Three professors of astronomy exhaust their budgets on a research expedition. Working class parents accept expensive and ominous gifts from total strangers. A wicked King plots against a baby.
This story of the Three Magi has worked powerfully on Christian imaginations all through the centuries. Within a few generations of the gospels, the power of legend turned the travelling scholars of the original story into kings, potentates in their own right. It was rather like turning Margaret Mead into Cleopatra.
At length they acquired shimmering names — Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar. Since they came from the Mid-East and Africa, a healthy instinct decided that one of them must have been a black man. Medieval folk rejoiced to find their purported bodies, and goldsmiths fashioned the exquisite triple coffin for their relics that now crowns the high altar of the mighty cathedral of Cologne. Like good German Catholics, they even named a beer after the Three Kings. During the Renaissance, when the Medici came to decorate their private chapel in Florence, they chose the theme of the Three Magi for the frescoes on the walls.
Even today, the legend stirs us at deeper levels. The Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors yearly enchants us with its whimsy and mystery. And one of T. S. Eliot’s more accessible — or should I say less inaccessible — poems describes the interior conversion of these three bewildered travellers.
When such a strange little story stimulates this much embroidery, then we may be in the presence of something like revelation, something like an epiphany. The immediate point of the story is, of course, that non-Jewish visitors have an epiphany when they recognize little Jesus as a Messiah, fulfilling Hebrew prophecies. But the story also has a larger point: it gives us a pattern of what may happen when a religious epiphany comes our way.
What we mean by epiphany is that an experience shows us a meaning clear and full. In an epiphany, our heightened perception finds profound meaningfulness distilled, intense, and manifest. A Biblical epiphany carries one further element: it is not just a moment of aesthetic appreciation, like the awe of viewing the Grand Canyon. A Biblical epiphany evokes a change of life. A discovery leads to discipleship. The Wise Men go home by a different road.
I would like to draw out some strands of this story, because, with the twelve days of Christmas just concluded, this story launches a whole season in our church calendar called “Epiphanytide”. Now that’s more than an Episcopalian word for the January blahs.
What does Epiphanytide really mean? It means that Christmas does not stand alone. Christmas does not yield its meaning and then recede like other holidays — Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July. No, Christmas recalls Eliot’s point, that “we had the experience but missed the meaning”. So, like a diamond set between two sapphires, Christmas needs the preparation of Advent and the unfolding of Epiphany for us to see its full lustre.
To help us understand the Three Magi and their startling revelation, I would like to tell a similar, more recent story about a traveling scholar and a holy child, named Robert and Ruby. In the days of civil rights, when schools were being forcibly integrated for the first time, Robert was a young psychiatrist working in the deep South. He came from a Jewish family in a comfortable suburb of Boston. Like the Magi, he was less of a mystic and more of a research scholar with an Ivy-league training.
Ruby was about seven years old, from a deeply religious Christian family. As an African-American, she was one of the first girls to be integrated into the white schools. A famous Norman Rockwell painting at the time that captured her dilemma: she walked to school each day between federal marshals who protected her from the angry crowd jeering at little Ruby, spitting out insults no child should hear, threatening her life and her home.
Ruby kept amazingly calm, her lips moving silently all the way to school and back. Robert’s training told him that she must be mouthing her own fear and hatred, her mechanisms of repression, projection, and denial.
But when Robert finally interviewed little Ruby, he was flabbergasted when she told him she was praying — not for herself, but for them. She prayed that God would send good things into their lives. She did this because Jesus and her grandmother told her she must always pray for her enemies.
Robert found this so far beyond anything he could grasp, that it became an epiphany that he still writes and lectures about now forty-five years later. He had the compassion and the training for the task, but this epiphany pulled a lot of things together, and made his own moral compass and his subsequent research agenda clear. He was, of course, Robert Coles, who went on to write distinguished volumes on the spiritual and moral lives of children. She was Ruby Bridges, a child of godly peace in the midst of hateful danger. And her story is told in the film “Ruby Bridges” available as a video rental.
Whether Robert and Ruby, or the three exotic Magi, there are two points in these stories that speak to the spiritual quest of our time. The first is a hot topic; it is what we call “interculturalism”, our discovery of wisdom in an alien tradition. The point of much contemporary spirituality is our openness to the sacred power of traditions not our own. Robert and the Magi walked into something alien, seemingly irrational to them, yet it warmed their souls and clarified their lives’ directions.
I myself encountered such epiphanies in an alien spirituality twice quite powerfully in the last year. The first time, I dwelt among the Lakota Sioux of South Dakota whose spirituality dramatically reveals the sacredness of land, weather, animals, and community. The second time, Glenn and I observed Shinto shrines and forests in Japan. Their simple rituals have touched our souls. Oddly enough, the Lakota and the Shinto spiritualities have numerous points in common as they reveal the sacredness of much that Christian tradition overlooks. They have worked their way into my prayer and thereby Christ takes on new dimensions for me. I know, too, that many of you have come closer to God through alien traditions like Zen Buddhism or Hindu yoga.
But there is a warning in all this, too. These epiphanies are not invitations to dabble, a little Zen here, a touch of Jewish there, and a slice of Christian on the side. No: the Magi remained what they were, Robert Coles the Jew did not turn Southern Baptist, and I have not embraced Shintoism. A challenge of finding sacred truth in an alien tradition is to deepen our roots in our own tradition, to carry the riches of our own faith with us as the Magi did when we encounter the sacred in an alien setting. In this regard, we can all thank Rabbi Howard Berman whose eloquent witness to his Jewish heritage has helped us appreciate and re-claim our Christian roots.
There is a second point about epiphanies. They carry inner authority. We do not work on an epiphany so much as an epiphany works on us. We do not discover their wisdom. Their wisdom takes hold of us — as in Rilke’s ominous line, “Du musst Dein Leben ändern.” “You must change your life.”
An epiphany shows something so powerful that it shakes us out of our distractions. It may not even take us out of ourselves: no, an epiphany may draw us closer to our own depths, revealing what we but vaguely intuited, what we have longed or dreaded to know. That new clarity also makes our priorities clear. The response to an epiphany is not appreciation. The response to an epiphany is discipleship.
From now through the next weeks of Epiphanytide, we shall hear story after story about a power unleashed in a life when God’s wisdom and grace appear. We shall hear about John the Baptist and fisherfolk drawn to preacher Jesus, just like the Magi drawn to an ordinary but very puzzling baby. But we will find the same plot line in all these epiphanies — everyone goes home by a different road. And some of them find new homes.
You may long for an epiphany, but you need to be ready to follow where it leads. That’s what the Advent and Christmas seasons were for: getting ready to follow. If an Epiphany distills a moment of discernment, then distillation and discernment direct us to discipleship. If an epiphany comes to you, you may have to drop what you’re doing, pray more often, pay more attention, follow a compelling voice, and even go home by a different road. Our Bible readings of the next weeks will offer us strategies and stories of how this can happen.
Now Christmas can finally become real. Welcome to the journey of Epiphany!