Sermons With Insight (eBook)

Epiph

"Themes of Epiphany"

(Isa. 60:1-3; Mt. 2:1-12; 3:13-17; Jn. 2:1-11)

If I were to ask you what the major Christian holidays are, you'd probably all say "Christmas and Easter." And that would certainly be true for the industrialized Christian world in the 21st century.

Even today, however, the peasants in Bolivia -- and probably in other parts of Latin America, as well -- consider Passion Week, the last week of Jesus' life, to be more important than Easter. They can identify with Jesus being arrested, being mistried, being beaten. They understand his sufferings. They know what suffering is. They are less able to find meaning in Easter. Easter represents victory, and victory is not what they usually experience. Easter is celebrated by the rich and by the landlords. For the peasants, Christianity's two main holidays are Christmas and Passion Week. (I wouldn't be surprised if migrant workers in this country, if they are religious at all, would feel the same way.)

So even today, our selection of Christmas and Easter as the major holidays does not apply worldwide. And if you would look into the history of Christianity, you'd find that Christmas hasn't always been listed among the top two, either. For the first three centuries, the major celebrations were Epiphany and Easter. Christmas, as a special commemoration of Christ's birth, developed only later.

The first Christians celebrated Easter, of course. They believed that Christ had risen from the dead, thereby destroying the power of death and making a new quality of life available -- even in this life -- to all of humanity. Today we would also say that the Resurrection means that Jesus' way of life continues to be God's way. Jesus' way of being human: his kind of love, his kind of faith and expectant openness to the future, his freedom to challenge the status quo, his concern for the oppressed and the infirm and for people on the fringes of society, his respect for the individual, his ability to bring people together and to give them a sense of worth -- these are still what it means to be fully human. They are still the things that bring abundant life. They didn't die out when Jesus was crucified.

And it is those characteristics that explain why the second big holy day that the early Christians celebrated was Epiphany. Epiphany means "showing forth" or "manifesting." The Christian claim was that God's glory had been shown forth or revealed in Jesus: in what he did and in what he taught. That's what was important. The fact that he had been born was considered incidental.

We are in the Epiphany season, which began on January 6th. Why was that date selected for Epiphany? Well, it was considered the birthday of the sun (S-U-N) in the ancient Egyptian calendar. It was the time when the people in that area celebrated the appearance of light. But Christians had found that Christ had brought light to their darkened and meaningless lives. "We were darkness, but now we are light in the Lord," they said. Their lives had been illumined by the spirit of Christ. God's glory had been manifested to them in Jesus. What better time to assert this claim than on the festival of the appearance of light?

Christ is the light of the world, and the early Church witnessed to this belief through four different scriptural passages which were appointed to be read during the Epiphany season. Let's take a look at them.

The first passage was the story of the three wise men bringing gifts. These men were not Jewish. And by means of them, the early Church said, "Look! Even the Gentiles are attracted to Jesus! God's glory has been revealed beyond the borders of Palestine!"

Now, we probably are not dealing with a historical event here. At least, you might expect that if three kings or even magicians went out of their way to find Jesus when he was born, they would have been interested enough to look in on him later on in his life. Where were they or their representatives when he needed them during Passion Week? But that wasn't a question that the early Christians were interested in. It wasn't a point of their story. They wanted to celebrate the fact that non-Jews were flocking to Jesus!

It becomes easier to accept the suggestion that the visit from the three wise men may never have occurred, after you've studied the other major religions. Because then you would see that, in almost all of them, all sorts of legends develop around their central figures -- especially in connection with their birth and death. For example, when the Buddha was born, wise fortunetellers -- so the story goes -- predicted that he would be either a great political leader or a religious savior of the world. And when he attained enlightenment, there was a great earthquake and the stars fell from the sky. That event -- when the Buddha attained enlightenment -- was awesome, from a Buddhist point of view, so it was depicted in that way in their scriptures, with earth-shattering events, to emphasize its importance.

Lao-tzu, the grand old man of Chinese Daoism, is said to have been so extraordinarily wise that he was conceived by a shooting star and born already an old man of 80.

Legends developed about Mohammed, too. The most popular one is that, at one point during his life, he was taken by a white stallion up to heaven from Jerusalem.

Of course, if you think about the direction you'd be moving, to get to heaven, it can get a bit confusing. If this circle that I'm making with my hand is a globe, going up perpendicularly from Jerusalem would shoot you off in this direction; whereas if you went to heaven from Australia, you'd head in the opposite direction; and it doesn't seem likely that the two people would ever get to the same place.

That's the problem with talking about heaven as a place. It's more likely to be a symbol for something more abstract, like "the best" or "the highest." Heaven is always up, because it stands for the highest, the morally superior, that is above the shabbiness of our normal existence. When we say that God is in heaven, we may well mean simply that God is where perfection occurs: indeed, maybe God is the potential for and the occurrence of the best or the extraordinarily good. But a more primitive mind that doesn't think in abstractions portrays those intuitions in concrete terms, as places (such as heaven) or personages (such as God the Father).

To realize all this, however, doesn't detract at all from the significance of Epiphany or even of Christianity. Because the question still remains, Why did they tell these stories about Jesus? Why not about someone else? What was it about him that made him so attractive? By raising reasonable challenges to the literal truth of some parts of the Bible, our attention simply is directed away from the fanciful and toward the essential, forcing us to consider afresh what it is that made Jesus unique.

But getting back to the three wise men, after the Bible was written the legend about them developed to broaden its racial base, so that one of the three wise men was considered to have been black. (They were all given names, as well.) Through the black representative, God's glory was depicted as being revealed equally to all the races (that they knew about). That was the point of the story, and it reflects the main purpose for celebrating Epiphany.

The story of the three wise men also includes a star that guides the Magi. Now, we're probably dealing with more legendary material here. Sure, ancient mariners used to follow the stars to be guided in the general direction that they wanted to go. But when a star directs you down a particular street and points out the house that you should stop at, we've moved out of the way nature operates and into another form of discourse, another way of telling a story.

But by including a star that guided the Magi, the New Testament Church was exclaiming that the heavens themselves point Christ out! Christians are attracted to the teachings, actions, and person of Jesus not, for the most part, as a result of straight-line logical reasoning but at a more intuitive level, at which, in moments of praise, it would seem that all of nature endorses our commitment.

The story of the star was often combined with one of Jesus calming the troubled waters at sea, to enable the Church to make another point, namely, that the Lord of the Universe had come. Here the sentimentality of Christmas is missing. Something much more important is being asserted. The God of the waves and of the stars and of the infinite variety of snowflakes -- the God of spontaneous remissions of cancer and of favorable mutations and of quantum physics -- this God is with us.

The third scriptural passage -- first was the three wise men, second was the star -- was the account of the baptism of Jesus. That passage is appropriate for Epiphany, because it includes a voice from heaven designating Jesus as God's beloved son. It depicts the Son of God coming to us in our weakness and sin, and doing what all people need to do. What we need to do is to be cleansed and to...