Epiphany 2

Epiphany I (Matthew 2:13-15; 19-23) “This is my Son, The Beloved.”

God is not a minimalist.

Nature testifies to the extravagance of Divine creativity.  The Plan of Salvation reveals the extravagance of infinite and eternal love. God so loved the world that He did not send a committee.

God so loved the world that He did not leave us with a book of instructions to figure out by ourselves. God so loved the world that He sent The Beloved.

At the baptism of Jesus God reveals Himself to us in several important ways.

First: God reveals that He is one God in three persons. All three persons of the Trinity actively manifest at the baptism of Jesus. God the Father speaks audibly to the crowd. God the Holy Spirit takes visible form as He anoints Jesus for his three year mission of preaching, teaching and healing. Jesus emerges from the waters of baptism revealed to everyone as the Son of God.

Second: God reveals the incarnation. In the fullness of the Trinity the One God reveals audibly, visually and actively that Jesus is the incarnate co-eternal Son. Lest we miss it, the Father declares of Jesus: This is my Son, The Beloved.

Third: God reveals that he is love. God has power but is not power. God has knowledge but is not knowledge. In the fullness of revelation at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, God reveals to John, the assembled crowds, the nation of Israel and the entirety of the human race that God is love.

As the Son of God, who is love, Jesus is The Beloved. He is not a beloved. He is not simply loved by God as we are all loved by God. Jesus is The Beloved- the one and only co-eternal Son of the Father.

Jesus is the very pattern of Divine abundance and Divine extravagance.

The Bible also testifies to Divine abundance and extravagance. John the Baptist is present at the baptism of Jesus to remind us that God the Holy Spirit worked with dozens of individuals over the course of hundreds of year to produce the Bible, the written record of the Plan of Salvation. God did not dictate the Bible to a single prophet. Neither did he inscribe the Bible on golden tablets to be translated by a single prophet.

God used the unique personalities, languages and cultures of dozens of people over the course of time to present a mosaic of images, observations, experiences, history, poetry, songs and wisdom to convey an amazing pattern of revelation.

The pattern of divine abundance and extravagance is revealed in the pattern of liturgical worship. From the Tabernacle, to the Temple to the Church God Himself reveals that the pattern of worship is liturgical worship. God invites us to participate in this pattern to be transformed by this pattern.

It is no historic accident that the Puritan minimalists who rejected the divinely revealed and appointed pattern of liturgical worship evolved into the Unitarian congregations who have largely secularized faith as a cultural phenomenon

The revelation of God the Father and the confirmation of God the Holy Spirit that Jesus is the co-eternal Beloved Son is key to the salvation and sanctification of souls.

As Jesus is the incarnate Beloved the Plan of Salvation is revealed in three basic categories: Reunification, Relationship, and Transformation.

The sole purpose for the existence of the Church is to work and pray for the reunification of lost souls to God the Father, through a personal relationship with the God the Son, by the transforming real presence of God the Holy Spirit. We are not a cultural institution. We are, for now, the instrumentality of the Plan of Salvation.

The Apostles and their heirs understood this revelation. They understood that a religion of rigid inflexible uncompromising law cannot support the infinite and eternal relationship The One God offers in the fullness of the Three Persons of God.

The apostles and the Ecumenical Councils also understood that the new life and the new way of living God offers in Jesus cannot be sustained by minimalist forms of worship. God invites us to offer our best in the pattern of worship He himself revealed to Moses, the Prophets and the Apostles. Anything less than the best in music, art, architecture, language and liturgy diminishes us and our ability to grow in grace and to experience personal transformation in divine love.

God the Father reveals the extravagance and the superabundance of Divine Love in a person: Jesus Christ. The most profound and transforming way to experience that love is in the highest form of love God designed into our souls. That highest form of love is worship.

The principle of worship is transformation. The pattern of worship is the interior life of the One God who is three persons. The extravagance of worship in art, music, language and ritual invites us to participate in and be transformed by the extravagance of infinite and eternal love made manifest in Jesus Christ, anointed by the Holy Spirit, and declared by God the Father as: The Beloved.