Holy Family of Nazareth, Denise Gosselin Gravel, Iconographer
This year, Epiphanytide, swinging on the date of Easter, a moveable feast, runs a full five weeks. The longest it can be is six weeks, so we are close to hearing all of the lessons appointed for this season of light. Today, the first Sunday after January 6, Epiphany, the Gospel lesson reveals another revealing of the Christ Child, who he is and why it matters.
The story is told by Saint Luke, thought to have been particularly close to Mary, and thus this writer also gives us the main narrative of Christ’s birth. It touches me, as a mother, for we forever worry about our children. My son is fifty-two, and when I learned there were raging fires in Los Angeles on the day his plane was due to arrive from Bangkok (Wednesday) I doubled, no tripled, my worrying. The plane arrived safely and one day I will find out what he saw in those skies, but for now I am grateful he made his connection home to Denver, albeit in the middle of the night. It is moments like these that make me grateful for cell phones, messaging, and even FaceBook. How did we ever manage without instant communication?
But returning to the story in today’s Gospel, about the boy Jesus in the Temple. We are told he is twelve years old and goes missing, at least his parents cannot find him. When they do, they fuss over him asking what was he thinking going off like that. (Sounds familiar.) And of course he replies that he was about his “Father’s business.”
An epiphany. A light shines on Jesus and who he really is.
The story produced other epiphanies in my little brain. He was born a baby, a human baby, and would have grown as we all grow, learning from our environment. He must have absorbed the lessons of the local synagogue, the readings, the conversations, as he grew up, for he needed to know these things, the history and rituals of his people, their prophets, their challenges. And so he is drawn to the temple in Jerusalem when they visit for the Passover feast. Luke writes that they had gone there every year (!) as was the custom. And yet we only have this one account of Jesus questioning the rabbis.
Given the choices all writers make, I have often thought the Gospel accounts were carefully curated. When there is a feeding of five thousand, this is only one account of many feedings we do not hear about. The healings too are probably too numerous to list, both of soul and of body. How many did Christ the Lord raise from the dead?
And just so, Mary and Joseph most likely were challenged with the boy Jesus and his remarkable parentage and his ways of learning, led by his Heavenly Father, guided by the Holy Spirit. This was their twelfth Jerusalem Passover, but Jesus is now of an age – a precocious age as mothers know – when his mental and physical growth take new turns. We call it adolescence. They called it becoming a man.
Today we ponder our time on Earth, Jesus’s time on Earth, and the accounts we are given, so carefully and prayerfully written “for our learning.” We are told in the Collect for Advent II to “inwardly digest” the Word, Holy Scripture. For indeed, these accounts, historical accounts, are food for our souls. Scripture tells us what is important in life, what is good and what is bad. Scripture, and those who interpret these Holy Words for us, gives meaning to our time, meaning to our individual lives. These words set us on the right path, shining a light in the dark forest of our days.
I for one am glad and grateful, for with every lesson, new epiphanies reveal more glory here and now and then in Heaven and eternity. What we don’t know, what we don’t understand, doesn’t matter. What matters is in the pages of this book called the Holy Bible. What matters is what we do about these matters in our own lives.
Are we part of a church community, one that welcomes us on board to sail the seas of our time? For community is one of the pillars found in Holy Scripture – community that teaches us, feeds us, leads us through the rough waters. It is the church family that gives us the songs to sing, the prayers to pray, the eucharists to strengthen our hearts and souls.
The answers to life’s questions are here for the taking. We need only trust and obey as the old hymn goes. Looking for happiness? Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
One of my grandchildren said she couldn’t find a church she liked. I suppose she thought there was a perfect one, just for her, as if she were at a buffet table, trying each dish. Alas, I told her, every church community is fallen, for it is made up of fallen men and women just like you and me. Find one close by and attend regularly. Be slow to judge and quick to forgive.
For without being a member of the community we call the Bride of Christ, the Church, we will die a slow death from spiritual starvation. We need to be fed, and this is where Christ is, feeding his sheep, caring for you and me. Don’t go it alone, or even imagine it is possible. Hermits are few and far between.
If you want to experience epiphanies of heart and soul, walk through those doors, take a seat, and sing with all your might. Pray prayers of repentance, prayers of petition, and prayers of thanksgiving. Listen and learn from the lessons read and the sermons preached. And do these glorious things with others, your new brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. One day you will be in their shoes, and you will be given parish children, grandchildren, in your church family. One day you will open the doors for those outside who want to come inside, in from the cold, the damp, and the dark of our world.
One day you will see them from Heaven and you will hear the words, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Welcome home.” You will turn and see the Master, the one who questioned the rabbis in the temple and set our worlds in motion. And you will know the ultimate epiphany, Christ himself.
