(79) Epiphany!

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Epiphany!, originally shared on January 7, 2021. It was the seventy-ninth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   What does the Epiphany teach us about living in a pandemic? How does it shed light on yesterday’s mob action in Washington D.C.? Today, we’re going to talk about the origin of a civil society, how we live in one, and how we preserve one as the people of God.

   Have you ever watched a cartoon character wrestle with a problem? What do they do? They think, and they ponder, and they cogitate, and scrunch their muscles and squeeze their eyes real tight, and then <gasp>! What appears over their head?

   A glowing light bulb! The light comes on! Light enters where there was darkness.

   They have a what? An epiphany!

   That’s the name of the season in the church year that began yesterday, ending the Christmas season.

   It’s the final season of the Christmas Cycle. Advent prepares for Christmas, Christmas is the event, and Epiphany reflects on the meaning of Christmas.

   Epiphany began yesterday with the Day of Epiphany, a day to remember the first revelation of Jesus to non-Jews, or gentiles, the 3 Wisemen. We don’t know much about them. We don’t even know how many there were, it’s only tradition that says three. We do know that they were men. Some have said that we know this because if they had been women they would have arrived on time and brought practical gifts like disposable diapers. <laugh>

   It’s light entering darkness.

*Matthew 4:12-16

   The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.

   We’ve had a lot of heat lately. We need the light we celebrate during the Epiphany season.

   Mark Krisky, one of the meteorologists on Channel 5, said this morning that 2020 sent out a Tweet with one question, “Do you miss me yet?”

   L.A. County health officials said that leaving home is now considered “a high-risk activity”.
   Ambulance drivers are now being told not to transport patient with little change of survival to local hospitals. Someone is making that call over the phone. The first 100,000 cases of the coronavirus took 10 months. The most recent 100,000 cases took just one. LA County reported over 14,000 new cases at 85 deaths on the day before yesterday.  ICU's are full, oxygen is in short supply at some hospitals and the military is being called-in to fill the gaps. One person is infected in LA County every six seconds.

   And yet, large gatherings are still taking place, people are still walking around without masks or practicing social distancing, and we still haven’t felt the full force of people’s indifference to practicing safer behavior over Christmas and New Year’s.

   Why? I think that the answer has a lot to do with yesterday’s invasion of our nation’s Capitol.

   I, personally, would not call it an attempted coup. There were no weapons, people in the mob paused to take selfies with the police, and no apparent organization or goal or plan. It was a mob.

   Have you ever been in a crowd of people with a singular purpose whose mood turns to incoherent rage and becomes, or comes near to being, a mob. It’s frightening It doesn’t take much to incite the crowd to action. In most cases, people remember that they belong to a civil society, and cooler heads prevail. Studies have shown that it only takes one person to inspire heroic and sacrificial action for civility from a crowd, as well.

   That didn’t happen yesterday. Why?

   First, I don’t think the root cause was social media. Social media is an amplifier, but it’s not a cause.

   I think that the root cause of yesterday’s anarchy has been around and growing for a long time. It’s the lack of a common culture, a common worldview, a winners and losers approach to politics which means there can be no compromise.  We have no common set of national values, no common cultural history, no cohesive national fabric, only the view that everything is relative. What’s good for you may not be good for me, and I have every right to seek my own good, just as you have every right to seek yours. If one speaks of seeking the common good, they are seen as naïve. 

   This long-held world view has produced not the polarization of our culture, but its fracture into hundreds of small self-referencing cultures, large and small, all primarily focused on self-preservation. All self-righteous, all organized on the principle of us against them.

   This has brought us to identity politics, cancel culture, and the replacement of liberal arts education (that is, being exposed to lots of different ideas and perspectives) with a “progressive” indoctrination tolerating no dissent, especially at our colleges and universities training the leaders of our nation.

   What is at stake is not democracy, that became a construct of self-interest long ago; it’s civilization itself.

   How much of our primary education is devoted not to teaching, but to bringing civilization, a sense of the common good, to our nation’s youth? Why is this necessary? Because many parents have turned, not just the education, but the civilization of their children, over to the schools.

