Epiphany Last .07c                                            February 18, 2007

Our Gospel lesson about the transfiguration
       marks the culmination of Epiphany,
       the season of light, manifestation, and revelation.
The Proper Preface for Epiphany, quotes from St. Paul.

       “In the mystery of the Word made flesh
       you have caused a new light to shine in our hearts
       to give the knowledge of your glory. . . .”

From 1992 through 1993, most mornings,
        in the City of Sarajevo,
        Vedran Smailovic did the same thing.
Sarajevo, in those days, was called “the capital of Hell.”
Civil war had torn the city apart.
Sniper fire and mortar shelling went on day and night.

Vedran Smailovic was a concert cellist.
But the Symphony Hall, the Civic Opera,
        all the places he had performed were reduced to rubble.
Leaving was not an option.
Only UN helicopters entered or left “the capital of Hell.”

So each day, Vedran did the same thing.
He got up, washed his face, and put on a tuxedo.
He went out into the streets of Sarajevo with his cello.
And he played.
He played mostly in the bombed out ruins,
        and graveyards.
He had made a vow, in his words,
        to “daily offer up a musical prayer for peace.”

Sometimes, as the mortar shells were falling
        and the crack of sniper rifle shots resounded,
                 people would say,
“Smailovic, are you crazy –
        playing the cello out here while they are shelling the city?”

And he would answer,

        “You’re asking me if I’m crazy?
        They are the crazy ones – shelling the city
                 while I am playing my cello.”

That is Epiphany.
The way of the world is power, violence, and privilege.
That is the darkness.
It is the way of things in all times and all places

         – especially sometimes and some places,
                  like Sarajevo, 1992.

But we all have our own personal Sarajevos,
         our own personal darkness
         which shares in the darkness of the world.
Into this darkness a light shines.
St. John said:

         “The light shines in the darkness
                 and the darkness has not overcome it.”

The light is divine love,
         the basic delight and compassion
                 that creates and sustains all life.
That light is the impulse that inspires
         the only sane man in Sarajevo
         to don a tuxedo and play his cello
                  in the ruins of a city at war.

When St. Paul wrote about the light
         God has caused to shine in our hearts,
         he didn’t just mean an inner light
                  that sustains our individual hopes.
He means that this light shines out from our hearts
         to show the world God’s love.
Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.”

Of course we are not sunlight,
         radiating our own energy.
We are moonlight reflecting God.
We are here to reflect the divine light
         into a world darkened by poverty and war,
         by power, violence, and privilege.

Each of us needs healing and strength.
Most of us are apt to be drawn here
         looking for such spiritual support.
But the paradox is that we will find our own healing

         – not through a profound sermon

         – not through a new insight from a class

         – not through the rituals alone

                 – but from immersion in the sacred mystery
                          of the Church

         – through a network of relationship
                 among people who have nothing in common
                 but the shared mission of reflecting the light of divine love.

In the Sarajevo of the post-modern world,
         in the Sarajevo of our broken lives,
                 we gather to make a certain music.
We gather, in Vedran Smailovic’s words,
         to “daily offer up a musical prayer for peace.”

This is not an easy thing to do.
It is less dramatic, but perhaps harder
         than playing the cello in a war zone.
It is hard because most of each week,
         our lives are lived in the darkened world,
         where we learn to live in the world’s dark ways,
         with the power tactics and political games
                  that govern work life, civic life,
                           and most of all family life.
So when we gather as the Body of Christ,
         we have to change our accustomed tune.

In order to reflect a holy light to the world,
         we have to do more than just act naturally.
Natural life, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it,

         “is nasty, brutish, and short.”
So we come together with the intention
         to do something different,
         to take a different view of each other,
         to treat each other in a different way,
         to resolve our conflicts in a different way.

We often fail because we are always fallible.
Pastor Peter Steinke says in his book, How Your Church Family Works,

      “Congregations can exhibit bitterness, suspicion, and angry forces . . .
      We find the gap between the real and the ideal disturbing .”
But nonetheless our intention, our purpose, is to be different.
We struggle by the grace of God to be different.
We come together, we practice together, like cello students,
         to overcome the habits of darkness.

In our Epistle lesson, Paul describes
         what we are striving to do.
He describes the Church as the Body of Christ,
         and each of us as individual members
         with our own distinct callings.
Christian love, Paul says, consists of a unity in diversity,
         and a diversity in unity.

That means we all share in one mission

         – reflecting the divine light to the world.
Within that mission, there are many vocations.
Paul spoke of teachers, healers, mystics, leaders, and others.

We might say that some teach Sunday School
         others sing in the choir;
         some raise money for Haiti;
         others swing hammers at Rebuilding Together and Habitat;
         some worship in one way at 8; others another way at 8:45,

                and so on.

Some offer pastoral care through personal contacts;
         others by cooking food or arranging flowers.
The trick is to not only tolerate each other’s diversity,
         but to support it, to encourage it, to praise it.
This takes a certain shift in the soul.
It takes study, prayer, and worship over time,
         and it takes discipline – the discipline Paul called “love.”
He isn’t talking about a warm feeling,
         but a soul shaping discipline
                  of patience, kindness, forbearance and hope.

To the extent that can treat each other this way,
         we will reflect God’s light,
         we become, little by little, the Epiphany of love.
And that is our reason for being.
We are not a school of theology – though some of us teach,
         we are not a social service agency

         – though some of us engage in acts of service,
we are not a lobbying firm – though some of us advocate for justice.
We are here to be the Body of Christ

         – the flesh and blood human expression
                  of God’s delight in and compassion for the world.
All our ministries are part of that mission,
         but the essence of the mission
                  depends how we treat each other in the process.

We are here to be as different from the darkened world
         as the strains of cello music from the sounds of bombs
                  and ambulance sirens.

                                                         Amen.