When Mark and I have the chance to go to New York City, one of the things we try to get on the agenda is to visit the Frick Collection on the upper East Side. The Frick is a former private mansion, and it houses artworks that the 19th century steel magnate Henry Clay Frick acquired over his life. Though there’s been some remodeling, the rooms still resemble the way they looked when Frick lived there. And in his living room, across from the fireplace, over a rug that picks up its colors to make it stand out even more dramatically, hangs one of the most important works in the collection: Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in Ecstasy.”
 
Bellini puts Francis in an outdoor scene, standing beside a cliff which contains a small shelter; there are some animals and a town in the background, but the thing that draws your attention is Francis himself. He’s gazing awestruck off to the left, outside the frame, so we can’t actually see what he’s looking at. But whatever it may be, it is bathing both him and the landscape behind him in indescribable light.  
 
This glow reflects off the rocks, and a laurel tree nearby is not only sparkling, but also inclined, as if the light source from outside the frame is radiating with such force that it’s become a physical weight, bending this tree over partway. St. Francis is looking right at whatever that invisible force outside the frame is, and his arms have stretched out at his sides in a mixture of surrender and awe. And you can just see the prints of the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus, beginning to form in Francis’ palms. Bellini’s painting, like many passages in Scripture, give amazing testimony to what the presence of God can do when it is manifest to a human being.

​In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
There’s a troop of rather insolent squirrels that lives right outside our house that I have named the Squirrel Punks. Because these aren’t your ordinary squirrels. They have managed to enlarge what was once a small hole in our trash bin to just their size so that they can crawl in and help themselves to all the leftovers. Which means that when you open the trash bin unawares, you often happen upon the squirrel party of the century. And then of course they have the nerve to perch themselves directly in front of our front porch windows, as if to taunt us. Like I said, squirrel punks.
 
Of course, I know that there is nothing at all intentional about their behavior, let alone malicious. Because I know that at the end of the day, they’re just squirrels; and squirrels are incapable of being punks. Squirrels, like the rest of the animal kingdom, live by the instinct. Squirrels don’t have to try to act like squirrels -- you could say that being a squirrel just “comes naturally” to them. So despite my suspicions, the squirrel punks are just being squirrels. 

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
 
You can always count on St. Paul to go for the rhetorical flourish. Despite all those protestations we just heard about how un-lofty and artless his words are, he has such an instinct for verbal drama. I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  Nothing, whatsoever, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. As we continue reading along in 1st Corinthians, Paul is really talking here about his initial approach to the residents of Corinth, but reading that sentence in chapter 2 could make you think this is either going to be a very short letter, or a very repetitive one. After all, he claims he’s only got one topic.
 
When you get to know this letter, you discover that it has far more than one topic. As I said 2 weeks ago, we are in early stages in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians at this point, though we’ll be reading nearly the whole thing as part of our Lenten program, and you’ll see that in fact it’s 16 chapters long and covers all sorts of topics, some of them quite pragmatic. Paul writes about conflict within a parish. He writes about the importance of collaborative servant leadership. There’s a section on lawsuits and a section on marriage. There’s some complex stuff dealing with the religious pluralism in Corinth.  

Today, February 2 is the Feast of the Presentation, Emmanuel’s Feast of Title.  This is one of only three feasts, which if they occur on a Sunday, can replace the lessons of that particular day. So, we probably won’t celebrate this occasion on a Sunday morning again for seven more years. And yet we see today’s gospel story every time we come into this worship space.
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A word about feasts of title, for many churches the choice of feast day is easy, St. Matthews in Bloomington is on September 21st, the day throughout the world that the gospel writer, and tax collector, Matthew is remembered. Christ the King in Normal celebrates on the last Sunday of Pentecost, which fittingly enough is also known as Christ the King Sunday. Emmanuel, meaning “God with Us”, could actually have any day of the year as its feast because God is always with us. The Presentation was chosen as our name day, I think, because today’s gospel tells of the first time that Jesus is taken out of his own private setting, his home, his birthplace and shown to the world. God has come into the world for everyone. The Presentation is the story depicted in the stained glass window behind the high altar here. I do not know which came first, selecting the name day, or having the window. Regardless, Feb. 2 is the traditional day for Emmanuel Champaign’s Feast of Title. 

“Give us grace, O God, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ.”
 
As I thought about preaching at this Annual Meeting, one of the things I did was to read through annual reports for the past several years, just to re-live the journey we’ve been on together so far. I’m halfway through my 6th year as your Rector. It’s hard to believe I’m already entering into a longer tenure than many priests experience these days (in the Episcopal Church, 5 years is the average length of time a priest stays at a parish.) It strikes me in one sense how much progress we’ve made together as a community, and in another sense how many of the issues we all saw a need to address back in 2014 are still posing some challenges for us.
 
Year by year, we’ve answered the call of our Savior by widening our circle of influence and our visibility in our geographical parish and the downtown. When the members of our parish who are working with our consultant from Partners for Sacred Places began phoning community leaders, it was a real delight to see how many of them were now well aware of us and how readily they agreed to serve on our Advisory Committee.  I remember well going to my first Champaign Center Partnership gathering shortly after I arrived and finding that some of the same individuals who in 2019 said an immediate yes to collaborating with Emmanuel, back then could not quite place what and where Emmanuel even was. We’ve made real progress. Good job, all of you.

