An Epiphany that Reveals the New Creation

January 12, 2025 - The First Sunday after Epiphany

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. And welcome to Epiphany, not the church, but the season, though certainly you’re welcome at this church too. For some of us, this new liturgical season began last Monday, when we held a special morning service on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6. Officially ending the season of Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany has historically celebrated three different gospel moments throughout the life, history, and tradition of the church: the Magi coming to present gifts to baby Jesus, which we discussed last week, the wedding in Cana where Jesus turns water to wine, which we will discuss next week, and then today’s story, where Jesus is baptized by John, where the heavens open and the Spirit of God descends like a dove, and where a voice comes from heaven saying “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

All three of these stories are “epiphanies,” specific moments where truth is revealed or made manifest. Our season starts with these three gospel epiphanies, and we’ll read a few more lesser epiphanies in this year’s eight-week season before the beginning of Lent, but for us, this year, Epiphany also started with a round of house blessings and chalked doors, another seasonal marker from ancient Christian tradition. Last Monday, a group of us left our special morning service and then visited homes throughout our neighborhoods, spending about half of the day in South Haven, and then the rest in Coloma, Fennville, Bangor, and everywhere in between. (Apologies to our Kalamazoo people for running out of daylight, I’ll get to your house before the season is done, I promise.)

Our little group visited Rosie’s house, which had been chalked in 2013 by Father Michael, the remnants of that blessing still visible. We visited Michelle and Tim, Patti and George, Karen and Steve, Linda and Frank, Rosalie and Walt, Mary and Chuck, Diana and Jim, Ellen and Doug, Kat and Roy... then I hit the road and left South Haven, visiting Tom in Coloma, Mary and Ray in Fennville, Cindy and Lee in the Township, and then Joni and Ken in Bangor. It was a day of this church made manifest, both of our presence as a church in your daily lives and your presence as the church in your homes and communities. It was an epiphany of Epiphany, an Epiphany-inception, or something.

But putting that aside for a moment, today’s gospel text brings us to focus on the baptism of Jesus as this week’s epiphany, on the heavens opening, the water, the dove, the voice of God. You might find the beginning of our gospel text familiar, if you were here during Advent. We read this quote from John the Baptist just four weeks ago, and I preached on the idea that this one who is coming, Jesus, will absolutely change you, baptizing you with the Spirit and with a refining fire. But today, we read this passage in the context of Jesus’s own baptism, explained to us in other gospel passages as performed by John, Jesus’s peer and cousin. Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River initiates his public ministry: the next verse after our lectionary selection today tells us that “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work.” This baptism marks the start of something new.

Baptism still today is supposed to be the start of something new, the beginning of our membership in the church. We don’t talk very often about what baptism means in the Episcopal Church, and I won’t go too deeply into this today either, because we as Episcopalians really seem to shy away from assigning too certain a meaning to things that are mysterious... and also because we don’t want to appear unwelcoming to those who are not baptized.

But unlike some Christian traditions who authoritatively say that the water of baptism washes away the stain of our original sin, or that the water of baptism makes us clean of the sins we’ve knowingly committed, giving us a fresh start, or that baptism is our ticket to heaven after we die, or that coming up out of the water is a simple remembrance of Christ’s rising from the dead, us Episcopalians in general, well, we like to chalk things up to mystery: we don’t know what exactly happens in baptism, but we do like it. It’s one of our two primary sacraments, alongside the Eucharist; we believe that something very holy happens in baptism and framing it as a new beginning is certainly an agreed upon image.

Personally, I love the imagery of baptism as the primary entrance ritual into the wider mystery that is all things church, all things Christianity. Not terribly unlike a wedding where we make vows and exchange rings, in baptism we make vows, either for our own sake or for the sake of our children and then something new begins, instead of a marriage, the life of a Christian. Others within our own tradition do have differing views on all things baptism, so I’ll leave it there for today, but we do as Christians, in part because of today’s gospel story, see baptism as the start of a new creation, a new life in Christ.

