Living on Tip-Toes - An Epiphany Sermon
The Rt Rev’d Richard Randerson, Dean
15 January 2006
When did you last stand tip-toes with expectation? really looking forward to
something? counting the sleeps? And what was it you expected? The family coming
for Christmas? a summer holiday at the beach? maybe a new house or car?
When did you last have a sense of expectation because you were about to embark
upon some new life-changing experience? a new job with hope and vision? a new
relationship with love and fulfilment? a new step in discipleship? Or maybe
even an encounter with the living God? - which can happen in the context of
any of the above events, and any event in daily life.
And if we no longer have any sense of expecting anything new to come our way,
we might ask what our life is about. Suppose you had to complete a sentence
like “My life is about......”, or “What I want most out of
life is ......” or “In life I am committed to ......”, how
would you complete the sentence? That could be a most revealing exercise for
each one of us.
Our readings today all speak to us of people who were living their lives expectantly,
open to God’s presence, earnestly seeking to hear God’s word, looking
for God in a way that would make a difference in their lives. 1 Samuel 3. 1-10: Here is the very moving story of the young Samuel, dedicated by his mother Hannah to the service of the Lord in the Temple. The story has many parallels
to Mary, and Jesus’ birth and dedication.
Note v.1: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were
not widespread”. And no wonder: the sons of Eli, the ageing priest of
the Temple, were robbing the food from those who came to make sacrifice, and
sleeping with the women who served in the Temple. They were people whose first
love for God had long since gone and life had become a self-serving routine
with diminishing satisfactions. Into this tired and demoralised setting comes
the young Samuel, who hears the voice of the living God calling to him in the
night, and he responds.
Acts 8. 26-39: This reading tells the story of an Ethiopian court official
on his way home from Jerusalem where he has been to worship. God’s spirit
directs Philip to approach the chariot where he finds the Ethiopian reading
a passage from Isaiah. Philip interprets the passage for him and then baptises
him. Here in this Ethiopian we find a highly ranked court official searching
the scriptures in his desire to encounter the living God, and he succeeds.
Matthew 2. 1-12: This well-known Epiphany story of wise men from Persia who
come to worship the infant Jesus fits in the context of a widespread expectation
of a new age, with the birth of a king who will lead the world into a new era
of truth and hope. The fact that the eunuch was from Ethiopia, and the wise
men from Persia, indicates the universal nature of God’s love in Christ,
a love spreading beyond Israel to encompass all nations and peoples on earth.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has asked : “What difference
would it make if I believed I am held in a wholly loving gaze which saw all
my surface accidents and arrangements, all my inner habits and inheritances,
all my anxieties and arrogances, all my history, and yet loved me wholly with
an utterly free, utterly selfless love?
“And what difference would it make if I let myself believe that each
person around me is loved and held in the same overwhelming, loving gaze, and
that this love made no distinctions of race, religion, age, innocence, strength
or beauty?”
Here is the heart of the Epiphany message, that God’s love for me is entirely
unlimited by my own imperfections and failings, that God’s love for every
other person is of exactly the same unlimited nature, that our love for others
should be equally unlimited, and that we are able to exercise such limitless
love because God’s love for us sets us free to do so.
When we are plagued with self-doubts, concerns about our own status or well-being,
we become competitive with others and enter into a “win/lose” way
of living, desperate for self- recognition, and taking secret satisfaction in
the failings of others. When you project that way out into the inter-racial
or international arena, it becomes a recipe for hatred and violence. We can
only win if they lose.
By contrast knowing the limitless love of God for me and for all people takes
us into a win/win situation where I want for others exactly what I want for
myself, viz. the knowledge that God loves and cares for me, and so God does
for all.
We saw recently the film “The Constant Gardener” based on John
Le Carre’s novel. It is a story of a large multi-national pharmaceutical
company testing new drugs in Africa, killing off local Africans in the process,
but the deaths are covered up by local officials and European embassy staff
in a context of all the corruption and hired assassins one would expect in a
John Le Carre novel. In the midst of this a young English activist married to a diplomat becomes
involved in exposing the corruption in order to save the lives of innocent Africans,
working with non-governmental organisations to this end. Both she and her husband
are eventually eliminated by killers hired by the commercial interests.
Well we know it is only a novel, and that such things don’t happen in
real life, except that they do. Many such organisations and individuals who
put their lives at risk in the struggle for justice and the well-being of all
people deserve our support. We hear about them all the time in the media. Those
they risk their lives for are our neighbours for whom God’s limitless
love is as real and as full as it is for us. They act out of an Epiphany awareness
that the love of God in Christ extends to all.
So is this truth something we would stand on tip-toes for? Would we let it
change our lives and arouse within us a passion that shapes our lives, and redirects
us to search like Samuel, and the Ethiopian eunuch and those Persian sages for
the truth and the love that will set us free?
T S Eliot’s poem Journey of the Magi is an evocative account of the journey
of those wise men to find the infant Jesus. Eliot writes of how they left their
“summer palaces on slopes, with silken girls bringing sherbet” and
after a rough journey found the child, returning then to their own country,
“but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, with an alien people
clutching their gods”.
As it was for the wise men, so for us an encounter with the living God should
make us ill at ease in our own society where we cling to the gods of our modern
lifestyle. But that same encounter offers us the hope of re-focussed living
where we rediscover a passion for the things of God that can change our lives,
and the world around us.
|