This sermon was preached at the 6pm service. The sermons at 7:30am and 12:15pm were extemporaneous.

“Where do you come from?” When I worked at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, I was asked this question almost every day. “Where do you come from?” The question usually arrived when I stood at the door, greeting people as they left Choral Evensong. They had heard me speaking or singing during the service, and were surprised to find me ministering in the heart of the Establishment. The English frequently assume that all Americans sound like New Yorkers or Texans, so a Midwestern accent was stupefying to them. 

Over 13 years in England, I gave an account of my origin many times. I used to frustrate people by cheeky responses like, “I’m from right here. I have lived here for years.” Right at the end, I could even say, “I’m British” because I am a citizen of the UK. (This amused no one but me.) Once or twice, I tried something grand and theological, meant to spur reflection on why they needed to know where I was from: “I am a child of God.” 

For the Christian, that origin is the most salient part of our identity. It reflects the view from on high and the view from the Scriptures. As the Psalm puts it, God “knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are … dust.” 


Creation and redemption are remarkable. God has raised children for himself from the stones, from the earth, from dust. The creation account in Genesis 2 imagines God as a kind of potter, molding us from clay and putting us where he wishes. Adam was made for the Garden. The story is not to be taken literally. God has no hands, after all. But it focuses our mind. We have one origin in God; God is intimately involved in our being. So, on the one hand, we have an incredible dignity: we are made in God’s image and after his likeness. On the other hand, we are poor creatures, made of common stuff. 

“Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field. When the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more.” 

In a few minutes, Deacon Chris and I will repeat these words dozens of times: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Remember. 

Remember that any time you want to exalt yourself over another person. Remember, you’re just one mobile pile of mud talking to another one. Enlivened by the Spirit of God? Yes! But at the end of the day, still mud. 

If you ever feel accusatory toward your neighbor, made of better stuff, more perceptive, apparently blameless, remember: you’re just the pot calling the kettle black. You are a sinner. Do not be a hypocrite, do not make a show of arrogance, do not practice your piety before others. Be humble. 

“We brought nothing into this world, and we will take nothing with us when we go,” as St Paul says in 1 Tim 6:7. 

Something else to consider: The sign of ashes on our foreheads is not just a sign of humility, though it is that. It is not just a sign of mortality, or limitation, or sinfulness, though all these things are reinforced by it. The sign of ashes is also a sign of mercy -- in at least three ways: it speaks of the grace of our condition, it shows forth the instrument of our salvation, and it retraces for us our baptismal identity. In all these ways, it is a sign of our renewal, our re-creation.

The Lord “knows whereof we are made. He know we are … dust.” God’s grace and mercy have been present with you your entire life. The wonderful thing about being a creature is that your life is all gift.

The ashes on your forehead will remind you of your creation, and they tell the truth: they remind you that the breath in your lungs is the gift of God, the experience of your senses is the gift of God, the whole surrounding world that nourishes and protects you, whether it is your food, your water, your shelter, your friends, family, or chosen society, the neighborhood in which you live, the invisible helpers, that is, the angels and saints who encourage us day by day -- they are all the gift of God, without which life would be impossible. We came from nothing, we brought nothing to the table. Nonetheless, we have been given life, breath, and all things. We have become God’s children. 

Consider, too: After this rite, you will bear on your forehead the saving symbol of the Cross. That mark on your body will declare to everyone you meet that Christ Jesus came into the world to save. It will even tell you that truth when you look in the mirror: saying that by his Cross and Passion, Christ has redeemed the world. Your life will be knit into the story of God’s love, and so you will become a walking parable. You may not be carrying a cross on your shoulder through the streets of Champaign – that would be a show of piety – but you will embody it. 

And as we trace that cross on you, as we mark that place, the action should remind you of baptism, either that moment when you were baptized or, if you not yet entered those waters, the moment you will be baptized and you will be “Christ’s own forever.” The minister pours the water over your head, and anoints your head with the oil of chrism, the seal of the spirit. It is the same place you are marked at confirmation. It is the same place where you may be marked at last rites. It is a site of grace.