We are in the middle of Christmastide, those twelve glorious days of Christmas ending on Epiphany, January 6. 
And we try to be like the angels and sing to him in his manger. We sing of the miracle and mystery of that unlikely birth, we harken to the herald angels singing glory to the newborn king, we sing of a silent and holy night when away in the manger there was no crib for his bed, we tell of the little town of Bethlehem and what happened on that midnight clear when the glorious song of old was heard as angels touched their harps of gold, for Christ is born of Mary, and while mortals sleep, the stars proclaim the birth and peace to men on earth.
We teach our children the songs, so that they will teach their children. To help them remember, we dress them to play parts in a stable in Bethlehem. We clothe them with the story of the Christ Child. They act out the greatest story ever told, and each year they add to their own library of Christmas rituals and traditions.
There is the silent hush of valley fog enshrouding our house today. The mute world waits, hoping for a sign. A sign of what? A sign of life, life everlasting, before and to come. A sign that we are more than flesh, more than animals on the hunt to survive.
Today is Gaudete Sunday, or Rose Sunday, and Heaven Sunday too. The Third Sunday in Advent is rich with meaning as we prepare for Christmas and the Incarnation of God, come to us to live with us and in us. Such miracle and mystery often astounds me.
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.” (Wikipedia)
orld of faith, hope, love, and joy. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s true.
We light our three candles today, including the rose candle, and we recall our ultimate destination, Heaven. As we do, we experience a moment of Heaven on Earth. The candles flame, testifying to the Lord of Lords to come, to be born on Earth and reborn in our hearts.
The opening prayer that collected our small flock together on this brilliantly clear morning in a chapel in Berkeley was the “Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent”:
Advent’s daily prayer begins with “Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light…”. To memorize this prayer is to digest it, to send our words to God, expressing our need for re-forming, re-creating. And even as we pray the words, we become clothed in a protective garment, an armour of light, lighting the darkness.
Today is also the theme of Judgment. We shall be judged. The world shall be judged. But Christ takes our part if we desire Him; we are forgiven if we repent. And so we return to words – words to instruct our conscience, learning right and wrong, law and love. Holy Scripture becomes the textbook that teaches us where we have gone wrong, returning us to who we are and are meant to be. We need merely pray our words to Our Lord to be changed, to be redeemed, to be saved.
The nights have been clear and cold here in the Bay Area. We can see the stars and I reach to touch them, they seem so close. Advent is the time of stars in the heavens. Advent is when we follow the star to Christmas. We reach and we follow the star.
These are big things, subjects we would rather avoid. Especially judgment. We define deviancy down and further down, so that we can deny judging anyone and thus not be judged ourselves. And yet we know deep within there is a moral law all mankind senses, reckoning that a standard has been set, a standard we don’t meet. And with law there is judgment.
We light our first Advent candle in our Advent wreathe. It is only one small flame in the dark, but it will light the others, each week, until we see the light of Bethlehem, the light of the world, the light of Christ.
It is good we practiced gratitude for our blessings this past week. Gratitude humbles us. Gratitude says, we owe something to someone else. Indeed. We owe much to those giants that have preserved the West, and fought for our freedoms through war and peace. We owe much to our local church, filled with good souls who try to love us. We owe much to our own families who try to put up with us. We owe much to Our Lord who gave us life itself and continues to breathe life into each day we live.
We begin at the beginning, the first day of the Church Year. In this new year we open the gates of Jerusalem – and our hearts – to the Messiah as our Gospel reading describes. Today the story begins, and each one of us will play a vital part in the greatest drama of all, life overcoming death, eternally, minute by minute.
Today we celebrate the Holy Trinity, the three persons in one God, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, beginning the long green Trinity season of growth.
My father, a chaplain on board the Phoenix in the South Pacific in World War II, was a man of truth. Fresh out of Dallas seminary, he joined his ship in June of 1944 at the age of 28. He prayed and he preached and he pastored his young charges, as kamikazes dove into the sea around them. He returned to America even more dedicated than when he enlisted. 
For we are broken, with hearts both good and evil. But the Father reaches out to us with the Son, and the Son fills us with the Spirit. A trio of loves lives with each believer, a holy nesting birthing a holy voice that sings the song of the Holy Trinity to the world.
So on this Memorial Weekend we pause to praise the God of all memorials, the Lord of all lives, the Father of all freedoms. We remember with our sacred memory those who have gone before us, those who gave themselves for you and me. We tell our children these sacred stories, so that they will tell their children, so that the people of this great nation will never forget our brave soldiers.
Christine Sunderland
Christine Sunderland 