Epiphany for a Generation at Century's Quarter

A Thimble Sermon

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

6 January 2025

Today is Epiphany, every January 6 is the Twelfth Day of Christmas when the Church recognizes the wisdom of pagan visitation, whose leaders recognize and bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child. A date also timed by the Church to his baptism and wedding miracle, heaven's gift of dove and wine to Noah now spiritualized by Christ's miracles to sustain and transform us on this ark sojourn. Under the temple rainbow's mix of air, sun, and rain, the universal gifts to mortals, in these elements is the offered path of reconciliation by their sharing so long as one breathes and eats and drinks responsibly from the earth's account, having faith it will not run out.

January 6 has become another, inverted epiphany: an anniversary of recognizing the manifestation of a skewed mob nation that brought its effigies, shofars, and scaffolds to the place of people's deliberative assembly of moral policymaking. Some with ideas to lynch duly elected officials and redirect governance by bullhorn. To kick others off the ark.

Both in literary structure and meaning, the Book of Proverbs lays out two paths: one of righteousness, one of strife. There is NO middle course allowed in the way of Christ: Any coercive blend leads to inner and outer moral chaos--naming Christ while bearing guns and flashing fangs.

Today is marked as Epiphany of this manifest and daily choice: to follow flag and fang toward death
or a cross and virtue toward life,
the Caesarean or Nazorean, the wolf or the lamb.
The way of peace or the escalator of conflict.
Bearing Christ in the name of de-arming and letting God's will flow through you, or naming a dream of a strife-constructed order of merit and letting your all hang out [1], shooting first and letting an idol of God sort it out later.

Heaven only comes in the purity of the one path.

"Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain made low. The rough places as a level plain and the crooked course straightened" (Isaiah 40:4; cf. Matthew 7:13-14).

Ours is by virtue to correct, straighten, and smooth our daily course and align with Christ's wisdom while time, never an intrinsic enemy, allows

NOTES:

[1] “'What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,' For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort—a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible."

Going by terms such as "accelerationism" [of anarchy] or "need for chaos," an unconsidered desire for change absent a cultural or civilizational direction, or for a "retrieval" of some social order of ideal, or nihilism:

Practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism [where some seem] drawn to any conspiracy theory so long as it was intended to destroy the established order. Members of this [un- or underemployed] cohort commonly harbored racial or economic grievances. ...they tend... to feel socially isolated. These aggravated loners agreed with many dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” [A term has been coined] to describe this cohort’s motivation: the need for chaos. [https://shorturl.at/lSzzS ]