Pastor Darren: So Epiphany Sunday, we're talking about today, part of the liturgical calendar, the day we are acknowledging, maybe celebrating, uh, when uh uh the wise men, the magi, finally get find their way all the way to Jesus, supposedly taking uh twelve days, which is why we celebrate on January the 6th, and that uh Epiphany is supposed to be that uh uh embodying uh or an awareness that comes upon people.
Pastor Darren: In this case, it's with the magi, this awareness that comes upon them uh and their journey guided by a star, right?
Pastor Darren: It's all part of the story that we celebrate at Christmas time.
Pastor Darren: Um so where I ended up starting for today in my own mind was looking at how different parts of the story that we know, the Christmas story that we understand, come from different gospels.
Pastor Darren: No one gospel has all of that story.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Our the Gospel of Mark, the earliest one written, uh, actually didn't really talk about the birth at all.
Pastor Darren: Might be surprising to some.
Pastor Darren: Uh for Mark, it seems that the uh the beginning of his real life was with the ministry.
Pastor Darren: And when it starts with his baptism as he gets to doing the work that God sent him down to do.
Pastor Darren: With Luke, you get the shepherds.
unknown: Right?
Pastor Darren: And so we extrapolate that uh what was important to Luke was that everybody was included, which is why he made sure the shepherds get included, who would be the kind of the lowest of the low on the economic scale, and so implying that this is a lot of why Jesus came, was to help us to understand that everybody is going to be engaged by God.
Pastor Darren: Everybody is included in the body of Christ.
Pastor Darren: Then with Matthew, this is where we get our magi, our wise men.
Pastor Darren: Clearly to Matthew, what was important about the story in his version was that this was an event, and people were traveling from far away to come and to witness to this thing.
Pastor Darren: Maybe even talking a little bit about how it reaches even beyond uh the Jewish community that it it all happens within.
Pastor Darren: So then we land on John, the Gospel of John.
Pastor Darren: Anybody have that as their favorite gospel?
Pastor Darren: Oh, yeah, a couple, a couple people like John.
Pastor Darren: The more spiritual of the Gospels generally, the birth narrative is fair to say, unique, because you just heard it.
Pastor Darren: That is the birth narrative in the Gospel of John.
Pastor Darren: So we try to pick that apart a little bit as we're trying to understand a little bit of why this gets picked uh as part of the lectionary calendar, why we read it today, partly because of Epiphany.
Pastor Darren: But what is it about this particular scripture coming from the Gospel of John that doesn't even really have a birth narrative in the sense of Jesus, the baby, the shepherd's coming.
Pastor Darren: It's something different, isn't it?
Pastor Darren: So things we know about John.
Pastor Darren: The earthly beginnings, you know, the way he describes his story, the birth narrative, kind of like Mark.
Pastor Darren: What's really important isn't really the baby sitting in the manger.
Pastor Darren: What's really important is the ministry, which starts with the baptism.
Pastor Darren: Which is why you heard a lot about that baptism right there.
Pastor Darren: He was uh, it was probably uh written after the others, the Gospel of John.
Pastor Darren: We can tell by some of the things that are hinted at historically that date it a little bit later.
Pastor Darren: But what that says is that John had already likely read the others, right?
Pastor Darren: And so what is important for us to notice is what does he not include in that, and what does he include in that?
Pastor Darren: He doesn't include key things like we think are key things, like the shepherd and the magi and all that stuff, right?
Pastor Darren: He doesn't include those, even though we're probably sure he did know about those, knew those other stories that Matthew and Luke had written.
Pastor Darren: Reflexively, he must have also felt like something was missing.
Pastor Darren: Otherwise, why write a gospel?
Pastor Darren: There's already three written, and actually probably many more.
Pastor Darren: Why does he feel like he needs to tell his version of what happened?
Pastor Darren: Clearly, he had something to say, an understanding of what was uh important about that story, right?
Pastor Darren: And you might say the star that John would follow, like the wise men, would convey to us what is important to him.
Pastor Darren: The star that he follows is different than the one that Matthew and Luke and Mark are following.
Pastor Darren: So let's take a look at this star.
Pastor Darren: His reason for writing this gospel.
Pastor Darren: What wisdom was he trying to light up and shine onto this world?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: To me, it sounds just a little bit like beat poetry.
Pastor Darren: Do you remember the beat poets?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: It's getting back there pretty far.
Pastor Darren: Some of you may not remember, but it's this movement that came actually out of World War II and people feeling really concerned about the future of the world.
Pastor Darren: And so this group of people would gather in these dark coffee houses and they would all wear berets to be different.
Pastor Darren: And they had Van Dyke's maybe a little bit like this, or goatees, what we call them today, right?
Pastor Darren: And and and they would sit and they would do these poems that they would do, spoken poems, right?
Pastor Darren: And somebody was in the background with a bass going dun dun dun dun dun dun dung dun dung, right?
Pastor Darren: I mean I'm not that old.
Pastor Darren: Some y'all were the ones around for all of this.
Pastor Darren: I just see movies.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Dun dun dun dun.
Pastor Darren: Listen to this now.
Pastor Darren: Boom, boom, boom.