The imagery of a new creation is strong this time of year, as it was at the beginning of John’s gospel a few weeks ago, but it is particularly strong in the baptism of Jesus that we read in Luke’s gospel today. In this very brief story, just two verses out of the entire text, two sentences, we have all the pieces for a new creation narrative. We have the water, of course, we have the heavens opening, we have the Spirit descending like a bird, like a dove, and we have a voice from heaven, making a pronouncement, right? T

hese four puzzle pieces are all present in two other creation narratives in Hebrew scripture, in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 8. In the first creation story, that which you’re probably most familiar with where “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” we find that the spirit of God is “hovering over the waters.” Author and theologian Chad Bird (ironically?) points out that the word used for hovering there is used to describe the flight of eagles elsewhere in the Bible; the Spirit, then, is hovering like a bird back in Genesis 1, the Spirit is depicted as birdlike, just as it is here in our gospel. In Genesis 8, we have what is known as the re-creation narrative after the flood, with Noah and the Ark. There too, a bird is sent out flying over the waters, bringing back a leaf to tell Noah it is time to start again, while God is there, speaking to him audibly from the opened heavens.

In the gospel today, we have Jesus in the water and the Spirit taking the form of a bird to land upon him, while God audibly pronounces him Son, beloved. Many Jews of the time believed that the heavens had been closed up since the time of the prophets, that God was done engaging in the world in the ways of the past, but here, in the gospel today, God opens the heavens again to announce that there is in fact a new creation, a new Adam, and that God is well pleased with him. The new creation, the way God is present in the world, is found in Jesus.

Now, today is chock full of meaning and importance, Epiphany, it is really a day of too much goodness and depth to pack into one sermon, as many days are this time of year. But here on the first Sunday of the season of Epiphany and on the day that celebrates the baptism of Jesus, God’s making manifest the new creation we find in the gospels, I want to connect one more point, a point from our second reading, from Acts.

Acts is another book written by Luke, continuing his gospel’s narrative beyond Jesus’s resurrection and into the life of the first-century church. Today, we read from Acts 8, where the disciples Peter and John are sent to the Samaritans who had accepted the word of God, who had become Christians, who had been baptized and who had started their own new life of faith. Samaritans, as you might remember from a certain parable, were despised by the Jews, an ethnic group from an area north of Jerusalem that were racially mixed, that were considered unclean by those of Jesus’s time. But when they heard the good news, in Acts 8, when even the Samaritans came to believe in Jesus, the disciples remembered the parable of the Good Samaritan and they went to them, prayed for them, and welcomed them into the faith. For people of that time, this was radical welcome, radical hospitality, and it was very Christian. It was in the mindset of this new creation, where God was revealing Godself in a new and different way, one open and freely available to all, no exceptions. 

Friends, Church of the Epiphany, on this the first Sunday after the Epiphany, the Sunday celebrating the baptism of Jesus and a new creation narrative for all of us, I want to ask you how you see our church being made manifest in this new year. In light of the new creation; in light of Jesus being the revealed Son of God, the Beloved; in light of Peter and John visiting even the Samaritans and praying with them, welcoming them into community; in light of your own baptismal vows and your own life of faith... how will you reveal God’s new creation, God’s love found in Christ, with your life in 2025? 

I was thrilled to be able to visit some of you in your homes this last week. I know that this neighborhood, this city, this area, this nation is full of Christians of differing political beliefs, differing stances on engaging the world, differing understandings of the gospel, let alone those who have rejected Christianity or who follow different narratives, who have different worldviews, who have different understandings of God. Today, friends, I ask you what it would be like for our Epiphany to be known, to be made manifest, to be revealed in our communities. What shape could that take, what could that look like, what impact could that have?

We believe that God has been revealed in the incarnation of Christmas, in the person of Jesus Christ. We believe that God was revealed to the Magi on the Feast of the Epiphany, a threatening revelation to those in positions of power, one of lavish offerings to an immigrant baby in a humble manger. And now in our gospel today, we believe that God reveals that Jesus Christ is the Beloved, the sign of a new creation, of a new way of being and understanding God’s love and presence in the world, available to all.

What will that revelation, that epiphany, mean for you, for us, and for our world?