The Rev. Austin K. Rios
15 January 2023: Epiphany
- Isaiah 49:1-7
- 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
- John 1:29-42
- Psalm 40:1-12
How much of a difference do your life and your choices make in the great story of salvation written by our God?
My guess is that most of us become convinced at an early age that we can effect those who are closest to us—family, friends, and maybe our communities—but our reach does not extend far beyond our tribes of origin.
Unless we show exceptional ambition, or are judged to be beautiful enough or uniquely gifted enough to warrant a greater celebrity, we humans tend to consider our influence in smaller and more limited terms.
Such an acceptance of a minor role in the great story of our existence can arise from a place of admirable humility and be a deeply faithful choice.
But what if your calling is to take on a greater role in the holy story God is writing throughout the ages?
How might you respond to that call faithfully and fully while still allowing room to acknowledge your own limitations, fears, and failings?
This dance of discernment is what our ancestors in the faith had to negotiate in previous ages, and all our readings today resound from the experience of prophets and apostles whom God called to a life beyond what they previously had imagined.
We hear from the Servant in Isaiah, a figure that could be interpreted as Isaiah, another prophet yet to come, Jesus, or a host of God’s servants just waiting to live out a call in troubled times.
The servant has been called and cared for by the Lord since before birth to raise up and rally God’s people to the freedom and fullness God intended since Creation.
The prophet believes that this call is about gathering Israel’s exiles out of Babylon and bringing them back home.
But the servant in our reading today suddenly realizes that God’s call extends beyond the boundaries of his own tribe and his own people.
“I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
Like most of us whom God calls to do something or be someone outside the boundaries of our current comfort zone, the servant sees the barriers to this call.
But so often, where we humans see only a blocked and impassable path, God reveals a way.
Though the servant is abhorred by the nations, deeply despised, and even a slave to rulers, God’s promise is that the light of the story of salvation will not be impeded, because God has chosen to work through the prophet to redeem not only the exiled tribes of Israel, but to draw Gentiles and the entire creation back into right relationship.
Saul who breathed threats and violence against the early followers of Christ, received a call that was outside his expectations, but not beyond his God-given expertise.
He writes the fledgling community in Corinth, encouraging them to claim the call they have in Christ to be fellow saints engaged in the holy work of reconciling the world with God by being the church, by proclaiming the Gospel in word and deed, and by living the new life that Jesus’ cross and resurrection have revealed.
Paul was strengthened by Christ for his role in God’s great redemption song, and his missionary endeavors were about sharing this new reality with all peoples within the margins of his limited life.
John the Baptist, Peter, Andrew and even Jesus—their lives of answering God’s call might seem grand and out of reach for all of us.
And yet, at least in the case of the first three, they all had to overcome obstacles and internal objections in order to realize that the scope of their calling was greater than they ever realized.
But respond they did, and the light of the Gospel, the light of the story of salvation—the way to live as a fully alive human being connected to all creation, the family of faith, and even the forgotten and forsaken—that light was amplified and extended through the particulars of their very lives.
Their gathered witness amplified the signal of that light so that its call and promise could reach us today.
Like us, they had serious personal, communal, and political obstacles that could have convinced them to limit the call God made to them, and to diminish their lives and the saving message they proclaimed.
But they trusted in the limitless strength of God to empower them when they were weak—they allowed their sins and their shortcomings to be acknowledged, forgiven, and to melt into God’s inexhaustible pool of grace—and they made the choice to respond in faith and with one another to become channels of the saving light to the nations.
And their lives shone with the splendor of God as a result, even when persecutions, discouragement, and division threatened to extinguish their hope.
Do you know that you, too, are called to do the same?
Do you know that you, with all your worries, rationalizations, and limitations are called to serve as a light to the nations, and to sing the redemption songs that God has entrusted to us?
Salvation has come through our Lord and God, but its fruit and its light get shared through the actions of our lives.
How we speak to one another, how we care for one another and our enemies, how we allow God’s forgiveness, power, and promise to flow through us like a river bringing life to the arid places of our hearts and the drought-stricken corners of all creation—these are the ways we answer the greater call upon our lives.
In this Epiphany season, and in the year that is beginning to unfold before us, God is calling us to believe that our lives and our choices do indeed make a difference.
Let us trust in the strength of our God to guide us as we accept that call anew, and let us follow in the footsteps of once ordinary prophets and apostles made extraordinary through the power of the Lord, to sing the redemption songs and songs of freedom in our own time.