It’s snowing this morning. Big, fat, light-as-a-feather snow. Like confetti in Times Square. A ticker tape parade. Like silence for eyes. The world painted peace. Like parachutes in The Hunger Games.
Somehow this snow is saving me…
Within an hour the whole world is painted white, heavy, fleeting beauty, here for now, no less real for the way it melts in warm hands.
Sitting on the porch, wrapped in two blankets, I pray over and over, “I love this. I love You. I love this. I love You…”
-
Tomorrow is January 6th. Maybe you’re reading this on January 8th or 10th or March 3rd. But as I write, today is the fifth and tomorrow is the sixth, and that matters because the sixth is the day I first committed to love only one boy, the same boy I still love with Gorilla glue devotion. I was 13. He was 15. And when he asked if I would be his girlfriend, I didn’t think twice. Yes.
It’s also significant because January 6th is the day the church has traditionally celebrated as Epiphany. Catholics remember and celebrate the visiting magi and God’s revelation of Himself through His son to the Gentiles. The Greek Orthodox celebrate Jesus’ baptism, the moment when the Father spoke and the Spirit descended and the glory of Jesus Christ was revealed.
That’s what epiphany means—revelation.
It’s about the moment God lifted the veil and tore down the wall and everything changed. It’s about seeing Him. It’s about Him letting Himself be seen.
-
Before the coming of Christ, Yahweh appeared to His people in numerous forms; there are epiphany moments scattered like breadcrumbs throughout the Old Testament—the Angel of the Lord who finds Hagar and sends her home (she says, “I have now seen the One who sees me”), the burning bush where Moses first hears God’s voice and feels the warmth of the flame of His presence, the cloud that first led the Israelites in the wilderness and them settled into Solomon’s temple…
People who study these things call them theophanies—manifestations of deity perceivable by the senses. Sometimes the Feast of Epiphany is called Theophany. But some people say the divine incarnation isn’t technically a theophany because it’s not sudden and temporary. I wonder if it didn’t feel sudden to Mary and Herod and the Magi. And I wonder if it didn’t feel temporary to John as he watched Jesus die on the cross.
But I think the point, the emphasis on sudden and temporary, is to help us understand these moments as a kind of unexpected snowfall. Just when you’d forgotten what was possible, you wake up one morning, and there it is falling from the sky. It might melt and disappear by mid-afternoon, and if it does, you’ll wonder, “Was that real? Did it happen?” But when you’re in it, when snowflakes land on eyelashes and children throw snowballs, there is nothing more real in the whole world.
Research on the strict rules of “theophany” leads me down twisting hallways. I find a new word, “hierophany.” This one means a manifestation of the sacred. This word makes space for messengers of God and blessings from God and miracles enabled by God. When you start adding those to the mix, the list gets long. All of life is a hierophony.
Yahweh is never absent. He is always revealing Himself.
But sometimes we lack eyes to see, and sometimes He jumps out to surprise us.
Epiphany!
-
He showed up at the party dressed as a hobo with a straw hat and a blacked out tooth. When he smiled I hardly noticed the tooth. I noticed his eyes, twinkling, and the way his easy posture, the collision of confident, relaxed shoulders and eager electricity, seemed to say, “Let’s play.” Cautiously, I accepted the invitation.
I found out he liked to sing. That he was a good storyteller. That he made me laugh. That he wasn’t scared of me (so many boys seemed terrified in the presence of a girl). That playing didn’t mean poking (as it did to the boys at my school). I discovered that this boy actually wanted to know me. That he was safe and kind but still delightfully puckish. And that probably we would be together forever.
I can’t explain it, but I knew: This boy was going to change my life.
Have you ever had a moment like that? When you felt like you could see the future? Or maybe when, for just a second, you got a glimpse of the scale of the gift in front of you.
Meeting Justin Gerhardt was an epiphany.
-
These days, post-Jesus’ death and resurrection, we get fewer pillars of fire, but undeniably more theophanies. Just as God dwelled in the temple in a cloud and in Christ in a body, God’s Spirit dwells in His people.
“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?” (I Corinthians 3:16)
“And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” (Ephesians 2:22)
“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:16-19)
If you have received the love of Christ, you bear the love of Christ. As you persevere in your attempts to grasp this love that surpasses knowledge, you will find yourself filled with the fullness of God—filled with Him.
Paul says to the Colossian church: “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,” “him” being Jesus (Colossians 1:19). Then Paul reveals the great mystery of the word of God in its fullness: “Christ in you” (Colossians 1:27). Paul says, God lived in Christ. Christ lives in you. “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness” (Colossians 2:9-10).
You are a manifestation of deity perceivable to the senses—a revelation of the presence and work of God.
A theophany? A hierophany?
I have a feeling we have failed to grasp how wide and long and high and deep the miracle of indwelling really is.
What a promise—You are full of the fullness of God!
-
But maybe you don’t always feel full of God. And maybe you aren’t always manifesting deity. And maybe the Christians around you aren’t either.
