ramifications. And she know the worth of her sons. So she goes to Jesus and asks that they be given positions of honor in this new kingdom. Thanks, mom! Jesus deflects this request - as he told the disciples in the preceding passage, he is travelling to Jerusalem to face death. The honor of being at Jesus’s right and left is one fraught with danger rather than being heir to power. And this scene immediately provokes an uproar among the other 10 disciples. Why should James and John be at Jesus’s right and left? Why not Peter and Andrew, or Thomas and Matthew? Why disrupt the magnificent equality of the 12? And so Jesus again steps in, repeating and underscoring the message that the first will be last and the last will be first. This time, he expresses it as, “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave,” contrasting this to the worldly rulers who lord it over each other in extreme hierarchies. The kingdom that Jesus proclaims will be led from below, empowered by service, and following the witness and example of one who faced and overcame death itself to bring liberation. How does our own church governance relate to this witness and example? In the 18th chapter of Matthew, Jesus says that when two are three are gathered in his name, he is with them. I like to borrow that phrasing to say that when two or three people are gathered, for any decision, politics ensues. Because what politics is, at the root, is people engaged in group dynamics around how to distribute power. And so rather than a dirty word, for me politics and governance are expressions of how an institution composed of tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions, of people organizes itself. And while we don’t need to be focused on governance at all times to the exclusion of other ministries, we are all called to take up roles in the organization of our church. On page 855 of the Book of Common Prayer, in the Catechism, the ministry of the laity – people not ordained to the diaconal, priestly, or episcopal ministry, is defined as: to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ's work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church. So church governance is, in its own ways, all of our work. How does this work in our Episcopal Church? For one thing, the Episcopal Church has some explicit hierarchies. We have bishops - it’s in the name, it’s what Episcopal means. Bishops serve as the chief priest and pastor of their diocese, and they act as the CEO of the legal corporation of the diocese. Our diocese, Western Massachusetts, is one of one hundred and eight dioceses in the Episcopal Church. Each diocese has a bishop, called the ordinary, or the bishop diocesan. Some of the larger dioceses have additional bishops - with titles such as suffragan, assistant, or co-adjutor, but the bishop diocesan is the top of the organizational chart of the diocese. Each bishop serves in the churchwide House of Bishops, which meets several times per year, and many bishops also serve on various churchwide bodies. But the Episcopal Church is not all about bishops! Bishops are elected by priests and by lay people - generally, each parish or church in a diocese is entitled to send representatives to the Diocesan Convention, an annual event where elections happen, budgets are passed, and the membership of the diocese can weigh in on the various issues facing the church. Bishops are elected at special meetings of Diocesan Convention (our Diocese will be electing our next bishop at an Electing Convention the day following our Diocesan Convention). The lay and clergy delegates to Diocesan Convention also elect the Diocese’s Deputies to General Convention. General Convention is the governing body of the entire Episcopal Church. It meets every three years, a triennium, and the next meeting will be in 2027 in Phoenix, Arizona. Each of the 108 dioceses is entitled to elect four clergy deputies and four lay deputies, as well as alternates for each, who take part in the General Convention. All of the deputies form a House of Deputies, which is the counterpart to the House of Bishops - we have a bicameral church legislature. The deputies and bishops spend the months before General Convention engaged in legislative committee work, taking all of the reports and proposed resolutions and budgets and statements and working to create a cohesive body of legislation that can be debated and voted for over the course of several days. Both houses - Deputies and Bishops, must pass legislation for it to take effect. In between the triennial meeting of General Convention, the church is governed by an Executive Council. This council is presided over by the officers of each house of the Convention - the Presiding Bishop, who is elected by the House of Bishops, and the President of the House of Deputies, which is elected by, you guessed it, the house of Deputies. Bishop Sean Rowe is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and Julia Ayala Harris is the President of the House of Deputies. Because Episcopalians love acronyms, they’re often referred to as the PB and the PHOD. There is also the Executive Office of General Convention, also