10 Epiphanies
10 Epiphanies
Matthew 2:1-12
As we have moved through Advent and Christmas together this year, I’ve tried to consistently point out one thing: December 25th was not Jesus’ birthday. Rather, it is the day that on which we celebrate Jesus’ birth. This mattters, in part, because the truth matters. It matters because having to act as if our birth stories are somehow “video taped accounts” is a stumbling block for a lot of people: “I just can’t do that whole virgin birth thing;” “I just have my doubts about a wandering star.” The question isn’t what actually happened. Rather, the question is, “What were our ancestors in faith—Matthew and Luke—trying to say to us?” If you can ask that question, then things lead into the most interesting question of all: “How do the truths that they were trying to share speak to us, 2000 years later?” When it comes to Advent and Christmas, I’m in it for the epiphanies, the insights that change how I look at my faith and my life.
In this spirit, I’m going to offer you ten epiphanies to consider. (Of course, numbering points in a sermon is always dangerous. I can sit and watch people counting backwards on their fingers, “Point five…Oh good…We’re halfway home!”). Let’s take a walk through what matters about the time around Christ’s birth…
Epiphany 1: The world changed long before Jesus showed up at the Jordan River to be baptized by John. Something was happening long before anyone realized something was happening. When we’re bored and it feels like the world is stuck or we’re in despair and thinking, “God, when will things change” we ought to consider the possibility that the change started years ago and is already unfolding. Faith involves both hope and trust that God is already at work in ways we don’t yet understand or see.
Epiphany 2: God loves a good surprise. In particular, God seems to love the moments like the one with Elizabeth and Zechariah, who, though they’ve wanted a baby their whole lives and altogether given up on that dream, finally get to have a baby. It’s a side story about where John the Baptist came from but it’s also just a relatable story for any of us who’ve given up on our dream and then realize that our dream is about to come true in the most unexpected way. It’s the kind of moment that can lead a faithful person to think, “Hmmm…I bet God’s in here somewhere!”
Epiphany 3: God loves to challenge righteously judgmental religious people. Everyone would have been ready to judge Mary for being pregnant and not married. Set aside the virgin birth question. Just consider that this story is the ultimate argument against being judgemental: we don’t know the whole story. You may not be judging the woman who is carrying God’s child but you have no idea really what the other person’s circumstances are. Maybe the faithful question isn’t, “What’s wrong with you?” Maybe the faithful question is, “How can I help?”
Epiphany 4: God loves to work through marginalized people. Just consider the shepherds. These men would not have been “A-list” guests at anyone’s party. They were uneducated, filthy, smelly people. God not only invites them to the stable, God sends them an angelic invitation. Who does that…other than the God who loves all human beings? What if we did that and went way out of our way to make sure that the uninvited know that they are completely and cordially invited, too?
Epiphany 5: God can make anything holy. If you just look at the world’s cathedrals and churches of every shape and size, you’d think that God was “totally in” to fancy. God must have a thing for gold, right? God must long for as many pipes on the organ as possible, right? A stable functioning as a birthing room and a feed trough as a bed is about as simple as it gets. That’s the thing, though…Anyone can see what a “holy” place a cathedral is but folks tend to end up “worshiping” the building instead of the God to whom the building is supposed to point. By choosing simple, God kind of says to us, “Pay attention to what matters here…”
Epiphany 6: The world is too busy for God. The innkeeper’s words that fly by us so easily are that there was no room for them in the inn. He’s just doing his job. He’s just telling the truth. True…he’s not really paying that much attention. After all, it’s a busy time. The crowds are huge. There’s money to be made. And, people like that pregnant woman and her man…well, they didn’t exactly look like they were loaded.
Epiphany 7: Almost everything we think we know about the wise men is wrong. There weren’t three of them. They didn’t have any camels. They did not sing what surely sounds like a German beer hall song during Octoberfest (“We Three Kings” “Oh….Oh…Star of wonder, star of light…) as they walked. They didn’t come to the stable. They visit a house, probably months later. They weren’t all that smart if they wandered cluelessly into the hall of the world’s most paranoid king and asked where the child who was his succesor had been born. (Seriously?)