These ashes, then, are a sign of your re-creation, a sign that you are being renewed after the image of your Creator, a sign that you were once falling into nothingness, and your dust was being scattered in the wind, but this baptismal water has come, and God’s hands have reached out to you again. Your dust, your dry soil is becoming clay, moldable, capable of being heated in the kiln and made imperishable.

“Where do you come from?” God. Of what are you made? Dust. What holds you in life? God’s mercy. 

Oh,“the Lord is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness… As the heavens are high above the earth, so is his mercy great upon those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us.” 

Thanks be to God.

​“We have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

St Peter lays out the Christian attitude toward life and the Holy Scriptures. We are living in a dark place. We cannot see or understand everything around us. In this situation, this present darkness, the Holy Scriptures are a light. They reveal what is around us. They help us to find our way. They help convey to us the presence of God, until that final day when his light and presence will be undeniable, visible, and glorious: “when the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

How can we have such confidence in the Scriptures? It seems like a big claim for them. They’re not always easy to understand; they can make for strange reading.

The answer is Jesus. St Peter had such confidence in the Scriptures and in the Christian Gospel because he was there on the holy mountain with Jesus and with James and John, as they witnessed his transfiguration. Christ’s face shone like the sun. His clothes became dazzling white. The great prophets of old, Moses and Elijah, were talking with him. And even as Peter attempted a feeble response to the glory of this divine vision, he heard a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

From that moment, those three disciples would be forever changed. You could not erase such an experience from your mind. Before, there were doubts, questions, uncertainties; there was darkness in the world and darkness in the heart. Afterwards: conviction and light. It wasn’t light enough to banish all darkness. Not yet. But it was light enough to point out their path, following the Lord on the way to the Cross.
 
The revelation of Jesus Christ gave strength to those early apostles. The vision of his glory and divinity helped them through the pain that was to come, as they saw him suffer upon the cross. It prepared them for his resurrection. And it told them to trust the prophetic message that they knew in the Scriptures of Israel. They would read them differently in the future. They would see them in relation to Jesus, just as they saw Moses and Elijah speaking to him.

That moment on the mountain was so powerful, so formative. It set the course for the apostles’ future. Still, I sometimes think about how there were things it did not do for them. It did not provide total clarity; they didn’t suddenly know everything they needed to know. They were still human and fallible, still stumbling through life like every person.

That experience also did not free the apostles from suffering or from most of the difficulties of human life, even when they were graced to work miracles. The opposite was often true.

For example, there’s a poignant story in the 3rd and 4th chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. I’ll set the scene. It is after Pentecost. The Spirit has descended upon the church, and one day, while heading to the Temple for prayer, Peter and John healed a lame man along the way. The man was freed and leaping for joy; the crowd was confused and amazed. It seemed a moment of victory, with the power of God visibly at work. But the response of the reigning authorities in Jerusalem was not positive. They imprisoned the apostles and threatened them with violence. It would have been easy for them to despair. Instead, they testified to Jesus. “We cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.” The vision of God had transformed them. Despite setbacks, suffering, and difficulties, they kept to the way of God.
 
This is a good message for us this morning: linger here and be transformed. For today is the Last Sunday of Epiphany. Lent is coming. As a church, we will enter into a season of “fasting, prayer, and self-denial.” We will recall the story of Jesus, going out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. We will remember the story of Elijah, fasting and praying. We will remember Moses and the people of Israel, wandering around the desert of Sinai. And we will recall that we are called to be like them.

For we are in the desert of the world. We are in a confusing and often dark place. We have our own challenges and temptations to contend with, and we live in communities that need the light of God.
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So linger here. Wait with the apostles. Pray to God that you might see Christ. Pray to see him appearing in glory and revealing the light and meaning of the Holy Scriptures. Pray that you may hear the heavenly voice saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved.” And then, when you have been strengthened, go down from the mountain into the darkness of this world in the company of the Son of God.

​Why do we fast, but you do not see?

This is the cry of people who feel that God has gone quiet. They have kept the fast. They have bowed the head and spread the ashes. They have done what the religion requires. And nothing has happened. Heaven is closed. God feels remote, sealed away behind something they cannot name.

