First Sunday after Epiphany--early service sermon

First Sunday after the Epiphany Year A
January 9, 2011
This past week, I spent some time with a fellow priest talking about the challenges of Jesus’s call to love which echoes again and again throughout the gospels. She was lamenting the challenge of loving and being loving when that warm, fuzzy loving feeling just isn’t there. As the week went by, I thought more and more about that conversation. How do we love people when they aren’t being particularly lovable?
I thought about my own life, and particularly about what motherhood has taught me about love. Many times in life, I act in a loving manner because that is what I have vowed and promised to do—in my baptism vows, in my marriage vows, in my ordination vows. There are many times in life when I love other people only because of these vows; I love out of duty.
Sometimes the only way we can love is out of sheer duty. And sometimes when we offer love and acts of love out of this sense of duty, God takes that duty that we offer, and God transforms it—like the bread and the wine—so that it becomes so much richer, fuller, broader, greater than a love that is born from duty. And it becomes a brush with Mystery; pure grace; it becomes one brief glimpse of the face of God.
A few weeks ago, I had an appointment at the church one evening with a 10 year old and her parents. The parents wanted the child to be baptized, and I was doing her baptismal instruction to prepare all of them for her baptism (which is actually taking place later this morning). I will confess that I had some trouble being there that night. My childcare had fallen through and both my kids were at the church with me, pretty much unsupervised and running around with the other kids who were at the church that night. I was more than a little distracted.
But I was there because it was what I was supposed to do, what I had promised to do. The 10 year old had been restless and a little fidgety during our time together, and her parents were embarrassed and distracted by her restlessness, and I was searching for a way to make this a meaningful engaging experience for her. So finally, I asked her if she wanted to hear the story of Jesus, and she agreed.
I told her the story—how he was born, how he lived his life, preaching, teaching, healing; how he showed people the way to God and taught us that it’s important to love each other and help each other. I told her of how he had a group of friends who went around with him and how they would eat together, how they ate together one last time the night before he died and how we remember that special meal and share in it every Sunday with communion.
And then I told her about how he died, nailed to a cross, and she became so very still with big round eyes. I told her how his friends were so very heartbroken, and they took him and buried him, rolling a big, heavy stone in front of the opening of his tomb, and then they came back a few days later to do the burial rites, and guess what they found! The stone had been moved, the tomb was empty, and a messenger was there who told them, “He is not here! He is risen!”
“’He is risen?’” She said. “What on earth does that mean?”
That’s exactly what they said! I told her. It means that God’s love is stronger than anything, even death, and that we are invited to share in that gift and live our lives with freedom because we know that we will be with God when we die. And I finished the story, telling her that Jesus was again with them until he was taken up to heaven and he sent the Holy Spirit to whisper in their hearts and be present with them to help them. And they spent the rest of their lives telling people about the amazing thing that happened. And that is what we are supposed to do too.
When I finished, the four of us sat there in silence for a few minutes, stunned by the holiness of what we had just experienced together.
Sometimes when we offer love, even out of a sense of duty, God takes that love and transforms it, filling it to overflowing with God’s presence.
On this day, when you renew your own baptismal vows, may you remember this duty out of which love may flow. May you remember that you have been baptized and named as God’s beloved child, and that you are called to act accordingly. May you find delight in doing your duty, and may God who loves you as God’s own child transform your duty into a love in which you see the face of God.