Voices In My Head Podcast #247: Epiphany

Have you ever thought to yourself, man, I'd like to host my own podcast? Well, guess what? You can go to podbean.com/voices and get everything you need to create, manage, and promote your podcast. I use Podbean every week for Voices in My Head. There's easy uploading and publishing tools, stunning templates, custom domains, social and promotional tools, an embeddable podcast player, monetization tools, and more. It is your all-in-one podcasting solution. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. So go to podbean.com/voices, and when you sign up, use the code "voices" and you'll get a sizable discount. Podbean, for your home podcasting. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Happy New Year, my friends, and welcome back to Voices in My Head, the podcast that is not afraid to— we're just not afraid. I don't know what we're not afraid of, but we're not afraid of it, I guarantee it. 2018 already, I can't believe it. This is the first podcast of the new year. You're gonna hear some background noise. Once again, I'm in my car, I'm driving someplace. You know, Jerry Seinfeld has that joke show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. My show should be called half the time Rick Driving Places to Get Coffee with worship leaders and other people who are doing things in the music-related industry. And that's what I'm doing right now. I'm actually on my way to have a meeting. I'll hopefully be able to tell you more about that meeting as time goes down the road, but for right now I'm just going to tell you it's a meeting and it has to do with worship leading. But I'm really glad to have some time to be able to spend on this ride to podcast with you. It's a It's a fun thing for me to get to do this from time to time. I promise we are going to be having guests again on the show very soon. As a matter of fact, there's a new book that I'm really excited about called Edison Churches with multiple authors, and we're trying to get actually all 4 authors from the book on the podcast at the exact same time. So we're trying to set up a call to do that in the very near future, and it's a great new book that I'm excited to share about. It's going to have a lot of really good helpful things for pastors of churches and for laypeople in churches as well. Before we get too far into what I wanted to talk about today, which is Epiphany, because today, the time of recording this, is actually Epiphany Eve. It's Friday right now and it's only 5 days into the new year. So January 5th, and it seems like the world has gone crazy already. By the way, this new year has been good for me so far. I started off running and I've got a funny story to tell you about the old year closing out and the new year starting. Hopefully I'll get to that in a minute here, has to do with me being sunburnt very badly. Isn't that hilarious? But before I do that, I wondered if you'd like to hear something. Because we are so close to starting our Indiegogo funding campaign for my new project, I wanted to give little snippets of it as we go along. And I already, just this past week, got the mixes of the first 2 songs that we recorded. They are mastered, they are finished, they are ready. If I wanted to today, I could go ahead and sign them up for iTunes and put them out digitally. But what we're going to do is actually use these as an incentive for people to give towards the entire project, which we're going to need to raise a little over $10,000 to do. So we're going to need your help, and I can't do this album without you. And I know God's going to provide in many different ways. So right now what we have is 2 songs that are hopefully going to lead to a new album. But you have been so faithful to be listeners. We've added so many new listeners. What I'm going to do right now for you is I'm going to give you a little bit of a preview preview of that Rich Mullins song that we recorded called "Thunder." I'm not going to play very much of it. It may even just be a little bit of an intro, but I want you to hear just something, just so you know I'm not lying, that we actually did record this thing. And then I'm going to talk to you just a little bit more about it before we get into our epiphany discussion. So listen up to this. You walked in when the prophets had grown tired of being so inspired but rarely being heard. Okay, that's enough. I'm not going to play anymore, but you hear the intro of it. I'm really excited about how it sounds. It just kind of keeps building and going from there. I'm going to be putting a link actually in this episode. If you go to the webpage at rickleejames.podbean.com, that's our podcast page, I'm actually going to have a link on there and you can click on that link and go to our Indiegogo. It's actually a pre-launch right now. We haven't even launched the campaign yet, but there's a really great video that we made when I was in New York that tells about the song, tells about the album, tells about what we are going to need to make the album. And so it's kind of a pre-launch to the launch, and hopefully the launch is going to happen later this month. It's a lot of work to get a funding campaign going, and it's a lot of work from start to finish, like a lot. It takes time to write up to set up the campaign, it takes time to write the story, it takes time to make contacts to people, because what you don't want to do whenever you are starting a campaign is just kind of put it out into the world and not have any movement on it whatsoever because nobody's been told about it or that it's coming. So with your help, you can actually be a help to me and all of us making this album just by helping to get the word out. So it's not like an easy link that