The Epiphany of the Personal God
Text: John 1:35-42
As a season in the church year, Epiphany often goes ignored. We tend to view it as the breathing space that we have between Christmas and Lent, when we begin making preparations for Easter. Many of us go away on holidays, taking advantage of or fleeing from the winter weather. This isn’t such a bad thing, but it can mean that we miss some of the finer points of the gospel message.
Up until this point, Epiphany has been about God being revealed in a broad context. We have nations and kings following a star bearing symbolic gifts for the Christ Child, we have the heavens being opened, and the divine voice over the waters of the Jordan at Baptism. This is epic scale stuff… at it fits. We tend to think of God in these really big, expansive ways.
But not here… not with this story. There’s no big flash, no shining star, no descending dove… none of that. It’s funny, because John’s Gospel starts out with this big expansive stuff… “In the beginning was the Word…” but in this story, it’s not… It’s a reminder that “the word became flesh and lived among us.” What we have is a personal encounter, an introduction that happens on a personal level. It’s a reminder that Epiphany moments aren’t just on a grand scale, but most often happen in those moments of personal contact.
After John opens things on a universal, cosmic scale, he very quickly shifts the scene. It’s like in those science fiction films that show a swirling galaxy, and then suddenly it zooms in this small corner in one of the galactic arms, and it keeps zooming in, to a small start, to a small blue-green marble, that suddenly expands into our field of view, through the clouds, and then a few seconds later, we are on the banks of a small river, on the edge of a desert. John is preaching on the banks of the Jordan, and a there is this newcomer… Jesus.
John speaks very well of him… calls him the “Lamb of God… the one who is to come.” Even a few of John’s disciples are intrigued. Like shy children on a playground they follow Jesus, he asks them “what are you looking for?”
Up until this point, it’s all arms length, it’s all theoretical… but now, it’s personal. “What are you looking for?” he says… but their answer seems kind of odd. “Where are you staying?” they say… “Come, and see.” he replies, and then they spend the afternoon with this newcomer. A personal encounter.
Shortly after that, one of them goes to his brother to tell him of this encounter. “We have found the Messiah!” Andrew drags Simon to come and see and experience for himself. In this encounter, Jesus gives him a new name… “Peter.”
The encounter Jesus has with Andrew and Simon is one of contrast. John’s gospel is well known for being airy and cosmic… “In the Beginning was the Word” where Jesus is portrayed as being nearly otherworldly… if it wasn’t the reminder that the “Word became flesh and lived among us.” In this initial encounter between Simon and Jesus, we have this revelation, this Epiphany that God calls each one of us by name.
Jesus goes so far as to call Simon “Peter” or “Cephas”. For us it doesn’t seem all that big a deal… Peter is a pretty common name, isn’t it? Actually, it isn’t… both names mean the same thing, just one is in Greek and the other in Hebrew. Both words when translated into English mean “rock.” You know, those hard things that people either throw or use to build buildings. Jesus is really him “Rocky.” It’s a nickname… like Jack, Bill or Bob…
Notice… no singing angels, no shining lights, no descending doves… none of that. Just, a personal encounter. “Hi! Your name is Simon? I like you… mind if I call you Rocky?” The Epiphany moment, when the light goes on, is suddenly realizing that God is personal enough to give us nicknames.
We tend to think of God in a very broad context. Creator of the universe, etc… Up until now, the moments of Epiphany that we have don’t threaten that notion. Stories of Kings and gifts, baptism and heavens opening… they’re broad, they’re grand… they’re also safe, because God is somewhere out there. But there’s this increasingly uncomfortable edge that has been growing… and this week, we can’t ignore it… because God looks us in the eye, and gets personal.
But we much prefer putting some distance between ourselves and God. We’re not comfortable with God being able to look us in the eye. In his book Seeing God in the Ordinary, Michael Frost tells of attending a rather strange worship service. It was held in a dusty church fellowship hall with the congregation perched on metal folding chairs. The service itself sounded like something of a mess. A children’s play was followed by a ventriloquist cracking jokes and doing magic tricks. Then a woman with a Broadway-sized voice trundled out onto the stage and began belting out Bette Midler’s pop hit “From a Distance.” The main line of this song, repeated over and over, is that “God is watching us, watching us, watching us, from a distance.” The basic idea is that God keeps an eye on the world, but only from a safe distance, and indeed, life’s problems would not seem nearly so bad if we looked at things from a distance too.
