Welcome to Christ Episcopal Church

A couple of years ago, I went with our oldest child Chara on a college visit to the University of Northern Iowa. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and as we left Cedar Falls to make the long drive across north-central Iowa to my parents’ house and our Thanksgiving celebration, it quickly grew dark. Not the sort of “dark” you find in urban areas, where there’s always some kind of light. But “dark” as in “very black, middle-of-nowhere, nobody-lives-here” dark.

If you’ve ever driven through northern Iowa or southwestern Minnesota, you’ll know that it’s fertile territory for wind farms. Now, the turbines in these wind farms are massive – with 200-foot blades that can reach up to 500 feet high. So high, in fact, that they can be a hazard for low-flying planes.

As Chara and I drove west, we saw a huge wind farm to the north of us. “Saw” is overstating it, though. The only way we knew it was there was that all the blades had red lights on their tips, and all the lights on all the turbines on the farm flashed to-gether at once every 15-20 seconds. There were long stretches of black nothingness, interrupted ever-so-briefly by hundreds of flashing lights that let airplane pilots – and those of us on the ground – know that the turbines were there. The rest of the time, you just had to trust in their existence.

The liturgical season of Epiphany – the time between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday – is a lot like that wind farm. Like those turbine lights that flash in the darkness, every so often Jesus’ divinity flashes in the Gospels for just a moment. The Coming of the Magi. The Baptism of our Lord. The Wedding at Cana. The Calling of the Disciples. Jesus’ miracles and teachings. And the Transfiguration. All show us – for just a moment – Jesus’ full, true identity – and encourage us to respond in faith.

Epiphany encourages us to look for those signs of Jesus – those signs of the Divine – in our everyday lives.

Just as Jesus’ divinity manifested itself to the disciples at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways, God comes to us in the same way. Unpredictably – using voices and means and circumstances we don’t expect.

In our Epiphany liturgies, we’ll be practicing listening for Jesus in unfamiliar ways. We’ll be hearing Scripture read from a variety of translations – all of which make different decisions about how to translate the same Hebrew and Greek words and phrases. And we’ll be using a variety of different Eucharistic Prayers from throughout the Anglican Communion – understanding that the same Jesus manifests himself in different cultures in different ways.

And just maybe – like the disciples – we’ll catch a glimpse of Jesus in some new way as we engage these practices. So be watchful for the revealing of Christ – the Light of the world who brings life and hope for all of creation.

Wishing each one of you a blessed Epiphany,

In Christ, Pastor Aaron Twait