I can tell you right away, like Indiegogo.com/Rick or something. There's a lot more to the pre-launch page than that. So what So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to have it on rickleejames.podbean.com on this episode, and you can go there and just put your email in when you go to that link, and it'll notify you whenever our campaign goes live. And you can actually go ahead and start sharing the link to the pre-launch around. Matter of fact, I encourage you to. Maybe do it once a day. That would be such a huge help to us, and we are putting together some really cool perks whenever you give to this campaign. I'm not going to tell you all of them right now because I'm still formulating some of them, but we're not just going to be giving you music if you donate to the campaign. We're going to be giving you things like— I hope I can actually give away some books this year, some, some actually maybe some autographed musical instruments, things like that. I live really close to where Rich Mullins grew up at, and I'm hoping maybe I can get some memorabilia to be a part of that. But I'm hoping also to offer things like come and spend some time with us in the recording studio. You know, you get give a certain donation, come join us in March. So at different levels, whenever you give, that will open up different perks for you, and there will only be a couple of those kind of perks available. Also looking into pressing a few vinyl songs from things from Hymns, Prayers Invitations that you will be able to get. I actually have a few of those on order right now. So if I get the vinyl and they sound as great as I think they are going to, planning on making some of those perks for giving as well. So we want this to be something that you don't just feel like you're just giving money and getting nothing for it. If you give towards this project, we want to find ways that show you that we are very grateful and have a lot of gratitude for you helping us make this project. So that's it for right now. In just a moment, I'm going to be talking to you about Epiphany. And until we do that, it's time to pay the bills, folks. Sorry about this, but I do have to run one more ad real quick. If you are not a person who has bought hymns, prayers, and invitations yet, Listen to this. Hymns, Prayers and Invitations, the latest album from Rick Lee James, has garnered praise from CCM Magazine, Worship Leader Magazine, UTR Media and more. Written and arranged using hymnals and prayer books for inspiration, this collection of 10 modern hymn-like worship songs will inspire individuals and congregations to draw near to the heart of God.— highlights include Christ Is Lord, inspired by St. Patrick's Breastplate Prayer, Advent Hymn, and the Communion Hymn, The Invitation. Worship leaders will be glad to know that all songs on the album are published through Lifeway Worship. Find Hymns, Prayers, and Invitations on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Music, CD Baby, and at Rick Lee James.com. All right, so we're back, and I wanted to talk to you just briefly today about Epiphany, because today, as I said before, it's the 5th of January, and this is Epiphany Eve, or I guess we would call it the Eve of Epiphany. The 12 Days of Christmas are almost over. They're winding down, and I know a lot of our traditions don't necessarily celebrate Epiphany, but I think we should. Epiphany is known as the 12th day of of Christmas. So it's gonna be on the 6th this year, January 6th. And it really marks the official end to the festive season for many Christians. So when you think about this, I mean, I don't know if you've been celebrating like we have, but we still have our Christmas tree up. We still have Christmasy things around the house. We're still celebrating the birth of the Savior because Christians celebrate the 12 days of Christmas. And the season doesn't end on December 25th, it starts. And I find it so interesting that like the Christmas station that we have in our area. I mean, December 26th, it's done. There's no more Christmas music. It's done. And I always think that's so ironic that, you know, technically according to the Christian calendar, that's when the holiday really gets going. So we're about to move into Epiphany, and maybe by the time you're hearing this, it is that time already. But Epiphany falls after Christmas Day on January 6th, and it's a very important date on the Christian calendar. And Christians used to celebrate for 12 days straight, and it marks the end of this festive season and the beginning of something else. Now, it's a significant celebration for a few different reasons, and I'm gonna try to just kind of highlight them here and not go super in-depth to what it is. But the celebration of Epiphany, one thing that it celebrates is the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. And it's also regarded more generally as a celebration of the birth of Jesus. So in some ways it's like Christmas Day all over again in some ways, but then we're starting to celebrate different parts of the life. So we're celebrating that Jesus was born once again on this Epiphany Day because it is the last day of Christmas. It's the final, the 12th day. And so what do you do on the last day? You should make that your biggest party of the year, right? And it's also the 12th night is what it's also known as, Epiphany, and it marks a visit of the baby Jesus from the Three Kings, the Three Wise Men, as we have songs about, "We three kings of Orient," and there's a whole lot of different lore about that. And Epiphany has been celebrated in Europe really since the 4th century, and it's associated with the visit of these wise men, which don't get a lot of play after Christmas. But it's interesting