Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of Light, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

The feast of Epiphany so rarely falls on a Sunday – it feels great to celebrate it with all of you! We have a precious handmade ornament that hangs on our Christmas tree at home every year that says, “Epiphany or Bust!” Once again, we appear to have made it with the grace of God! You probably know that the word epiphany comes from the Greek word for showing or revelation or manifestation. So the Feast of Epiphany is a celebration of the vision of well-being – of the shalom of God. And we have a marvelous trio of readings about seeing the goodness of God in the darkness, through the dense fog; about perceiving the mystery of the Christ, the redeeming urge of the Divine in what feels like a god-forsaken place; and about searching for meaning and a true moral compass in the midst of fear, evil, and false directives. Of course, there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news first. These are not readings about seeing the glory of God when everything is going beautifully well. These are not lessons about giving thanks to God for how wonderfully easy life and love can be. These are lessons about when darkness covers the earth – as it will – and thick darkness the peoples. The words of Isaiah are emphatic and can be translated dense fog, obscurity, ignorance, confusion, mourning, and intense misery. These are lessons about very hard times in the 5th century before the Common Era, remembered by Jesus followers in the very hard times of the first century of the Common Era and in the very hard times of the twenty-first century of the Common Era. These are lessons about the kind of thing that will happen. It does happen. It is happening: violence and vengeance, military oppression, economic injustice, environmental destruction, murderous tyrants like Herod who have betrayed their own people for the sake of wealth and power, and who will kill hope every chance they get.
The context for our passage from Isaiah is the return from exile in Babylon to the chaos of a destroyed Jerusalem. The people are engaged in terrible disputes, experiencing deep divisions, and much despair about rebuilding a meaningful life in the midst of so much devastation and moral bankruptcy. The prophet, sometimes referred to as Third Isaiah, is issuing a call to the people in the darkness – like a rooster announces a new dawn before the first light of it. (Do you know that roosters do that? They start crowing while it’s still very dark.) The prophet Isaiah is crowing, rise and shine with the radiance of the Holy One. You don’t see the light? Then you shine in the darkness, Isaiah is saying. You reflect the light of divine radiance, so that nations and their kings can know the way by the light you give off, the light which comes from the Name too holy to even pronounce. Although the promise in Isaiah of being covered with camels does not sound at all good to me, the resulting picture of abundance of treasure and food and transportation, says to me, that the people being addressed have not had their basic needs met for a long time.
In the letter to the Ephesians, written in the Apostle Paul’s name, the setting is prison – the context is imprisonment in a dungeon. And the message is not about violence or vengeance. Nor is the message about regret or bitterness or fear or grief. The message is a call for unity – about an end to hostility between people within the community and in the whole world. The call is both communal and cosmic in its sounding. It reminds me of this great love ballad that is sung by Lucinda Williams about how the walls that separate two lovers are only made of concrete and barbed wire. That’s all. In other words, the concrete and barbed wire might look formidable, but really they are flimsy compared with the power of love. It’s only little things like concrete and barbed wire that keep us apart – and love is surely more powerful than concrete or barbed wire.
You know, the verse from Ephesians that I say as the offertory sentence comes from chapter four and it’s an instruction about how to arise and shine. The full passage reads, “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” And what follows that is the statement of the oneness of God and the oneness of people that begins our every baptism liturgy in the Episcopal Church. I want to remind you that these instructions wouldn’t need to be written down if folks were living honorably. Instructions are never needed when following them is already easy or obvious. These operating instructions are being written to people who are behaving in ways that are arrogant, harsh, impatient, people who are displaying an inability to bear with one another in love, to communities which are not making every effort to maintain unity.
Our Gospel reading is the story from Matthew about some astrologers from the east searching for the meaning of an unusually bright star, shining in the dark night. It’s no coincidence that the story of the magi and the passage from Isaiah seem to go together so well. The writer of Matthew was quite inspired by the teachings of Isaiah, and interpreted the life and ministry of Jesus through the lens of the Hebrew prophets and the story of the Exodus. The writer of Matthew knew about the need for vision, for perceiving the Divine at work in the darkness.
When I hear Matthew’s story of the magi who arose in the dark to follow the star, I always wonder, did others notice the star but not attribute any special significance to it? Did some attribute special significance but were unable to extract themselves from their other commitments in order to journey to discover its meaning? According to Matthew, for these few it was a star that captured their imaginations and made them stop the other things they were doing and search diligently for the Christ of God – the personification of redemption and hope. They had begun to wonder. As one of my colleagues says, “wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”
According to Matthew’s story, when these wise ones saw the child Jesus, with Mary his mother, they opened their treasure chests and offered him some of what they had – some of their belongings. Perhaps it was observing the child that tugged at the latches of their treasure chests. This makes all kinds of sense to me, because as far as I can tell, God’s promise is revealed in children — every child. God’s promise is made manifest in every human being, but it’s often easier to see in children. Bishop Steven Charleston wrote the other day that one remedy for what he calls “hardening of the spiritual arteries” is to watch children. “When they make you smile,” he says, “you are on the road to recovery. Repeat as necessary.” Maybe that’s what made these astrologers from the east so wise.
Scripture doesn’t tell us, but tradition has it that there were three. Tradition has it that they were men. (Naturally.) Various names have been given them: Apellus, Amerus and Damasius; or more famously Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. But their number and their names were not important to Matthew. And so what I want to draw your attention to is the last part of this passage from Matthew, where, having encountered the child, the wise ones all dream that they should not keep their word and return to King Herod, but go home by another way. Given Herod’s reputation for ruthless brutality toward anyone he perceived to be disloyal, this was no small decision. Perhaps the biggest treasure in their chests that they offered was courage to believe in the promise of God’s mercy and justice for all people and to do the right thing at considerable personal risk. It wasn’t their names that made them famous to Matthew, but their wisdom and their courage. It makes me think about fame – about being famous. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye has a wonderful poem about being famous that goes like this:

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do. [1]

Here’s the good news: we might be able to be famous in this way. I wonder if we might become famous for being wise enough to put aside our distractions and despair, and arise and shine to reflect the marvelous work of God, to illuminate hope, to enact love, to be changed to share even more of the treasures in our own chests – and to be even braver on our way home today than we were when we arrived.

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