Show Forth!

Christ Church, St. Joseph, 6 January 2013

 

Here’s a startling thought: If it weren’t for today, Christmas might mean nothing to us!

  

Today is The Epiphany. We have all heard many times that “epiphany” means “to show forth” or “to bring to light” or “to manifest.”

Being a visual thinker myself, I just imagine what we all have seen in hundreds of cartoons: a light bulb going on over someone’s head!

As a teacher, I frequently scan the faces of the students in my classes, looking for that telltale dawning, the expression that says, “Aha, I get that!”

I can assure you it does not happen nearly often enough! But every so often—just often enough to keep a teacher going—the light dawns on a heretofore blank face, and the teacher silently rejoices.

Today, the light bulb going on over our heads is an important step in our journey from the manger to a more grown-up understanding of Incarnation.

The Wise Men from the East by James McConnell

In Matthew’s Gospel (2:1-12, NRSV), that more grown-up understanding is represented by the wise men from the east who show up in Nazareth to worship the baby Jesus and give him gifts.

Tradition has it.., and this is important because we actually know very little about this event from an historical point of view! So, tradition has it that one of these gentlemen was Asian, one African and one Caucasian, and that is how they are depicted in countless artistic representations of the story.

All Matthew tells us is that they were gentiles from “the East,” a general reference to all those mysterious, far off lands and peoples known primarily to Jews like Matthew as “not Jews.”  And that of course is central to their importance to us.

Those of you who follow the Daily Office know that just three days ago was the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. That’s the day, eight days after birth, that Jesus was taken to the temple to be circumcised and named… according to Jewish faith and custom.

In other words, the Feast of the Holy Name is a celebration of Jesus’ Jewishness. We Christians have a strong tendency to want to forget that Jesus was born, lived and died a devout Jew, never once giving any indication he intended to or thought he was starting a new religion.

Thankfully, Matthew, and only Matthew, for this story does not appear in the other Gospels. Thankfully Matthew tells us with this story that Jesus is for us, too. And not just for us, but for all the peoples of the world, and equally so.

We tend to think the concept of “diversity” was invented in the 20^th Century as a tool of “political correctness.” We would be wrong. Matthew and early Christians who interpreted these stories about Jesus were there way ahead of us.

Here’s another slightly shocking thing about this story. These guys probably weren’t kings at all. Matthew calls them “wise men,” which might translate better to “nerd” than “king”!We also call them "Magi," and that word comes from "magician."

We know they were people who believed that the positions and alignments of stars and planets at the moment of a person’s birth were important indicators of who that person was and how they mattered. Today we call such people astrologers and they write horoscopes for mass media!

Of course, today we also have astronomers—the academic and scientific descendents of the wise men. But the distinction between astrology and astronomy is pretty much a modern invention. Two thousand years ago, they were largely indistinguishable.

My point is that the meaning of this story, as with many of the Biblical stories is..., well, it’s the meanings given them by humans struggling to express and explain the experience of God and the miracle that God cares for us and came to live and die among us.

And so we have the wise men bringing gifts to the Christ child, the very gifts we receive from God in the first place: the gold of love, the incense of adoration, the myrrh of pain and suffering. That’s Incarnation.

Here’s how one 13^th Century poet explained it, speaking from God’s point of view:

 

Behold, I give thee gold, that is to say My Divine Love;

frankincense, that is all My holiness and devotion;
finally myrrh, which is the bitterness of My Passion.
I give them to thee to such an extent
that thou mayest offer them as gifts to Me,
as if they were thine own property.

(Mechthild von Hackeborn, 1241-1299; The Book of Special Grace, Part 1 Chapter 8)
(From Edge of the Enclosure, online, 5 January 2013)

So… how do we today “show forth” what was first shown to us in a humble dwelling in Nazareth so long ago?

We are given the same gifts today: God’s love, God’s steadfast devotion and righteousness, indeed God’s suffering for our sake. We are given these gifts so that we have something to give--both back to God and, as Jesus put it, to our neighbors as ourselves.

AMEN