Epiphany 8: For God, curiosity trumps intellect, every time, hands down. Okay, so the wise men weren’t politically savvy. Maybe they were even naive. What they did that distinguished themselves was they saw something that piqued their interest and they knew that somehow, someway, they had to go find out what this whole star thing was all about. They saw something and decided to do something, which, when push comes to shove, is a lot of what a life of faith is about. They didn’t just start doing something, though. They kept going. When they started, they had to explain to everyone who mattered that they were leaving. That’s hard but they kept going. At some point, they reached the limits of what was familiar and comforting to them. In what must have been a hard moment, they watched as what was familiar receded behind them but they kept going. Eventually, they stood outside of the palace in Jerusalem and, I’m pretty sure, hyperventilated just a little bit. They thought to themselves, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more” or something to that effect. Then, they stepped into the king’s presence. Then, when all the royal and religious “kerfuffel” was over, they reset their sights on Bethlehem and they kept going.
Epiphany 9: God loves people who show up. So imagine these people, however many of them there might have been, whether they had camels or not, no matter how savvy or naive they might have been, imagine these people standing in front of a house. That’s right. The story isn’t that these visitors came on Christmas night. That’s just a little twist we’ve added for our pageants. (After all, what would a pageant be with those regal “kings?”). Scholars, if they try to piece the story together as a history, think that there might have been months between Christ’s birth and the visit of these foreigners—maybe as much as two years. Joseph and Mary and the child would have settled into some kind of routine, just like we did with our own babies, even though we couldn’t imagine that such a routine was even possible at the beginning of those days. Seemingly, in the story, Joseph is not home. (Is he at work or is he picking up daipers and wipes at Target? We don’t know.) Was there a window to look through where they could spot Mary and her child? Did these visitors stand and size things up for a while?
Eventually, one of those wise men must have screwed up the courage to knock. Then, there was that pause that’s always there, when you wonder if you should knock again or if you should just wait a minute more. I imagine the wise man who knocked shooting a glance over his shoulder at his friends, maybe raising an eyebrow at them, then, shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet while he waited some more. Then, with authority, the door opened. He saw the woman on the other side. She stood there, holding her child.
Imagine Mary for a moment. There was all that initial fanfare even before her son was born. There was that extraordinary unexplainable but life changing moment of realizing that she was pregnant with a child who would do great things. There was the exhaustion of traveling so late in her pregnancy to fulfill the law. There was the disappointment of realizing that she was going to give birth in a barn and then the realization that it was, in fact, perfectly imperfect. There were those shepherds—sweet men but not sweet smelling—who stood like witnesses and just took things in. It was all so disorienting.
Then, all of that stopped. Things got quiet. The routine began to develop. She and Joseph and their baby settled in. Maybe this was going to be more normal than she thought. Maybe they had time to enjoy their son before whatever was going to happen would happen. Then, there was a knock at the door.
When she caught a glimpse of these men who had shown up, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. If you had told here there was a group of men outside of the door, she would have been scared, especially without Joseph around. If you had told her that on the other side of that door were a bunch of foreigners, Mary wouldn’t have known what to make of that. She may have never met a foreigner before. However, when she realized that these men who showed up at her door were there to bring gifts to the newborn king, something came over her—peace like she’d known the night that Jesus was born.
It looked for all the world like the key to faith was just showing up. She and Joseph had shown up. The shepherds had shown up. Everyone had been told, one way or another, to not give into fear: “Do not be afraid!” Everyone who took that message to heart and rose to their calling had found the same peace, even when the place that you had been led to turned out to be a barn or turned out to be a tiny house in the middle of some little town with a history.
Epiphany number 10. Keep listening. Keep watching. There’s always more to the story. So, the wise men show up. They present their gifts—the gold and the frankincense and the myrrh, gifts which make no sense until you know the story that unfolds thirty years later in which Jesus and his disciples would depend on the generosity of supporters (gold) and in which his most faithful supporters—the women, like his mother— would bravely show up in the end to prepare his body with burial spices (like frankincense and myrrh). It made no sense at the time but if you kept listening and kept watching, it made all the sense in the world.
If you kept listening and kept watching, then like both the wise men and Mary and Joseph, you would be making sense of the world by listening to warnings in dreams—to stay away from Herod and find a different way home or, for Joseph and Mary, to flee to Egypt to keep their child safe.
So, in the end, we need to keep watching and keep listening to the clues in our lives, too, to the epiphanies God is calling. Can we hear?