Epiphany After Epiphany

Epiphany After Epiphany

Matthew 2:1-12

Have you ever had an epiphany? An epiphany is a sudden insight into the nature of something, usually in a simple and striking way.  What I discover as true has been true all along.  What makes my discovery an epiphany is that all of a sudden, I “get it.”  “Wow,” I think to myself, “how did I not see that before?”

So, let’s get the Epiphany juices flowing.  I’ll give a few personal examples.  (Epiphanies are almost always personal.) For a long time when I was a child, I knew I was a boy and I knew there were girls but that fact was completely uninteresting and immaterial…until…the day that I noticed that there were girls! It was like the moment in the “Wizard of Oz” when the world goes from black and white to color:  “Whoa…this changes everything!”

We can have an epiphany and not know what to do with what we realize.  It’s a navigational challenge to move successfully from, “Hey, there are girls” to “Hey, do you want to go out?” I specifically remember that the missing insight for me was that the girl that I wanted to ask out might already have a boyfriend.  That literally never occurred to me.  That made for an awkward moment or two:  “Dude…I’m sorry.  I didn’t know you were going out with her!”  Most epiphanies leave us facing a learning curve and on that learning curve, mistakes will be made.  Over time, though, if we’re paying attention and learning as we go, our epiphanies can become turning points.  In my case, my epiphany (there are girls) prepared me to be ready to notice Tracy the day that I met her in seminary but God knows how awkward I still was at moving from noticing her to actually asking her out.  (Just ask Tracy…)

The challenge of looking at our text is that there are layers of epiphanies that are going on at the same time.  I will name five this morning.  Let’s start with our own epiphany.  To put it simply, most of what we’ve been told about this story—the stuff we think we know— is wrong. This is the dilemma of any familiar text.  We think we know the story but usually we don’t.  We think the visitors are kings but they are actually “magi,” the root word of “magicians.”  They are not kings or royal representatives or scientists.  They are probably closest to what we would call astrologers, reading the stars like tea leaves.  We think there were three.  There is never a number given.  We think they rode camels.  No camels are mentioned.  We think they were men.  That is never specified.  All of these things that we thought were true that turn out not to be true should open the possibility that there might be something for us to learn.  Forget what you think you know and ask yourself instead, “What’s really going on here?”

The second layer of epiphany that I want you to consider is the epiphany that is happening for Matthew’s original audience.  In our minds, the whole Christmas narrative is woven together as one story.  Everyone has to arrive at the barn at pretty much the same time because that’s how you have a good ending for the pageant, right!  If you just read the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel though, it is a very different tale.  Matthew gives us a long genealogy, tracing all the men who’ve mattered in the history of Israel, from Abraham on down.  Then, he tells us the story, presumably, of the next important man—Joseph—and how he handled the news that his fiancé’, Mary, was going to have a baby and why and how that was happening.  After all the “begats,” the message is that God “begat” this one.  It’s almost an after thought that Mary has the child. Oh, and by the way, there is no mention of an inn or a barn or a feed trough or shepherds or a chorus of angels in our text.

Here’s the first epiphany for Matthew’s audience, though:  God, who had seemed so completely distant from the people for centuries is now so completely close, so intimate, that God has joined the genealogy:  “God begat Jesus.”  Beyond the “how did Mary get pregnant” angle on things, which I’ve told you is not central for my faith, the word attached to the baby is that he will be called Emmanuel, “God with us.”  God is with us and is one of us.  God is right here, closer than God has ever been before (Remember, God previously hid in burning bushes and clouds.)

Here’s the kicker—the second epiphany for Matthew’s audience—the first people who gain insight into what’s happening other than Mary and Joseph are… foreigners, of all things.  The whole story of the people’s faith was that they were God’s chosen people.  Honestly, people didn’t feel like God had chosen them for a long time.  Still, though, somewhere in the back of their heads, they could always hold onto the notion that they were special.  Before anyone among God’s chosen people had any inclination that God had made a new choice, strangers from the East recognized that something was going on.  They were curious enough to go on a journey to find out.  Isn’t there a whole file of epiphanies in all of our lives of moments when we discovered that we’re not as special as we thought we were?  That would have been a painful moment for Matthew’s audience to take in, that the last people in the world that they thought “mattered” actually mattered a lot. 