Frost reports that this seemed like an odd choice of a song for Christian worship. He said, “but we all politely listened, until halfway through a woman in the front row could stand it no longer, jumped to her feet, and strode onto the platform. Whereupon she burst into singing the same tune but with the following words, ‘God came near to us, God came near to us, God came near to us.”[1]
We are really tempted to put God at a distance… but honestly, as much as we might want to relate to the sentiment of the song, it’s got it all backwards. The Gospel… the good news is that God comes near to us, and is able to relate to each of us in a way that is personal. That’s the Epiphany moment today, that the infinite creator of the universe, the Ground of all Being, our reason for existence… God… can and does come into our lives in a personal way. Up until this point, Simon saw himself as a nobody, and then along comes Jesus and calls him “Rocky.” Peter… a personal nickname… and a bit of foreshadowing that Peter himself would be one of the key “rocks” on which a new faith would be built.
As much as we are tempted to put Biblical characters up on a pedestal, what is really striking about the people Jesus related to was how ordinary they were. Joe and Jane Average… people who would consider themselves as “nobodies” and yet here is Jesus looking them in the eye and giving them nicknames. God gets personal… Yet let’s be honest, this is a scary prospect. Perhaps we like our anonymity… the possibility of getting noticed by God can be pretty frightening, because we might be forced out of our comfort zone. We have our own plans, our own thoughts as to what we would like to do, and along comes Jesus to interrupt them!
But then again, that’s exactly what an Epiphany moment is, a moment of realization where we come to a different way of thinking about something. In this, we can no longer think about God as being out there somewhere, but is right in our midst in a personal way. It has an impact on us, because we realize that God actually cares deeply about who we are, individually. Nobody is a nobody. That really is a moment of realization, when we learn all of us matter to God.
Amen.
[1] Michael Frost, Seeing God in the Ordinary. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000. p. 14-15
As a season in the church year, Epiphany often goes ignored. We tend to view it as the breathing space that we have between Christmas and Lent, when we begin making preparations for Easter. Many of us go away on holidays, taking advantage of or fleeing from the winter weather. This isn’t such a bad thing, but it can mean that we miss some of the finer points of the gospel message.
Up until this point, Epiphany has been about God being revealed in a broad context. We have nations and kings following a star bearing symbolic gifts for the Christ Child, we have the heavens being opened, and the divine voice over the waters of the Jordan at Baptism. This is epic scale stuff… at it fits. We tend to think of God in these really big, expansive ways.
But not here… not with this story. There’s no big flash, no shining star, no descending dove… none of that. It’s funny, because John’s Gospel starts out with this big expansive stuff… “In the beginning was the Word…” but in this story, it’s not… It’s a reminder that “the word became flesh and lived among us.” What we have is a personal encounter, an introduction that happens on a personal level. It’s a reminder that Epiphany moments aren’t just on a grand scale, but most often happen in those moments of personal contact.
After John opens things on a universal, cosmic scale, he very quickly shifts the scene. It’s like in those science fiction films that show a swirling galaxy, and then suddenly it zooms in this small corner in one of the galactic arms, and it keeps zooming in, to a small start, to a small blue-green marble, that suddenly expands into our field of view, through the clouds, and then a few seconds later, we are on the banks of a small river, on the edge of a desert. John is preaching on the banks of the Jordan, and a there is this newcomer… Jesus.
John speaks very well of him… calls him the “Lamb of God… the one who is to come.” Even a few of John’s disciples are intrigued. Like shy children on a playground they follow Jesus, he asks them “what are you looking for?”
Up until this point, it’s all arms length, it’s all theoretical… but now, it’s personal. “What are you looking for?” he says… but their answer seems kind of odd. “Where are you staying?” they say… “Come, and see.” he replies, and then they spend the afternoon with this newcomer. A personal encounter.