We know this condition. Perhaps not the sackcloth. But the sense that faith occupies one room of life and the rest of the house is empty of God, we know that. We have inherited a world that has divided reality in two: the sacred over here, the secular over there, as though God inhabits one half of existence and the other half runs on its own without him. There is a thinness to our experience of God that we can feel but rarely name.

The people in Isaiah's day had the same thinness, and it is worth understanding what had caused it. Their failure was not simply that they were hypocrites, cruel on weekdays and pious on the Sabbath. It was something more fundamental. They had made worship into a thing that could exist apart from the material world. A transaction between the soul and God that need not touch the body, the neighbor, the concrete stuff of daily life. They had sealed God inside the temple and themselves inside their devotions, and the hungry could remain hungry because that belonged to a different order of things altogether.

God's answer is fierce and strange, because he does not address the question on its own terms. The people ask about worship. God answers with bodies.

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Notice how relentlessly physical this is. Bread. Shelter. Clothing. Bonds cut from wrists. God does not prescribe a better spiritual technique. He points to the bodies around them and says, There. There is where your fast must reach. Not deeper into the self but further out into the flesh of the world.

Why? Because the God of Israel has always worked through material things. He made a world of matter and called it good. He fed his people with manna. He dwelt among them in a tent and then in a temple. And in the fullness of time, he took flesh himself. He is the God who hallows the material order, who fills it with his presence, who refuses, absolutely refuses, to be worshipped in a way that leaves the world empty of himself.

And this brings us to the promise, one of the most luminous passages in all of Holy Scripture:

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

We must not read this as a transaction. The light that breaks forth is not a payment for services rendered. It is a presence unveiled. When the fast reaches the neighbor, when bread is broken and bodies are tended, what happens is not that God finally decides to show up. What happens is that we see, at last, that he was there all along, hidden in the very places we were trained to think he could not be.

St. Jerome, reading this passage, understood plainly whose light it is that breaks forth like the dawn. It is Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, rising with healing in his wings. It is the light that was in the beginning, the light that shines in the darkness, the light the darkness has never overcome. And it breaks forth (mark the word, breaks, as one breaks bread, as dawn breaks the night) through the material, the bodily, the concrete. Christ is already present in this text. We do not put him there. We find him there.

And here is where we must see something that will change the way we read not only Isaiah but the whole of our Christian life. Look again at what God asks of his people. Share your bread with the hungry. Is this not what Christ does with us at the altar? He takes bread, he blesses it, he breaks it, he gives it, and it is his own Body. When you see the naked, cover them. Is this not what Christ does with us at the font? In baptism we are clothed with Christ; we put him on like a garment. Loose the bonds of injustice; let the oppressed go free. Is this not what Christ does when he speaks the word of absolution and the chains of sin fall away?

The works of mercy and the sacraments are not two separate things. They are one reality moving in a single direction: from God to us and through us to his world. The sacraments are the source; the works of mercy are their fruit. Both are Christ embodied, for his Church and as his Church.

This is what has been severed, and not only in us, but in our whole civilization. We have built a wall between the sacred and the secular, as though God's presence stopped at the church door and the world beyond were left to run on its own. And when this wall stands, both sides wither. The sacraments shrink into private devotions. The works of mercy shrink into mere programs, emptied of any sense that God is in them. Neither carries the weight of glory, because neither is seen for what it truly is: Christ, present in flesh, doing what he has always done.
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This is exactly what our Lord unveils in the Sermon on the Mount. He looks at his small company of disciples and tells them not what they must become but what they already are.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

The light that was promised, the light that would break forth when worship and life were joined, is standing before them. And he tells them that this light lives now in them. Not as a task to be accomplished but as an identity received: they are salt, they are light, because they are in him and he is in them.

