My childhood was during the 1970’s.
One of the great television shows that my friends and I watched regularly was a show hosted by Leonard Nimoy, called “In Search of”.
It was one of those shows that looked at the fantastic as if it were credible.
Mr. Nimoy dazzled our imaginations and with “true stories” of unusual phenomenon. Like a band of scholars we watched the show and discussed them in depth.
The wonders of Big Foot, the Lock Ness monster, the Yeti, flying saucers and ghosts filled our informed discussions.
The stories of the sightings of these creatures and events filled our hearts and minds.
They appealed to our innate sense of awe and wonder and our openness to the beyond, to the mysterious, to the unknown.
They appealed to our sense of adventure.
Sightings.
Sightings of something greater than our own lives, bigger than what we knew, unfamiliar to conventional lives.
Sightings that called us forth to be bold explorers and adventurers.
The world, the universe is full of wonders.
Sightings.
One of the great dangers in being a Christian is in loosing a sense of adventure, of becoming purely domestic, rather than bold adventurers into the mystery of God.
We perhaps grow too familiar with the sacred, or even indifferent, or perhaps bored.
Perhaps our experience of faith has been so washed down that we have never had anything expected of us.
Perhaps the idea of faith being an adventure into an awe, into a wonder, into a beauty, into a holy fear that demands commitment and a deep ongoing change of life has never been a part of how we see things.
We dwell on the edge of mystery, on a sheer cliff that overlooks an endless Ocean of the unknown and we so rarely see it.
Sightings.
Sightings of God that fill our hearts and minds with the spirit of boldness and adventure.
That is what the Church celebrates today in the ancient observance of the Epiphany.
This past Wednesday we celebrated the Eve of the Epiphany with the Feast of Light. The Light that the Wise Men came looking for and the light that they bore with them on their adventure to and from Bethlehem, the light of a sighting of God, God manifest, God appearing in the new born King.
The Feast of the Epiphany also celebrates two other sightings of God in the world.
One is Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, turning the water into wine.
And the other is today, in Jesus’ Baptism, when the Spirit descends and the voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
In Jesus we have a sighting of God that has never happened before.
In Jesus we have a sighting of God on a bold adventure of taking on our fallen human dignity and restoring that dignity.
In that sighting we see things turned upside down.
We thought we were in search of God.
The truth is stranger still. God is in search of us.
God is not the strange phenomenon that the explorers seek.
We are the strange phenomenon that is being sought after.
And God is on that search.
What we have a sighting is that in Jesus God is searching out a rare and wounded beast that bears God’s own image. God is searching out that beast that it may come home and be healed and we are that beast.
The hunter has become the hunted.
The searcher has become the searched for.
We are the sighting.
This is indeed a strange adventure that we are on.
As they say in Alice and Wonder Land, “curioser and curioser”.
The passion of Christ is the passion of God for our lost image, that is the lost treasure. We are the pearl of great price that God sells everything he has in order that he may restore us.
Have we ever considered ourselves to be the pearl of great of price?
Have we ever considered how passionate God is about us?
Have we ever considered that Jesus is the sighting of God calling out to his beloved?
That we are beloved?
We dwell on the edge of a great mystery, the mystery of human dignity and God’s image, the mystery of God’s dignity, and God’s human image.
That is what we celebrate today on the first Sunday after the Epiphany.
Today is appropriately a baptismal feast. Especially appropriate for baptisms. We will now renew our own baptismal promises. We renew the strange adventure of baptism.