There’s an experience that a lot of people have had, and it goes by many names, but I call it epiphany. It’s going to turn out to be important later on in my sermon.
What I’d like to do now is to describe a situation in which you might have experienced an epiphany yourself. If my description causes you to remember something, go with it; and if not, try to imagine what such an experience would feel like. After I’ve finished my description, we’ll sit quietly for about a minute, so that you can really get the taste of the experience. You can close your eyes if you like. And naturally, if you just want sit quietly and think about whatever you want, that’s OK too.
Imagine, or remember, some major life decision: whether or not this is the person you want to marry; whether you want to have children; whether to take that dream job that makes you leave all your friends; whether or not you can retire now. Something that’s not easily reversible. Something that’s too big for you to see all the consequences.
And, for a while at least, you don’t know what to do. Some of your friends give you advice, but none of it is compelling. You make your two lists of reasons why you might do one thing or the other, and it doesn’t help. You don’t know what to do.
And then something trivial happens. You hear a song on the radio. You pick up a book that you haven’t looked at in a long time. Somebody says something unimportant that reminds you of something else. And suddenly you know what you’re going to do. In an instant you go from indecision to complete certainty, without being able to explain exactly what changed.
You go back to your two lists, and the reasons to do the other thing still make a certain kind of sense, for someone else. But not for you. Being the person you are, there is only one thing you can do.
That moment of instantaneous knowledge welling up from the deepest part of yourself, that’s an epiphany. Let’s sit with that experience.