But salt that has become foolish (and the word in the original means precisely that, foolish, not merely tasteless) is good for nothing. Light hidden under a bushel basket ceases to do what light exists to do. The identity is real, but it can be rendered void. Not by failing to achieve something new but by refusing to be what you already are: by keeping Christ sealed in the temple and the neighbor out of view. Isaiah's people had done exactly this. They had become foolish salt. And the world around them had gone dark.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

To fulfill. To fill full. Everything the law and prophets demanded, all the justice, all the mercy, all the righteousness Isaiah cried out for, Christ does not set it aside. He fills it to the brim with himself. He is what it was all reaching toward: the one in whom God and flesh are permanently joined. And so when he says, Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven, he is not prescribing a more demanding code. What he is offering is altogether different: not a stricter law but a living union with himself. The greater righteousness is not our achievement. It is his presence: his life in us, working itself out through hands that feed, arms that shelter, hearts that will not hide from their own kin.

In a few moments we will come to the altar. Bread will be taken, blessed, broken, and given. The same God who will not be worshipped apart from the flesh of the world will give himself to us in flesh: in bread, in wine, in the Body and Blood of his Son. And he does this not so that we may keep him safely within these walls. He does it so that we may carry him out into the world he made: into kitchens and shelters and hospitals and streets. For the sacrament does not end at the altar rail. It continues in every loaf shared, every door opened, every bond broken, every garment placed on cold shoulders. His life, poured out and poured through, until the whole world is filled with the glory that Isaiah promised.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

He is here. In the word. In the bread. In the neighbor. And when we keep the fast that God chooses, when we carry what we receive at this altar into the flesh of the world, we no longer cry, 'Why do we fast, but you do not see?' Rather… We fast. And at last, we see."

We celebrate today our patronal festival and mark our dedication as a church, so I should probably say, “Happy Birthday, Emmanuel!” Other churches are dedicated to particular saints like John or Paul, and they take on the characteristics of that person at times through their focus on them. Here at Emmanuel, we are simply dedicated to Jesus, and so we mark the consecration of this church by that feast when he himself was dedicated to his Father and presented in the Temple.

I’d like you to cast your mind back over the decades and imagine this parish in years past. It has been here for a long time by local standards. 

It’s possible to get on the City of Champaign’s website, and look up the early color maps of the city. The earliest is from 1887. The distinctive shape of downtown Champaign is recognizable, with the railroad cutting through South by Southwest. Near the rails you can find lumberyards, grain mills, animal feed and supply, along with some passenger facilities. Further out, there are municipal buildings, transportation buildings like Coffin & Gardiner’s stables, and the usual combination of general stores, dining rooms, and places to buy liquor. Everything the body needs could be found within a few blocks – well, almost everything. 

There were also churches. And on the West Side of the city, at the corner of University and State Streets, was Emmanuel. By 1887, it had occupied this site already for five years. There were Episcopalians in the area even earlier, and itinerant Episcopal missionaries passing through by rail and horseback to preach the Word of God and celebrate the Sacraments. But from 1882, a handsome wooden church was built here, and the following year it was consecrated by Bishop George Seymour of Springfield, in the presence of Emmanuel’s Missionary Priest Walter Moore, the Wardens and Congregation, and various City Officials. Some 35 years later, a stone building would be erected and similarly consecrated, to house a larger congregation and to replace that wooden church partially destroyed by fire. It, too, was consecrated for “the worship and service of Almighty God.” And so it has been ever since. 

To echo our first hymn, this “the Lord’s own temple,” consecrated for his use. Here “faithful prayer has sounded” for decades, for over a century. Here men and women have seen and known Jesus “the child of grace,” the hope of the nations. 

People have come to Champaign for many reasons since its founding: for commerce and industry, for study -- or just to have a good night out. We’ve always like our entertainment. But this has also been a place where God is known and proclaimed. Missionaries spread the message, faithful people built up the life of the church, and so the Lord has been present in his Body. 

We rejoice in these truths today. We gratefully acknowledge the inheritance we have among the saints. It is a spiritual heritage, shared with every person who has come to know the Light of the World in Jesus Christ. It is a way of life, a tradition of worship and service, known in the Episcopal Church.

It is also a physical and tangible inheritance – our forebears’ faith, and their hope, and their love made manifest in brick and mortar, in stone flooring, in wooden handiwork and stained glass, in keyboard and organ pipes, in cloths and silks of the altar, in the crosses, chalices, and patens that bear to us our Lord’s presence, in pew and pulpit dedicated to his service, in the rood screen that proclaims to us each day we see it, “Behold, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.” 

