Sermon of the week: God showing up

(In this 40th installment of the UPI series of sermons, the Rev. Dr. Jay C. Rochelle, a pastor emeritus of St. Timothy's Lutheran Church in Allentown, Pa., reflects on the feast of Epiphany this Sunday. Rochelle is preparing for the priesthood in the Antioch Orthodox Church).

This sermon is based on Matthew 3:13-17.

Faith in God is largely a matter of "what if?"

What if there were a God? If there were, we would expect God's world to run predictably, even respectably.

We want a God to support form and order. What if there were not a God? Well, we imagine a world without God in terms of chaos and disorder.

We are confronted with death and random evil. Stability and order have been shaken.

Remember the Holocaust, that grim scar at mid-century. Remember the Gulags and how Stalin murdered more of his own people than anyone in history. Remember the countless genocides. Remember Sept. 11.

If God is supposed to show up, he seems to be absent. Where to turn? Maybe we should look elsewhere.

Epiphany means "manifestation." We use the word when God shows up. The Eastern name for the festival on Jan. 6 is theophany, which means "God shows up."

The church confesses that God showed up here, so this festival is third in importance only to Pascha (Easter) and Pentecost. We pay attention to this event in worship and in icon.

In the West the festival recounts the visit of the Magi, and is followed by the baptism of Jesus. For the East, Theophany is the true baptism of Jesus because there we experience all of God for the first time.

The church sings, "The Trinity, our God, today has made itself indivisibly manifest to us. For the Father in a loud voice bore clear witness to his Son; the Spirit in the form of a dove came down from the sky; while the Son bent his immaculate head before the Forerunner, and by receiving baptism he delivered us from bondage, in his love for mankind" (From the Third of the Royal Hours).

God comes among us as a community of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit revealed at once. This is not God the force inherent in creation, an abstract concept to contemplate.

God walks among us in Jesus of Nazareth whom, the writer John says, "we have seen and touched and heard." God wants us in personal relationship, or not at all.

God wants us fully human, not escaping into a religion detached from ordinary life. This personal God seeks persons who are fully human, or who can be brought to full humanity, whom he can love.

This down-to-earth God of love still seeks us today.

Today God enters the living stream of nature to heal creation. The cosmic powers remain a threat to many people. Wind and rain, snow and ice: meteorologists can chart and measure these elements but we cannot stop them.

Ancient peoples saw them as demonic forces. People still seek to appease the wrathful God they see in adverse forces of nature, even if they do not see the myth below their superstition.

The church sings, "The Savior, who is grace and truth, has appeared in the streams of the Jordan, and enlightened those that sleep in darkness and shadow. For the Light that no man can approach has come and is made manifest" (Expostilarion of Matins on Theophany).

When he steps into the Jordan River, Christ overcomes the elemental forces and brings to naught their power to separate us from God. When he steps into Jordan darkness is dispelled and the Light of God is dispersed in the world.

"A strange wonder it was to see the Maker of heaven and earth stand naked in the river, and as a servant receive baptism from a servant, for our salvation" (From the Ninth of the Royal Hours).

Faith is grounded in upheavals and reversals: from the beginning we see God willing to squeeze into our world as a human being without loss and without change. Astounding images! Take them in faith and feed upon them.

The church sings, "Today the waters of the Jordan are transformed into healing by the coming of the Lord. Today the whole creation is watered by mystical streams.

"Today the transgressions of men are washed away by the waters of the Jordan. Today paradise has been opened to men and the Sun of Righteousness shines down upon us.... we have been delivered from darkness and illuminated with the light of the knowledge of God" (Great Blessing of the Waters).

We stand inside God's act of showing-up. This is no ancient act, remembered in books. God may show up in each Now of our being and experience.

Matter has become once more the bearer of the divine presence; that's what we celebrate this day with the blessing of the waters, with our reveling in water. All water becomes holy water on this day, capable of bearing theophany to us.

We know, finally, the healing power of the water that we enter at baptism, an image of the baptism Christ underwent at the Theophany, at his cross and exaltation.

Risen with healing in his wings, we all rise with him. Every drop of water, every drink we take, may remind us that we are in Christ through baptism. All water may be the Jordan into which Christ descended in order to raise us up.

The water of Jordan flows through the blood of the martyrs, as well, and sanctifies it too. No one can bring them back, from any of the holocausts we have seen and known in our lifetime.

But God showed up once for all to bind up the brokenhearted and to heal the wounds of the destroyed. This, too, is the Epiphany.

Nobody can make you believe this. God's truth is so different from what we might invent that it brings us up short. We enter it by taking water blessed for our homes and our bodies, by receiving Christ within us in the Eucharist.

There is no belief as mental exercise, no belief as calculation of the logical possibilities. We step into the Jordan of God's silent, hidden, tearful, compassionate presence. Come! Step into the light and the water where God has shown up.