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I am sure, this first Sunday of the new year, none of us needs to be reminded of what a strange tumble in time all of us have been through with Christmas just past.  Our mania, our money, our memories—and, by the grace of God, some moments of peace, good will, and Christmas beauty—not to mention the good news of Christmas:  the whole of creation brought, once again, into salvation just by Jesus being born.  Good news indeed!

And yet now our tumble in time dumps us on the beach of secular January, and we are left blinking at that vast expanse before us called “2007.”  But suppose for a moment that January were not all that secular.  Suppose, for example, that the next sacred break-through we are all looking for is not the coming applause-pageant called the State of the Union.  Suppose that, as the greens come down, the sacred imagination does reveal for us yet more light, and yet another image by which we can guide our wandering lives.

Of course, I can back up this supposition!  Yesterday was Epiphany, and for those of us who are not panting to hear the State of the Union but do want something “to live for” between Christmas and the Super Bowl, Epiphany, January 6th, is there!

This is the ancient traditional date for the appearance of the star in the east to guide the wise ones to Jesus.  Epiphany, what an old-fashioned minister of mine once called “a thinking man’s holy day.”  It comes just when darkness seems to regain the night-time sky where not so long ago angels and heavenly hosts sang and talked to shepherds in their fields.

Since we don’t use the word “epiphany” much, I looked it up to help us out.  It’s not even in my Roget’s Thesaurus.  Webster adds to the Christian meaning this more secular definition:  epiphany:  a sudden perception of an essential meaning, an intuitive grasp of reality, through something simple.

Now the ancient Christian tradition sees in the story of this star a symbol of three things.  The star marks the birth.  The star also marks the baptism of Jesus.  Yes, imagination can do that.  January 6th in the Orthodox tradition brings to sacred memory not only the story of the revelation of Jesus to the three wise men, but also that future blessing to the world—the baptism of Jesus some 30 years later when the white dove Holy Spirit commissions and blesses him.

And just to make the holiday of Epiphany really worthwhile, tradition says that the day also marks the first miracle that Jesus performed.  You may recall the wedding feast at Cana, where Jesus changes the water into wine.

So by religious imagination Epiphany has gathered all three of those meanings:  Jesus’ birth, his baptism, his first miracle.

Now we ourselves were probably not recalling yesterday that it was Epiphany.  And we, unlike that poor couple at their wedding feast, are probably not running low on wine!  But we are, we assuredly are, running low on imagination and real and sacred images to live by.

Yet we came here this Sunday still willing to seek inspiration for our lives, willing still to give the holy images of bread and wine their ritual chance at nourishing our souls.  And now we have come to the part of the service of worship where the word of God revealed in scripture is to be broken open and also offered as nourishment, sermon words as images to live by.

We have heard in scripture today of two epiphanies, two times when people who are caught up in the dangerous life of faith have a sudden experience of the word and words of God.

God speaks to Moses through the burning bush, “Let my people go.”  And Jesus speaks to Peter through his burning questions, “Do you love me?”  And from the human side, Moses and Peter have the common experience that comes with epiphanies—they have an intuitive grasp of an essential reality, seen through something simple, yet it feels more like magic or miracle.

In our quest here for images to live by, if they are to be sacred, let us not be shy of magic and miracle.  Our three wise ones were thinkers, yes, astronomers, but as magi they pondered the mystery of the cosmos.  These three kings had imagination.  Magi were thought-filled magicians, not warrior kings.  And, as such, they lead us toward images we can live by—ending in the super-natural love of God, shown also for us in the image of Moses the liberator from slavery without an army;  and Peter, the founder of the church, a preacher feeding the lambs of God.

So as we tumble into 2007, resolving to face another year, frankly we also look for the resolve to face another year!

Hence our two scriptures:  both the great prophet-to-be Moses and the big preacher-to-be Peter are without resolve and have retreated.  Of course, retreat has been on our minds, geo-politically, and for many in our spirits, psychologically.  So, when we advance that question, “by what image shall we live?” we are asking it in a new way as Americans.  It is, of course, an old question for us as individuals trying to put together a family, a career, an education.  And it is always our eternal question when we face illness and loss:  “by what image shall I live, now?”

So, we resolve to face life and another year but it is real to look at retreat first, the retreats of Moses, of Peter, and then to look to the images of God for life that God gave them.  In our Bible God has no problem speaking to Moses in retreat, hiding in the mountains, and Jesus doesn’t hesitate to address Peter retreating back into fishing.

