Sermon preached at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill by the Reverend Robert Atwell
Sunday 13 January 2008

According to the Acts of the Apostles, we were first called ‘Christians’ in Antioch, a city in what is now known as Turkey. It was a nickname given to us by some Greeks because we said that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah. Before that, St Luke tells us, we were called people “in the Way”.

I’ve always liked that original title because it reminds me that being a Christian is not simply an intellectual thing: it’s a whole way of life.

Spelling "Way" with a capital W also reminds me that we are responding to Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life: the way to God and the way to live life fully. But the phrase has another meaning - at least in English. Christians are those who get in the way. We are irritants in society: questioning prejudice, challenging injustice and self-seeking, championing the cause of the marginalised. It's irritating when you get a piece of grit stuck in your shoe. But grit can also make pearls. And that's precisely what God calls us to be and to do: to be irritants that make pearls for his kingdom.

Today we commemorate the Baptism of Jesus. In one week we have jumped thirty years. We have moved from the journey of the wise men which we remembered last Sunday, to that other Epiphany on the banks of the river Jordan when Jesus was baptised by John. It was this event which marked the inauguration of his public ministry.

In the early church the baptism of Jesus (not the visit of the three kings) was the original theme of the Epiphany, and of course the Feast of the Epiphany on 6^th January was observed long before Christmas Day was invented. Today it's the other way round. Everybody knows about Christmas and the birth of Jesus; some know about the Epiphany when the three Kings arrived; but few can be bothered with the baptism of Jesus.

The Greek word 'Epiphany' means a sudden appearance. For example, we might use the word speaking of the sudden appearance of enemy troops in a battle. What really struck the first Christians about the birth of Christ was not stories about a baby lying in a manger with shepherds and angels milling around, or even magi from the east paying him homage. It was the sudden appearance of God in our everyday world. Wow. Ephiphania.

They went to the core meaning of the incarnation rather than to the visual trappings. They celebrated God made man, his manifestation in our midst, with the divine voice proclaiming, ‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.’

One of the differences between Judaism and Christianity is that you are born a Jew, whether you like it or not, because Jewish-ness is an ethnic as well as a religious identity. But you cannot be born a Christian. Christianity is something you have to opt into.

When I prepare people for baptism or speak to parents who want to have their children baptized, I often remind them of that first description of the disciples as "people in the Way". There is nothing automatic about baptism. It's not an inoculation. Being a Christian is a journey of which baptism is the ticket. We have to make this journey for ourselves. I dare say we've all got our baptism certificates somewhere at home, lurking in a forgotten drawer. The question is, whether we've risked setting out on this amazing spiritual journey, or whether like some unused tube ticket it languishes forgotten and discarded.

For some people, and here I include myself, the journey of faith can be long and arduous. Although I'm glad for the shepherds, it's the wise men that I relate to. They were searching, questioning. Their contemporaries missed the twinkling of the star. But they risked following its light. They got things wrong en route and ended up in Herod's palace. But they kept on going and got there in the end.

As a child I loved being read to before I went to sleep, and the book I loved most was Wind in the Willows. Last week when staying with friends, what did I discover on the table by my bed? A copy of Wind in the Willows. I rediscovered one chapter in particular. It's winter, it's snowing, and Mole and Rat are walking down the village street, peering into the lighted windows of the houses. Suddenly Mole stops in his tracks, transported by a smell, the smell of home.

He's been living with his friend the Rat in the riverbank for the best part of a year. Now he is full of heartache for his home, and following the scent, he leads his friend Rat through the dark, across the fields until he finds his burrow. They disappear down the tunnel and come out in a little forecourt. Rat lights a lantern which illuminates the sign outside a battered old door. The sign reads, ‘Mole End'.

Overjoyed Mole unlocks the door and shows Rat around his house. They light a fire, but Mole becomes despondent because he hasn't got any food to offer his friend. So Rat goes off exploring the cupboards and cellar, and comes back armed with biscuits and beer, which they drink in front of the fireside.

I don't know whether Kenneth Graham, the author, was a Christian, but reading this chapter afresh it felt like a religious allegory. I know it sounds terribly corny, but it felt as if Rat was like Jesus, accompanying his friend Mole on his journey. And the goal of the journey was home.

Lines of T. S. Eliot came to mind: "and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we first started and to know the place for the first time." God desires to bring us all home, and part of that journey is learning to feel at home in ourselves and with ourselves.

To that end we need to give Jesus access to forgotten cupboards, and even to the locked cellars of our lives. And who knows, his light may find all sorts of goodies to share, not merely the ghosts and bogeys we fear.

Dr Martin Israel, one of the great spiritual directors of our time who died last year, used to say that people often complained to him that they had little sense of the presence of God in their lives. Indeed, that God seemed supremely absent. In his experience, he claimed, it is not God who is absent but we who are not sufficiently at home in our bodies to receive him. That is the problem.

In this season of Epiphany, we celebrate the fact that God has made his home here among us. Let it become a reality for each of us. The longest journey in the world is also the shortest. It is the journey from the head to the heart. And there God awaits us in Christ, saying, ‘Welcome home. You are my beloved child. In you I am well pleased.'

Robert Atwell