Epiphany 3C_2019

3rd Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C January 27, 2019 In my opinion, it is the purpose, the true work of the Church to create structures and opportunities for each one of us to be transformed into the image and likeness of Christ. Let me say that again. Years ago, when I participated in the Cooperative College for Congregational Development (which is the sister program to our Diocesan Church Development Institute, which we have a team from St. Thomas participating in now), I learned about a model that shows the different sources of transformation in the life of a congregation. Imagine, if you will, a circle. One the outside of the circle are three different components. First--Study and learning which includes the Biblical witness and personal experience and application. Second—Action which includes stewardship, evangelism, and service. And then third is life in community which includes conversation, food, and silence. But at the very center of these three equal areas, at the center of the circle is worship and prayer because that is the heart of Christian community that feeds and powers all the rest. In our readings for today, we have two rare pictures of worship during biblical times. First, in Nehemiah, we see the children of Israel returned home to Jerusalem after being in exile in Babylon. And as a part of the rebuilding process, they hold a worship service where all the people are reintroduced to the Law given by God to Moses—the heart and soul of their faith. Then in the gospel reading, we have Jesus participating in a worship service in the synagogue in his hometown. He is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it and reads aloud: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." “And [Luke tells us] he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’" Thus, Jesus offers his understanding of his mission to those who have known him longest in the middle of a worship service. (And while everything seems all hunky-dory this week, just wait for the rest of the story that we will have in next week’s gospel.) Transformation is hard. And it’s not something that we readily do on our own. If I’m really honest, I’ll confess that I don’t really want to be transformed into the image and likeness of the Christ whose mission is “to bring good news to the poor. …to proclaim release to the captives/ and recovery of sight to the blind,/ to let the oppressed go free,/ [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” That’s not really part of my agenda, even though I know it should be. Which is why worship is so important that it is at the center of the model, at the heart of a healthy Christian community. And it is why we as the body of Christ need to be in worship together regularly—weekly, even, if possible. We see this being played out in the portion of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians this week—a community that was full of all sorts of strife. Paul is reminding them that they are the body of Christ and like a body that they have many members. It takes being knit together over and over and over again through worship together for them to function as a healthy body. When I was in high school, one of my brothers got a rock tumbler for Christmas. Do y’all know about rock tumblers? Well, I didn’t. It was this smallish machine that had an opening where my brother put all these ordinary looking rocks. And then he added some water and probably some salt, closed up the little door, plugged it in, turned it on and left it. And the rock tumbler stayed on in our formal living room for at least a month. And it tumbled and jumbled the rocks together over and over again in that machine, until finally, when the month was over and my brother opened the door, out spilled these beautiful polished rocks. They had knocked all the sharp edges off of each other during their time together in the rock tumbler. It probably wasn’t a particularly comfortable experience for the rocks, but it was certainly transformative. That is why we need to come to worship every week. It is because in and through worship of God together week after week, we are like those rocks in the rock tumbler. We knock all the rough edges off each other, and we are polished by the Holy Spirit to become more and more in the image and likeness of Christ. So this week, I invite you to realistically consider your practice of attending worship. If you need to, look back at your calendar for the last month, the last two months… Have you been in church enough to be polished and shaped in the rock tumbler that is our common worship? Sit with God in this and offer to God how you feel about your practice. Ask yourself before God what, if anything, holds you back? Can you imagine what might happen in your life, what rough edges might get smoothed over, if you made the commitment to God and to yourself to be here weekly for just a month? In closing, I offer to you an excerpt from “a blessing for one who is exhausted” by the late Irish priest John O’Donohue that sums up for me the ongoing gift that weekly worship and daily prayer offer me: “You have traveled too fast over false ground; Now your soul has come to take you back. Take refuge in your senses, open up To all the small miracles you rushed through.”