We celebrate the Epiphany today. Although officially not until January 6, which is tomorrow, this celebration marks the end of the 12-day Christmas season.
The young family made its journey as best they could. The baby was born, this love come down, gathering all of God’s creatures around its warmth. The star in the east, a new celestial event, arises in response. The wise ones take note and their curiosity guides them to the manger. So, now our tableau is complete. Everyone is in place.
The gifts were wrapped and given and opened. The food was bought and prepared and eaten. Travel, visits, phone calls and texts were made and cards exchanged. Pageants performed. Movies watched. Games played. Puzzles completed. Books read. New year celebrated and, perhaps, some resolutions made. And, as the Epiphany dawns tomorrow morning, people return to work or school, if they haven’t already. Christmas is complete.
The Feast of the Epiphany often slides past us without celebration or comment as we move right back into life as we know it. Why do we have this part of the story… Where the wise ones travel to witness the gift of salvation and then return to their homes?
The gift of salvation we receive at Christmas is, as Mother Kate put it in her Christmas Eve sermon, not probable. It’s a bit miraculous really. That God comes as Christ in the midst of our everyday lives. God breaks into our ordinary experience filled with all the worldly yearnings and human emotion and unhelpful thoughts and selfish actions.
Christ comes to us, bidden or unbidden, taking on this messy human flesh.
Christ comes as love incarnate to be present with us and to teach us what it means for us to be God’s beloved creation. And God remains here. With us. In this beautiful mess.
And, my friends, this knowledge, this truth is so utterly astounding to me because it tells me that no matter what I do, no matter how far I take myself away from God in my own human attempts to prove my worthiness… or whatever other well-worn highway of assumptions and neural pathways that I find myself falling down into like a sinkhole… no matter how often I do this, God is always yearning to be born again. God wants to break into my world regardless of my own opinions on the matter.
This defies logic. This truth of the Divine Inbreaking goes against everything the world would have us believe about how God should work. We want God to need us to behave to be worthy of God’s love so that we have a way to prove ourselves. But God does not need us to behave. God only needs us to be.
And this human turmoil at the heart of today’s Gospel story. The lengths that Herod goes to in order to maintain his power. Herod, like all of us, believed that he had to hide something, or take something, or own something.
But what the Incarnation proclaims is the inexplicable yet undeniable truth that God loves us with such wild delight and unhinged passion… simply because we breathe. And because God put breath into us, God is with us.
This inbreaking, this love, this astounding miracle of the Incarnation is why I’m a Christian.
The Epiphany is meant to be celebrated as a recognition of God’s in-breaking. As a completion of the gift of the Incarnation. It’s why people with nativity sets in their home have the wise men travelling around the house, only arriving at the manger on the day of Epiphany. This is when we come to fully realize and understand our salvation and what we are called to do in response. When we really take in this whole story, indeed this whole tableau, and claim it for ourselves. What does the Incarnation really mean?
What does it mean that God loves me simply because I breathe? What does it mean to me that God loves you simply because you breathe? What does it mean to me that God’s breath fills this whole creation and this breath is God’s light, God’s glory? What does it mean that we are all so deeply interconnected? That we share this breath? That we are completely interdependent?
I don’t believe that Herod was a person who spent much time in reflection. The original Herod (Herod the Great) was placed on a throne by the Roman Empire as a way of placating the Jews after the Roman incursion into their land. Herod had 3 sons and the one referenced here in Matthew’s Gospel is Herod Antipas because it is he who inherited the territory of Galilee after his father’s death.
Herod Antipas is depicted as jealous, which he likely was. The son of a puppet king who was also a puppet king himself. And who now had to compete with his 2 brothers in an effort to demonstrate his worthiness, I would imagine he wasn’t an overly confident person. But, instead, relied upon power-grabbing efforts to shore up his self-esteem. This is what privilege often creates.
I’m not prepared to say that this depiction is false, but curiously, it does play well into the narrative that both Matthew and Luke need in their gospels because their story needs someone to be the corrupt and jealous Jewish king. The foil to play against the wise men – the good Gentiles who have witnessed the Light and protect the Light by giving Herod the slip at the end of the story.
We should remember that the gospelers were writing in response to the chaos caused by the utter destruction of the Jewish way of life. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman general Titus. The Temple obliterated. Thousands upon thousands of Jewish people were murdered or taken into enslavement by Roman captors. While the others dispersed becoming the great Jewish diaspora.
And, in all of that pain and confusion, Judaism began the task of redefining itself. There were factions and the need arose to identify oneself with one group or another. So, the theological writing in the first century was often filled with verbal assaults against “the other”… Jews against Christians, Christians against Jews, Jews against Romans, Christians against pagan Greeks… there was always “an other.”
Regardless of Matthew’s motive here, the reality is that we humans do want to believe that we have to prove our worthiness in God’s eyes and that often comes at the expense of the “other.” Someone or something has to be unworthy so that I can be worthy. We want to believe that our cunning and achievements matter to God. If we are honest, we all know what it’s like to be Herod.
And just like that, the Epiphany slips past us. In our confusion and pain that tells us we have been separated from God’s love and we have to get it back.
Herod tries everything in his power to control the situation, to make sure he has the advantage. That’s what fear does to us. It causes something inside of us to contract, to pull back. To control and manipulate. To run and hide.
Author, professor, and poet Audre Lorde described herself as “black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet.” She gathered a series of journal entries from her time of battling cancer (along with the racism and sexism that she had been battling her entire life) into an essay that she called A Burst of Light. Here is a quote:
Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle wherever we are standing. It does not matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor’s office or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department, or the classroom. The real blessing is to be able to use whoever I am wherever I am, in concert with as many others as possible, or alone if needs be.
This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light – that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation. Metabolized and integrated into the fabric of my days, that knowledge makes the particulars of what is coming seem less important.
Lorde was not a Christian but she did understand the gift, the immediacy, and the power of the Incarnation. She came to know the blessing of who we are is that which gives us the capacity to offer our full selves to the real work of life – to show up, in other words.
My friends, the Epiphany is this: The moment when we recognize what it means that we are inheritors of this burst of light and we finally, fully accept that. When we take stock of exactly what it means to be human, wholly loved by God as an integral part of the beloved creation. And whose lifeforce is intimately intertwined with all life.
That God breaks into our lives, coming as human life is the salvific gift of the Incarnation. This is God’s Love.
And when we really come to know this, we come into relationship with our real power. A power whose basis is love. And this power emboldens us to move beyond our fear in any given moment and act as a force of that love. To choose mercy rather than power or privilege. To choose justice rather than social niceties. To choose kindness rather than cynicism or judgment.
This is no longer a time of waiting. God’s love has broken in and the Epiphany is now upon us. Don’t let it slide by. What does it mean for you to bring God’s love into this world? What will you do with this burst of light?
