The First Sunday after the Epiphany-The Rev. Melanie Lemburg
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
[iv]
Here’s the original blog post with the prayer:
https://fabricpaperthread.blogspot.com/2021/12/almost-christmas.html
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