Sunday 10 January 2016

First Sunday after Epiphany (BCP)


‘And Jesus increased in wisdom, and stature, and in favour with God and man.’ Luke 2:52

The word ‘epiphany’ refers to a revelation, a sense of knowing something from God, not necessarily out-of-the-blue and not necessarily claiming to know in full; but, perhaps, an invitation to set out together and see what we might find. In that sense, epiphanies have beginnings, but no ends. As I turned my attention to preaching in this season of Epiphany, I had an epiphany of my own: the sense that God wanted me to focus on just one word each time I spoke, to explore one word that God would draw my attention to, and see what might come of it. The word for this sermon is ‘stature’.

The Greek word in question can refer to the ‘span of years’ or ‘height’. At face value this is simply a statement that Jesus grew older and taller, progressing through infancy and childhood, through the physical changes of adolescence to adulthood. It is an utterly unremarkable observation, given that, all things being equal, it is inevitable. Except, of course, that all things are not equal. Jesus’ closest contemporaries were murdered in their infancy at the orders of a paranoid king; and doubtless others around him died of natural causes, as babies and children do today, even in the West, even if we try not to think about it.

There are no acceptable answers as to why some live and others die. There is only solidarity with humanity in our joy and sorrow, or distance, denial. In the incarnation, at (literally) breath-taking personal risk, God chose to fully-identify with us.

But, like children, words grow, change, take on new form and meaning once birthed into the world; and in the fullness of time (long after the Gospels were written; indeed, long after King James authorised a translation of the Bible into English) the word ‘stature’ took on a figurative meaning, of intellectual accomplishment or of moral standing. More recently still, the word ‘stature’ has fallen out of fashion entirely. We might have a sense of what ‘wisdom’ and ‘favour’ look like; but ‘stature’ is perhaps lost in the mix.

Stature is a physical thing, but surely more than size. The Queen, for example, has immense stature, and she is only 5’4’’ tall. It is, rather, to do with how we inhabit ourselves, as souls that have been given bodies.

Jesus summarised the whole of the Law and the Prophets in loving God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength; and your neighbour as yourself. If wisdom is making good or godly choices (the heart, the seat of our will), informed by good or godly thought and good or godly feeling (the mind, the seat of our intellect and our emotions), then stature is the physical projection of wisdom into the world (our strength, directed in love of God and neighbour). Or to put it another way, if stature refers to the span of our years, who gets to shelter under that span?

I am 6’1/2’’, an achievement that I can take no credit for; but for which I can take responsibility. Indeed, if I want to increase in stature, as Jesus did – and as a follower of Jesus, I want to grow in the ways that he grew – then I must love God and my neighbour through how I embody my embodiment.

For example, I know that I am a man of greater stature when I take someone’s hand and look them in the face as I speak and listen to them, than I am when my body language makes it clear that I consider being somewhere else and attending to something else more important to me, more worthy of my attention. And in this sense there is real evidence that smart phones, sold to make us bigger, to extend our reach and our connection, are in fact diminishing our stature. That in itself is a challenging thought, in the world we appear to live and move and have our being in.

Through the years, the Church has perhaps devoted more energy to the management of ‘sins of the flesh’ than it has to nurturing increasing stature. Stature involves stance, in relation to others: neither aggressive, nor defensive; but open, looking for the good in others, delighting in them without seeking to possess or control. If we have thought of stature at all, we have focused on the instruction of the young, rather than our own life-long following after Jesus. But we don’t finish with stature when we stop growing physically: stature is the evidence of wisdom; and those who increase in stature, however young or old, will grow in favour with God and – generally, though not universally – with those around us. As we seek to finish the race before us, may we each increase in stature through the year ahead, even as our bodies slowly start to wear out…

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