God's Household is for Everyone

Epiphany 2, Year C

The Rev. Linda Campbell

“God’s household is for everyone.”

Epiphany – it’s fun to say. And it’s great when it happens to you. Epiphanies are those a ha! Moments. Those times when you slap your forehead, “Oh, I get it!” When the light bulb goes on. When the fog clears and the light shines. I’ve read that in Israel, the dawn comes quite suddenly. It’s black as night, and then the sun comes up and boom – it’s light. Arise. Shine! Your light has come. Morning is here. The darkness has vanished.

Epiphanies are like that. Like what happened to Paul as he was on his way to arrest some of the followers of “the Way”, as the early Christians were called. He was passionate about the Law, about following the Rules of how to please God, and he was on a mission – God’s mission. But then he was confronted by the living reality of God – blinded by the Christ light of God’s intense love for him personally, confronted by God’s justice and Christ’s Question – Why do you persecute me?

Paul alluded to this experience in his letter to the Ephesians – “surely you have already heard….how the mystery was made known to me by revelation…” This epiphany permanently changed Paul’s life – it changed his life from that of a zealous Pharisee who focused on strict adherence to rules about how to please God, to that of a disciple of Christ who focused on being known, accepted and loved by God, and proclaiming the new things God was doing in the world.

And the new thing that God revealed to Paul was that Gentiles and Jews had a permanent place in the kingdom. That God’s household was inclusive. That God’s household was a place where everyone belonged – where no one was left out. This is the mystery revealed by the grace of the Spirit – in Paul’s words – “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

The truth is, the Source of our Life is not about slavishly following the rules to please God – it is about bowing down, with open hands and hearts before the awesome, incredible mystery of God’s steadfast, faithful, permanent, unfailing, active Love that flows out toward us, reconciling us and drawing us into God.

The truth is, the Source of our Life is God’s active love – and the way to tap into that source of life is to open our hands and heart in trust and dependence. The two traditional stances of prayer reveal this to us. One is to stand with open hands, reaching up to receive and praise. The other is to kneel in humility and trust.

And when the living Christ revealed himself to Paul, Paul’s stance completely changed from clutching stones to throw at his enemies, to opening his hands in radical inclusion and friendship.

This is the mystery of the ages that Paul proclaims - the eternal purpose that God carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord – to gather up all things – all peoples and nations, things in heaven and on earth – into himself. Proclaiming this is what got Paul imprisoned. Living it is what got Jesus crucified. Because the world, the powers that be, for the most part, are about walls and boundaries and judgements about who is good, who is evil, who is acceptable and who is not.

This is as true today, as it was then. Our world is deeply polarized, and life is often held up in terms of absolutes. In our own Episcopal church, as well as in government and international forums, we hear a lot about us vs. them, good vs. evil, orthodox vs. revisionist. And, as the past Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold, said, “rather than listening to the other with an undefended heart and a spirit of graced curiosity, people feel obliged to defend their points of view.” But, as he went on to say, “The mystery of our baptism is that in Christ we have all been made irrevocably one – beyond all imaging or desire. Within our own community of faith, we are being called to a radical encounter with Christ in one another, which is not easy when “the other” holds views very different from our own….This is not an easy season in the life of our church, and yet it is in precisely times such as these that a deeper, and more costly, understanding of what it means to be limbs and members of Christ’s body is literally being pulled out of us by the very circumstances we are called to live as a community of faith.”*

The uneasy season in the life of our church to which the Presiding Bishop referred is the decision by the last two General Conventions. The first to include homosexuals in the full life of the church. And the second is to institute the first woman as Presiding Bishop.. Referring to the first, Bishop Spong concluded that “our Church has done an audacious thing. This is … a cause for rejoicing that another in a long list of human prejudices has begun to fall. This is not "cultural trendiness," nor is it a denial of "doctrinal clarity."” Rather, it is the binding together of an ancient faith with the insights of our contemporary world, insights that gender and race and sexual orientation are simply biological givens.

So, our Episcopal church is audacious – but the church was founded in audacity. Paul was an audacious person doing an audacious thing – insisting, to the point of imprisonment, upon the full inclusion of Gentiles in the life of the church - something that had not even been considered possible, much less desirable. But God is persistently, quietly without fanfare, and loudly in the public eye, doing new things – and we, as much as the first Christians, are called to always be on the lookout for what God is up to. In this, we follow the magi, who traveled halfway around the world, to see what new thing God was initiating.

In our modern age of cynicism and easy hopelessness, it isn’t easy to be like the wise men – it sounds foolish and gullible – childish even. It is easy for us to succumb to the despair that things are hopeless and will always be hopeless – look how many billions of people are starving, there is really nothing we can do about hunger. Look how many are without homes, there is really nothing we can do about homelessness. Look how the nations spiral into violence, there is really nothing we can do about war. Look how the politicians are so slick, there is really nothing we can do about campaigns and finance reform and the restoration of civic, democratic discourse. Look how the church degenerates into name calling and threats.

But there is hope, and we are a piece of that hope. We have been baptized into a new identity, and given light and a new set of eyes with which to see – we see with the eyes of Christ and we live in his light. And in this light, we see God active in the world, urging us to offer back the gifts we have been given in order to serve God’s purposes. We see that the first step is to fall on our knees in worship, in homage and in trust that what we have to offer - our open hands, our hearts and lives – is sufficient for God to work miracles.


* Encountered by Love, Episcopal Life, January 2004