A Homily for the Fourth Sunday after The Epiphany

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on January 28, 2024, the Fourth Sunday after The Epiphany.

In the season of Epiphany we find ourselves at the beginning of the Gospel according to Mark. And one of the first things to notice is the basic trajectory of the proclamation and the promise embodied in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Sauntering by the net-mending James and John of the prestigous Galilean Sons of Thunder Fishing Company, the Kingdom Come Near in Jesus lures them away from the captivity of seeking that for which their hearts yearn in power, possessions, and prestige and discover it instead with nets dropped and empty hands gifted to them in Jesus and Jesus alone.

From there, Jesus makes four targeted stops: the synagogue, Peter’s household, the town square, and into graced encounter with the outcast, shoved aside, unclean other personified in the leper. The light saturates each and every dimension of human life–church, family, public square, and those whom it would be easy to forget–the poor, the unhoused, the sick, the lonely. Each of these dimensions of our common life together are in need of Jesus’ healing presence and touch. And each of these different dimensions is in some way held captive by something other than what our psalm calls, “the fear of the Lord [that] is the beginning of wisdom.”

Now the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom is a delicate matter that requires some unpacking. It is, of course, Solomon who is the great exemplar of what fear of the Lord looks like in a human life. You remember that when God asks Solomon to ask God for something Solomon begins with the admission that he is not wise. He confesses that he is a little child and does not know how to go out or come in. Solomon’s wisdom is born of the simple, poor admission that he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. His wisdom is given to him by God as gift from the honest confession that he can’t really even tell his hindquarters from his elbow. “Claiming to be wise, they become fools” (Rom 1:22).

Wisdom, true wisdom, comes from God (extra nos/outside ourselves) as in-breaking love. It’s not buried within us, or the product of some realm of human knowledge that is a lamp unto itself apart from God. The great reminder of this, which we do well to never forget, is the Shoah, the Holocaust. Germany in the years leading up to World War II was arguably the most advanced civilization in human history–culturally, philosophically, technologically, scientifically, psychologically. And yet, despite (because of?) all that progress in the span of twelve short  years between 1933-1945 over six million Jews and other so-called “undesirables” were deemed, “life unworthy of life” and exterminated. 

The great dream of infinite progress into a future of boundless possibility went up in ghastly, choking smoke belched from Auschwitz ovens. The murderous hubris of all human-generated projects pursued apart from empty-handed reception of the Wisdom from on High as sheer gift is brought to light. “Knowledge puffs up,” in a truly grisly manner. True knowledge comes from being known by God–something we don’t have a shred of say in! True knowledge comes down in the simple, humble recognition of our need for a savior, a deliverer, something other than our own good old fashioned craft and guile.

Living as we do in a Culture of Fear, it’s easy to mistake fear of the Lord for basic anxiety. We’re anxious about the environment, horrified by the wars in Israel-Palestine and Ukraine and a hundred other places, antsy about our fragile political situation…. And it doesn’t help that many of us were brought up to fear the Lord in the same way we fear endless drought, unbreathable air, and shrinking glaciers. We were taught that to fear the Lord meant to be anxiously afraid of God as irascible judge, punitive task-master who will brook no lolly-gagging. We were taught that God is what Karl Barth recalls from his own Sunday School formation as an accusing  “oversized giant prosecutor… [who] will judge us like some sky-scraping chief justice [who] will send us forever to hell at the end of our days.”

True fear of the Lord is wonder, awe, and marvelling at God’s works. In the splendors of creation surely, but also in dawning recognition that God since before the foundation of the world has loved and chosen us, covenented with us, taken our alienation and separation upon Himself in the person of his only-begotten son Jesus Christ and revealed it for the sham it really is. In Jesus Christ God reveals Godself to be a God for us. Jesus, our brother, gathers us to himself that in Him we might have the audacity to call God Father, and know ourselves as God’s beloved children here and now. True fear of the Lord begins with the stunned, grateful recognition of the free gift of God’s grace totally apart from and in spite of what we’ve done, merited, or deserved. 