The third layer of epiphany is embedded in the beginning of our text.  The old saying is that “Curiosity killed the cat.”  The magi are paying enough attention to notice that something different is happening.  (Trust me, this is a big deal when sleep walking our way though a day seems like such a popular choice.) They are not only paying attention, they are curious enough to go find out what’s going on. Again, this is a huge deal!  “Going and finding out,” takes time and energy.  You also run the risk of looking like a fool.  This, of course, is exactly what the magi do.  For allegedly intelligent people, they wander straight into the halls of the world’s most paranoid king (Herod) and ask him the one question that would set him off (“Hey, where’s the new king who has been born?). Herod had killed his own son because he was worried that he might be angling for the throne.  If it weren’t for the chance for Herod to use the magi to find this “new king,” Herod might have killed them on the spot.  The magi, though, were clueless.  Insight without wisdom can put everyone at risk.  What Matthew’s audience would have understood was that Jesus was a threat to the powers that be from day one.

Here’s epiphany number four:  the religious authorities are going to be no help at all.  When asked where a newborn king might be born, they nail the answer:  “Bethlehem.”  Thanks for that, guys!  When’s the last time you asked a religious leader a question and actually got a specific answer?  Had they not been to seminary and learned the fine art of “hemming and hawing?”  Did it not occur to them that Herod might be asking the question with something other than compassion and concern in his heart?  For Matthew’s audience, any hope that the religious authorities might “catch on” to the notion that this child was Emmanuel should have been dashed from the beginning.  This is Matthew’s answer to everyone who wondered after Jesus’ death how the religious authorities could have been so wrong about Jesus:  they were wrong about Jesus from day one.

The fifth layer of epiphanies are shared between ourselves and the magi.  They follow the star to Bethlehem and what they find is not that they expect to find or what we expect them to find.  They don’t find the baby in a feed trough inside of a barn, surrounded by his parents and some shepherds and a bunch of animals.  (That’s what we expect.) They don’t find the baby in some royal setting befitting a new born king. (That’s what they expect.)  Instead, in our text, the star comes to rest over a house—that’s right—a house.  The magi are curious enough to take the final step and enter the house.  What they find is Mary and her baby.  (Joseph is nowhere to be found.) And these foreigners drop to their knees and worship the child.  They get it.  They are the first people to get it.  And they are are the last people in the world that any of God’s “chosen people” would have expected to be lifted up as the epitome of faith.

And what do the faithful foreigners do?  They give the child gifts, gifts who’s names we have known since our childhood—gold, frankincense and myrrh.  Think about the irony of those gifts.  The baby is given gold.  This child would grow up and choose, as a man, to reject the security of wealth and instead choose to live as an itinerant preacher and healer, caring for the poorest of the poor, lifting up the overlooked and the ignored and the rejected as the objects of God’s love.  People who knew the story of who Jesus became would have enjoyed the fact that the baby Jesus would have had nothing to do with that gold, just like the grown up man.

And the other gifts?  Those in the ancient world who knew the rest of Jesus’ story would have recognized those gifts right away.  They were burial spices, the kind of spices that the brave women, years later, would have carried with them to the tomb to honor Jesus’ body with a proper burial.  Matthew’s implication was that those spices, and that destiny, were with him from the start.

What are we left to consider?  Sit with Mary in Matthew’s gospel.  Strangers—foreigners—show up at her house and worship her son and offer him the strangest gifts.  Unlike the fierce Mary of Luke’s gospel, Matthew’s Mary is silent but she has to be thinking to herself, “What in the world is happening here?” Sometimes what’s happening is what needs to be happening but all we get to do is learn how to wait for it to make more sense.  Are we able to wait?

Sit with the Magi for a moment.  They have been on an amazing journey and have been led to the most extraordinary place, a simple house with a woman and a baby inside.  Even though this is not where they ever expected to arrive, they get it anyway.  They drop to their knees and thank God.  They offer what they have to the child.  Would we be willing to be led to unexpected places?  Would we be open enough to discover God’s presence when we are standing in a place where we never thought we would be?

Matthew’s God works through unexpected people, leads us to unexpected places, and challenges what we’re sure we know.  What if that’s the God who is still with us, the God who wants us to be curious enough to go find out, who wants us to risk making a mistake or two, who wants to surprise us in the strangest of places.