The Slow Way: Epiphany, Belovedness & Prophetic Imagination

The revelation of God’s trustworthy and formative care is the beginning of every good and wild holy thing to come.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

Tim, my co-leader in our youth ministry, has been working through a series of lessons with our high school students he’s calling “Jesus in First Person.” In it he’s reimagining the stories of Jesus’s life from Jesus’s own perspective. How and when did Jesus realize his calling? What led him to go to John to be baptized? What actually happened in the desert when Jesus fasted for 40 days?

Most of us have been given a script around Jesus’s life that says he always knew who he was, that he was a remarkable holy child who had a clear plan that he should become a carpenter, hanging back in his twenties until the moment was right to step into his true calling as Messiah. What Tim has been asking our students has been challenging their assumptions: What if Jesus, like them, needed to learn who he was and what God was inviting him to do?

So we’ve been spending a lot of time on Jesus’s baptism, one of the three main stories of the season of Epiphany. Is it possible that when the heavens opened and the Spirit descended on Jesus like a dove, everything changed for him? What if this was not just a moment recounted in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (and referred to in John) because it was neat? What if it was a moment when Jesus realized he had to trade his former life (a carpenter in Nazareth living close to his family) for a ministry that would risk his safety, demand a nomadic life, and eventually require that he reveal himself as the Christ? He had a powerful and life-changing realization that he was God’s own child, the one sent to the world. Whatever happened in that water, it was transformative.

This Epiphany season, as I’ve spent extra time with this story, I’ve discovered that the divine announcement that bellowed from the heavens when Jesus went into the waters of the Jordan River was not an announcement to the crowd. I’ve read this story my entire life and was shocked that in all three versions of Jesus’s baptism in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), it’s Jesus alone who seems to experience the power of the divine revelation that "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." It doesn’t seem like either the crowd gathered nor John the Baptist actually see or experience what Jesus hears and feels. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist refers to the moment of Jesus’s baptism, telling his followers that he saw the Spirit of God fall upon Jesus and recognized him as the "Lamb of God." The other stories, however, make it seem as if the voice of God is revealed to Jesus alone.

What kind of moment was this for Jesus? Did he know, when he was twelve and debating the priests in the Temple, that he was the Son of God? Or was he simply a brilliant kid with a mind for theology? What if this revelation in the baptismal waters actually clarified everything for him: his love of teaching, his mind for religious thought, his connection to God, that nagging feeling that he was here for something different than fulfilling his duty as the eldest son. What had Mary told him about his birth? And what did that mean to him?) Whatever has come before, this is the moment is where it all clicks for Jesus. Everything changes from this point on.

That’s what epiphanies do for us, right? We undergo revelation, and when we do, something changes in us. And so of course the Christian season of Epiphany would ask us to wonder about the baptism of Jesus, a moment that my pastor Michael Rudzena considered last Sunday as an “icon of secure attachment to the presence of God.”

Attachment theory, that psychological framework coined by John Bowlby, points to how we develop healthy emotional connections, particularly in childhood, when we need to be able to trust that our caregivers will be available and responsive to us when we need nurture or support. What is “secure attachment to the presence of God?” Perhaps it was that all Jesus knew to be true of his Father was clarified as trustworthy in that moment of his baptism. Secure attachment is necessary when you decide to transform your life, when you leave your baptism and head to the desert for forty days of fasting (/starvation). When Jesus was tempted during those forty days of desert dwelling with very real and attractive notions of ambition, self-protection, and appetite, it’s his secure attachment to God and the revelation of his sacred identity that gives him the strength to claim what he already knows to be true.

This is the foundation of Jesus’s prophetic role. He needs his experiences of baptism and his transformation in the desert in order to head to Galilee to start his ministry. Secure attachment is always the foundation necessary for speaking out and working for transformation in the world. A foundation of Love is required for what Walter Bruggeman calls a “prophetic imagination.”

This week we’ve watched that prophetic imagination play out in real time as Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde made the courageous choice to go beyond a ceremonial sermon at the Inaugural worship service at the National Cathedral. She chose to speak directly to President Trump, pointing him to one of the most powerful teachings of Jesus: “Blessed are the merciful.”

