Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany 3
January 23, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
​Have you ever heard of Josh Wardle?  Yeah, me neither, until this week.  I share an interest in word games with many of you: scrabble, crossword, and the New York Times Spelling Bee game.  Some folks are more drawn to numbers and go for Sudoku.  Either way, puzzling is good for the mind.  Playing at just about anything is good the soul.  Tom Duke turned me onto a newer game called Wordle.  Josh Wordle created it and named it Wordle as a twist on his name. As a software engineer, it was relatively simple for him to create.  Wordle is completely free.  It has no app, no ads, and it makes no money.  To play all we have to do is go to https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle.
 
The premise is simple.  You have six tries to find the five-letter word of the day.  When you are wrong on guess, Letters that are not in the word turn grey.  When you find a letter that is in the word, but not in the right place, that letter turns yellow.  When you find a letter correct and in the right place, it turns green.  Players have have six tries.  Once you find the word, or fail to find the word, the game is ends, until the next day, when there is a new word.
 
As the story is told in the January 3rd New York Times, Josh Wardle’s girlfriend and partner, Palak, likes to play word games.  She plays lots of them, so Wardle made Wordle for her to play.  The two of them, only, played Wordle for months as a fun diversion from their working life and pandemic isolation.  Palak shared the game with her family, they shared with friends.  Down the line, somebody shared it Tom, and he shared it with me.  On November 1, 2021, there were 90 players.  On January 3, 2022 there were 300,000 players.  As of this week, there are 2.6 million players.
 
The idea that catches me is the immense power of what marketing people call ‘word of mouth.’  The concept is also called storytelling.  I googled Josh Wardle and found the article entitled “Wordle, a love story.” Since then, story has been told in countless articles, news reports, and good old-fashioned face to face communication.
 
It is not much of a stretch to use this technology assisted example to understand how we got the Bible.  After all, the Bible is a library of stories, songs, and recollections.  In a world where few could read, word of mouth, storytelling was the only media.
 
Each of our lessons for today tell pieces of the God’s story with humanity.  The oldest one is about Nehemiah and Ezra, unearthing old scrolls in the rubble of their destroyed and almost forgotten temple.  The people gather from far and wide to hear the story with interpretation, finding their way back to the God they thought had abandoned them.  Imagine coming back to a long dead ancestors home after a wildfire like scorching and destruction, and having heard bits and pieces about God and God’s love for the world, imagine unearthing an entire Bible, and hearing it read for the first time.  Certainly, that would clarify what was lost in chains or storytelling and the intrusion of other more harsh and competitive god stories from Babylon, Assyria, and Persia.  Those stories were of many gods warring for affections and sacrifice and obedience.  It is no wonder that the One God, Yahweh, the Great I Am of the Hebrew story might come off as angry, particular, and nationalistic.  Even with all of that baggage, the One God remains merciful, forgiving, compassionate, and tenaciously loving.  God’s story characters are not mighty and hardly righteous superheroes, rather they are deeply flawed, and thoroughly human.  Only in cahoots with God do they get some things right, and keep the story alive.  As that sing on Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the others.”  This is what so compelling about the One God among the various gods to be worshipped at the altars of success, status, and competition.
 
475 years later, with his people under the thumb of yet one more oppressive empire, Jesus takes his place in the story.  Early in the telling, when Jesus is stands up to read at Temple worship, he reads from a copy of what Ezra and Nehemiah found.  Flying in the face of liturgical tradition, he does not read the portion appointed for the morning. Jesus turns to the text from Isaiah’s ecstatic dream of restoration and wholeness.  Jesus’ boldness in speaking those words in the first person implies that he is God’s restorer and revealer.  After only two verses, he sits down.  These things were supposed to go on for much longer, with rabbinical commentary added on.  Instead, Jesus drops the mic.  The Temple folks do not take it well.  We will hear the rest of the story next week.
 
Some 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the former bounty hunter of illegal Christians, Saul, has his own experience with Jesus, becoming Paul, who tells the story all over Asia Minor and nurtures these Christ following communities when they get outside the lines of love, grace, and mercy.  His letters to fledgling churches are part of our story too.  Today, we hear from a letter Paul writes to the church at Corinth. Remember, is not unlike the Las Vegas of the Mediterranean.  There are plenty of salacious attractions for human attention, and a band of hucksters cashing in on self-styled religious fervor.  Paul’s culturally contrasting words to a mad, mad world are sublime and calming, echoing resonant harmony with Jesus’ embodiment of God.  And so, the story spread, mostly by word of mouth, to these words we read, speak, sing, and pray today.  This is how we connect to the story, join the story, and keep telling it.
 
The image of the body of Christ and its many members is worthy of much more reflection for sure, but Paul delivers his own mic drop here too. “Strive for the greater gifts.”  Here again, the story continues.  Spoiler alert, Paul will write: “the greatest of these is love.”  Not the feeling, the lose yourself in it way of seeing, being, and doing kind of love.  What Paul invokes is Jesus’ powerful powerlessness.
 