We begin today reading Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. In green seasons, which don’t have the focused themes of Lent and Easter, or Advent and Christmas, the Church invites us to read straight through some of the letters in the New Testament. So in green season, the second lesson will always find us going through a letter in order. This is intended as a way of keeping before us that the Bible isn’t little snippets for worship services – it’s a wide and rich book that we need to imbibe deeply on its own terms.
 
Standing here together at the start of 1 Corinthians is sort of like standing in front of the Alps - chapter 1, verse 1. We’ll be reading along from the early chapters of this letter until Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, except for February 2nd which happens to be the feast of the Presentation, Emmanuel’s Name Day. It’s Paul’s second longest letter, and perhaps his most thorough in showing how Christian truths address the kind of issues and struggles that every church in the world seems to get itself into now and again.

Shortly before Christmas, I read an article by Fr. Ben Maddison, an Episcopal priest in NJ, that drew on the song “Mary did you know.” He and his wife are foster parents, and he wrote about that experience through the lens of the song. I expect many of you have heard it – it’s a series of questions addressed to the Blessed Virgin, wondering how aware she was, ahead of time, of all that her Son would go through. It begins,
 
Mary did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water?
Mary did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you. Mary did you know?
 
Fr. Ben starts out by speaking from his own perspective about how little, really, he and his wife and all parents know ahead of time: They brought the baby to our doorstep. Five days old. Directly from the hospital. One outfit. Four pre-made bottles. A handful of diapers. A package of wipes. And a packet of papers that offered no definitive judgment on the proper pronunciation of her name….

“And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.”
 
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
Merry Christmas! Today is the twelfth day of Christmas, so we get to say that one more time. The Son of God has been born into the world as a human being and we’ve been rejoicing ever since the day of his birth. Today we find him, the child born king of the Jews, in the house where the wise men from the east behold, for the first time, the manifestation of the Son of God to the peoples of the earth. If Christmas proclaims that there was never an event as new as the Incarnation of our Lord, then tomorrow, the Feast of the Epiphany, will proclaim how this unprecedented event will work itself out in the lives of those who encounter it.
 
Our Gospel today concludes with the wise men returning to their country by another road. In the most immediate sense, this is in direct response to a message from an angel warning them to get out of town without checking back in with King Herod, as they had originally planned to do. But the reality is that they could not have possibly returned home the same way as they came, for they are no longer the same people. Had they not knelt before the King and Savior of the world? The one who is very God of very God and yet fully human, born of the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Such an encounter makes for an irrevocable change and an overwhelming joy. Once the wise men enter the house, they are not the same people that they were. And after they leave the house, there are no steps to be re-traced and even their journey home will be unfamiliar. It is certainly not the journey that they had expected. They have witnessed the Epiphany, the manifestation of the Son of God to the world. Before that, human life was just like it is right now at the beginning of a new decade and had always been. We have always been the people that we were. And none of our hopes for innovation and progress can ever quite shake that knowledge from us. Nothing can save us that is possible, the poet W.H. Auden said, for We who must die demand a miracle.
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​Today is the fifth day of Christmas and the frenzy of Christmas has settled.  No more pageant, no more incense, no more thinking ahead to the big dinner, or last minute presents to wrap.  The stimulation, of all the people and paper and stuff being everywhere, has paused. For many of us, we have been so busy “doing” Christmas that we may not have had the time to experience it or to reflect on what it means. And then in the liturgical year we are given the space of these twelve days to actually do that. And that is one of our opportunities this morning.

The Christmas season is one filled with memories, mostly good memories though occasionally sad ones too. We remember favorite carols and favorite holiday foods. Perhaps we remember favorite gifts through the years and certainly favorite people with whom we have shared Christmases past. This reflection is a way to experience and re-experience the love that Christmas brings.  And human love and human kindness is a reflection of God’s love. We hold these experiences in our hearts year after year as a part of our understanding of God’s all-encompassing love. The season is filled with remembrances of love, how we are loved and how we have loved.
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Let’s take a few moments this morning to reflect on the origin of that love and how we can grow in our understanding of the depth of God’s love for us.

When I went to the Holy Land last summer to take a course called “The Footsteps of Jesus,” I went, being a priest, with some background in the topic. I already knew a good amount about the New Testament, and a moderately decent amount about the historical evidence for the New Testament. I knew about some of the archaeological discoveries of inscriptions, bone boxes, and particular sites that corroborate what we hear in Scripture. And I knew about how good the manuscript evidence is for these texts as opposed to so many other ancient documents, in other words, that far more than we can with ancient books by people like Plato or Euripides, we can be sure the New Testament still says what was written down by the original authors, that nobody changed the text to suit an agenda.
 
And just to be silly about it, I of course knew that Capernaum and Nazareth and all those places were real towns in a real country. I had enough background, in short, to understand that Christianity depends on history. What Christianity offers is not a set of values or a spiritual philosophy or a special kind of attitude; Christianity offers the news of what God did in a real time and place – followed up by the additional news that because God did what he did then and there, many things have changed forever here and now.