Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany
“But speak the word only”
What wonderful words! They challenge and convict all the atheisms of our world and day. They challenge and convict the unbelieving church which has forgotten or denied the meaning of the Epiphany season captured so wonderfully in this Gospel story. Epiphany is simply and entirely about the making known of the essential divinity of Jesus Christ through his humanity. I can’t put it more simply than that. The miracles teach us about the essential divinity of Christ and the meaning of Christ for the understanding of our humanity. They reveal God to us and show us, too, something about what God wants for us. “Speak the word only” is a powerful counter to all our confusions and denials about God. It counters the prevailing spirit of religiosity in our churches, what one might call, ‘Western Buddhism’, which is neither western nor Buddhist, I hasten to add.
This is the anti-intellectualism which thinks that there are simply many different names for God and that religion really comes down to clichés like “don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff,” the idea that ideas don’t matter, and that God is not essentially the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Christian understanding but whatever terms you feel comfortable using. Our prayers and praises are merely addressed “to whom it may concern” or to the God of x and y of whatever our choosing. It is really all about us, all about ‘the you,’ the self. This is contrary to Buddhism’s fundamental insight that there is no you. You are an illusion; the self does not exist. It is also contrary to the Western world’s insight into the reality of the world, a world which is in principle intelligible because God is intelligible. In the orthodox Christian understanding, God reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ and that idea makes all the difference in the world about our thinking and our doing, our being and our actions.
We see this in today’s gospel. It is about the power of God’s Word which goes forth not only to create but to restore and heal. Here we have a double healing, a healing within Israel and a healing outside of Israel, a healing touch and a healing word, the word tangible and visible, we might say, the word audible and intelligible. Jesus heals the leper by “put[ting] forth his hand and touching him,” touching the untouchable, the leper, and then says, “I will, be thou clean.” Here is the Word and touch of Christ near and at hand. Then, there is the healing of the Centurion’s servant, a healing from afar, by the simple power of the Word spoken and passed on, as it were, down through the ranks of the Roman legion!
