Epiphany and almost Lent greetings, my dear family in Christ,
For a month now, we’ve been celebrating a few of the many “epiphanies” of Jesus e.g. the voice from heaven and the “Spirit descending as a dove” at his baptism, his healings and miracles, all epiphanies or expressions of the very presence of the Divine. Just as important, perhaps, is his “epiphanies” or revealing just what a loving and faithful human life should look like. We believe that Jesus Christ lives on, not only “at the right hand of God” but in the lives of each and every one of us. It follows then there are innumerable epiphanies or expressions of the God’s Realm happening in and around our lives.
All too often, however, we don’t think about or talk about how we see and experience God in our lives. When we do wonder about how God and God’s will for our lives, we frequently rely on others (pastors, writers, theologians etc.) to give us the language to use. For example, we Episcopalians look to the beloved Book of Common Prayer to give voice to our faith and prayers. Now, this is all well and good, but what is most important, is that we use all of the above joined with the unique story that is each of our lives. Each of us has something (in fact, many things!) to say about his or her experience of God…wonderful and wondering things, experiences of grace and experiences of struggle.
In Krista Tippet’s book, Speaking of Faith –Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About It, she shares with the reader her experience with articulating faith during her time at the Benedictine abbey in Collegeville, MN. She became immersed in the “first-person” approach. This approach to religious speech is essentially about humanizing doctrine and beliefs. Concerning her time in Collegeville she writes,
I inherited the notion that everyone has relevant observations to make about the nature of God and ultimate things—that the raw material of our lives is the stuff of which we construct our sensibility of meaning and purpose of life, of how the divine intersects or interacts with our lives, of what it means to be human…I believe that we have too often diminished and narrowed the parameters of this quest. We’ve made it heady or emotional and neglected to take seriously the flawed, mundane physicality, the mess as well as the mystery, of the raw materials with which we are dealing…There is a profound difference between hearing someone say this is the truth and hearing someone say this is my truth. You can disagree with another person’s opinions, you can disagree with his doctrines; you can’t disagree with his experience.
Give voice, dear faithful friends, to the “mess” and the “mystery” to the struggle and to the epiphanies of grace. And find yourself, your God given humanity in the unfolding stories and lessons that we will share on the Sundays of Epiphany and Lent.
In Christ’s abiding presence and love,
Jim+