Let us review for a moment these stories, how Moses got up to his mountain retreat in Midian, becoming a shepherd.  Moses was the baby in the bulrushes, an adopted prince in Egypt.  Moses grew up with a moral passion.  And Moses killed an Egyptian guard who was oppressing an enslaved Jew, a man of Moses’ own blood.

So Moses fled for his life and turned his back on both political power and moral passion.  Yet in the eternal fire of God’s unquenchable rage at injustice, Moses saw in a burning bush a call to freedom from slavery.

And Peter’s story?  Peter, once upon a time, had given up being a fisherman to follow a man who said, “I will teach you how to win the hearts and minds of people:  no longer fish for fish.”  But after Jesus was killed, and even after Peter saw the empty tomb, Peter retreated—back to being just a fisherman.

Now you and I face this stuff all the time!  Like Moses, we have moral passion for justice and freedom, and we take on tasks and beliefs and ideas.  They get too risky and dangerous for us and we back off, maybe retreat.  Like Moses.

And like Peter we have met beautiful people like Jesus who are filled with great love and fill us with the power to love and not just the desire to make money.  But then the world talks back.  We hear another voice not unlike God’s when he sent Adam and Eve out of the garden, saying “in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread!”  And our love of love, like Peter’s, ends.

These stories of retreat are personal to me as well as true to life—which is why I chose them as scripture for us today.  Some 12 years ago, on the day that I was ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ, these two scriptures were the twin loaves of God’s word in that surprising service!

My testimony is that I had gone into retreat from my Martin-Luther-King-inspired freedom call for racial justice and liberation.  My own interracial family had splintered and I had left for the mountains of poetry and psychology.  So to get ordained meant to see the burning bush again, and to pick up the God-given image of Moses who went back into the clutches of the empire to say again, “Let my people go!”

I had already, like Peter, given up on my youthful, heartfelt, relationship with Jesus.  And so Peter’s story at the charcoal fire breakfast—where Jesus was serving fish already there, not caught by Peter!—Peter’s story at my ordination meant that the image of loving God in Jesus had reclaimed my life and I was, from then on, to come out of my vocational retreat as a poet and psychotherapist and try to feed the flock of God’s people as best I was able.

And so we have two Biblical stories—Moses’ and Peter’s—and one personal story—mine.  What about your story?  What about your retreat?  Your retreat from facing the empire and speaking God’s call to freedom, especially from economic slavery?  What, also, about your retreat from a personal response to Jesus Christ?  What about you counting fish, your catch, not feeding sheep, God’s people?

It takes imagination to come out of retreat.  It takes an image of God that breaks through to you, to us, like the burning bush, like the Lord on the shore with his already-cooking breakfast and his burning questions and command.  It takes imagination to perceive the on-going revelation of God:  unstoppable fire for justice;  still speaking asking Lord.

Of course it takes imagination.  How else to grasp the epiphanies of God, to intuit the strikingly simple reality of God in life?!

Let us not be silly about scripture here so that we might dismiss its claim on us!  You do not have to believe that God spoke in audible words from a bush that wouldn’t burn.  And if you take the epiphany of Moses that way only, you will never hear God telling you, now, where God wants you to be, and how, this day.

Revelation is a form of reason we call imagination.  Moses may not have been a poet.  He certainly was not a public speaker.  But we can all see how God led him to put together some thoughts, how to connect some dots into a new, imaginative direction for life.  And of course it’s inspirational to imagine Moses feeling that God had heard the cry of those enslaved.  It is then an action of his own inspired imagination that Moses follows.  This was his epiphany:  I know who I am and who I am to become and what I am to say to the empire:  “Let God’s people go!”

Peter also was no natural-born poet.  Fish and sheep he’d seen all his life, with no inspiration.  And he had heard Jesus many, many times.  Only this time it was different.  Don’t think that what changed in Peter is a magic that cannot also happen to you!  “Do you love me?  Feed my sheep!”  Those are not the most poetic words Jesus ever spoke, but how they set Peter’s heart on fire!  How they lit a new and sacred image for him to live by.

Yes, it takes imagination to see God in God’s sign-language world.  But even without Moses or Peter being poetically imaginative, certainly the collectors and the writers of our Bible were!  The ancient Hebrew poets!  The inspired early writers of the way of Jesus!  We can give thanks today for the imagination of the Bible writers, who saw—among all the stories ever told—the burning light of God in these stories, that they set down:  such stories, as full of images now as was a new star in the east—once upon a time.  Images for the vast expanse of 2007, images for us to live by:  a burning bush with words “Let my people go!”  A charcoal fire with the words of Jesus, “Feed my sheep!”

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