Let prayer be the place you come from.
Sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany (February 27, 2022). Thank you to the Esteemed Mr. Andrew J. Pierce for the audio!
View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day: Last Epiphany Year C
VIDEO available on Facebook via St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Camillus. Sermon starts at 28:10.
Manuscript (actual sermon may vary, blame the Holy Spirit!)
After weeks of growing tension on the news, on Thursday morning we woke up to hear that Russia has invaded Ukraine. Radio reporters on the ground spoke to families fleeing Odessa on foot. They played recordings from their phones of the sounds missile strikes made in their hotel rooms.
And here is what I want to say to you about that:
Do not be ashamed to pray.
This pandemic has been long. Many of us have lost someone we loved. Know someone whose health has been compromised. As we begin again to hope that we’re emerging, we hear of wars and we are already depleted. And you just want to sit down with a sigh. There’s no good place to begin.
Do not be ashamed to pray.
Thoughts and prayers have gotten a bad rap, and maybe rightly so, when those who pray are more concerned with “looking like they care” than actually caring.
But I say to you, when you wake up to news that makes your chest tight and your heart hurt, and you find yourself weary, and you can’t think of what you might do to help and you’re wondering what this might mean for your own future and the future of your loved ones, don’t be ashamed to pray. Pray.
You can keep the church bulletin on your kitchen counter and use that prayer for the week, or say the psalm slowly to yourself. You can hum one of the hymns.
You can open your Book of Common Prayer. If you don’t have one, I’m sure we can get you one today. On page 154 is The Supplication, part of the Great Litany, and our prayer book encourages us to say this prayer in times of war, of national anxiety, and of disaster. The full Great Litany begins a few pages before on page 148, and this is a prayer you can read slowly, or say aloud to yourself, or phone a friend and say it together. It is a prayer that deeply grounds us in God’s power to love us, to care for us, to guide us through the hardest times.
You can use your own honest words.
You can pray the Lord’s Prayer.
But do not be ashamed to pray. To begin with prayer. To let everything you do be grounded in prayer. Let prayer be the place you come from.
Today is the Transfiguration, and Jesus takes his disciples to the mountaintop, and there he prays.
Jesus is the Way, and he showed us what to do. He prays.
And in the midst of prayer, he is transformed. There is Glory!
Glory is everywhere in Luke. In that great Christmas birth story, the heavens open and the angels are singing, Glory to God in the Highest. In Luke 3, the first Sunday after the Epiphany, Jesus is Baptized and the heavens open again, and a voice says, this is my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.
And here as the season of the Epiphany ends, and we look ahead to Lent on Wednesday, here, on this mountaintop, in the midst of prayer—the heavens open again and again that voice says: This is my Son! My chosen, my beloved: Listen to him.
An epiphany is a revelation or an insight, and in the Church year, the feast of the Epiphany on January 6th , and the full season after it, is a season where we celebrate, we see, we have insight into the reality
that Jesus is the beloved and chosen Child of God
and that we, too, are God’s chosen and beloved Children
At the beginning of the season and at the end: This is my child. My beloved. My chosen. Those words can resonate in our hearts, too.
Because we need them. In the Gospel of Luke the Transfiguration, this mountaintop experience, and affirmation of Jesus identity as God’s beloved, this is the turning point. From here on out he sets his face toward Jerusalem and the hard death that waits for him. This is the topic of his conversation with Moses and Elijah.
And for us, the Transfiguration is a turning point in our Christian lives: from this time of Epiphany where we ground ourselves deeply in knowing how much God loves us, but also to know that God’s love helps us to do the hard things, the hardest things. God’s love helps us to make the journey through loss, through risk, through self-sacrifice, through repentance, and even death. We are on a hard journey, the journey that we practice each year in the season of Lent.
But we walk this hard journey together. Together with one another, together with Jesus, together with God. Today I want to remind you that we walk this hard journey together grounded in our knowledge of God’s love for each and every one of us. Grounded in our knowledge that God has called and chosen each one of us, saying my beloved Child, be my partner in healing this world. Be my friend. I have called you friends.
And that is why, on this hard hard journey, I say we need never be ashamed to pray. Prayer is where we come from. Prayer is where Jesus comes from. It’s in prayer that Jesus draws strength and courage for the journey: from his friends, from his Father, from the great leaders and prophets who proceeded him. It’s in prayer that we remember our glorious identity as God’s beloved, God’s chosen, and the ones who God has called healers.
Amen.