The Epiphany of the Lord: Cycle C 21-22
THE EPIPHANY OF THE LORD
Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6 | Matthew 2:1-12
Oh God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
The word epiphany means a showing, a way of seeing. What I want to talk about today is going to be really hard for me to explain it in using words that work on your mind, that help your mind to see how what I’m saying is logical and it makes sense, and that’s often a way that we imagine working with religious, mysterious, mystical aspects. And it’s always dangerous to say, “I’m here to help you understand logically what this whole feast is about, what it means that God entered into the world and became flesh and took the form of a human being and walked this earth with us.” All of that is mind-boggling, in a sense. It goes beyond logic. And how did it work, and who was he, and how could he be both God and man and all that? So I guess what — I’m just beginning my homily by saying whatever I’m going to be doing, don’t use your mind to try to understand it, but use your imagination and your heart to feel it, to sense it, to imagine it, because it’s beyond anything that the mind can figure out.
And the best thing that we could start with in this feast is something that seems really unusual, that the ones who recognize this birth of Jesus, this birth that was spoken of over and over again in the Old Testament, and all the experts, the scribes, the people that spent their lives studying and reflecting on scripture, they were not in tune enough to know when it was happening or where it was happening and what scripture basically gives us an insight into the fact that the temple, where this reflection on scripture was supposed to be something that was constantly in the minds of the great scribes and leaders and the Levites of the temple, that they weren’t aware of really what was happening. They hadn’t read the story that the Zoroastrians, these strange astrologers that discovered and became aware of this foretelling in the scriptures, that yes, there would be a star, and it would be over Bethlehem, and it was all written that way. And instead of the Jewish tradition opening that up to the minds and hearts of those who ran that religion, it was a group of Persians and — they weren’t magicians exactly, but they were very unique in the sense that they were fundamentally reading the stars, reading the heavens to look for the portance of what is coming, which is something the church has not encouraged people to do. So it’s so fascinating. When the story is that unusual, you know it’s probably really true, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least not to the mind. But somebody had to recognize the sign, the beautiful sign that God was going to give to the world about who this child would be, and we’ve known, since we’ve reflected on it for weeks now, he is the incarnation of God the Father. He is the promise that God has entered into the world and become partners with human beings. He is 100 percent human and 100 percent divine, and when he came into the world as that figure, he came into the world to reveal to people primarily not who Jesus is but who God the Father is.
Jesus is a manifestation in the world of the presence of God in a human being. The presence of God in a human being, that’s who Jesus is. And what is the impact of having that divinity living inside of you? Well, first of all, the image of Jesus as a human being reveals something about who God the Father is, and that is that he is just like us. So one of the things we could say at the very beginning, the showing, the enlightenment that this figure Jesus is bringing into the world that God the Father is not this strange, distant, judgmental figure — he is somebody just like us. When Philip asks Jesus, “You keep talking about the Father being in you, and we don’t know who he is. We don’t know what he looks like.” And Jesus sets such a clear indication of what he really knows in his heart and what we have such a hard time believing could be true for us also, and that is he said, “Look, if you see me, you see me, see my face, this is what God looks like.” He is just like you. He is a human. He has a humanity to him. Now, that does not mean that he’s not divine, but divinity is manifested in a person called God the Father, and he’s real, and he dwells in the world everywhere. And basically he’s like us, so he understands us. He’s not some other kind of creature. There’s a wonderful book on the humanity of God that — I just can’t think of the author right this minute, because I’m 81. But anyway, but basically, the beauty of this image of God revealing who God is, the first stage of it is that he’s like us.
And then the next stage is something that is so clearly about this feast, and that is what’s it like when you experience the presence of this Father of yours, this God of ours? How does it feel? What does it feel like? Well, first of all, the images of a star are so important, because there’s something about this star in the heavens that reveals the presence of God coming into the world that underscores the fact that every human being, and especially God himself, comes into the darkness of the world, which in the first reading is described as darkness that covers the earth and thick clouds that cover people. I know somehow darkness covering the earth is that feeling that there’s nothing that makes any sense. There’s fear. There’s anxiety. There’s stress. It’s like depression, and then the thick clouds that cover the people is the lack of clarity and understanding. Whenever we recognize it, that’s part of the nature of being a human being, that we are prone to darkness, and we are also prone to being confused by trying to figure things out. Into that experience of darkness, there is this promised light, and when you see it — I love this image in that first reading. When you see it, your heart becomes radiant at what you see, and it throbs and overflows. And you feel rich, and you feel blessed, and you feel like everything is coming to you that you need. What an incredible, beautiful image of what it means to have a conscious sense of this promise of God that we see manifested in Jesus, a human being in partnership with divinity — and not that that’s something to look at and be in awe of and look at Jesus as if he is so foreign from who I am, he is so perfect, he is so powerful. No, we’ve got to look at Jesus and say, “This is who God is inviting us to be like him.” To be like him.
