Above was the “King’s Cake” for this year. Below was the start of the sermon. (I don’t have a recording for this because I typically don’t do these smaller groupings from the pulpit.) Hope you had a wonderful Epiphany of Three Kings day…
On the one hand you can’t talk about Epiphanies without sounding like a pretentious schmuck, on the other I’ve been thinking about how the core texts of Epiphany and the what the season itself is about is quite meaningful today.
Here is what I mean by that. Each season of the church year has a general feeling. Lent is penitential. But to be in a penitential mood, one has to have accepted a certain story about what humans are. Advent is about hopeful waiting, but again, unless you’ve accepted a story about God, hopeful waiting can be Waiting for Godot. Christmas and Easter are proclamation seasons. Christ is here! Christ has triumphed. There are no preconditions to the proclamation. It is just good news. But you don’t need to receive the good news. Maybe it just falls off the front page tomorrow, or by the 6 PM news. Pentecost is about how we live, but it requires having received that good news.
Epiphany sets itself up in that liminal space. We’ve heard the proclamation in some way. “We saw his star in the east.” We witnessed the first of his signs, when he changed the water into wine. We heard the prophet say “behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” right before he dunks Jesus in the Jordan. We’ve heard the proclamation, and with our inner eye we perceive that something is different, but what we do next isn’t sure…