   How does this affect us?

   I would suggest that if you, wherever you are in the political spectrum, can not understand the origin of others rage, wherever they are in the political spectrum, then I submit that you are a part of the problem. I’m not saying “condone”, I’m just saying “understand”.
   Does it bother you when people call the ballot sacred, the halls of Congress sacred, political ritual sacred. Can we now only defend civilization by claiming that its institutions are holy? Is that now our civil religion? Are our human institutions now considered holy? It bothers me.

   So is this just an old-guy’s rant. Today’s equivalent of “Get off my lawn?” You tell me. Put your reactions in the comment section. I’d like to hear from you, and will respond to every idea.

<deep breath>
Let's talk about something that truly reveals the holy. Epiphany.
   God’s people had a problem. They had once been a great nation, but they had been the region’s door mat for 1,000 years.

   They had been an economic and cultural crossroads, now they were a place to go through to get from one place to another. Like many think of the Midwest, a fly-over states between the two coasts.

   They were waiting for the messiah, the anointed one, the deliver. Most people thought when he came, he would be a military leader, build an army, strike fast and hard and get rid of the hated Roman army of occupation.

   They would be on top again, where they belonged.

   After King David died around 1,000 BC, the prophets began to bring the word from God that a messiah would come. They called him the anointed one, because that’s how Kings were made, not with a crown, but by anointing, with oil. The next king was David’s son Solomon He was a disappointment, The next king was Rehoboam, and he was a disaster.

   The nation split into two kingdoms After many warnings from the prophets about the people’s behavior and their lack of interest in keeping their covenant with God, the Assyrians came in 722 BC and wiped out the Northern 10-tribe kingdom of Israel and assimilated them, then in 586 B.C., the Babylonians displaced the Assyrians and took the remaining two-tribe Kingdom of Judah into captivity in Babylon for 50 years. Then the Persians wiped out the Assyrians and let those who wanted to, go back to Jerusalem. Not all of them did. Then, the Greeks came and wiped out the Persians. Then, the Romans came and wiped out the Greeks.

Then, they waited through tough times for 600 hears. Then God went “radio silent” for 300 years. There was no word from God through the prophets. At all.

   And then <gasp> Jesus was born! An epiphany! Only very, very few people realized what had happened.

*John 1:1-9

   He was kind of puny for a military leader. Babies aren’t known for leading armies. Maybe he’d grow. Not many could believe that Jesus was the Messiah then.

   Then he grew up poor. Then he started his public ministry kind of late by our standards. He was about 30 years old, and that ministry would only last about three years.

   When he announced himself, most people didn’t experience an epiphany. His family thought he was nuts. Wouldn’t you? I’m guessing it was part of the family that was not Mary and Joseph. They would have had some pretty strong clues!

   Then he did miracles, he gave people a glimpse into what God had intended in Creation before people messed it up trying to put themselves in the place of God. He had lots of followers then, but he hadn’t raised an army. When the free medical attention, the free food, and the free education stopped, and he started to talk about how he was going to die, they dropped him like a stone.

   Even his closest disciples abandoned him. Even his closest disciple denied he even knew Jesus, three time, while Jesus was being tortured.

   But, he still didn’t raise an army. Instead, he suffered and died.

   Jesus was the Messiah.

   He was the light of the world.

   He died to free us from our sinful selfish selves and to embody an ethic of love. Sacrificial love for the sake of the other. The building of community through a common relationship with the one true living God. That’s the Epiphany!

   We love because He first loved us. That’s the basis of a civil society. That’s the contribution Christians in any society bring to the table.

   We live in a civil society not by seeking our own interests but by serving others as Christ has first served us. We maintain a civil society through an ancient ethic: love one another, as I have loved you.

   Governor Newsom has said that there light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel.

   The Light of the world, however, has come.

<phooo> An Epiphany.

   Do you still dwell in darkness? Open your hearts to encounter or renew God’s gift of faith, a living relationship with the living God. May Jesus be your Epiphany. A sudden awareness of something that was always there. The light that has overcome the darkness. Jesus.

   Happy Epiphany! Share the good news.