One major problem for me growing up as a Roman Catholic in the ‘40s was the only thing that I really knew about Jesus, that I was told, that didn’t create a great deal of enthusiasm and joy in my heart, was that he was perfect. He never sinned, and we’re supposed to be like him. And so he came to teach us what it’s like to live a sinless life. So if we live a sinless life, then we’re like Jesus. No one told me that what Jesus is witnessing is not a sinless life that enables us to be an instrument of life and growth to other people. No, that sinlessness robbed me of a sense of my ability to welcome this God, because I was so unworthy, unacceptable.
That God would come into the world and would reveal a God inside of Jesus that was judgmental — and there is nothing in Jesus that’s judgmental, and there’s nothing in him that would imply that sinners were a negative. In fact, they were the only ones he could reach. They were the only ones he could find. It’s almost like the life of Jesus said, “If you’re aware of your sins, you have the best chance to be engaged in this God/man Jesus who is the witness of who you can be with God inside of you.” It’s amazing. Imagine when Jesus comes into the world, not only is he accepting sinners, but he does something else, and this is the second reading in Ephesians. And it’s so interesting to me, because what this reading is describing is something I saw my church do in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. When I grew up as a Catholic, I believed that those who were not Catholic would not go to heaven, could not go to heaven. That’s what I was taught. It’s a lie. It’s not true. Anyone who seeks God, anyone who wants what is good, what is true is able to receive God’s gift of salvation. God does not limit himself to only work through one religion. And so the same incredible revelation is given with the coming of Jesus as a light of the world, and one of the things he wants to enlighten us about is there is no way that we could imagine that God is an exclusive God to just a certain few people. He did begin with his call of Abraham to say, “I have a favored people, and I want to work with them.” And that’s what people needed, a God who was their God as opposed to their gods, but we grew out of that. And yet it took my church a while to catch up to that, but it’s so interesting that, when God revealed, through St. Paul, that the gentiles were as welcomed into God’s favor as anyone, that would be — gentile was a non-Jew. So it’s like, when the Roman Catholic Church at the Vatican Council decided that this is a true teaching — and we need to believe it, and we have to stop thinking about exclusivity in terms of the one true religion. We did that by saying, “We felt we were the only ones that had the truth.” And that is it may be that we have the truth, but that doesn’t mean that this institution is the only way to get to God.
Then we have this continued image. This most beautiful image that I want to get back to is that what this revelation of the incarnation is trying to say to us is that there is this light that is the presence of God the Father living inside of you and me. It brings people through and out of the darkness and out of confusion, and basically it was recognized by those who were open and receptive to everything that was written about him. There’s something interesting about that. If you go back to the Old Testament, you can find 300 references to who the Messiah is going to be, and you look at how possible it is that an institution that is dedicated to that truth can lose it because it became too over-simplified into a system of right and wrong, a binary world of good and bad and of sin and salvation. And all of that robbed those people of this gift that God wants so desperately to feel, this enlightenment that comes into us. It’s so personal. It’s not run through an institution. The institution teaches it and celebrates it. That’s what religion’s for. It’s to give us the truth and to celebrate that truth in community. That’s what every healthy religion does, but an unhealthy religion robs us of the intimacy of this God who dwells within us. And why is it? Why is it that an institution would be resistant to this? It’s because the authority that is given — when God’s presence lives inside of you, this partnership we have with God, gives us such authority to be able to make decisions as to what to do with our life, and who we’re supposed to be, and how we can maybe be there for someone else, and to go inside of us and to find that direction without having to go to an institution, say, “What do I do in this situation?” It undermines, in a way, the authority, but what a sad state it is. This very institution that is dedicated to bringing this light to us is less receptive to it in themselves, but it’s a shadow. It’s the shadow of being in charge, of being a parent, of being pastor, of being whatever. When you’re in a position of authority, you may try too much to lean upon an over-simplified notion of right and wrong and not open someone to this awesome light, this star of Bethlehem that is born inside of you.
I love the image that, when you’re connected to your star, which everyone has traditions that, when anyone is born, there’s a star in heaven that appears. You are a unique gift to the world, and whenever you separate yourself from that destiny and you separate it, it’s a dis-astar [sic], separating from your star. What a disaster it is when we don’t believe in the light that we are, and the light that we are can’t be separated from the light that God is when he’s in us. It’s not like you can say, “Oh, now I’m using God. Now I’m using me.” No, the intimacy of that communion of humanity and divinity in Jesus is in us the same. It’s not as deep. It’s not as intense. I’m not saying we’re gods. I’m saying that we have this right and this responsibility to live in union with a light that the world needs, and you’ll know when it flows through you. You’ll know the enthusiasm in your heart when you feel it working. It’s heaven on earth.
Father, your revelation to us is mysterious, but at the same time, when we see it and we hear it and we take it in, it is so life-giving, so comforting, so much — it produces peace within us. And that’s the joy that I think comes from finding the truth. It takes away all of our anger, all of our fear, all of our shame. So bless us with this wisdom that we cannot achieve on our own. We can only wait for it. We can only expect it. We can only trust in it. Let this light that Christ has brought into the world to awaken in us the goodness of God take its normal, wonderful course of filling us with such richness, such peace and such effectiveness of bringing others to the light. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.