called the General Convention Office, or GCO, which is the bureaucratic glue that holds the two Houses together and makes General Convention function. The interim Executive Officer of General Convention is Molly James. These officers, as well as the Treasurer of General Convention, currently Kurt Barnes, serve as officers of the Executive Council. Joining them are thirty eight elected members of Executive Council. Twenty of them, consisting of bishops, priests, deacons, and laity, are elected at General Convention. The other eighteen - 9 clergy and 9 lay members - are elected by the nine Provinces, geographical regions that I will talk about momentarily. The Executive Council meets quarterly and conducts the day-to-day business of the church. But most of the legislation passed by General Convention is larger in scope than an Executive Council. In between meetings of General Convention, the presiding officers of the two houses appoint Episcopalians from across the church to interim bodies, working groups who are tasked with taking the legislation passed by General Convention and applying it. Some interim bodies are standing commissions, carrying an ongoing mandate broader than one General Convention. I serve on one of them - the Standing Commission for Formation and Ministry Development. We are currently working on enacting legislation passed by General Convention around access to Spanish language resources, issues around clergy formation, gathering various Christian formation materials into an easily accessible online hub, and other projects. Other standing commissions include the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, the Standing Commission on World Mission, and the Standing Commission on Structure, Governance, Constitution and Canons (a mouthful, but I hear they have their own t-shirts, and I want one). Other interim bodies include Task Forces, constituted for a single three year term to work on a specific issue, as well as various ecumenical and interfaith bodies that the Episcopal Church sends representatives to. This triennium, some task forces include Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property and LGBTQ+ Inclusion. Any Episcopalian can apply to serve on an Interim Body - you don’t have to be on your church’s Vestry or be elected to Diocesan Convention or General Convention. After each General Convention the church opens an application process for Episcopalians interested in serving on an interim body to put their name forward for consideration. Supporting the General Convention, dioceses, interim bodies, and Episcopalians everywhere are the Presiding Bishops’ staff. The Presiding Bishop serves as the CEO of the Episcopal Church - our corporate name is the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, or DFMS. The DFMS is headquartered at 815 Second Avenue in New York City, and so sometimes the churchwide office is referred to as 815. The Presiding Bishops’ staff includes staff officers working on youth ministry, leadership development, racial justice, global mission, as well as supporting dioceses outside of the United States, ministry to members of the Armed Forces, and up until very recently, refugee resettlement. And so that’s our churchwide governance. Moving laterally across the org chart, I want to also mention Provinces. The 108 dioceses of the Episcopal Church are arranged in 9 geographical Provinces. Confusingly, Province is also the term used for member churches of the Anglican Communion - the Episcopal Church is a province of the Anglican Communion and also has 9 provinces. We are in Province 1! Province 1 is the 7 dioceses of New England - Western Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. Provinces don’t quite fit into the “hierarchical” model of the Episcopal church. I serve as the Provincial Coordinator for Province 1 - it’s my job, and it’s not full time. Provinces look different in each region. Because Province 1 is geographically compact, we have some advantages that help us organize our ministry effectively. Provinces fill the gap between dioceses and the churchwide systems of governance and ministry. Province 1 supports its dioceses with a Province 1 School for Deacons, a modest grant program for ministries that connect multiple dioceses, and, recently, sponsorship of the Episcopal Path to Creation Justice, a program guiding Parishes through a year of discernment and action around climate issues. Each Province has a Provincial Synod- the provincial version of Diocesan Convention - and each diocese elects delegates to the Synod. In Province 1 we call our Synod Provincial Conference. The Synod has one extremely important churchwide mandate - electing a lay member and a clergy member to Executive Council. Beyond that duty, the Province is free to experiment and explore the best way to engage in ministry in its context. All this is a confusing rush to get through in one teaching sermon, and one might reasonably ask, amidst all of this governance and bureaucracy and structure, where is Jesus? Jesus is present in the faithful Episcopalians who put their time and talent and effort towards building and maintaining structures that