RCL Year C - (Epiphany 1C - the Baptism of Our Lord) - January 10, 2010

The Rev’d Kenneth H. Saunders III

Christ Church

Cleveland, NC

RCL Year C – (Epiphany 1C - the Baptism of Our Lord) – January 10, 2010

Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Have you ever stopped to think about - Who are you? Think about who you REALLY are? Is who you are - what you do? or is even who you are – who you’re related to?

You’ve got to love the south… in the south, who you are it is definitely who you are related to… I can hear it now, you walk up to somebody on the street to introduce yourself and the next phrase out of their mouth is Who’s your Mamma? or Who’s your Daddy? Who are you related to? Who are your kin folk? and you ain’t from around here, are ya?

When we stop to think about who we are, we get caught up in a sort of identity crisis… Where when who we are (or who we are related to) and what we do, start to mesh together and become part of our personae.

It’s hard for some folks to figure out who they really are. They live years living into a farce a fake, plastic personae of who others think they aught to be… It’s difficult and sad when society has such the grip on us that it dictates who we are… to the point that we are expected to dress a certain way or have a certain amount of money to be worth anything…

I pose the question this week… what does Christmas / Epiphany / and the Baptism of the Lord all have in common?? The one thing that they have in common is identity! The identity of who Christ is…

And the thought about identity it even stretched into our Advent series, when we asked the question about the identity of the One that cometh… when we asked, “who are we waiting for???” I said Wednesday night at our Epiphany service that Epiphany is a season of light and identity… not just Christ’s identity, but also of our own identity… and the readings for today, that surround the baptism of Christ shed a lot of light on who Christ is and who we are as his followers.

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah says that God calls the people of Israel out of exile in Babylon… God calls them by name and leads them through the waters and fire… God saves them ALL from harm, God redeems and restores them (saves them) and re-gathers them into community…

Just as the people of Israel are gathered and redeemed so God gathers and redeems us… And in the Gospel lesson, the ones going out to John the Baptist and listening to John preach repentance were filled with expectation… and were questioning the identity…Of the One who Cometh.

The were asking, If you’re not the one, then who are we waiting for?… and John tells them the One that will baptize you with the holy spirit and with fire… The cleansing power of the Holy Spirit will come and burn the chaff (the sin) that the wind blows away.

John tells them that the One coming will separate the pure grain (our true self) from the chaff the inedible, unusable, scaly parts of the grain - the waste (or the sin in our lives). And as wind and fire of the Holy Spirit blows and burns in our lives, the sin is consumed and forever removed. And with it, there is a transformation that takes place in us, (a metanoia) a desire to turn to God and repent and change…

And in Acts, the outcasts in Samaria have undergone this change and been baptized, so the Apostles Peter and John went to them to give validity to their experience (an apostolic witness to their faith) and laid hands on them and strengthened them with the only spirit.

After Jesus was baptized by John in the river Jordan he was praying and the heavens opened and the holy spirit descended on him in the bodily form of a dove. Then a great voice came down from heaven “You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased”… And it was witnessed by everyone there…

Baptism is an initiation into the Christian faith… that sacrament through which God adopts us as His Children… it makes us members and gives us full inclusion in Christ’s Body the Church by water and the Holy Spirit. And our baptism is witnessed by the whole community and the whole community makes vows to help us live into the commitments of our Baptism…

In a few minutes, we will once again stand and re-new those promises those vows that commit our lives to Christ… And we know, that regardless of the age we were when we were baptized, that God’s grace came raining down on us to adopt us as children of God and make recipients of the Holy Spirit… and we also had a Christian community backing us up…

See, the Christian life doesn’t occur in a vacuum it is not just “God and me” or a “Jesus and me”… It is experienced in a Community gathered, a community of Christ adopted by God and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Through our participation, we become the beloved - those favored by God and given the task of doing God’s work in the world.

We know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God… God came to this world as one of us to redeem us, to restore us to God’s favor, so that we might become his Children and therefore heirs of the Kingdom of God, - to forever be in the presence of the One who created us.

God gathers us as a community, and gives us identity… our only true identity as God’s Children… Then God empowers us by the Holy Spirit to act… to act and build up the Kingdom of God.

(Please Stand)

Therefore, brothers and sisters, I call upon you now, to renew the solemn promises and vows of Holy Baptism, by which we once renounced Satan and all his works, and promised to serve God faithfully in his Holy Catholic Church.

RCL Year C (the Feast of Epiphany) - January 6, 2010

The Rev’d Kenneth H. Saunders III

Christ Church

Cleveland, NC

RCL Year C (the Feast of Epiphany) – January 6, 2010

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

Today has many names…

The western Church calls it Epiphany (the Greek word that means an intuitive leap of understanding), The eastern Church calls it Theophany (or the appearance of God in visible form) or it could simply be called the Manifestation of Our Lord Jesus Christ to the Gentiles.

Regardless of what we call it… it means one thing to us… We know who God is a little better, because God revealed God’s self to us in the person of Jesus Christ… An he did it for ALL People!

This is a feast day that has been celebrated as a major feast in Christendom since before the year 354. At one time it was bigger than Christmas – because it included the birth of Jesus and the visit of the magi in one fail swoop.

It is a season of Light, filled with images of identity and journey, of understanding and a coming to know…

The story of the Magi (or Kings) that bring gifts to the Christ Child are familiar… They are as familiar as their lore – the lore that has become ingrained into the stories of the Christian faith…

The mysterious astrologers (the magi) or Persian priest, definitely non-Jewish (or Gentiles) from another place and another culture… They somehow see the need to honor and worship the new born “king of the Jews”

We don’t know how many there were, the scripture just calls them magi (have you ever wondered where the word magic comes from). Early traditions of the church asserted that there must have been three, because that’s how many gifts that were given… And the church even named them - Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar

The gifts are important, because they weren’t just any gifts that someone would give a newborn… These gifts tell stories within the story… about the identity of this miraculously born Jesus.

They become revelations of who the new born is and is to become…

Gold – a symbol of kingship and dominion on Earth… and Jesus will be referred to as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Frankincense – a fragrant incense burned in the temple of God every day by the priest… and Jesus will be referred to as the Great High Priest

Myrrh – the combination of spices used to anoint the dead and Jesus will suffer and die a human death for us on the cross.

God chose to reveal to astronomers the Good news of a miraculous birth that took place in a manger in Bethlehem of Judea. And these astronomers followed a great star over a mighty distance to worship a child revealed to them as “the King of the Jews.”

The scripture tells us that when the star stopped over the place where the child was that the magi were filled with joy and coming into the house they knelt down and paid him homage - they worshipped him…

This is the first revelation to the Non-Jews (or Gentile people) that God came into the world for the WHOLE WORLD not just the Jews…

Jesus walked on this earth and lived and died as one of us for everybody… so that everyone might come within reach of God. The God that created us, redeems us (or re-creates us), and continues to sustain our lives... the God that loves us so much that he became one of us…

The question to us is… how will we respond to that… Will we continue to be complacent and uninvolved, and live life for ourselves?

Or will we decide to follow the light of Christ? Do we make the difficult journey with the magi and cross the hard obstacles along the way? Will we follow the light of Christ that will eventually lead us to the cross?

The light of God has come into the world… so that we might see and experience God face to face…

After worshipping Jesus at the manger, the Magi carried the light of Christ out into the world with them, as they returned to their homes. So we, too, are called to rise from our worship here… leave the manger and move into the world, bearing the light of Christ – To take it to the places we live work, the places we work, the places we study, and the places we play.

And we are to remember that we are always called to welcome ALL who come to share in that light – The light of Christ!