that, you know, they really are not a part of the Christmas story if you read the story. They're in every nativity scene because St. Francis, in his telling of the gospel narrative and in the birth of Jesus, when he came up with the nativity scene, he included the wise men in it. But it's one of those things that actually happens years later. And, you know, Jesus is back at home with his family. He's a young boy. It doesn't say that they're in Bethlehem anymore. And they get visited. And according to legend, there's 3 of them: Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. And they followed the star across the desert to Bethlehem, and they were bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Now, we don't know for sure that there was just 3 of them. There could have been 3 of them that were the heads of the party, so to speak. Week, but there could have been a lot of people they were traveling with, and likely there were. So it probably wasn't just 3 people coming together at this time to see Jesus. It was probably like 3 very large processions of people coming together with these gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And these are very symbolic gifts that are given. The gold, it represents Jesus standing as royalty. Jesus is the King. The frankincense, if you want to think about what incense is, it represents his divinity. And incense is something that is burned in temples. It's something that is used in worship. So we have the king, we have the divinity represented here through this worshipful gift of frankincense, and then we have myrrh, which is actually an embalming fluid, and it represents his mortality. So we have the king who is fully God and fully man, and you see all of those things represented in the gifts that are given. It's really kind of an ingenious way of —of telling the story and an ingenious way of using those gifts as representative of who Jesus is and who we will see him revealed to be. And the word epiphany actually comes from Greek and it means manifestation or revelation. So in the baptism of Jesus by John, in the birth of Jesus, in the giving of these gifts by the Magi, we see epiphany. We have this revelation or we have this manifestation of who Jesus is. It literally can be translated as manifestation. It literally can be translated as revelation. And revelation is something that is given to us. It's like when our eyes are opened by the divine. It is also a gift to us. It's not something we just come up with. So think about what that might mean. What is being revealed in the baptism of Jesus? What is being revealed in the virgin birth? What is being What is being revealed in the way that Jesus was born? What is being revealed in these gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh? What is being revealed in the fact that kings are coming to bow down? I mean, these are such rich symbols. And I don't want to do the work for you because I want to do the work myself as well. I want to think through these things. I want to take time prayerfully on this Eve of Epiphany as we move into the holy day of Epiphany to celebrate. Now, we've already kind of discussed, I guess, when Epiphany is celebrated. The Catholic Church observes Epiphany as a single day, but Protestant churches say the season of Epiphany actually extends from January 6th until Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. So if you're Protestant, woohoo, you got a lot of Revelation to celebrate. Matter of fact, this year at our church, we are studying the Book of Revelation during this season leading up into Lent, which I'm very excited about. About, especially because of the symbolism of Revelation. I don't know if that is on purpose or if it is an accident, but I am going to go with it being on purpose. And I love that we are going to be celebrating and looking into that beautiful book of worship that is Revelation. And during the medieval period, Christmas was celebrated— hang on just a second, guys, getting off on an exit here, and I lost my train of thought for a second, but I didn't want to have a wreck. During the medieval period, that is I think where I left off, Christmas was celebrated for 12 days from Christmas Eve on December 24th until Epiphany. And then some Catholic churches in the US, they mark the feast Sunday of Epiphany, and I think many of our Protestants are starting to do that as well. I seem to see a lot of my friends doing that. And then in the Orthodox Church, they celebrate Epiphany on January 19th, I believe. So we've got all kinds of different things all over the calendar. Wouldn't it be nice if we could kind of get united on one day I mean, I think it would be great if we could all celebrate together. But hey, I'm just glad people are celebrating it. Now, the 6 Sundays which follow Epiphany are known to Christians as the time of manifestation. And that's very appropriate because we are leading into Lent, which is when Jesus, you know, is beginning that journey towards the cross. So in this time, we are having a time of revelation, a time of revealing, a time of God coming into our midst and showing us who he is. A time to reflect, on those things, a time to look at the life of Jesus. So how do we celebrate Epiphany? Well, I'm not going to say for you how you have to celebrate it. I can tell you some of the ways that it's celebrated around the world. Celebrations— I can't talk, sorry. Celebrations of Epiphany, they vary around the world, and in many countries it's a public holiday. So like, we've forgotten about it pretty much in America. We don't really think that much of Epiphany unless you go to a Catholic or an Orthodox church, but in many places it's almost like a secular holiday. It's gotten almost like, you