We have set these things aside for God’s glory. In doing so, we share in the pattern of consecration and dedication that our Lord Jesus experienced himself when his parents brought him into the Temple in Jerusalem, where they offered to God the sacrifice of the poor, “a pair of turtle doves.” This child was the Lord God, the Almighty, come in person to his own Temple. Yet even he was consecrated for a life of service like the firstborn sons of many generations of Israelites.

Simeon, the priest and prophet, took him in his arms, acknowledged him as the light of the world, the Lord’s Messiah, and also proclaimed his great and holy calling. “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed ….”

Christ’s destiny, his person, his mission to save would reveal the thoughts of many. He stood like a banner to which some would rally and some would be opposed. His life and teaching were like a mirror, revealing to his hearers the state of their souls. And he was consecrated, like the cornerstone of a building. Like a stone, some would stumble over him, some would fall, while others would rise, being built upon his strong foundation. 

In his work and life, Christ was the Lord “come suddenly” to his people. He was “the messenger of the covenant” foretold by Malachi. He drew near for judgment; he drew near for purification.
 
“He is like a refiner's fire and like fullers’ soap,” says the prophet.

He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering … will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

In the ancient world, the smelter would heat an alloy to blazing hot temperatures, 960 to 1000 degrees, that the noble metal might separate from its baser cousins. Lead, copper, and zinc might become slag, while the silver settled in the middle of the container – a precious and beautiful offering.

And we are told that the Lord Jesus is such a fire. He is kindling a flame. He is purifying the offering of our lives, until we present ourselves in righteousness. 

There is dross in every life and in every society. The Word of God comes to burn it out. I am sure we have a sense of it from our readings, which speak of how the Lord is “against the sorcerers [and] the adulterers” –

against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow, and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me…

God shows his fiery visage to us. He reveals himself as the defender of the poor and the vulnerable, as the upholder of family life, as one who rejoices only in the truth, as one who bears no manipulation, as one who has no tolerance for violence against the foreigner, the immigrant. 

God help us if we forget that! To continue with a theme important to focus on in the present moment: All are made in God’s image, the Scripture says. To attack a fellow human being is to attack that image of God (Genesis 9:5-6), whether they are native or foreign. These are not enemies; most of them are fellow Christians. They are, as St Paul puts it, “the temple of God…if anyone destroys God’s temple, God shall destroy him” (1 Cor 3:16-17). 

Fiery words! I’m sure they have been repeated here many times, perhaps as many times as this Feast of the Presentation has been celebrated here in Champaign, that is, 126 years in which the voice of the prophet Malachi has resounded, and the Lord’s coming to his Temple has been celebrated, and he has been acclaimed as Light and Fire, as Judge and Maker, as “a refiner and purifier of silver.” He has come to us in mercy and judgment, lo, these many years.

Hear me well, and remind yourself of the mercy of God. Part of that refining, that cleansing, that purification, was the offering the Son of God made in his own flesh. His Word judges us, his standard makes us aware of how often we oppose him, but he accomplishes the mystery of salvation so sweetly as well, so gently and mercifully, receiving in his own person the pains of the cross on which he made atonement for all our sins. There is grace and help offered to us – not simply a harsh voice. The Lord comes to persuade and turn us. We may respond to him. He says, “return to me” and we may say, “How shall we return?” We will find him then, not as a fire only, a voice of judgment, but as that kind Savior who gave himself for our sake long before we ever had a thought of giving ourselves to him.

So come to him. He calls you. He sees you, “broken, waiting, lost, or hopeless.” He bears your wounds; he makes you whole. Come. 

Come and be washed in baptism. Come to the altar and receive him who gives himself in bread and wine. Come and see his light, hear his beauty, know his grace. Come and be dedicated anew to him. He purifies you, not to your harm, but that you may shine with his glory, that you may bear his light to the world. “Dare to grasp the hope Christ offers; take new courage for your fight.”

Come and join the generations who have been dedicated here in this parish, who have helped make this city. Come and by God’s grace, shape its future.