True fear of the Lord starts with Solomon’s empty-handedness of not knowing up from down,  whether he’s coming or going, and opens onto to dumbstruck, joyous recognition that even here, even now, we are God’s chosen, beloved of the father, whose well-pleasedness extends to each and every person regardless of nationality, race, class, creed, sexual orientation or gender identification. The one who is “wise” in this way says Barth, “Already in this life… lives beyond death. Already here and now… may begin to live eternally.” And make no mistake, there is not a single person here this morning to whom wisdom is not offered for free. No ifs, ands, or buts.

We don’t much like receiving grace as free gift. First of all, it’s horribly dispiriting that the person whom we despise and look down our noses at has this pure, free, oil of gladness, adopting grace poured out upon them. They don’t deserve it we mutter to ourselves. Why? Because we secretly think we do somehow deserve it! Meritocracy haunts our conception of God’s grace and that makes us fearful of the uncontrollable nature of the gift. We want, secretly, alone on our beds at night not to receive free grace like children, but to be “Good Germans” who follow orders and then flash our list of completed tasks to St. Peter at the Pearly Gates as we brush past him confident that it’s our efforts that got us through the door. No! Fear that! Be anxious and terrified of that propensity to trust in our own “wisdom” operating apart from God to punch our own tickets and live in willful ignorance of the gift of God’s covenanting, merciful, and saving grace!

Human institutions have a natural tendency to fall into this Godless self-sufficiency. You see it in the preponderance of programs in the Church dedicated to effective leadership techniques, management strategies, the endless 7 Steps to a Better… that flood my inbox. Puffed up knowledge. And the synagogue of Jesus’ time was no different from the church in ours. They know who’s in and who’s out, who's clean and unclean, who’s assiduously punching their tickets and who’s not. They are possessed. They are quite literally in the thrall of the demonic impulse to be a light unto themselves–in the know instead of not knowing whether they are coming or going like Solomon in marveling, awed, wonderment of God. Living, that is, by God’s light not our own.

And the Corinthians are up to the same thing. If you eat this you’re out. Do it my way or you’re going to hell. They, like us, make a god of their preferences and proclivities, and worship those instead of the Living God. What we do, our particular ministry is the “true Christian life” and everybody else falls short. No wonder when the ark is brought into the temple and it fills up with smoke, the priests have to high-tail it out of there because they “could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.” God’s acutual presence is literally toxic to our self-aggrandizing holiness projects. No sooner does the presence of God come into the Temple than the priests don their gas masks and declare an emergency fire drill, make everyone exit immediately, and line up alphabetically in rows! (2 Chronicles 5:14). You can’t make this stuff up!

In every arena of human endeavor–church, family, public square, on those wilderness roads beyond the pale where people who keep polite company dare not go–the call is to let God be God and to be fastidiously aware of the ways in which we substitute our puffed up knowledge for the marveling wonderstruck awe of God who is always doing a new thing, apart from and quite often against the good we think we’re doing. “Apart from Christ,” Luther says with his trademark disputational bluntness, “your good works are mortal sins.” Ouch. 

So what is it like to receive communion as if for the first time? What is it like for church to be a place where we come as forgiven sinners to receive grace and mercy from a God who won’t let us go rather than having to perform having it all together? What is it like to see your spouse or partner or dog or sibling or your sworn enemy as if for the first time–a mystery bursting out beyond all the shared, well-trod history together? What would it be like to meet a sick person not as a problem to be fixed, a disease to be cured, someone to be expertly ministered to, but as a fellow child of God, a holy mystery to marvel at and see what service emerges from that empty-handed, non-controlling place of simple presence? And what would it be like to meet that leperous, strange other who eats all the wrong stuff, doesn’t do it like we know they should (like we do), and who won’t take our wonderful advice… what might it be like to fear the Lord in the face of that one truly seen, truly received, truly listened to? 

Teach us Lord in church, in our families, in the public square, and in solidarity with the outcasts for whom you have a special love to know that we don’t know. Gift us your wisdom and free us from mere knowledge that puffs up, separates, divides, incinerates, crucifies. Unclench our fists, and lift up our heads that we may rest in the finished work of your only-begotten son Jesus Christ who became poor that we might be rich with love of you and you alone. May we be your light shining through the cracked and crazed glass of our lives for others.

Amen.