I do not see it as an accident that Josh Wardle’s domain name for Wordle is “powerlanguage.”  The power of words attracts us.  It is no accident that we call our story the Word of God, and Jesus, the Word made flesh.  The power in reading, speaking, and telling of the Word propels us, helping us find our place, shaping our belonging, affirming our ultimate worth, and nudging us not to do more, but to be more present who we really are, and whose we really are.  This is power language: this wildly self-emptying love, which is worth whatever we have to give up to find.  Word up.  Drop the mic.  Amen.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Snow Day
Epiphany 3
January 16, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
For some reason, I have been thinking a lot about coaching lately.  I am not sure why… I could be because my Georgia Bulldogs won the National Championship last Monday.  Mercifully for you, that is not what this sermon is about.
 
For pre-season soccer at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, where I was Chaplain, teacher, and JV soccer coach, we took the whole team to rural New Hampshire.  There, we had plenty of field space, cooler temperatures, and a singular focus on preparing for the season.  We stayed in a long defunct ski lodge with spartan, dormitory style accommodations and family style meals.  The best part of the experience was that the whole place was off the internet grid.  There was one rotary landline phone for emergencies in a locked office, thus the boys were out of contact with girlfriends, gaming, and helicopter parenting.
 
With ice on knees and ankles, we relaxed in the evenings and made our own fun, playing pool with the one surviving cue stick, Trivial Pursuit, and lots of card games.  One evening, Rodrigo, one of our players, amazed us with card tricks.  The one that got everybody was a trick where he would have a boy we chose pick a card, remember it and shuffle it back in the deck himself.  Rod then took the deck, and sprayed it all over the room.  While he sat in his chair, he told everyone to gather the cards. Rod put them back in the deck, fanned it out face up, and asked the boy to find his card.  It was not there.  He told us to look all around the room for the card.  We could not find it.  We looked again, and far across the lodge, by the fireplace, we found the card barely sticking out of a pile of firewood.
 
How did he do that?  We were consumed with figuring it out.  We suspected the boy we chose must have been in on it, but he had stayed at the table next to Rod.  For the rest of the trip and the rest of the season, we pleaded with Rod to tell us the secret.  His only reply was “magic.”  We are now Facebook friends.  He lives in Europe.  Every now and then, someone from that team will ask him how he did it, and he only replies “magic.”
 
I think of Rod every time I consider the Gospel we hear today.  It is one of seven miracle stories in John’s Gospel: three healing stories, the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus Walking on water, and this, the first one changing water into wine.  It is not just a little water changed into wine either.  Jesus changes all of the water into wine: 6 jars, 25-30 gallons each, that is 150 gallons of wine.  That is, more or less, about 600 standard sized bottles.  He had servants as witnesses.  He had a wine steward declare it to be really good wine, normally served first.  Magic.
It is hilarious to search the internet for sermons that try to make sense out of this miracle.  There are the puritanical grape juice adherents who cannot believe that Jesus would condone raucous partying.  There are the wine enthusiasts, who note the wine was weak and much safer to drink than water.  There are the social anthropologists that point out the fact that weddings, at that time in history, were week-long celebrations, involving the whole village as well as out of town guests.  And there are the demythologizers who dismiss the story as John’s brand of gaslighting propaganda.  All of these explanatory gymnastics revolve around the big question: how did he do it?  Our rational selves are sure there is a trick.
 
Sometimes our humanity gets all bogged down in how things happen, instead of the more important purpose of storytelling: why things happen.  John is not at all concerned about the mechanics of God’s work, he is too busy being astonished at all of the miracles at hand.  The fact that through embryology we can trace human development down to the molecular level, does not make it less astonishing.  The more we learn, the more we learn about what we do not know.  Even the smallest thing we can observe or conceive is made up something smaller.  Though matter and energy are finite, matter and energy are on the move, all of the time.  So much for explanation.
 
If not how, why do the water and wine thing?  Why is Jesus is reluctant to get involved before his mother gives him a shove.  This sets up the idea that the human Jesus was not completely aware of the divine, eternal Jesus, what the theologian Richard Rohr calls the “Cosmic Jesus.”  Why six jars? Well, those were empty ritual vessels reserved for religious rites of purification.  God is all about repurposing here.  Why a wedding?  Well, it is a time of new life and celebrating a new version of family.  Why good wine?  Why so much wine? Why just have the servants be the first to see the miracle that is Jesus himself?  Why did it take this for the disciples to believe in Jesus?  We can point to the why all day, and that is the point.  Questions without one final answer lead us into our own faith, asking where God’s abundance touches us, what miracles we might have missed, and where we might be amazed beyond explanation.
 
God knows what God is doing.  God gives us a glimmer of God’s infinity in all creation.  God is a profound and infinite mystery.  When we take all three of these things together, we begin to put ourselves into God’s unfolding story.  If nothing else, we watch this Jesus carefully.  As living, cosmic Christ, he is not bound up by the rules of time, space, or limited humanity. 
 
