January 2, 2004
Epiphany Sunday,
Year A
Title: God REALLY Is Still Speaking
I know many of you are quite aware of the God Is Still Speaking
Campaign being waged by the United Church of Christ—we’ve got the
banners up, we’ve done the workshop on it a few weeks ago, we’ve got it
on the front of our bulletin, and we’ve used the tagline we’ve been
encouraged to use, which I love: “No matter who you are or where you
are in life’s journey, you are welcome here.” And the campaign stirred
up some controversy when a few networks wouldn’t air some of the ads,
which brought an extra 20 million dollars worth of free publicity for the 2
million dollars spent on the ads themselves. And I love the campaign,
and I’ll share with you the reasons I do in a few seconds, but the greatest
source of anxiety so far for me hasn’t been the complaints of some
outside of UCC that its insulting to their churches that the ads might
imply that their churches have not been so welcoming of all God’s
children; and it doesn’t bother me too much that UCC might not really
been ready to welcome all of those that its actually issued that word of
welcome to—I really do believe that the church in general has the ability
to change and grow, even now—even in my relatively short lifetime, I’ve
seen changes that I couldn’t imagine happening 15 years ago.
None of these controversies bother me all that much, but what really
causes me the most anxiety has been my gut wrenching decision to
actually put one of the God Is Still Speaking bumper stickers on the back
of my car. That has been what has kept me up at night! With all my
hand-wringing about it, you would have thought I had been asked to
attach one of those lit Domino Pizza-type signs on the top of my car! I’ve
just never been a fan of bumper stickers on my car, especially religious
ones—I’ve had a couple of my colleges on my previous cars, but never
anything religious. And I’ll tell you why I don’t like them: because I know
my reaction when I’m tooling down the road, and someone with a “Jesus
Love You” bumper sticker cuts me off, and my immediate reaction is,
“well, I’m glad Jesus loves me, and especially YOU, because I know I’m
not feeling a lot of love for you at the moment.” Or you see the person
going 55 in 30 mile-per-hour zone with the ancient Christian fish symbol
that has become popular again of late. Or you see someone with the
“Warning: In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned” bumper sticker
is driving as if the rapture had indeed happened, swerving all over the
road, and driving as if the car was, indeed, without its driver. You know,
when someone cuts me off or is just a rude driver, and they have a
bunch of religious stuff all over their car, I know I instantly go to the place
of being smugly self-righteous, ready to point out their hypocrisy when I
see them acting in ways that fail the words on the back of their car. I don’
t like myself when that happens, when I do that, and I also don’t want to
be one of those people that other folks become self-righteous about
when I cut them off on I-10. Christians already have a pretty bad
reputation, especially when it comes to our hypocrisy, and I just don’t
want to add further fuel to the flame. And besides, if I put a religious
bumper sticker on my car, it might actually mean I might have to become
a more courteous driver…and I’m not sure I’m ready for that!
But, still, the God Is Still Speaking Campaign and the obligatory bumper
stickers that came with it was a relatively easy sell for me. I really do like
what UCC is trying to say in this effort to reach out to those who have felt
alienated by the church—that God is alive and still present, and is
continuing to speak to the church and the rest of the world in so many
different ways—and that truth is personified in the quote by Gracie Allen,
who is not known in many circles as being a theological giant: Never
place a period where God has placed a comma…” I just like the idea of
a church, a tradition, saying that we have not always had the right
answers, and we know that God is continuing to speak in this world,
sometimes through the Scriptures, sometimes through voices in the
church, sometimes through those have become alienated to the church,
and sometimes through voices of other faiths or no faith at all. The
church has always been hard of hearing, always stubborn in hearing
God’s call to do justice and in hearing God’s call to do the work of the
Gospel, which is keep welcoming and welcoming all of God’s children
home, until the categories like insider and outsider eventually just melt
away, and we realize that we have always been home, and that we have
always been God’s children, each and every one of us. And at the root
of this belief is the idea that revelation, the great unfolding, the shining
forth of God, has never ceased—that revelation didn’t stop thousands of
years ago in the Scriptures, as some believe, and it has never ceased,
and the great work of the church has been to listen and to do whatever
new thing God has called forth for us to do. The revelation continues,
and our work is to listen, to discern, to do the new things that God has
put before us to do.
And the work of listening and watching, of being witnesses to the great
unfolding work of God is actually integrated into the great yearly rhythm
of the church’s life—Epiphany, revelation, the beginning of something
new, begins the great work of watching the unfolding work of God in this
world. Today we celebrate Epiphany Sunday, the beginning of a time of
reflection on who this Jesus of Nazareth really was and is. Epiphany is a
season of revelation for us Christians, a time when the church reminds
us that we have not always known what we now know about God, that
there was a time in history that revelation, that disclosure, took place in
the life of a particular human being and it slowly unfolded before the
eyes and ears of women and men who knew this man some two
thousand years. It was a time when God was speaking through a life of a
peasant named Jesus from the town of Nazareth. The word “epiphany”
means to “shine forth”, or to “reveal”, or to even “expose”—I mean, I am
sure you have heard someone say they had an epiphany, meaning of
course, that they finally got it? The Epiphany season is the time
between the beginning of Jesus’ life, the birth of Christ, and, on the other
end, the Passion drama, the story of the end of Jesus’ life—it’s the
middle part of the story, and, actually, its most of the story in the
Gospels, even though we spend so little time inside the guts of the great
story of Jesus’ life. And the good thing is that revelation, more often
than not, revelation, which is that divine unveiling, it comes to us in such
unexpected ways, and through such unexpected means, and so often,
so very often, that revelation comes to us through truly unexpected
people. If the story of the Magi has anything to teach us this Sunday, it
probably has to do with the fact that revelation from the God who
continues to speak comes through such unexpected sources, and that
God will not settle on the familiar to tell and teach us what we need to
know.
