What does “God with us” look like? We’ve been building towards this. During Advent we sang O Come O Come Emmanuel, a song of longing for God to come, a song of anticipation of God being with us. Then at Christmas, we proclaimed that God was with us, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Now it’s Epiphany, and we look for the word become flesh to reveal God’s glory, and show us what it looks like when God is with us. For centuries, the people of Israel had been asking the same question. They had been longing for the day when God would come to be with them. What would it look like, they wondered? How would God reveal God’s glory? In their poetry, in their songs, in their stories, p
John went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. All the people were baptized. Jesus also is baptized by John in the Jordan River. And for centuries since, people have asked the question, “why did Jesus get baptized? Why was he baptized with a baptism of repentance? Surely he hadn’t done anything wrong – did Jesus need to repent?” Some have tried to answer that question by saying that Jesus didn’t need to repent, but that he chose to be baptised anyways, as a gesture of solidarity with all the rest of us that do need repentance. And while I agree totally that Jesus stands in solidarity with us, in this and so many ways, I h
Have you ever set out on a long journey, and when you arrived at your destination, realized you were in the wrong place? That’s what happened to the wise ones from the East in today’s gospel reading. But let’s start from the beginning. Around the time of Jesus birth, there were astrologers in the East, likely in Persia or Iraq, who observed a new star in the night sky. They understood this to mean that a child had been born as king, and so they set out on their westward journey across the desert to seek for the child and to pay him homage. Now this wouldn’t be an easy trip. It would be a long, challenging journey through difficult terrain, a trip that would take months. And as they lo