Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.”
I love Epiphany, both the doctrine and the season, which are, of course, inseparable. Epiphany teaches us something which has been largely lost in contemporary culture and the contemporary Church, namely, the realization that religion is philosophy; not cult, not politics, not social activism. As important as those things are, they are secondary to the teaching of Epiphany. Religion is philosophy, the love of wisdom that guides and directs every other aspect of our being.
From Bethlehem to Jerusalem, from Kings to Kids – at least the Holy Kid – and now, wonderfully and profoundly, to signs and wonders, in short, miracles. Here is the first miracle, “this beginning of signs” as John styles it. The story of the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee is the beginning of signs, he says, the beginning of the outward deeds and actions of Christ. Behind such a beginning of signs lies the philosophical wonder of the Epiphany season, the wonder of God with us, the wonder of the divinity of Christ opened out to us through his humanity. It communicates and reveals the great and profound philosophical insight of the great religions of the world but especially in its Christian form. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. We are, as Dante puts it, “soul[s] made apt for worshipping,” the very thing we see in the Magi-Kings. The first thing they do upon arriving at Bethlehem is to fall down and worship. Philosophy is worship, worship of the truth. In the Christian understanding, the truth is God Incarnate. He is in our midst making himself known to us in Word and Sacrament.
And here is the explicitly sacramental moment, signs which effect what they signify, to paraphrase the sophisticated and learned understanding of our own Anglican position on sacramental theology, so wonderfully articulated in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and so sadly neglected and ignored by the politicization of the sacraments in our social and political confusions – all because of a kind of neglect of the forms of our theological identity as part and parcel of the Church Universal.
