The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany Year C

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C February 9, 2025 It is pretty uncommon for Episcopal preachers to give our sermons titles. (It can be common in other denominations.) But this week, I couldn’t help thinking that if this sermon had a title, it would be “Sin and Awe.” Sin and awe are two states of being that I would not normally associate with each other, but they are two ribbons woven through almost all of our readings for this Sunday. So, what’s up with that? First, I think we need to start with some definitions. When I asked our Wednesday healing service crowd to define sin, we had even more definitions than we had people in the room. Sin is “separation from God; moving away from God instead of moving toward God; unrighteous behavior; disobeying the commandments; defiance; missing the mark…” The list was much, much longer. Our Book of Common Prayer actually has a really helpful section that gives us some definition around common phrases and words that helps bind us together, like the Prayer Book helps bind us together in our common prayer. If you look on page 848 in the BCP in the Catechism section, you’ll see lots of writing about sin, including this definition: “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” Seems straightforward enough. But what about awe? Our group described awe as standing at Pike’s Peak and looking out and down and being overwhelmed by majesty. I think we find awe in the brushing up against something so much larger than ourselves. Unfortunately, our BCP doesn’t have a handy definition of awe for us, but in her book Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, sociologist Brene Brown defines awe for us. She writes about how we often use awe and wonder interchangeably, but there is an important difference. “ ‘Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let it shine, to acknowledge and unite.’ When feeling awe, we tend to simply stand back and observe, ‘to provide a stage for the phenomenon to shine…Researches have found that awe ‘leads people to cooperate, share resources, and sacrifice for others’ and causes them to ‘fully appreciate the value of others and see themselves more accurately, evoking humility.’ Some researchers even believe that ‘awe-inducing events may be one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth.’” i Interesting. So, in one way they are complete opposites. Sin divides and separates. Awe connects and humbles. Our readings for today give us two solid examples of this juxtaposition (and the Corinthians reading actually hints at it pretty strongly as Paul points back to his own story and conversion experience on the road to Damascus). We see in both Isaiah’s call story and the call story for Jesus’s disciples in Luke this encounter with the divine which provokes awe for both Isaiah and the newly-minted disciples juxtaposed with an acute awareness of their sinfulness. And I can’t help but wonder if this overwhelming sense of connectedness to the infinite doesn’t highlight for them all the ways that they are separated or divided from God and from others? The passage from Isaiah is interesting, too, because it isn’t just an indictment of individual sin. The call from God through Isaiah in the first third of that book is all about the ways that God’s people Israel are failing as a people. Isaiah isn’t calling for just a repentance from individual sin; he is holding up a mirror to an entire society and pointing out the ways that they are not living up God’s expectations of how God’s people should treat each other and especially the most vulnerable among them. Back before Christmas, I saved a meme that I found floating around social media that I’ve been contemplating since then. It’s a quote from someone named Mark Charles (who I know absolutely nothing about), and it is this: “Western Christianity preaches a hyper individualistic salvation so it doesn’t have to repent from its systemic sin.” (Ouch!) But this systemic sin is, in fact, what Isaiah is calling the people to repent from, even when he acknowledges that there seems to be a certain inevitability to their destruction because they have allowed themselves as a society to become too separated, too divided from how God encourages and calls them to live as God’s people. Last week, in one of the daily meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation, they shared excerpts from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s new book titled The Tears of Things. Rohr reflects that we often think of a prophet as someone who is angry and raving at the people of Israel for their many sins or predicting future doom, but there is often a larger pattern to the prophets (and Isaiah falls into this larger pattern as well). First the prophets “rage against sin as if they were above or better than it-then they move into solidarity with it.” Rohr continues, “Please understand that sin is not as much malice as woundedness. Sin is suffering. Sin is sadness. Many of us have learned this truth from studying addictions, where it’s become more clear that sin deserves pity, not judgement.” He concludes, “Sin is also the personal experience of the tragic absurdity of reality. It leads us to compassion. We must have compassion for the self, for how incapable we are of love, of mercy, or forgiveness. Our love is not infinite like God’s love. It’s measured-and usually measured out according to deservedness. But that’s not how YHWH treats ancient Israel, which was always unfaithful to the covenant. God is forever faithful.” The meditation ends by showing how the prophets move from standing above sin to being in solidarity with human suffering, and we, too, can be transformed by that evolution, just like the prophets. ii And awe is one of the tools that God uses to transform us. Awe is God’s unexpected gift for us. It’s not something that we can generate, but it is something we can look out for, and when we encounter it, we can lean into it allowing it to transform us through humility and re-connection. Your invitation this week is to try to think about sin differently, to see it as something to be pitied, in yourself and others, as opposed to something to be judged; to look for the ways that our systemic sin harms the most vulnerable among us. And you are also invited to try to create space for awe in your days and in your interactions, and in those moments in your life when God’s glory is revealed, to pay attention. i. Brown, Brene. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House, 2021, pp58-59 ii. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-misunderstood-image/