1
Epiphany I Year B 2014
In 1931 the British writer Aldous Huxley wrote his novel Brave New World. It is
a story of a dystopian future, a future filled with fear and oppression and lifelessness, a
world gone bad… a world gone bad, ironically, in the face of good intentions… in the
face of high expectations. Indeed, the modern world was supposed to have brought us
much. The novel depicts a world in the future ordered by science and technology in the
hands of the powers that be… a future quantified, controlled, precisely ordered, but
sterile, lifeless…In spite of all the technological advances, nothing is open to
possibility… everything is prescribed, predicted… and predictable… perfect.
Indeed the aim of the modern world… an illusion to say the least… was that
humanity, empowered by post Enlightenment scientific knowledge, could achieve
perfection… that illusion, that pathology, I would argue, still plagues us today…The
modern literary world is teeming with dystopian novels calling that illusion out… novels
by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Lois Lowery, just to name a
few… all of these are prophets, prophets of the inevitable demise of Modern culture….
The ends of humankind’s lust for power and control…. of humankind’s inflated ego… of
its envy and greed and its addiction to violence.... and when I say prophet, I don’t mean
one who predicts the future… a prophet is one who speaks the truth, plain and simple…
one who tells it like it is… One who cuts through the bull and names things as they are….
Prophets don’t speak of things that might be… they speak of things that are.
Huxley’s title, Brave New World, drips with irony… the phrase ‘brave new world’
is taken from Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. You perhaps remember the play… The
heir to the throne Prospero is exiled from his rightful kingdom by his corrupt rivals; even
his kinsmen betray him…. Exiled to a remote and uninhabited island… He lives there
with his daughter Miranda who has never known another human other than her father. As
fate would have it, Prospero’s enemies find themselves shipwrecked on his island… and
the human drama of violence and mercy, of love and loss…. Of reconciliation and
redemption is played out in microcosm, on the cosmic stage, as it were…….. In the
balance, in the philosophical and cosmic balance for Shakespeare…. Shakespeare and all
such prophets over the millennia, I think, is the question as to whether human nature is
ultimately good or evil…. The question as to whether the world is good or evil… the
creation, ultimately good or evil… It was a poignant question for Shakespeare as it is a
poignant question for us… And the answer matters… the answer matters as to how we
live. I believe Shakespeare’s answer lies in the voice of his daughter Miranda in the fifth
act upon meeting finally her father’s rivals, his betrayers amid a scene of improbable
reconciliation and restoration: She says:
O wonder!
How many godly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
The play ends with Miranda’s marriage… a symbol of a world restored,
consummated… made whole… restored and made whole because of love… For Miranda
‘brave new world’ means a world that is beautiful, excellent, fine…A wonderful southern
idiom… Fine! She sees humanity as beautiful, excellent and fine, despite its capacity for
2
wrong… For Huxley, the title notwithstanding, the brave new world is fearful,
oppressive, shameful and lifeless…. The difference between Shakespeare’s world and
Huxley’s world is Love…. It is love that transforms the dystopian world… the world that
has forever been the same… It is the way we choose to see it… the way we choose to live
in it that makes it one that is ‘brave’… beautiful, excellent, fine… good…or not…It is
always a choice, always a choice.
Today is the feast of the Baptism of Christ. We are reading Mark’s account of
Jesus’ baptism, which serves as prologue to this gospel… which means that baptism will
be the principal theme of this gospel. Mark holds up baptism in contrast to a world that is
in its demise, not unlike Huxley’s world. It is oppressive, corrupt, unfair, violent,
demeaning… It is a world riddled with injustice. It could be our world…. Jesus is
executed in Mark’s story…. An innocent, good man… like so many innocents killed in
our world…. Mark is writing as prophet… cutting through the illusory veil of apathy and
denial and telling it as it is… naming what the world is like… It is dangerous and
fearsome…It marginalizes the weak and powerless… it is riddled with injustice…. But
we call Mark’s rhetoric, ‘Good News,’ and the Good News is that which stands against
such a dystopian world…. The world then and the world now… and the good news is
Love…. And that is a choice, brothers and sisters; love always a choice…. It is for the
baptized, the followers of the Christ, to love the world into brave newness; and at every
baptism, Jesus’ baptism the representation of all of our baptisms…. At every baptism the
heavens are torn apart….love set loose… Mark’s metaphor of cosmic significance.
Today Edward and Marisa have chosen to have their daughter Sarah Elizabeth
baptized… they have made a choice that she will be raised in a community that aims to
choose love over hate…they have made the choice to raise her in a community that aims
to choose compassion and mercy over violence… that aims to choose fairness over
injustice…a community that aims to forgive seventy times seven times and more… a
community that aims to choose life up and against the lifelessness so rampant in our
world….an absurd choice really… That is the choice we all make in our coming to this
place, and, most importantly, in our leaving it… We choose publically to lead a life of
faith… We have witnesses…witnesses to our acting as if it is true that love will win,
believing the absurdity that love wins….
All of us, each day that we have life in our bodies, must choose to live as the
baptized…. We must choose to love our world…. We must choose to make the world
into the glorious dream of God…. We must choose to make it brave… excellent,
beautiful and fine…. That is a revolutionary idea, given the vast darkness around us; but
to live as the baptized is revolutionary… because to live as the baptized, those dead to the
ways of evil, and alive to the ways of love… the world is utterly changed… restored,
reconciled, made whole…. The world is rendered not to a prescribed order, not to a
prescribes precision, but to meaning and infinite possibility… infinite possibility for the
good and the true… Do y’all believe that? Do you believe it enough to act as if? Brothers
and sisters it is what we are made for.
One day Sarah Elizabeth will have to make the choice for herself… She will have
to choose to see with the eyes of the Christ; she will have to choose to see with the eyes
of the prophets come before her… and after… She will have to look upon her world in all
of its complexity and make the choice to love it… to love it as she loves herself, no
less… She must one day live into her revolutionary heritage, and choose love… as
3
rending as that choice will be…. And in so choosing she might see the world, as all of us
the faithful might see the world and say in joyful affirmation: How many godly creatures
are there here?! How beauteous is mankind. O brave new world that has such people in it.
Sarah Elizabeth, may you be blessed with courage in your baptism to choose
love…. And dear people of God, may we be blessed as well with enough hope and
enough courage to make the choice for love….Because the stakes couldn’t be higher…
Because the world’s restoration waits…the heavens wait to be torn apart…. And by
God’s grace, may it be so.