Second Sunday after Epiphany
We have a bunch of educators in my family. My dad taught piano and music for his entire career. In fact, he taught well past retirement, giving that up only when taking care of my mother demanded too much of his time. His aunt, my great aunt Mamie, was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. It was his experience with her as his teacher that inspired him to go into teaching.
Two of my three sisters were educators. One was a pre-school director and teacher for many years. The other retired just a couple of years ago, after teaching art and illustration at Truman State University in Missouri and then at the University of Connecticut.
And it’s not just in my family, either. Pastor Anke’s family also produced a long line of educators.
We don’t learn much of anything that hasn’t been taught to us by another person. You might counter, “Well what about learning from a website or a movie or a book. Fair enough. But that website, that film, or that book didn’t spontaneously come into being. They were made by other people. Even what we learn in nature is influenced by other people. You know a tree is called a tree because you learned that word from someone. This means that life and learning are inherently social: it’s a process of one person sharing information with another person. All of us have had these kinds of teachers in our lives. Sometimes they’re actual teachers, like the ones you had in school, and often times they’re not.
Who are yours? Who taught you about life, the universe, and everything? Maybe it was a schoolteacher, or a parent, or a grandparent. Maybe it was a boss or a spouse. Or a dog. Who has been that person that showed you there was more to life than you thought? Who taught you that life is far bigger and richer than you realized?
In today’s Gospel reading, we see how this teaching about a bigger life, works. John the Baptist is apparently just sort of hanging out. And then suddenly, along comes Jesus. And completely unprompted, John declares ““Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” OK. Well, that’s kind of a weird thing to just shout out about someone. But John is also kind of a weird guy, so no big surprise there.
When John describes Jesus as the Lamb of God, he means that, in the spiritual tradition of Jesus and John and those who were gathered there, Jesus is the active agent in the restoration of creation. Remember that the beginning of John’s gospel strongly parallels the beginning of the book of Genesis.
Genesis begins: “1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1:1-4)
Listen, then, to the striking similarity with the beginning of The Gospel of John: “1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:1-5)
With that, the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus is the source of restoration for the relationship between God and all people. That proclamation began with John and his testimony. John is testifying to what God has already made known to him. The thing about testimony is that it is predicated on both a testimony about something, namely God, but also to something, namely whoever wants to hear about it. So, John testifies to those around him. And what do they do in response to that testimony? They leave John and follow Jesus.
That’s when we learn that one of John’s disciples is Andrew. We also know Andrew will become one of Jesus’ disciples. After Andrew spends time with Jesus, he goes to his brother Simon Peter and refers him to Jesus. Andrew functions as both a student and a teacher. He learns about Jesus from John and then, in turn, teaches Peter about Jesus and on and on and on until we arrive at this very moment in time, in this place, where that same tradition of learning and teaching continues to unfold.
The Church and all its history, its witness, and its theology is no more and no less than a series of these learning and teaching cycles about Jesus. They began with John and Andrew and are completed right now in your ears, your head, and your heart, and will continue ever forward into the future. The challenge is not allowing it to end with us.
The season of Epiphany is when we celebrate what is revealed about the savior whose birth we celebrated a few weeks ago. The light that came into the world. But what does that light reveal about us? Yes, Epiphany is about Jesus. It’s about what Jesus reveals about himself, but it’s not revelation for its own sake. What are we called to see, to recognize?
It’s one thing to acknowledge Jesus’ glory, Jesus’ identity in the season of Epiphany. What happens when we take on Epiphany in our own lives. How much are we willing to give witness to Jesus’ epiphany-moments? Or do we sit quietly in the background, unwilling to testify, hoping that someone else will? Are we really called simply to observe? Or are we called to take the risk of pointing to those places and moments when Jesus truly reveals who he is? Who do we need to be because of Jesus’ Epiphany? Or, more pointedly, who or what does our experience of Jesus, our personal epiphany of Jesus as Lord and savior, compel us to be? What does that experience compel us to do?
This is one of the things that lies at the heart of John’s Gospel. John implores us to be believers who are willing to confess in whom we believe and why. John begs us to be believers who are willing to point to the Truth. Believers who are vigilant in seeking out where and how we are called to say “behold, look,” there’s Jesus. We’re called to be students of faith, who can’t help but be teachers of faith, as well.
Epiphany is not an event for innocent bystanders. We can’t just sit in the bleachers and watch the game. If that’s all we do, then we’ve either dismissed the meaning of Epiphany, or missed it entirely. I’d even go so far as to say that we have completely misunderstood the life and ministry of Jesus.
The question which the Gospel of John poses to us is the following: Will we be like John the Baptizer or not? Will you witness to what you have seen? Because what is at stake is nothing less than the life of the world. The abundant life which is made possible only through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Epiphany reminds us that God needs our willingness to witness to the Truth. Too many Christians and too many congregations have relegated themselves to living out of a spirit of fear. But if we are willing to accept the gift of faith, then we must be willing to admit that we have been taught and have learned a different message. Rather than living out of a spirit of fear, we are called to teach about the hope we have in Jesus. We are called to teach the promise of the Gospel. The demise of the church is not rooted in declining membership or churches closing or diminishing seminary enrollment. The Church enters into its demise when we give up on the Gospel. That decisive moment is the one that happens when we question our epiphany role. It’s when we choose to believe that our voice can never compete against all the other voices that are out there. And yet the truth is that God will never, ever give up on bringing God’s Kingdom to all people. John invites us to imagine boldly: That our voices matter in the public arena; That the world needs to know it is loved.
If no Christian ever dared to go public with their faith, if no Christian ever again testified to Jesus and the power of his saving love, the Church would utterly evaporate. The Gospel would continue to exist, but only in the abstract. It’s would still be out there, somewhere… But if there are no people who are willing to give voice to it, the Gospel becomes the proverbial falling tree in the woods with no one to hear it fall.
The gospel begs us to live it and, as equally important, to proclaim it. If we don’t, this world will simply swallow it up, because nature abhors a vacuum. If we don’t proclaim that God is love and that, through Jesus, God has broken every suffocating bond and boundary and empowered us to do the same, the world will come in and fill the void.
How are you teaching about Jesus? How are you teaching Jesus to others? Maybe you feel you aren’t articulate enough to give testimony to Jesus. But Jesus doesn’t ask us to be poetic or eloquent. Testimony means simply: what does it matter to your life, and everything which that encompasses – your working, your resting, your buying, your selling, your loving, your TV viewing, your praying, your driving, your relating to others – what does it matter that you have been baptized and follow Jesus? That’s where you start. Begin to answer that and then start bringing Jesus up as the reason why you act the way you act.
Start small and simple. Start with prayer. Ask God to work in your life in a more powerful, explicit way. Ask God to open your eyes to the work God is already doing in your life. Then you can say, “You know, I think I actually believe this whole Jesus thing, and here’s why…” Once you begin saying it, once you begin teaching about Jesus, it gets easier and you become braver.
Without testimony, the gospel dries up. We need your testimony now more than ever. Be like John and Andrew and witnesses to God’s gospel of love, justice, peace, and presence in plain and simple ways. So that by your words and life, the world will see that Jesus is the Lamb of God who has taken away the sin of the world.
Amen.