3 Epiphany C

We are the body of Christ

3 Epiphany C

Sermon given on January 22, 1995

At St. Alban’s Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-30

            We are the body of Christ. Could there be a better reading for the Sunday of our annual meeting? Could anything better express what it means to be a part of a church, part of The Church?

            We are the Body of Christ - each a different, unique, necessary, honored, glorified, valued, and loved part of One Body. We are all needed to fulfill the purpose of Christ - to be Christ in the world, to be Christ’s feet and hands and eyes and ears. What a wondrous, awesome thought - to be the body of Christ.

            What does it mean to be the body of Christ, or better, how are we to live as the body of Christ?

            Today’s Gospel gives us the answer. Jesus reads “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This is the quote from Isaiah that Christ chooses to use to introduce his ministry.  Through this quote he in essence says:

                        - This is who I am.

                        - This is why I am here.

                        - This is my role, my responsibility, my calling from God.

And we - as the Body of Christ - are here to continue that mission, to complete that call. We, as baptized Christians, as part of the one Body, are anointed to bring good news to the poor. We are to bring hope to those who are both materially poor and to those in spiritual poverty. We are to bring the good news of God’s love and forgiveness, the good news of our unity with God through Christ.

We are also sent to proclaim release to the captives - to proclaim that we are each and every one of us free beings, not captives of sin or fear, or even death - but free through Christ’s Love. And we are to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind, that those who are spiritually blind might see once again. We are to proclaim, to encourage, a new vision. We are to see all things in their new and glorious form. In the words of the hymn Amazing Grace, “I once was blind, but now I see.”

We are to let the oppressed go free. We must fight injustice and oppression wherever we find it, whether people are oppressed because of politics, or bigotry, or poverty, or racism, or sexism.  We must fight injustice whether the oppressor is government, business, religion, unions or ignorance.

And finally we are to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. We are to proclaim the Good News that God Loves Us. We are to tell the world of this love as shown by Jesus Christ.

            That is what this is all about. That is who we are. That is our purpose, our calling as the Body of Christ.

            Each one of us has a unique and necessary role, whether as an ear to hear the cries of the poor, an eye to see injustice, a brain to plan and reason, a mouth to speak out, a foot to carry the message of Christ to the world.

            Paul says that the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. Indispensable! The apparently weak, the young, the old, the ill, the poor, the disadvantaged are INDISPENSIBLE!

            This is who we, the people of St. Alban’s, are. This is our mission. All that we do, all the decisions we make, our vision, is in response to this call, for we are the body of Christ. The Book of Common Prayer, in its catechism, puts it another way. It states that the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. That is what we, the body of Christ, are all about, to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. The catechism goes on to say that the Church pursues its mission as it prays, worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace and love.

            This is who we are, or at least what we should strive to become, for we are the Body of Christ.

            But we are not the whole body - we don’t do it alone. We are part of a greater body. We are part of the diocese of CA which supports us and whom we represent in the far East of Contra Costa County. And the diocese is part of the entire Episcopal church. and the Episcopal church is part of the world wide Anglican Communion, and the Anglican Communion is just one part of the whole Christian community. The Body of Christ is made up of all Christians. Even though we disagree and sometimes fight bitterly among ourselves, we all make up the body of Christ. The CHURCH with a capital C is the body of Christ

            Paul says that God’s desire is that there may be no dissension within the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

            This is who we are called to become, this is our call from Christ, for “we are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

Epiphany Year C - Seeking, finding, being transformed

Epiphany

Transcribed from a sermon given on

January 6, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

A new star appeared in the sky, but only a few people on Earth noticed.  It was a group of people who were searching; they were seeking in the sky.  They were searching for something special.  They were searching for some kind of message from God.  They were seeking something in their lives, and they studied the sky.  In order to notice that star, a new star rising, they had to have studied the stars for a long time.  They had to spend every night looking and searching.  But a time came when they saw something new, something different, something that wasn’t from the world as they knew it, but led and suggested of something more.  So they packed up and left home and traveled.  They traveled a long way.  

These days you can get on a plane in Arabia and go to Jerusalem. We don’t think of distances the same way they did.  These Magi, and we have no idea how many there were, by the way; it never says that there were three of them in the Bible; it just says there were three gifts. This group of people traveled across desert, through various lands, at a time when it was dangerous to travel, when there were robbers on the road, and they had a lot of money.  It was not an easy trip.  But there was something about that star that told them they had to follow it, they had to seek out whatever it was that it pointed to.  Something about that new light in the sky.

Finally, they come to Jerusalem and meet Herod and asked for directions.  They got good directions to the right town to go to.  And they went and they came to the home of Joseph and Mary. Yes, Matthew does not indicate that it was a stable; this was their home.  Jesus was not an infant in a manger.  He may have been a couple of years old by this time.  When they found the him they saw something in this child and knew that this was what they had been seeking.  This child was what they had been searching the skies for.  This child was what their hearts yearned for. So they paid him homage, their worship, and they left their gifts, great gifts.

The first gift was the gift of gold. Gold represents kingdom and royalty.  Also gold is valuable.  Gold, even in our culture, represents riches and money.  If you tell somebody, “He’s got a lot of gold,” well that means he’s rich. If you say I’m going for the gold that means your going for the most. They offered Christ the things of the world, material comfort and security.

The second thing they offered was frankincense.  Frankincense comes from a tree in Arabia that if you cut it the sap that oozes out dries and becomes frankincense. If you burn it and it makes a beautiful smell.  They brought frankincense, which was also extraordinarily valuable, and at that time period was used as a major trading item. It was quite literally worth its weight in gold at that time.