And those unexpected, surprising people who hear God’s voice are
found almost at the beginning of Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ life story: the
Magi, these ancient visitors, outsiders of the first order to people and
culture of Israel, they come in response to a divine voice. Actually,
these wise men, these magi, were magicians and astrologers—and they
tended to specialize in the interpretation of dreams. Now, keep in mind
that in Jewish thought, these sort of people were actually forbidden to
practice their craft in Israel—and they were for many Jews of the time the
very epitome of Gentile idolatry—a scholar describe the attitude of
disdain for these men—and I quote—these “dabblers in chicken
gizzards, forever trotting off here and there in search of some key to the
future.” The chicken gizzards, I suspect were used to read the future, not
fried and eaten like they would in my next of the woods I am from—
Mississippi — the gizzards were probably examined much like some
people use tea leaves today to try and tell the future. And in the Book of
Acts, we have a story of Paul in chapter 13 where he confronts one of
these fortune tellers, where he calls him all sorts of names and
denounces him and just tears him up, to be honest.
So, we have some pretty negative attitudes here about these sort of
people—and yet, and yet, it is to them whom revelation has been given,
it is to them whom God has spoken and speaks, and it is they who see a
star in the East, and they follow it, persistent, so persistent that this
quest carries them across borders and cultures until it finds them in
Jerusalem before a King, inquiring about where this Jewish Messiah was
to be born. What unexpected people, what unexpected visitors that we
find here in Matthew! But it fits the divine pattern, doesn’t it—every time
we think we’ve got God cornered, every time we think we’ve got God in a
box, every time we think we’ve got God defined, God goes off and slips
out of the corner, God sneaks out of the box, God expands the
definition! Its frustrating for those of us who like things nice and neat,
orderly and defined, but, of course, we don’t get the God we want, we
get God who is, and that God is not so nice and neat, nor is he easily
ordered or definable—she is the unexpected God, the God of
relationship, the God of our lives, the God who meets our questions with
some answers, and then oddly enough, with a few questions of her own
for us. It is the God we meet in the manger, vulnerable and beautiful, so
human and so divine, full of mystery and full of light.
You know, I know that we are a congregation who is very comfortable
with the idea of God meeting us in unexpected ways and unexpected
means, of the truth that God is still speaking, really speaking in this
world, saying new things, or at the very least, finally being heard clearly
for the first time. In fact, we may be a congregation that actually does
expect God to meet us in new ways, and through new voices. But I tell
you where I think this openness to God’s voice really hits the road—or
the ear drum, if you will—it’s the moment when we acknowledge that
every person that comes through the door of this meeting house, every
child and youth we nurture within the Christian faith, that every stranger
who does not look like us, or exactly believe like us, or love like us, that
each of them and us is possibly a new vessel, a new voice with which
God is speaking to us. And the difficult task for the church has always
been the work of listening for the voice of God, as I suppose listening
has always been the hard part of any relationship between two people.
But maybe that is our work for this year, to listen to the voice of God in
each other, but I would also say this—that we especially listen to the
voice of God through the new people that will join us this new year, and I
believe that there will be new, surprising voices who do join us this year
in the work that God has for this particular congregation. There may be
new magi coming through the door this year, speaking of a new thing,
bringing their own peculiar and precious gifts, pointing to some new
wonder that is being born among us, we who may not even recognize
that we are ourselves pregnant with this wonder, even after this difficult
year. And the voices of these new companions on the journey, they may
not sound like us, but I suspect the difference will do us a world of good
because they will remind us that God does continue to speak to us in
different and unexpected ways, we who are often hard at hearing.
In Flannery O’Conner’s short story titled REVELATION, she tells of a
Southern woman who is quite sure she knows the voice of God—Mrs.
Turpin is white, privileged, wealthy, better than the white trash and
blacks that she and her family employs. Near the end of the story, she
received a revelation of her own, an epiphany that startles her as much
as disturbs her.
“Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained
there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal
life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a
purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading,
like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised
her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A
visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging
bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.
Upon it a vast horde or souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were
whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and
bands of black in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics
shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of
the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as
those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything
and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them
closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity,
accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense
and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see
by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being
burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog
pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a
moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way
on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the
invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the
voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting
hallelujah (508-509).
In this coming year, may our own souls be the recipient of such
revelation, and may we hear what new word God may have for us.
Amen.