This incongruity, Scripture’s claim that Christians are vessels of Christ and the boots-on-the-ground data telling a sometimes-different story, is the greatest source of confusion and doubt in my relationship with God.
Yours, too?
I am learning how to understand it. My 29 year relationship is helping.
-
I dated Justin Gerhardt for five-and-a-half years before we got married, so it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. A bride at 19, I already knew many of the ways he would disappoint or bother me. I was under (only a) few illusions. Maybe I thought he would eventually become perfect (technically, I was right), but mostly I thought he was a good bet. He was kind, alive, devoted to Christ, full of joy, and bubbling over with hope. I’d seen God in Him more times than I could count. I did not always see God in him. But sometimes…
Justin Gerhardt was mountain and clouds. I could accept the clouds because I loved the mountain.
Do you know that metaphor, the one from Tim Keller in The Meaning of Marriage? He writes,
“Have you ever traveled to a mountainous part of the world when it was cloudy and rainy? You look out your windows and you can see almost nothing but the ground. Then the rain stops and the clouds part and you catch your breath because there, towering right over you, is this magnificent peak. But a couple of hours later the clouds roll in and it has vanished, and you don’t see it again for a good while. That is what it is like to get to know a Christian.”
Keller says we’re all glorious mountains—carriers of Christ being made in Christ’s image—but we’re also human and not fully transformed yet and some days you’d never guess that under all those clouds you’d find anything worth seeing.
That’s why we give up on people. Because of the clouds.
We stop believing in snow, because the snow melted.
It was easier to believe in the mountain while dating Justin Gerhardt than it was while being married to him (for the first 15 years, anyway). Not because of any change in who he was or how he loved me—it wasn’t his fault. Maybe I struggled to believe in the mountain because I was depending on it now, requiring things of him, needing things from him, things he sometimes couldn’t deliver. Maybe because I’d made a bit of an idol of him, and though he bore God, he could not be God. Maybe I’d stopped being grateful for the moments of divine joy or gentleness or love and had started expecting them.
In marriage I started to feel entitled to epiphanies.
But that’s not how epiphanies work; they are, by definition, “sudden and temporary.” They’re like visions or dreams or snow—sturdy and sure, as real as real can be, but also fleeting, ephemeral, a peek.
The truth is that in marriage I felt entitled to incarnation, a perfect and permanent expression of the glory of God. That my husband could not offer.
My husband is not Jesus in whom all the fullness of God dwelled in completion—Divine presence inhabiting every corner of His heart, directing every desire, instinct, intention, hope, and purpose.
My husband is us, the ones who are being filled with the fullness of God, the ones who are seeking completion—the ones who will one day experience what Jesus experienced here on earth (total oneness with the Father and Spirit). We don’t experience that oneness in a perfect and permanent way right now but we do definitely experience that oneness in an incomplete but/and still glorious way in increasing measure as we grow in Christ.
That’s the mark of Christ-in-us—not completion but growth. Fruit. More fullness today that yesterday.
In Ephesians 4:11-15, the apostle Paul says this is the point of Jesus assigning some to be apostles, others prophets, some teachers—to equip the people so the body can grow, so that we all might “become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”
Sometimes that fullness actualizes (even if just for a moment); it seeps out through our pores and, like Moses, we descend from the mountain ablaze with the glory of God. Sometimes we find ourselves so full of the love of God that it spills out onto the people around us in ways that defy human understanding.
Epiphany!
-
My family shares communion by candlelight at our dining room table most Sunday nights. My daughter Eve breaks the bread. The body of Christ broken for you… My daughter London passes the wine. I receive it and then I pass it on to my husband. I say, “The blood of Christ shed for you.” And as I transfer the cup from my hand to his, I think of all the times this man has been the body of Christ to me, all the moments in which he’s shed actual blood on my behalf.
The time he re-sided our house, pulling off rotted boards one by one, replacing them with sturdy ones, scrapes and bruises polka-dotting his hands and arms.
The time he cut off most of the top of a finger making me dinner.
The time in college when he totaled a car driving too fast in the rain, trying to cram a date with me into a too-short lunch break.
The time he practiced a song on his guitar until his fingers blistered just to impress me.
And then of course, there’s the figurative blood—
The way he’s worked all these years to take care of me and our girls.
The second job he took as a Hospice chaplain at 23, watching people die so he might have a little extra money to take his wife to dinner.
The perseverance he showed when things got hard. And then the greater perseverance when things got harder.
The way he shares his french fries and the clothing budget.
The faithfulness. Decades of faithfulness.
There he is, still manifesting Deity. Fuller and fuller as the years go by.
And here I am still praying, “I love him. I love You. I love him. I love You. I love him. I love You…”
-JL
This week I’d encourage you to consider where you’re experiencing a revelation of the identity, presence, power, or love of God.
Who is your epiphany today?
Who is so full of the fullness of God that you can’t help getting splashed when you get close?
Maybe this is a question you need to ask:
Of whom am I expecting too much? Where do I need to offer grace for incomplete on its’ way to completion?
I love Him, I love you🙏♥️
Thank you for this.