know, everybody celebrates Christmas here. In Bulgaria, people jump into the icy water of the Black Sea as they celebrate this feast day. I mean, that's some commitment there. But you can see that even though it is kind of a secular thing to do and something that they do as a culture there, and many of them, the crazy ones I guess, jumping into the icy Black Sea, you can see the connection there, can't you, of Jesus's baptism? Like, why would we jump in icy icey water. Well, I don't know that Jesus jumped in icy water, but I can see why in Bulgaria they associate water with the Epiphany Day. Other countries, they have fireworks and they have parades, and we actually do that in Springfield at Christmas time. I don't know if your town has a big holiday gathering like that, but we actually celebrate with a Christmas parade and we celebrate with fireworks. How cool would it be if like we celebrated that after Christmas and not just before? Like, I don't mean after Christmas, I mean when the celebration actually starts. I think That would be really cool. And my understanding that like in the Spanish-speaking world, Epiphany is known, I think it's known as the Three Kings Day, and I'm not even going to attempt to say it in Spanish. But a lot of people will gather and they'll eat king's bread. And I don't know if king's bread is like, you know, King's Hawaiian rolls or not that we often have around Mardi Gras. But if it is, I want to be in on that because I really like that. So what's Epiphany going to be for you this year? What is it going to mean important for us as Christians to celebrate, not, not just a day, but to really walk from now until Lent in the light of this Epiphany, to walk in the light of Christ and what it means that he is revealed to us. What is it going to mean for your church this year? What is the significance of Jesus being baptized by John in the Jordan? That is something we definitely celebrate. How does that affect your church? How does that affect your life as a Christian from day to day? These are important and good questions to ask. We get into all kinds of minutiae sometimes, and maybe it's good at this time to start asking those little bitty nitpicky questions at times. What's it mean about Jesus that the Divine was allowing himself to go through a ritual that was supposed to be for purification of sin? What does it mean that a truly sinless one would do that? What does it mean that he would identify with man in such a way that he not only identifies with, but he actually is one? That he is fully God and fully man. How does that tie in together with these three 3 gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gifts of a king. Gifts of worship that represent the divinity of a man. But then gifts of myrrh that also represent his mortality. Fully God, fully man. We see in those gifts, I think, just as much of a foreshadowing of the Trinity as we do anything else. What does it mean to just once again on the day of Epiphany celebrate the King who has come into the world? Do we sing Joy to the World again this Sunday that the Lord has come? I'm not going to decide for you, as I said before, but I hope that you will celebrate Epiphany. I think it would be wonderful if we could connect more with these holy days that are on the calendar, because if we don't, I think that in the church we just get tossed back and forth celebrating whatever the secular days are without giving a lot of thought that, that our calendar is actually set up to help us tell the Gospel story. We're constantly looking for ways. How can I share the gospel with people around me? How can I live my life to share the gospel? Well, the Christian calendar is actually a, a lived-out way of sharing the gospel in our lives. It's actually a way of setting our lives into a rhythm of a holy calendar that actually sets us not by the Hallmark calendar. We aren't just living for Mother's Day and Father's Day and Independence Day. And nothing wrong with celebrating those days, but as Christians, we are actually driven by a different chronology. And I think that's very important for us, that our Christian time, that this chronos time, that we are actually celebrating something different, something unique, and it's something that the world doesn't quite understand. You know, worship is supposed to be something that is counter-cultural. And yet, as my friend Ryan Gage said this week and reminded us all, we too often have made it just sort of a part of our culture. You know, our worship services often just look like another concert, or they just look like whatever our culture is into at the time. One of the most countercultural, one of the most gospel things we can do, one of the most other things we can do is to really make our worship unique from the things that the world is doing around us on those days. I know it's unique that we go and worship when the rest of the church, or the rest of the world, maybe stays in bed or goes shopping or something. It means something that we choose Sabbath to be a day of resistance to all those those things around us. An epiphany in that same way can be a day of resistance. It can be a day when we're not going to let whatever, you know, Fox News is bringing today to be the priority. We're not going to allow whatever NPR is bringing on their newscast to be the priority. As much as I'm interested and have already bought the book Fire and Fury, which everybody's talking about and can't wait to read it, those are not things that are going to order my life. I enjoy those type of things. I enjoy reading and research. I'm in the middle of a wonderful book called Hannah Coulter right now by Wendell Berry. Great way to start the new year reading a book like that. But what really drives my