What's Next?

Christmas is done. It's a new year. So what's next?

Well, maybe. Depending on when you are reading this, Christmas may not be done. Officially the Twelve Days of Christmas end on January 5th with the 12th Night (of Shakespeare fame). In the liturgical calendar, the New Year started in December with Advent. We've been answering "what's next" since then! So what is next? Glad you asked. January 6th marks the Feast of the Epiphany and the season that follows.

The Season after Epiphany (although I prefer 'Season OF Epiphany') marks a time of realization. Who is Jesus? What is his significance? What does he have to do with me? From the Magi, celebrated on January 6th, we learn that Christ call all nations. On the Sundays afterwards we are told of Jesus' Baptism where the Triune God is revealed simultaneously as a voice from Heaven, the Son of God being baptized and the dove/Holy spirit. We read also of the Wedding at Cana where Jesus performs his first miracle and Mary gives us a hint about following Jesus, "Do whatever he tells you." And on February 2nd is Candlemass, the celebration of Jesus Presentation in the Temple which celebrates the Light of God in the midst of the Temple and the worshiping community.

The Epiphanal season challenges us with water and light and invitation. Water awakens us to the wonder of God's activity around us. Light at the new possibilities of what a life bathed in salvation may look like. Invitation that causes us to realize, we are invited; there is no part of us that has been excluded from God's call for transformation; and there is no person that God does not want within God's own family.  
 
What's next? It's time to awake to the reality of new life in God. Is this a New Year's resolution? No. It's a New Life resolution.

What is the Season of Epiphany?

January 6th marked the beginning of the church's liturgical season known as Epiphany. The word "epiphany" means a moment of clear understanding, an "aha" moment where everything comes together to finally make sense. In Advent we anticipated the coming of the Messiah who would put things right. In Christmas we witness the birth of the Messiah, though we have little time to ponder what that will mean, only that this is the beginning of the fulfillment of our hope for "peace on earth and [God's] goodwill to [all] people."

Epiphany is the final season of the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany trilogy. In this season we ponder who Christ is, to whom he was sent, and what that will mean for us. In the story of the Wise Men, we learn that the Messiah has come not only for the Jews, but for the Gentiles, not only those near, but those afar, and not only for those "like us", but those who are "not like us." In the Baptism of Christ we discover that we all must convert and be transformed. In Jesus' day, baptism was how a non-Jew became a Jew. It was a radical thing that John the Baptist was calling for the Baptism of all, Jews and Gentiles, as a sign of their repentence. And notice that Jesus, himself, did not escape Baptism. At the Wedding at Cana, we see Jesus' first miracle prefiguring the second sacrament of Communion and its necessity in the Christian life. We also see Mary, mother of Church and first Christian, model the essential Christian response to Christ when she says, "Do whatever [Jesus] tells you."

It is in these and other stories we learn who Christ is and that he was sent from Heaven to gather us, you and me, into the Kingdom of God, through baptism, eucharist, and quintesentially through himself. As the mystical nature of Christ's mission to us becomes clearer to us, we join in having an Epiphany.   

May your Epiphany not be a season only!

Fr. James+