Good morning, Friends.  Happy Epiphany! This past Monday, January 6th, the Church celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany which falls on the 12th day after Christmas. The Epiphany is the revelation of Christ to the gentiles, to the world. It commemorates the journey of the Magi who follow the celestial manifestation of a Global Positioning System to bring gifts in homage of the Incarnation — the coming of Christ into our world. This star leads the way to God; it leads us to the King of kings.

For the next eight weeks we will be ensconced in the season of Epiphany, which culminates with Jesus’ Transfiguration, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. I want to begin this morning by reminding you of the theological meaning of “epiphany” while trying not to get tripped up by fancy-sounding and confusing church talk.

The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek, Epiphania, meaning “appearing” or “revealing.”  In the Gospel stories we read during this season, God parts the cosmic curtain for brief, shimmering moments, allowing us to look beneath and beyond the ordinary, to catch glimpses of the extraordinary. Every glimpse is a peek at Jesus’ divinity. Yet an epiphany is much more than an “ah ha!” moment; it is an intuitive grasp of a new reality.  The Son of God has been manifested to the world with a triptych of heavenly signs: the star that leads the Magi to the crib; the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and the miraculous wine at the marriage feast of Cana.

For four years now, I have stewed and steamed over the fact that, in the public’s consciousness, the date “January 6th” no longer calls to mind the Feast of the Epiphany. It has been co-opted and forever tainted by the insurrection at our nation’s Capital; a moment scarred by death and destruction in which our cherished democracy hung in the balance. For us liturgical Christians whose church seasons and feast days frame our worship and practice, the date of January 6th, our beloved feast day, is marred in infamy. It’s time for reclamation.

Every Christian is to be a magus on this day, in search of the light, and guided by it in the life of faith. As I ponder this truth, it is difficult not to feel a painful distance between what ought to be and what is. We are people called by the star, led by it, leading the nations in turn to the true King, the Prince of Peace. How do we move forward in this reality? Well, John the Baptist has the answer.

The theologian Marcus Borg describes John’s message— “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”—as both a message of indictment and an invitation. John warns the Pharisees, that “brood of vipers,” that Jesus “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (vs. 16b-17). The words “we are truly sorry and we humbly repent” actually mean something to us. I believe a collective posture of repentance regarding the events of January 6, rather than gaslighting and political obstinance, would commence the healing of a deep wound and signal a way forward for all Americans.

Many malignant forces try to name and claim us. Baptism reminds us first and foremost that we belong to God. God knows and calls us by name. “You are mine,” Isaiah prophesizes in today’s Old Testament reading. And if we belong to God, that means we abide in God’s love. The ultimate act of sharing this love was Jesus’ death on the cross—a love reenacted in each baptism when the one who is marked as Christ’s own forever dies to sin and is reborn to new life.

According to Christian historian John Dominic Crossan, Jesus’ own baptism story was an “acute embarrassment” for the early Church. What scandalized the Gospel writers was not the miracle of a dove alighting on Jesus or God choosing that moment to part the heavens and pronounce him “beloved.” No, it was the more mundane questions surrounding it. Why was Jesus placing himself under the tutelage of an outsider, a rebel-rouser such as John? And why was God’s eternally begotten Word receiving a baptism of repentance? Repentance for what? Wasn’t Jesus perfect? And why in the world did he wade into those waters with scores of the great unwashed?

It is important to note that his was not a private baptism. The gospels say that crowds of people flocked to John at the river from as far away Ephesus—600 miles from Jerusalem (Acts 19:3). Jesus’s baptism inaugurated his public ministry by identifying with what the Gospel writer Mark describes as “the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem” (1:5). The Messiah’s first public act is a declaration of solidarity: I am one of you. That’s right: God is one of us.

Jesus chose to ally himself with the faults and failures, the pains and the problems, and with all the broken and hurting people who had flocked to the Jordan River. By wading into the Jordan, he took his place beside us and among us. This is Jesus acknowledging the full implications of his Incarnation—he risks what it means to declare genuine and costly solidarity with one’s neighbors in a world that is structurally, wholly, and jointly “living in sin.”  As Debie Thomas wrote, “We can’t belong well to each other if we’re busy erecting walls between “our” piety and “their” sinfulness.  We are in this together.  We are in all of this together.”1 Emmanuel.

Jesus’s baptismal solidarity with all the broken people is vividly confirmed by God’s claim on his life. Still wet after his cousin has plunged him beneath the river, Jesus takes a breath, gathers himself, and kneels in prayer. It is then that he hears a voice and sees a vision — first the declaration by God, the Father and Mother, that Jesus is the beloved Son; and then the sight of God the Spirit, manifested as a dove, descending to earth from above. Eugene Peterson’s The Message bible has a more poignant translation: “And along with the Spirit, a voice: “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life” (3:22). My friends, this is the epiphany! This is the moment Jesus goes public with his message and mission after thirty years of invisibility — that by the power of the Spirit, he embodies unconditional love for all people, everywhere, forever.

During this Epiphanytide, Jesus’ baptism story confronts us with a question we all need to be asking in these difficult and divisive times: How can we live well together?  How can we belong well together? What must we do to embrace a mutually fulfilling life as human beings coexisting on this fragile planet?

Listen, and you will hear God say, “You are my son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.”  Indeed. This is what the Epiphany is all about. It is about the recognition of the divine in our world and in each one of us—and of the unbearably bright truth that each and every one of us is beloved by God.

Listen, and you will hear God say, “You are my daughter, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.” There is nothing more sacred and beautiful than being seen, recognized and acknowledged for who God created us to be. God encourages us to believe that we are not useless, not alone, not forgotten, not unlovable, not disposable. We are God’s beloved children.

Listen, and you will hear God say, “You are my child, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.” God reminds us that he created us, and he came to earth to live among us. And as a gift of love he went to the cross to reconcile brokenness and the injustices of the world. If we allow it, the baptismal waters will engulf our fears and insecurities with a reminder that with God we are precious, honored and cherished. Within our dreams for a better way of living together, and against the struggle against systems that deny our humanity and our flourishing, we hear god’s echoing refrain: there is one body and one spirit. There is one hope in God’s call to us; one Lord, one faith, one baptism (BCP, p. 299).  Amen.


1 https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/3285-one-of-us.  Always deeply grateful to spiritual writer Debie Thomas for her insights, her theology, and her writing.
 https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/3794-he-knows-my-name. Deeply grateful to writer Dan Clendenin and his commentary for Jan. 12, 2025.  I used some of his ideas as well in this sermon.

Preacher

The Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello

Canon Vicar