Jesus does not do magic tricks.  Jesus shows us who God is, what God does, and how we might see past our own horizons.  The story is not really about a wedding, water, wine, physics, or hasty fermentation.  The story is about God.  We do well to watch this Jesus carefully, not to discover how he does what he does, but why he does what he does for all to see… and just be amazed and grateful.  Amen.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany 1
January 9, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
​
Please turn to the mysterious illustration in your service bulletin.  You see a duck, right?  That is a picture of a duck.  No?  Perhaps you see a rabbit.  Thus, this is a picture of a rabbit.  Whatever you see first, is what you see.  If someone tells you they see something different, then you can go looking for it, or just argue with them.  Perhaps you have seen this illustration before, so the illusion of the first time is lost on you.  What we have here is a picture in which you we may find a rabbit and a duck.  Of course, it is just a picture, and not an actual rabbit or duck, but what we see depends on our frame of reference.  If you had never seen a duck or a rabbit, it would take no form at all.  Experience gives us the imagination to see things.
 
When I was a kid, my best friend, Elizabeth, and I had two major passions: climbing trees and imagining we were something or someone else.  Elizabeth lived in the oldest surviving house in continuous use in Athens, Georgia.  To this day, the house is known as Pink Chimneys.  Other homes claim the moniker of oldest because, while built in 1788 Pink Chimneys was moved from a neighboring county to downtown Athens in 1840, then to its current location in 1856.  There were numbers on the heart pine floor planks so they would reassemble them in the right places.  I will let the preservationists argue the facts, but for us, the house super old, creaky, drafty, haunted, and purely magical.  It was a perfect palate for our imaginatively created worlds.  Being that old, it was surrounded ancient trees.  The magnolias were gargantuan, and perfect for climbing. 
 
On Sunday’s after church, while the grownups shared sandwiches and a more liquid lunch on the generous front porch, Elizabeth and I would gobble down a peanut butter and honey sandwiches, change into our play clothes, and begin scaling the magnolias, quietly.  We climbed as high as we could go (like 80 feet high!), then hide in the canopy, and eavesdrop on our parents as they critiqued the sermon and shared juicy town gossip.  We played like we were birds, chirping, and signaling one another.  These days, such adventures would require ropes, helmets, and safety harnesses.  Clearly, we survived. 
 
Elizabeth and I are still friends, and when we get together, we recount our adventures.  My memories and her memories match exactly.  While many of the trees fell victim to ice storms and the progress of intown development, a few of those immense scions of deep time remain, reminding us that we were once more fearless and imaginative.  I will never forget seeing my grounded world from 80 feet in the air, hiding out above the parental sight line, and hearing the things grownups talked about when they did not know we were listening.  I promise this is going somewhere.
 
Embedded in this past week was the actual day of Epiphany, January 6th.  It is a day to match experience with imagination.  It is the last of the 12 days of Christmas and is remembered as the day the Wise Men from the east visited the Christ Child.  In many cultures, Epiphany is the gift giving day.  It is the day we hold up the belief that Jesus comes for everybody, not just the stable attending originals.  And the word, Epiphany, is loaded.  It implies an “aha” moment, a happening, or observation of something that changes how and what we see, feel, or experience the world.  It is like seeing a place you have always known for the first time, like from the top of a tree, or being given a second chance to stare at a picture.
 
Wasting no time, the next story we tell is the story of Jesus’ Baptism.  Between baby and God man, we get very little detail.  What we do know is that two of the Gospels skip the birth narrative altogether and start where we are today.  Whether it is an Epiphany to the shepherds, the wise men, or onlookers by the Jordan River, the stories are packed with big special effects: signs of wonder, a voice from heaven, and awestruck people who know this child/man is big news.
 
Maybe, we are so accustomed to the stories that we miss their outright shock value and implications.  Christmas has been mass marketed, and Jesus’ Baptism story is repeated three or four times each year.  If we have lots of babies, we go there even more.
 
I am convinced that like we do with creation, sacraments, and the stories of God’s incarnation, God’s insistent and persistent epiphany among us gets relegated to a shelf in our minds; reserved as mythic legend or fodder for Sunday school felt boards. 
 
Wake up.  That is what Epiphany says.  Wake up not to a God with a beard and white robes hurling lightning bolts from the sky, rather wake up to the God who decides to love us, to love with us, and to act in and through us, despite our dulled or limited vision.  Wake up to the knee shaking wonder and miracle that is life and love.  Life and love eclipse everything with their power and presence.  This is the God we are here to meet.  This is the God who, when met, gets our attention. 
 
Is it a duck or a rabbit?  The answer is yes.  What we see depends on what we seek.  Get that imagination working.  We were created with that too.  Get into a new head and heart space and expect Epiphany.  If all else fails, climb a tree.  Climb a mountain.  Look out a forgotten window.  Be amazed.  Tell us about it.  Shock us.  Shock yourself.  It is all Epiphany.  Amen.