A Homily for the Second Sunday after The Epiphany

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on January 14, 2024, the Second Sunday after The Epiphany.

Epiphany–the season of light–is a time in the Church year where a strange, counter-cultural kind of passivity is modeled, is patterned in us. When it’s all said and done, the Christian life consists of something that we really cannot abide (despite its salvific power!). And it’s this… we are a listening, receiving, and illumined people. It is, after all, Satan who transforms himself into an angel of light–he is his own light apart from God, in rebellion and disobedience to the Lord. In my book, the lovely little hymn “This Little Light of Mine” should properly run “This little light of yours shines even despite my besetting provilicities and ingrained tendency to quench, dim, and squelch it.” But I don’t think that would sell in Sunday School (though it should as it’s the greatest news we’ve ever heard).

Epiphany reminds us that we place our trust in Christ alone: “Jesus + Nothing = Everything,” as the bumper sticker has it. Illumined by word and sacrament shining upon us, from outside ouselves, God’s inbreaking love comes to us again and again and our addiction to securing our good standing with God by our own efforts (essentially without God, or only when we’re in a pinch) slowly comes undone. We learn to live in faith and trust with open, empty, receiving, surrendered hands that his light (not our blazing headlamps) might illumine us and that we might be that received light for others. 

The done, finished, accomplished, once-and-for-all truth of being made right with God, and of God’s on-going sanctification in this life and the next by the Holy Spirit as entirely God’s work in us starts to dawn like the dayspring from on high, or a morning star rising in our hearts. What prodigal grace! How astounding that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, that he covers, clothes, blankets us with his righteousness rather than a hyper-active, desperately performed righteousness of our own. Nothing to earn. Nothing to gain. Grace abounds and we’re freed to simply love our neighbor in humble acts of unmagnificent service.

Nothing worse, nothing more repugnant actually, for a grabby group of sinners  (i.e. all of humanity) who want to take the credit for apparent glimmers of holiness and to heroically climb their Tower of Babel way to God than to hear it’s all God’s work in us so that none can boast: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2: 8-9). And so, with the “word of the Lord rare in those days [and] visions not widespread” we find Samuel bedded down next to the Ark (the tangible, visible, sacramental sign of God’s presence that comes to us, that calls from outside ourselves). Israel’s decrepitude and disobedience is summed up in dim-eyed old Eli who’s let his sons run amok. They’re being unfaithful to their wives, taking the choicest of the meats meant for sacrifice for their own enjoyment. And yet… and yet. The God of the Promise–who rescued Israel from Egypt, led them through the Red Sea, rained down provision in the wilderness with manna, quail, and water from the rock–the God of the promise is still present, active, working, calling, interrupting–drawing new life from dead ends, fashioning for Godself a people who might, by his received light, be that light for others.

But it all starts in a mournful, hopeless, dead place where self-centeredness rules the day. Stubborn, recalcitrant willfulness to do it our way is actually judged and put to death, so that the new thing God is doing can take place. In Eli, we have our true situation–sinners who by their own efforts cannot fulfill the law. The law accuses us, reveals our sin, and kills us. The law strips us of our self-righteousness and shows us of our need for someone other than ourselves to save us. The law shows us we are dead in our sins and that the wages of sin is death: a guttering lamp of the Lord perceived only dimly by the failing eyes of a broken down nepotistic priest. The law shows us our need to receive something from outside ourselves–the unconditional, free grace and mercy to all in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He, and only he, can fulfill the law. He and only he is the Paschal Lamb. He, and only He, is the righteousness of God who pays the debt of sin (I know, I know Episcopalians all hate that language) and opens the way to true life in Him. In Eli we have judgment and crucifixion. In Samuel, promise and resurrection. We are both at once. And this dying and rising happens over and over and over. Daily. Hourly. Minute by minute and moment by moment.