life, I hope, is what I find in the Christian calendar, which I think is Jesus. You know, I think we find the Trinity. I think we find the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit throughout the Christian calendar as we gather together. The time is too precious for to waste, my friends, my beloved. It really is too precious to waste. We put so much emphasis on that one day a week on Sunday. What if we could teach our people that discipleship is about living by a new rhythm of life and about living by a new calendar? It's a new year, it's 2018, but guess what? The Christian New Year actually started back on Advent several weeks ago. So we've already been living in the new year as Christians, and people will think, well, that's weird, that doesn't sound right. Well, guess what? We're supposed to be a little weird. We're supposed to be resident aliens in the world. We're supposed to be living this out so that the world will see something different. Guess what? Living by a different chronology will make a lot more difference in the world than like avoiding dirty movies. Which, by the way, you should avoid dirty movies. But that's all I've ever heard preached for so many years in church. Just stay away from this, stay away from that. What if we actually preached ordering our lives by a different calendar? Ordering our lives by a different way of living? By different seasons? By by different rhythms than the world gets into. I really think it could change the world if we started living this out. We could creatively together as the church find new ways and new celebrations and uncover old ones that we didn't even know were already there. So that's why I think we should celebrate Epiphany. It's the beginning of a new secular year. It's the following along telling the story on the Christian calendar. It's what is leading us into our next part of the story, and it's very important that we tell it. So I want to challenge you in this new year of 2018 to try to live by a different calendar. Try to live it out this year. Maybe you've never done this before, but try to live by the Christian calendar. Get yourself— go online, you can actually find physical copies of the Christian calendar that you can use day after day, or you can just go online and see what day it is today. See what days fill up the holy months that we have together and what fills up this holy time. Well, I have enjoyed talking to you a little bit about Epiphany today. Again, go to rickleejames.podbean.com because there's going to be some important information on there if you're wanting to know about some things in the coming days. Something I haven't talked about a lot but I'm hoping to do very soon— I have been incredibly busy, and one reason I haven't had guests for the last couple weeks, I've been doing a lot of writing for the Discipleship Place, which is part of the Nazarene Church, and they have asked me to write a history of Christian worship. I'm almost finished with that. I actually have to go back and I'm done with my first draft of all, I think it's 9 sections that I'm doing of that for this website. But I'm hoping to actually share some of that here on the podcast. I would love to do a lot, take the research that I've done in writing this Christian history sort of for a lay perspective and start doing this on the podcast this year too. Maybe not every single week, but taking like maybe one week a month or something and just going through a history of Christian worship. Because believe it or not, it's really not that much about music. It actually is about the way the church ordered its life, and it's very pertinent to what I've talked about today with Epiphany. So go to rickleejames.podbean.com. And also, we just added one new feature. This is the last thing. This will help you kind of follow along with what's going on with me and this podcast and my music. If you just go to rickleejames.com, just go to that main page and wait about 5 seconds. There will actually be a pop-up that comes up on the screen, and it gives you the option option of giving us your email address, and that is so helpful. I can't tell you how helpful that is. I promise I don't spam you. I don't give the email addresses to anybody else. I just try to give some updates out. Maybe I try to do it at least once a week just to kind of send an update out of what's going on. Sometimes it's more than that, sometimes it's less, but I try to always make it something that I think you're gonna find valuable. So I think that's about all that I have for today. I want to thank you again for listening to Voices in My Head. I'm looking forward to 2018. I think it's going It's going to be a really wonderful year and we're going to grow together and we're just going to see what God has in store for us as his people. I'm coming with expectation. I'm praying that Epiphany will be a time for all of us where there will be a true revealing in these weeks that are leading up to the season of Lent. God bless you guys. Thank you for being a part of this show. Thank you for joining me here this week on the Voices in My Head podcast. Podcast. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page on Facebook at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing at my author page on amazon.com. Make sure to follow my calendar on the website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website by clicking on the link for Pare Booking Agency. That's P-A-R-E Booking. And finally, it would mean the world to me if you were to leave me a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction: May the God of peace who raised Christ from the dead strengthen your inner being for every good work, and may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.