The First Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C

The First Sunday after the Epiphany-the Baptism of our Lord Year C January 9, 2022 “Everybody hurts, everybody hurts, everybody hurts…sometimes.” i REM lead singer Michael Stipe crooned these words over and over as 7 of us sat on the floor of my freshman year college dorm room listening to the song over and again and again. We were a biology lab small group working on our lab project to test the way that listening to sad music affected the biometric readings of the human body—the connections between the body and the emotions. I don’t remember the results of that experiment but here is what I do remember from that day. 1. The REM song Everybody Hurts is a really long, and really depressing song. 2. It is really, really awkward to be a 19 year old sitting on a dorm room floor during such a long, agonizing song which both lifts up the pathos of the human condition and also acknowledges the shared condition and burden of suffering with a bunch of random classmates, relative strangers, who you have been thrown together with in a lab assignment. ii I was reminded of the song and the experience this week, when I read a portion of the daily meditation written by author, theologian, and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. Rohr’s meditation could have easily been titled “Everybody hurts.” Here is what he writes: “I am no masochist, and I surely have no martyr complex, but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it. Sometimes I wonder if this is what we priests mean when we lift up bread and wine at the Eucharist or communion and say, “Through him, and with him, and in him.” I wonder if the only way to spiritually hold suffering—and not let it destroy us—is to recognize that we cannot do it alone. When I try to heroically do it alone, I slip into distractions, denials, and pretending—and I do not learn suffering’s softening lessons. But when I can find a shared meaning for something, especially if it allows me to love God and others in the same action, God can get me through it. I begin to trust the ambiguous process of life.” He continues, “When we carry our small suffering in solidarity with the one universal longing of all humanity, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together, and it is just as hard for everybody else. Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. When we can make the shift to realize this, it softens the space around our overly defended hearts. It makes it hard to be cruel to anyone. Shared struggle somehow makes us one—in a way that easy comfort and entertainment never can.”iii Our reading from Isaiah today is a love song from God to God’s hurting people. They have been scattered and exiled far away from their home, assimilated into the foreign empire of Babylon. They are deeply fearful that they will become extinct; they are doubtful of their future as God’s chosen and cherished people because God seems to have abandoned them. The prophet here speaks on behalf of God and reassures God’s people that are loved and cherished and not abandoned; that their suffering will not be endless but will give birth to hope and new life. This year in reading this familiar scripture once again, I am struck by the poetry that the prophet uses: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” I don’t think it’s an accident that the phrase “pass through the waters” calls to mind another time that God’s people were suffering and afraid, as the Egyptian army is bearing down on them to either recapture them and drag them back into slavery or even to kill them all. During that moment of fear and suffering, God proves that God is with them, working through Moses to part the waters of the Red Sea so God’s people can pass through them unharmed. Exodus 14:22 describes the event as the waters parting to create a dry path with walls of water on either side where the people walked—truly a terrifying experience but one through which they come out on the other side, into the first day of their life as a free people. Today in our liturgical year, we lift up the theme of Jesus’s baptism by John in the Jordan River. Every year on this first Sunday after the Epiphany, we read a gospel story about Jesus’s baptism, and it is a Sunday that is especially appropriate for either a baptism or for renewing our own baptismal vows. This Old Testament passage for today, coupled with the gospel passage which shows us Luke’s version of Jesus’s baptism, is a timely reminder of life’s hard places or as REM puts it, that “everybody hurts.” Our lives are a series of passing through the waters of hardship, fear, and suffering, through death (or a change), and into new life or resurrection. And God is with us in and through all of that, comforting us and reminding us that we belong to God and that we are precious in God’s sight. This is what we are baptized into; this is what we recall and remember when we renew our baptismal vows; this is what lift up before God when we gather around God’s altar: that even though we suffer and things may feel scary and hard right now, God will not allow us to stay in that spot for forever. We will pass through the waters and come out on the other side. Just before Christmas, I receive an email from my mom with the subject line: found prayer. Her brief email said that she had read this prayer on a blog that she follows and the writer said it had been sent out by her church. I’ve been praying it since just before Christmas and even though it is a new year, it still seems applicable. I’ll share it with you in closing. "God of the long and aching wait. This year has swelled with the grief and longing and loss of many. We want so much more than the present condition of this world. Where are you? There are seasons where it becomes difficult to believe in your nearness. Would you make it known to us now? That as we carry each other through this season, we would find the miracle in the mundane, tiny sacred flashes of good as we wait for a healing that lasts. Help us to dream. That we would find even our prayers grow large in this season, asking for those things which have seemed too good or naive. Help us to dream, not that we would pine for some mirage of how things used to be, but that we would hold space for visions of life where justice can breathe, where power is mobile, and where liberation leaves no one behind. Come, God. And we will wait." iv Amen. i. Here’s how to listen to the song and see the full lyrics (in case you need some comfortable melancholy or you were living under a rock in the early 90’s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rOiW_xY-kc&t=5s ii. The song is described as having a comfortable melancholy and REM guitarist Peter Buck wrote in the album notes “that ‘the reason the lyrics are so atypically straightforward is because it was aimed at teenagers’, and ‘I've never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the idea that high school is a portal to hell seems pretty realistic to me." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody_Hurts iii. https://cac.org/it-cant-be-carried-alone-2022-01-04/ iv.Here’s the original blog post with the prayer: https://fabricpaperthread.blogspot.com/2021/12/almost-christmas.html