Frankincense is usually seen as representing worship, because they burned frankincense in the temple of God.  All the different worshippers, it didn’t matter what God you were worshipping, you would burn incense.  And there’s a place in the Psalms that says, “May our prayers be like incense and lifted up to you.”  So the incense represented worship, prayer – it represented the spiritual life.

Finally, there was myrrh. If you were reading the words when we sang the first song, that third verse that talks about myrrh is one of the most intense verses in all our hymnody.  It talks of the pain, the suffering, the hurt, the sacrifice and the death of the child. We don’t think of that as being part of our Christmas carols, but it is.  Myrrh was used for embalming; it preserved the body, so it is generally traditionally to see the myrrh as looking ahead to Jesus’ crucifixion, to his suffering.  But myrrh was also used in healing ointments.  It was put with other oils on wounds or to treat pain.  In fact, there was myrrh in the wine that was offered Jesus on the cross because it was a painkiller.  So it also had medicinal quality.  

The Magi laid before the Christ child their pain and their suffering, their death, and their life. Then they got up and headed home, but they weren’t the same as they were when they came.  They couldn’t possibly go back by the same road that they had come.  They had to go back a different way.  Life had changed.  Everything changed with that encounter.

These Magi, these wise ones, represent all seekers, all people who are seeking God.  Part of the idea of Epiphany is that Christ was made known to all people; not just to Christians, not to just the Jews, to all people.  The manifestation of God to humanity.  The wise ones represent everybody who is seeking, everybody who has that sense that there’s got to be something more.  Some people may actively be seeking God, and they’ll say, “I’m seeking God.”  But there are a lot of people in this world today who say they are just seeking, there has to be something more.  

Sometimes we start seeking and searching when things are really tough, when the world is falling apart, when we’ve got an illness, when we’re in grief, when we’re recovering from addiction, when we’re at our bottom and we realize there’s got to be more to life than this. 

Some people start seeking when they reach the epitome, when they’ve accomplished all their goals, when they’ve gotten the job that they were seeking for, when they now have the house and the car and the family and the kids and everything that society told them that if they got those then they’d be happy.  Then they realize that there’s still something missing, and they begin seeking, looking, wondering.  All of us here have undoubtedly had a time in our lives when we were seekers, when we were looking for something more.  The Magi looked and they saw a light.

Think back for yourself when you might have been seeking.  What was the little light that you saw?  Did you read a book?  Did you talk to a friend?  Did you go to a meeting?  Did you have an “epiphany” in nature?  What was the light?  What was the star?  What was that little something, or big dramatic something, that told you, “I’ve got to follow that.  I’ve got to find out where that’s going to lead me”?  

Now it could be a very long and complicated journey that goes in many directions.  My seeking took me to yoga philosophy and all kinds of Eastern traditions before coming back around and finding Christ again.  The journey is not always a straight line; it can go across deserts, through dark places. Sometimes you can lose sight of the star and not know if it’s there at all.  Along the way each one of us has gotten help.  We can’t make that journey alone.  We have to ask for guidance.  It might have been parents, it might have been friends, it might have been a book, but somebody wrote that book, so that person who wrote that book, or the Bible, that person helped you, guided you.  We have to be willing to go to even Herod and ask for directions and get guidance and support and help.

Then eventually, eventually, if we keep putting one foot in front of the other… 

There’s a thing called a labyrinth, some of you may be familiar with it. There are a number of them around the country. It looks like a maze, but it’s not a maze, because there are no dead ends.  It winds around, and if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, it eventually leads to the center.  

You may think you’re going way in the wrong direction, but all you need to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other.  If you keep putting one foot in front of the other and following whatever that light is that is calling you, eventually you may find for yourself the Christ child.  

You may finally encounter Christ.  You may encounter Christ in a song, on the beach, at church, who knows?  Who knows when Christ will make Christ’s self known? But you will encounter Christ. And it’s at that moment, at that moment when you have the most important decision of your life to make, because you can either bow down and worship, like the wise ones, or you can react in fear, like Herod.

The king was afraid.  The king was afraid because here was another king.  Of course Herod wasn’t a real king; he had no real power. He was a puppet of the Romans.  He didn’t even have the bloodlines of a king, but he saw himself as a king, and a real king terrified him.  Because a real king would mean that Herod was no longer in control, it was no longer about him.  He wouldn’t be in charge anymore.  

When we encounter Christ, when we encounter the true king, our egos are terrified, because if we really worship Christ, we’re not in charge anymore.  It’s not about me anymore, and that can be pretty terrifying. But if we can get past our fear, we can worship. 

What we’re asked to do is to offer to the Christ child our gold, the material world, the focus on things, the focus on security. To give all that to Christ.  All our concerns about finances and security and all those fears, to hand them over to Christ.  

And we’re asked to give Christ frankincense; our worship, our prayers, our spiritual selves, our devotion.  

And we’re asked to give Christ our myrrh; our pain, our sorrows, our heartbreak, our suffering and our very lives.  

Christ will accept these gifts.  Once we’ve handed over our gold, then it’s up to Christ to take care of our needs.  When we’ve handed over our worship then we can feel the joy of that relationship.  When we hand over our lives and our suffering, our pain and our sorrow, the myrrh becomes the healing balm in Christ’s loving arms.

Of course, once we’ve made that choice and offered our lives to Christ, we can’t go back by the same road we came.  We’re not the same person.  The rest of our lives go in a totally different direction.  Nobody outside might notice, but inside we know; we make different choices, we take different paths.  Our life is transformed when we finally find that which we seek, that which our deepest soul seeks; or more accurately, once that which we seek has found us.