Shortly after that, one of them goes to his brother to tell him of this encounter. “We have found the Messiah!” Andrew drags Simon to come and see and experience for himself. In this encounter, Jesus gives him a new name… “Peter.”
The encounter Jesus has with Andrew and Simon is one of contrast. John’s gospel is well known for being airy and cosmic… “In the Beginning was the Word” where Jesus is portrayed as being nearly otherworldly… if it wasn’t the reminder that the “Word became flesh and lived among us.” In this initial encounter between Simon and Jesus, we have this revelation, this Epiphany that God calls each one of us by name.
Jesus goes so far as to call Simon “Peter” or “Cephas”. For us it doesn’t seem all that big a deal… Peter is a pretty common name, isn’t it? Actually, it isn’t… both names mean the same thing, just one is in Greek and the other in Hebrew. Both words when translated into English mean “rock.” You know, those hard things that people either throw or use to build buildings. Jesus is really him “Rocky.” It’s a nickname… like Jack, Bill or Bob…
Notice… no singing angels, no shining lights, no descending doves… none of that. Just, a personal encounter. “Hi! Your name is Simon? I like you… mind if I call you Rocky?” The Epiphany moment, when the light goes on, is suddenly realizing that God is personal enough to give us nicknames.
We tend to think of God in a very broad context. Creator of the universe, etc… Up until now, the moments of Epiphany that we have don’t threaten that notion. Stories of Kings and gifts, baptism and heavens opening… they’re broad, they’re grand… they’re also safe, because God is somewhere out there. But there’s this increasingly uncomfortable edge that has been growing… and this week, we can’t ignore it… because God looks us in the eye, and gets personal.
But we much prefer putting some distance between ourselves and God. We’re not comfortable with God being able to look us in the eye. In his book Seeing God in the Ordinary, Michael Frost tells of attending a rather strange worship service. It was held in a dusty church fellowship hall with the congregation perched on metal folding chairs. The service itself sounded like something of a mess. A children’s play was followed by a ventriloquist cracking jokes and doing magic tricks. Then a woman with a Broadway-sized voice trundled out onto the stage and began belting out Bette Midler’s pop hit “From a Distance.” The main line of this song, repeated over and over, is that “God is watching us, watching us, watching us, from a distance.” The basic idea is that God keeps an eye on the world, but only from a safe distance, and indeed, life’s problems would not seem nearly so bad if we looked at things from a distance too.
Frost reports that this seemed like an odd choice of a song for Christian worship. He said, “but we all politely listened, until halfway through a woman in the front row could stand it no longer, jumped to her feet, and strode onto the platform. Whereupon she burst into singing the same tune but with the following words, ‘God came near to us, God came near to us, God came near to us.”[1]
We are really tempted to put God at a distance… but honestly, as much as we might want to relate to the sentiment of the song, it’s got it all backwards. The Gospel… the good news is that God comes near to us, and is able to relate to each of us in a way that is personal. That’s the Epiphany moment today, that the infinite creator of the universe, the Ground of all Being, our reason for existence… God… can and does come into our lives in a personal way. Up until this point, Simon saw himself as a nobody, and then along comes Jesus and calls him “Rocky.” Peter… a personal nickname… and a bit of foreshadowing that Peter himself would be one of the key “rocks” on which a new faith would be built.
As much as we are tempted to put Biblical characters up on a pedestal, what is really striking about the people Jesus related to was how ordinary they were. Joe and Jane Average… people who would consider themselves as “nobodies” and yet here is Jesus looking them in the eye and giving them nicknames. God gets personal… Yet let’s be honest, this is a scary prospect. Perhaps we like our anonymity… the possibility of getting noticed by God can be pretty frightening, because we might be forced out of our comfort zone. We have our own plans, our own thoughts as to what we would like to do, and along comes Jesus to interrupt them!
But then again, that’s exactly what an Epiphany moment is, a moment of realization where we come to a different way of thinking about something. In this, we can no longer think about God as being out there somewhere, but is right in our midst in a personal way. It has an impact on us, because we realize that God actually cares deeply about who we are, individually. Nobody is a nobody. That really is a moment of realization, when we learn all of us matter to God.
Amen.
[1] Michael Frost, Seeing God in the Ordinary. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000. p. 14-15
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