Bishop Budde’s bold and remarkable truth-telling reminded me of the passage that comes next in Luke 4, following Jesus’s trial in the desert (though, based on the other accounts, it’s likely a year or more later). Jesus returns to this hometown after a season of establishing his ministry in Galilee, and is invited to read the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue. As he stands and unrolls the scroll, he takes the opportunity to pull out a passage with similar themes to Budde’s call for mercy:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Jesus, knowing the power of a dramatic moment, rolls the scroll back up and announces: “This scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

There are so many things going on here: We see the overflow of that moment in Jesus’s baptism, that clarity of his secure attachment, his deep knowledge of identity and calling. We recognize the confidence and power that was established during his time away in the desert, in which he came to understand himself and his own temptations. And now we see how his combination of knowledge, security, and transformative love provides the confidence he needs to stand up in front of his former carpentry customers, the parents of his childhood friends, and maybe even his former schoolmates, and say words like this: This prophetic passage? This promise that someone would be anointed, set apart to bring healing and freedom, to proclaim the really real of God? I’m the guy it’s talking about.

The rest of that story tells us what we suspect. Your former school principal doesn’t like it when you show up saying you’ve been sent by God to proclaim freedom for everyone. Neither does the old lady you made a table for three years ago. And neither does your dad’s best bud who is very disappointed that you haven’t taken your role as eldest child seriously and stayed close to home to care for your mom.

How dare you make a statement like this? That God is fulfilling an ancient prophesy through your life?

Only secure connection can give the kind of assured clarity Jesus needed to be this bold. His words get him kicked out of the synagogue and dragged by a mob to a nearby cliff. (He somehow walks away unscathed.)

Bishop Budde didn’t get physically attacked for asking President Trump to show mercy to illegal immigrants who are terrified of being separated from their children or removed from the safety of our country, or to Trans folks who this week have watched as many of their rights have been taken away. Prophets always suffer when they call out the powerful. Besides being labeled a “so-called Bishop,” by Trump, who called her straightforwardness request, “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” she has also been attacked with hate mail. This is not a safe country for those bold enough to use their platform to point the powerful toward the way of Jesus.

There’s a reason Budde was compelled to call our leaders to the words and way of Jesus. Our new executive government is the overflow of a right-wing, America-worshipping Christianity that has chosen to disregard the teachings of Jesus when it comes to the weak, the marginalized, and the stranger. Prophecy’s role is to speak the truth to the powerful. The perspective of the prophet will always cause discomfort, and sometimes full-fledged disgust from the one being called out.

This season of Epiphany rarely focuses on prophecy. It wants us to consider the moments before Jesus healed, or spoke provocatively, or got himself in “good trouble.” Epiphany wants us to remember that the revelation of God’s trustworthy and formative care is the beginning of every good and wild holy thing to come.

This is the season for looking at what formed Jesus, and how the Spirit is also breaking through our lives, forming us. We who have experienced the transformative love and revelation of God are all called to prophesy: to point to injustice, to demand that every human be offered safety, care, and opportunity.

And that prophetic calling can only stand on a foundation of knowing who we are, and finding sturdy care in the Divine Love that forms us to be agents of love in the world.

A Slow Practice

Seeing someone use their position and voice to say the hard thing when it most matters? That’s powerful stuff.

Today let’s reflect on our lives and where we have the privilege of being heard. All of us, whether or not we are ever listened to on the global stage, have relationships in which our opinion matters.

I defined Jesus’s prophetic imagination as his vision for rightness and justice, combined with his willingness to say the truth from a secure foundation of belovedness. What does this mean for you?

I love coming back to Micah 6:8 in considering this question: "What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."

Let’s consider this passage and that definition in prayer:

Get still and focused. Invite the presence of the Spirit to reveal what a vision for rightness and justice should look for you right now.

Breathe in: You ask me to act justly.

Breathe out: Show me where my just actions are needed.

Sit in silence for a minute.

Breathe in: You ask me to love mercy.

Breathe out: Show me where mercy is needed.

Sit in silence for a minute.

Breathe in: You ask me to walk humbly with you.

Breathe out: Give me security in your love for me, and clarity in what you ask of me.

Sit in silence for as long as you need.

A List of Things

• I’ll be in Canyon, Texas February 23 & 24, speaking at St. Ann’s Catholic Church about how the wisdom of the Beatitudes can be a companion for us throughout the season of Lent.

• I’ll also be leading the women’s retreat at Trinity Episcopal in Asheville, NC March 28-30, working through the themes of Blessed Are the Rest of Us—how in our limits and longings, God is inviting us into wholeness..

• Speaking of Blessed Are The Rest of Us! Do you or someone you love need a copy? Find it here or anywhere books are sold.