Pastor Darren: In the beginning was the word.
Pastor Darren: And the word was with God.
Pastor Darren: And the word was God.
Pastor Darren: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Pastor Darren: He was in the beginning with God.
Pastor Darren: All things came into being through him and without him, not one thing came into being.
Pastor Darren: Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Are you hearing it?
Pastor Darren: Are you feeling it?
Pastor Darren: A little little little beep pole.
Pastor Darren: And then remember how they would applaud.
Pastor Darren: I'm getting none?
Pastor Darren: I mean, I threw it out there, right?
Pastor Darren: I, you know, I'm I made myself vulnerable.
Pastor Darren: I get none.
Pastor Darren: Anyway.
Pastor Darren: But then get down to verse 14 is where I think the real, oh, I was gonna say the meat of things.
Pastor Darren: Uh, but there's an irony there.
Pastor Darren: And the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.
Pastor Darren: The glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.
Pastor Darren: Probably the main point of what John was trying to get to.
Pastor Darren: This is the birth of Jesus for John.
Pastor Darren: This is what was most important to this gospel writer, the spirit becoming flesh, becoming present.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: For him, it's this, I'm going to use the word cosmological event.
Pastor Darren: You know, it's not this earthly event, it's something broader than that, with this idea that Jesus was the word, right?
Pastor Darren: And you think about a word, a spoken thing that's out into the air or maybe written down, but that word already existed before the world even existed.
Pastor Darren: This idea that Jesus has always existed, but finally took earthly form here in this one moment.
Pastor Darren: This one moment, the word, the spirit, becomes flesh.
Pastor Darren: I don't know how many of you are familiar with the uh the book of James, but you remember that the famous verse, faith without works is dead.
Pastor Darren: It was that idea that faith, if there were no actions that backed it up, was kind of not alive, you know, maybe even dead.
Pastor Darren: I think John is in that same sphere.
Pastor Darren: He's trying to say there was this spirit thing, and then it took flesh.
Pastor Darren: It became real, at least real in the way that we earthlings could understand real.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So it's a it's an interesting concept and an important piece for John, so important that it becomes part of why he even writes a gospel.
Pastor Darren: This piece that Matthew, Mark, Luke, others just didn't quite understand or at least convey that this is something bigger than just what we see in here.
Pastor Darren: It's this massive spiritual reality that took uh body.
Pastor Darren: That took body on this earth.
Pastor Darren: And seeing the wisdom of picking this scripture in the lectionary, which I'll remind people that that's the calendar of scripture readings that we would do over three years.
Pastor Darren: So it was picked by a body with the idea that this was a perfect scripture for this day.
Pastor Darren: I'm start starting to see the wisdom because we're in this place where we're looking to a new year.
Pastor Darren: And we're invited to ask these kinds of questions ourselves.
Pastor Darren: How will our individual ministries, our faith, take shape this year?
Pastor Darren: What will it look like this year?
Pastor Darren: What will we dedicate ourselves to individually?
Pastor Darren: What will be made real by our commitment to God through Christ this year?
Pastor Darren: It's resolution season.
Pastor Darren: It is a good scripture to get us into that mode.
Pastor Darren: There's some key questions we could be asking ourselves.
Pastor Darren: Will this stretching, will this growth, will it be a spiritual depth that we reach with enhanced worship, enhanced study, more commitment to these things?
Pastor Darren: Maybe, maybe it'll be a missional heart, a missional heart that takes body in service to those who are in need, to those who are less advantaged, to those who are needing to know that there is love in this world for them.
Pastor Darren: Maybe, maybe it's an evangelical heart that's gonna grow in some of us.
Pastor Darren: This evangelical peace, reaching out to those who don't know the love of God for this world yet.
Pastor Darren: Don't know that there is a creating presence that made the world around us, but also landed us where we are here, and that creating presence loves this world and loves them.
Pastor Darren: Maybe that's what's going to be birthed in some of our hearts this year.
Pastor Darren: This reaching out of love, this message of love, maybe to those who have never known that love, or maybe to those who've been separated from that love.
Pastor Darren: As we seek God's presence in our lives, these should be our centering questions, our focus questions.
Pastor Darren: What will it be?
Pastor Darren: And for us here in this church, this long-standing as well as developing extension of the body, I think we're still figuring out how we are going to embody Christ going forward.
Pastor Darren: Surely there will be things that we have done in this church for years and years, the heart and the body of community that's been built here for 50 plus years, yes, that's going to be part of what our the body of our ministry is going to look at.
Pastor Darren: But what will be the new thing for us?
Pastor Darren: What will be the new thing that reconnects us with the world around us, the community around us?
Pastor Darren: Maybe 2026 will be a year when this all truly starts taking some real shape.
Pastor Darren: Perhaps the spirit is going to climb into the hearts and the minds in this room and bring us together and inspire us to do some amazing things.
Pastor Darren: Maybe the spirit is going to reach into our hearts and then reach out from that heart into the world, and others will join us on that journey.
Pastor Darren: Others will be inspired by our particular message from God.
Pastor Darren: I don't know about you, but I'm kind of excited to find out.
Pastor Darren: Amen.