allows our church to worship together, engage in pressing issues, and stay in faithful relationship across 50 states and over a dozen countries. Jesus and his kin-dom are present when Episcopalians in their diocesan and General Convention and Provincial Synods urge the church to speak on behalf of the marginalized. Jesus is with us when Episcopalians build provincial networks to take part in indigenous justice efforts or to raise up young leaders. Jesus is with us when we pray faithfully for servant leaders to take a turn in our various leadership bodies, whether on our Vestry, serving our Diocese, or stepping into churchwide leadership. We have certainly created a structure more complex and convoluted than what James and John’s mother was envisioning when she asked for her sons to sit at Jesus’s right and left, or when the disciples squabbled over their internal pecking order. I think there are days when what we have doesn’t quite pass the test of the leader being the servant rather than lording it over others. But the governance of our church reflects an honest engagement with the realities of two or three, or a million and a half, Episcopalians praying, serving, giving, and being church together. I pray, and I hope you will pray with me, for the leaders in our church - in our parish, diocese, province, and the whole Episcopal Church - and pray that they reflect and continue to reflect the model of Christ’s servant leadership.  by lay preacher, Will Harron
All rulers shall bow down before him, and all the nations do him service. For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress and the oppressed who has no helper. Amen Good morning saints! In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea. So begins today’s gospel passage, the story of the three wise men, sometimes kings, sometimes Magi. These mysterious figures travel from the east to find a King they scried in the stars and encounter Jesus. Not minding the lowliness of his appearance, they bestow gifts on him from their treasure chest - gold and the sacred anointing spices of frankincense and myrrh, before travelling back to their homeland - and outfoxing Herod the schemer king in the bargain. This is such a great story, and it bookends a season of story. Christmas is a twelve-day-long feast, beginning in the evening of Christmas Eve and ending on the eve of Epiphany, the Twelfth-night. January sixth marks the formal Feast of the Epiphany, and the start of the Epiphany season between Christmas and Lent, a brief return to the regular weekly cycle of Christian life. But all throughout the twelve days and Epiphany, we are treated to the vivid stories of the birth and first days of Jesus. Christmas Eve and Christmas give us the stories of Mary and Joseph seeking shelter and finding it in a barn and the angels appearing to the shepherds announcing glad tidings. Holy Innocents tells the shocking story of the aftermath of the Wise Men’s visit, and the precarity of life amidst the brutal paranoia of empire. Holy Name enfolds Jesus into the Jewish life of his family. And at the Epiphany, we have this story of kingship, of mystery, and of wisdom. What are we to make of all of this? I think this set of stories is so striking partially because it is only through Matthew and Luke’s gospels that we get them. The literary quality of Mark is so striking in part because of its insistent pacing, opening with an adult Jesus beginning his ministry, and the style of John is expressed by opening with the creation of the Universe, and Jesus’s place in it. Luke and Matthew have different but often similar stylistic goals in their telling of the gospel. They both build richer settings, embellishing the spare stories told in Mark with additional details, settings, and explanations. Luke and Matthew feel more story-like, in part because they are aware of and playing into tropes - both in the Hebrew scriptures and in the Greek society they are enmeshed in. They are telling stories that their listeners are primed to hear, and understand. I think this is especially present in Matthew’s story of the Epiphany. His Gospel begins by situating Jesus in the genealogy of David, claiming Jesus’s kingship by tying it to the power of David’s special relationship with God. Matthew then tells of Jesus’s conception and birth by situating Jesus as the answer to prophetic riddles and cyphers about the continuation of Israel after the exile to Babylon and the destruction of the ancient kingdoms of David - another sign of Jesus being the long-promised king, right down to being born in Bethlehem, the ancient city of David. But the story of the Epiphany uses a different set of literary allusions. Wise men from the east - Magi, a word that in Greek derives from the Zoroastrian priests of the ancient Persian Empire, have arrived in Jerusalem. Practicing the arcane and scientific craft of astrology, which requires precise knowledge about the movement of the stars and the meanings of each possible configuration, these mysterious foreigners have determined that a King of the Jews has been born, and they have arrived, inexplicably and with no warning or expectation or further explanation, to