This receptive posture is what Luther calls “passive righteousness.” Terrible! Disgusting! Improper and unseemly! What about all my assertiveness training classes and the mountain of self-help books I read? Jesus’ righteousness in which we find ourselves made righteous takes the wind out of the sails of our need to earn, win, gain, climb ourselves to a righteousness that only God in Christ through the Holy can pour out upon us. It’s God’s righteousness poured out into our cupped, empty, needy, poor, little hands as gift to be received rather than holiness project to be (always) frantically executed well or badly. If it’s all on us we either do it or well (pride), or badly (shame). And in each case it’s us and our efforts utterly apart from God upon which our salvation hangs. A terrifying place (for all involved) to live from (if we can even call it life).

Passive righteousness looks like what Samuel undergoes sacked out in the Holy of Holies. It begins not with Samuel (he’s flat on his back–dead for all intents and purposes), but with God’s interruption into dimming grimness and despair: “Samuel! Samuel!” Out of darkness a light shines. Illumines us self-proclaimed luminaries. Breaks in and upon us. And what is Samuel’s response? A simple “Here I am, for you called me.” Like Abraham, Jacob, Moses at the Burning Bush, Isaiah, Mary at the Annunciation and Ananias in Acts… what is modeled is a simple allowing of ourselves to be raised, awakened, lifted, provisioned and sent in the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re here. We’re listening. Confident that God still speaks. “Here I am… Speak for your servant is listening.” God is a loving reality we undergo through passive reception rather than a prize to win, or an interior state to be cultivated, some consciousness to be attained, an emotion to feel….Simply let yourself be loved.

How desperately we would like to not have to undergo God, a process  totally out of our control. How desperately we would like to chart our way through the various maps of the spiritual life–whether steady progress through rooms in a mansion (Avila), a journey to the Celestial City (Bunyan) or clambering up rungs on some ladder (Climacus). And how desperately the Church in its own inability to undergo God will gladly give us a ladder to climb and grade our progress! How desperately we yearn for a little patch of ground we can call our own (with Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and cultivate for ourselves. But, of course, as Abraham Kuyper reminds us, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” 

We are already children of God. Our bodies, indwelt by the Holy Spirit are already God’s Temple. We don’t make ourselves holy, but are made holy in the process of undergoing God, of trusting Christ alone–there is one who is righteous, and it’s not me or you! We don’t join ourselves to (fornicate with!) our ideas about a confected and performed holiness apart from God that we do well or badly, but are united to the Lord who becomes one spirit with us. We let ourselves be loved into loving others. And that’s Good News after we’ve gotten over our hissy fit of wanting to have a shred of control over the process. That ladder Nathaniel sees? Not another way for you to climb your way, ice-axe in hand, to the holiness of God. No, siblings in Christ. Jesus is the ladder. He comes down it in order to free us and draw us–lovingly, mercifully, with some refining along the way–into the divine life. Greater things than these indeed!

Perhaps it’s my age, or the result of being a recent guest of L’Hotel Hunstman, but I’ve been pondering my inevitable end in good Benedictine fashion. And I came across this little passage from the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Called the greatest theologian since Acquinas by Pope Pius XII, Barth had a keen sense, despite his brilliance, that he was a sinner like the rest of us (not one is righteous, no one has understanding, no one seeks God as Paul says in Romans 3) and that we are justified by his grace as gift through Christ Jesus. Here’s what he wrote to a friend in the very last days of his life:

I shall be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, in and with my whole ‘being,’ with all the real good and real evil that I have thought, said, and done, with all the bitterness that I have suffered and all the beauty that I have enjoyed. There I shall only be able to stand as a failure that I doubtless was in all things, but… by virtue of his promise, as peccator justus [justified/forgiven sinner]. And as that I shall be able to stand.

God comes to us, here, now, in the person and work of Jesus not to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or make already good people a little better, but to save sinners like me and you by his act of free grace. This is His astounding “quid without a quo.” It’s enough to make your ears tingle and your heart sing. Here I am Lord… your servant is listening flat on their back. Here we are Lord, your Church is listening flat on its back. Illumine us, for our eyes have grown dim. Break upon us dayspring from on high for the lamp is low! Stand us up in the sweet assurance of your eternal promise. Stand us up in your loving grace received, and, yes, undergone, apart from all works of whatever law we’ve invented for ourselves. May we–illumined by your word and sacraments–shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory for our neighbor.

Amen.