Third Sunday after the Epiphany--The Rev Melanie Lemburg

 3^rd Sunday after Epiphany—Year A

January 22, 2023

 

        I’ve been reading a book titled The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community.  The author is The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers, who is a canon on the staff of our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.  In this book Spellers is writing about the seismic changes that are happening in the Church since 2020, and she is unpacking some of what she thinks is happening there.  I’m about half-way through the book, and she is painting a bleak picture, indeed.  So, I’ll confess, I looked ahead to the conclusion (mainly to decide if I could keep soldiering through this challenging read), and I was heartened by this paragraph:

        “No one asks to be cracked open or disrupted.  No church seeks to decline in membership or stature.  Most people don’t go looking for experiences that will humble them and break their hold on a treasured identity and culture.  We did not choose to land here in this wilderness; we were shoved by pandemic, racial reckoning, decline and economic and social disruption.  But now that we’re here, humbled and open, we have a choice and a chance.”[i]

        It’s an interesting idea to think about how a crisis can crack us open, and in and through that process give us a choice and a chance at something new.  It’s true for us as a church, and it’s true for us as individuals.

        In our gospel reading for today, Jesus is beginning his public ministry in Matthew’s gospel, and he begins it under the shadow of a crisis.  His cousin, John the Baptist, has just been arrested by Herod after John has offered public criticism about Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife.  In the midst of this crisis, Matthew tells us that Jesus decides to move from Nazareth to Capernaum, citing the fulfillment of scripture from the prophet Isaiah for the reason for this move: “Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,/ on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—/ the people who sat in darkness

have seen a great light,/ and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death/ light has dawned.”

        But what’s interesting about this is that at the time of Jesus and even at the time of Matthew’s writing, Zebulun and Napthali weren’t on any maps.  They had been wiped out by foreign occupation 700 years before.  So Jesus is starting his ministry under the shadow of a crisis, in a place that is marked by darkness and failure and loss, and in an area that is especially connected with the shadow of the occupation of the foreign power of Rome, under which the people of Jesus’s day lived. 

        And what is Jesus’ message in this crisis-shadowed time and place?  “Change your hearts and lives!  Here comes the kingdom of heaven!” (This is from the Common English Bible translation.)

        In the midst of crisis and failure, Jesus offers an invitation to change, to new life, and new hope, and new opportunity. 

        When talking about how crisis can be a time to experience new life, our Wednesday healing service reflected on crises that they had weathered in their past—how we as a church changed and adapted to the crisis that has been the pandemic, how they recognized new life and growth in their spiritual lives after having coming through personal crises.  Some of us shared how, even as we are in the midst of crises now, we look toward tried and tested sources of wisdom or learnings from how we navigated other challenging experiences to help us look for the sprigs of new life that are sprouting even now and that we hope will bear fruit on the other side of this crisis.  The gift of that conversation was also a reminder that community is another gift in the midst of crisis to help weather and navigate change together. 

        There have been no shortages of crises of late.  Many here have known the death of a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a child, a friend.  Some have known the loss of a job or income.  Many are tasting the lessening of mobility or independence.  We have heard a new diagnosis.  We have been held by the uncertainty of waiting for what may be to come. And that’s all in addition to the changing landscape of the world around us, the changing landscape of the post-covid church.

        But there is good news.  Jesus who is God with Us, the very heart of Matthew’s gospel,  doesn’t leave us alone in our crises.  And let me be clear and say again, I do not believe that God is giving any one of us these crisis, so please, stop saying that to yourself or about yourself.  (God isn’t giving you crisis to handle!)  In the times when we are being cracked open by the circumstances of our lives and of our choices and other peoples’ choices, God moves there—into the moment of crisis, into the no-man’s land—to make God’s home there with us.  And God calls forth new life, even in the midst of the worst experiences, even when we are not able to yet see it.  And Jesus acts to spread the good news of God’s love and to heal us.  The gift of community, of church, is that we can help share some of the burden with each other, and we can help each other see the sprigs of new life which God promises will come.

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[i] Spellers, Stephanie.  The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community. Church Publishing, Inc: New York, 2021, p 95.