Epiphany Season's First Sunday

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

The first Sunday in the season of Epiphany follows other extraordinary "enlightenings" with Jesus's baptism. In "Stepping In," Debi Thomas says, "The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek, "epiphaneia," meaning "appearing" or "revealing."  During this brief liturgical season between Christmas and Lent, we’re invited to leave miraculous births and angel choirs behind, and seek the love, majesty, and power of God in seemingly mundane things.  Rivers.  Voices.  Doves.  Clouds.  Holy hands covering ours, lowering us into the water of repentance and new life.  In the Gospel stories we read during this season, God parts the curtain for brief, shimmering moments, allowing us to look beneath and beyond the ordinary surfaces of our lives, and catch glimpses of the extraordinary.  Which is perhaps another way of describing the sacrament of baptism, one of the thin places where the "extraordinary" of God's grace blesses the ordinary water we stand in.  

The Rev. Charles Hoffacker says, "The Epiphany Season is a time in the church year when we focus on many epiphanies, shinings forth of the glory of Christ, among them his manifestation to Gentiles as an infant, the time at Cana when he supplied wine for a wedding, and his mountaintop transfiguration shortly before his death. On this first Sunday of the season, we recall yet another epiphany, how Jesus declared his solidarity with suffering, sinful humanity by accepting baptism at the hands of John—not because he needed it, but because we needed him to be baptized for us. Read why he says the manifestation of God’s glory to, for, and in us is more like "Johnny Appleseed Christianity " than "Jack And The Beanstalk Christianity."

Dan Clendenin, in "Why Do You Come To Me?," says "the biggest bombshell of the baptismal story — the stupendous claim of a trinitarian confession is Jesus' baptismal solidarity with broken people was confirmed by God's affirmation and empowerment. Still wet with water after John had plunged him beneath the Jordan River, Jesus heard a voice and saw a vision — the declaration of God the Father that Jesus was his beloved son, and the descent of God the Spirit in the form of a dove. The vision and the voice punctuated the baptismal event. They signaled the meaning, the message and the mission of Jesus as he went public after thirty years of invisibility — that by the power of the Spirit, the Son of God embodied his Father's unconditional embrace of all people everywhere."