Epiphany is the Church’s season of information sharing
by the Right Reverend Thomas Clark Ely, Bishop of Vermont
Mountain Echo, January 2009

We live in an age when vast amounts of information are accessible to us in an instant. I did a Google search for “God” and got 546 million hits. “Jesus” got 200 million hits. The “Holy Spirit” got 11.5 million hits, plus another 4 million for “Holy Ghost.” “Bishop Thomas Ely” only got 62,000 but who’s counting?

Information is expanding daily in every field—from electronic technology to physics, from medicine to industrial technology, from business to community organizing. This is part of the reality that Thomas L. Friedman talks about in his book, The World is Flat, and again in his most recent book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. The vast amount of information available to us—and the ready access we have to it—has made the world a smaller and more level place. Whether or not this all makes the world a better place depends on how we use and share that information.

There is a familiar adage reminding us that, “Information is power.” To have information is generally an advantage, although at times too much information can overwhelm or immobilize us. To know something about something can better equip us for the mission at hand, and the sharing of information can build capacity within an organization or community for its mission.

This stream of consciousness about information recently got me thinking about the season of Epiphany as the Church’s season of information sharing! The season of Epiphany is all about the revealing of God in Christ to the world. The theme of Epiphany is manifestation—making known, showing forth the presence of God in the life of Jesus. The season of Epiphany is about sharing information, about telling the good news of Jesus Christ, about making Christ known to the world. It is about revelation.

The familiar stories of the Epiphany season: the stories of the magi and the baptism of Jesus; the stories of healing and casting out demons; the stories of teaching and calling followers; and the Transfiguration story on the last Sunday of Epiphany are all stories of revelation—stories that share sacred information. All these stories have one thing in common: they reveal the Christ; they provide incredibly significant revelatory information about Jesus, and ultimately they remind the faithful of the information we are invited to know and to share.

Most of the Sunday Gospel stories we will listen to this Epiphany season come from Mark. In Mark’s Gospel, information is shared in crisp, action-oriented fashion. We will engage these stories week after week through the long Vermont winter as the days gradually get longer. The information we get about Jesus increasingly sheds more and brighter light on him as the Christ, the light of the world, and who we are in relationship to that light. The prevailing image of the Epiphany season is light and all that is associated with light: clear vision, enlightened understanding, a new day, hope, brightness, inspiration and the ability to maneuver with less fear through the darkness.

Light is the summary symbol of the Epiphany season’s information highway. Light is a powerful biblical metaphor for the very identity of God’s people, as Isaiah reminds us in Israel’s call to be “light to the nations.” As the Church, as a community of followers and disciples of Jesus Christ, we stand in the company of that same light. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus says. “Let your light shine before all people and give glory to God.” The Church and all its members are called to be the bearers of Epiphany’s light—the light that shines in the darkness with such hope, veracity and conviction that the darkness has no power over it. We are light bearers, keepers and sharers of a story, human internet custodians of information that has the power to change both lives and the direction of lives.

Of course, it is not always an easy thing to be that light. I don’t know about you, but for me there are times when it seems especially difficult even to think of myself, or the Church as light, let alone to be that light. At times the confusion is of our own making, as when we loose sight of our focus as agents of God’s reconciling mission. At other times the darkness of the world—the hate, the injustice, the corruption, the violence, the warfare, the poverty, the greed—seems so overwhelming and insurmountable that we easily ponder, “How can one person, or one community of faith, or even one diocese be light amidst such odds?” How in the face of all that would draw us away can we faithfully live out the promises of baptism; the promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons; the promise to proclaim the Good News of Christ in word and deed; the promise to strive for justice and peace among all people; the promise to resist evil; the promise to respect the dignity of every human being? Sometimes I’m not even sure we know the light from the darkness and yet Jesus keeps saying to us, “You are the light of the world!”

This Epiphany season, I encourage us to share the information we have about Jesus with a broken and hurting world: a world struggling with fear born of an economic crisis that few of us have experienced before; a world consumed by war and the threat of war; a world dying from diseases that we could prevent if we would share the information and resources at our disposal without restrictions; a world resisting the call of its scientists to address the global climate crisis that could mean the end of life as we know it; a world where too many still go to bed hungry, thirsty, cold, naked, alone and without hope. Share the information and trust in the light.

The Reverend Julia Gatta, a friend and faculty member at the School of Theology in Sewanee, Tennessee, ended her sermon on the Feast of the Epiphany in 2006 with this line: “The joy of Epiphany is catching sight of God where he is: not in the stars but on earth in his Son, whose presence is manifest among us.” Information is power. Epiphany is the Church’s season of information sharing. I did a Google search for the word “hope” and got 616 million hits. I scrolled though the entries and I saw your name.

Let your light shine!
+Thomas

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