give him homage. This isn’t like any other story in the bible. This is a set of tropes out of Greek literature, sounding more like Herotodus or Xenophon than Moses or Jeremiah. But it fits the setting - the Greek-speaking Hellenistic culture overlaid on the region by the conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors, even more than the Roman occupation, have deeply shaped the Judaea of this time. And even if Matthew is writing to an audience further afield, Hellenistic Greek culture and literature dominates the Eastern Mediterranean. Even with this shift in literary genre, Matthew continues to underscore his theme - Jesus is the promised King. The heavens and earth are bending themselves to proclaim it - a universal kingship that is both enmeshed in and greater than any previous understanding of kingship. Imagine the story set today, using some of our current frames of reference: Headline: Nuclear scientists from Los Alamos have just arrived in Jerusalem looking for the next President, because their isotopes have determined that he will be born in the West Bank. This reflects some of the strangeness of this story - and also the authority that the Magi have to make their particular claim, finding meaning in the unfathomable makings of the universe. I think another retelling, using a different set of modern literary references, can give us insight from a different angle. In ancient days, three wizards arrived at the great city in search of the promised king. The usurping lord of the city sought to turn the encounter to his advantage, but the wizards evaded the evil lord and made their way to the most unlikely place, to the most unlikely boy, in a humble village. Bowing to him, they offered him three gifts to use on his quest to kingship: Gold, frankincense and myrrh. They then disappeared, returning to their homeland and confusing the evil lord, who struck out in anger. The mythical, mystical dimensions of the Epiphany are apparent in this retelling. The echos of the hero’s journey, one of our current cultural tropes, give us places to anchor ourselves in the story. We know the child faces a long journey, that the visit of these wizards will send him far from his home, and that even when he triumphs at the end, there will be a bittersweet note to that ending. We can guess that these gifts will have some place in the real or symbolic ending of the story. And we can cheer the fall of the evil lord, whose power seems so real and tangible at the beginning. All of these stories, and all of our Christmas stories, and the Epiphany itself - teach us to pay attention. The Advent imperative to keep awake is redoubled. Incredible things are afoot - the powers of princes and potentates are of no account to the order of the universe, which is bending towards one born in the most lowly and unlikely of places. At the rising of his star, Jesus is born and the world takes notice - even Herod is forced to pay attention, and his cruellest orders are unable to halt the progress of the King of Kings. And this infant grows up, and just as we’ve heard this story before, we’ve heard the story of his ministry, his journey towards Jerusalem, and his kingship, which does not lead where the tropes, ancient and modern, lead us to look, leading conquering armies, being sworn into earthly office, being crowned and anointed atop glittering palaces - but instead leads to something more horrible and more amazing - the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the full re-ordering of life over death, the deliverance from the triumph of evil and the horror of death. This re-ordering is ongoing amidst us to this day. Even amidst the deaths of Holy Innocents, the journey of refugee families fleeing oppression and war, the forces of Empire rampant and rampaging in all of their power and paranoia - there is a star rising, a hope among us, and a child, a king, a promise, that shows us where God is: For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress and the oppressed who has no helper. He shall have pity on the lowly and poor; he shall preserve the lives of the needy. He shall redeem their lives from oppression and violence, and dear shall their blood be in his sight Amen |
Mission
We believe God is calling us to cultivate a community of love, joy, hope, and healing. Jesus is our model for a life of faith, compassion, hospitality, and service. We strive to be affirming and accessible, welcoming and inclusive; we seek to promote reconciliation, exercise responsible stewardship, and embrace ancient traditions for modern lives.
Office HoursTuesday 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Thursday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Friday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Closed holidays Our gardens and grounds are open from dawn to dusk for the community to pray, rest, be. Please help us take care of this sacred space by following the outdoor ethic & principle of “leave no trace.” |
Contact Information
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Worship Times10 a.m. In-Person Worship & Livestreamed
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