EPIPHANIES OF PROTEST

1. 2 Cycles in the Church Calendar: A) Easter B) Epiphany.

A) Lent/Easter/Pentecost Cycle focusses upon sin and redemption, upon the way God acts to repair the broken relationship between God and creation.

B) Advent/Christmas/Epiphany focusses upon the way God becomes known. “Epiphany”= revelation, disclosure, manifestation, discovery, “aha”…

2. Last week= “Epiphanies of Pilgrimage”= recognizing the “epiphanic” quality of our own experiences and how they may/may not relate to those presented in the Epiphany scriptures and liturgy. Today

A) I Samuel= “I have heard you calling in the night”. With help from the old priest Eli, the boy Samuel discerns that God is speaking to him as he sleeps in the Temple. (It is significant that Eli encourages Samuel to trust what is revealed to him, even though, as it turns out, what Samuel hears is disastrous for Eli and his sons).

B) John= Jesus tells Nathaniel that “I saw you under the fig tree”, which (for some reason) comes as a huge epiphany to Nathaniel. The significance of figs?

C) Both stories begin with a dissonance, an offence, a blindness of some kind… (the abuse of priestly prerogatives by Eli’s sons & Nathaniel’s prejudice against the town of Nazareth).

3. Dissonance for me growing up: “the slums”. Contrast= the safety/civility of my own household and the apparent chaos/threat of the slums.

4. In my teens= at church I learned that “race and wealth are not supposed to matter.” As a college/seminary student in the early 60’s = Civil Rights Movement. As a newly ordained priest in 1966, I joined the Chicago Freedom Movement.

5. A “Prayer Vigil” in Marquette Park.

Dr. King struck by rock

6. An Epiphany of the kingdom of God. What had represented chaos/threat=safety and peace.

7. Limits… Stokely Carmichael.

8. How discern an “epiphany” from self-deception? A “prophet” from a “crackpot?”