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Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

Epiphany

Year B
January 6, 2024
Pastor Mark Ditmanson

Introduction

 

As you read this Epiphany is here, as I begin to write Advent is only just starting.  And my thoughts are quite taken by the words for worship right now.  At the very beginning of Advent we will hear Isaiah’s prophetic wish, “Would you just rend the heavens and come.”  We will also hear Jesus’ response to that apocalyptic and mysterious longing with ‘wait for it.’  In our annually repeating liturgical discipline we seek to enter into the divine drama like so many generations before us.  Even as we pray “stir up our hearts Lord,” Advent’s themes stir our spirits as we contemplate God’s announcement that the “kingdom is near.”  Then finally the familiar festival of the Incarnation will be upon us.  Centuries of longing answered in something so natural as a birth.  We of course will adorn the celebration of that birth with crowded, and sometimes boisterous, sanctuaries decorated to our utmost where we will raise our voices and maybe “raise the roof” singing about angelic choirs “in excelsis deo Gloria!” And yet amid all the festivities my overwhelming image of Christmas is quietude.  In my imagination in the aftermath of the birth I see the young woman take the crying infant in her arms, kiss its head, she rocks and hums and comforts it, just as the pattern had been happening and is still happening, quiet, intense, intimate mother and child.  And in that quiet Christmas Eve moment as “I wonder as I wander” out to my car after the last late night service my heart turns to that classic Lutheran question: “what does this mean?” What does this mean to me, and to everyone, that the longing for the divine presence resulted in cuddling a little baby?  There is so much to think about, and to allow those thoughts to shape our responses. What does it mean that our God so cares for, in fact esteems, the very substances of the created order that God would enter there. Partly, it is an honoring of the creation, an acknowledgement of the place of God’s heart.  It is an acknowledgement that our faith is not based on some gnosis, some vague spirituality, some mystic inner striving within, but an encounter in the moments of life lived, an encounter with the prevailing presence of the Creator who loves the creation. A little baby says this and more to me, for an infant is such a tremendous statement of the depth of love as we have all experienced it in our lives or that of our extended families. And therefore we are to love God’s creations.  We are to embody this intense intimate tending and keeping modeled for us in this moment.  God placing God’s self in the cradling arms of humanity.  And now in our arms we must cradle and care for the fragile, the young, the vulnerable, and most of all the loved by God.

And then finally we arrive at Epiphany.  If advent is the season of longing and waiting for the presence of God to come into our hearts and homes and this troubled world; and if Christmas in the event of the incarnation of God in the swaddled and embraced Christ child is the season of the answer to that longing; then Epiphany strikes me as a particularly Lutheran season for asking, “What does this mean?”  Indeed the event of Incarnation needs more that the two Sundays after Christmas.  And Epiphany becomes for me the season of seeking answers.  Many years ago I received the carved images of three magi from my parents’ home.  I put them on my mantle for the first Christmas season in our new home.  Twenty two years later they are still there.  They never get put away.  They stand there year around seeking answers and bearing gifts, and I have come to realize that that they represent something deep in my heart; that I have been seeking epiphanies to better understand this God who chose birth and incarnation to teach us love, justice, grace, freedom, the way of God.  Epiphany is upon us and for me the arrival of these three seekers longing to know more fully what this means, that in the ‘fullness of time God sent his son,’ to be born, swaddled and loved as every child deserves.  Incarnation leads me into a journey of seeking, or perhaps more accurately, being open to epiphanies of further revelation.

Pastor Mark Ditmanson
Pastor Mark Ditmanson
Retired
Grand Marais, MN

Mark Ditmanson is a retired pastor living in the Grand Marais, MN area. Beekeeping,monarch watching, gardening, and planting trees keep him busy these days.

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