The Feast of the Epiphany Yr B

We finished our story on Christmas Eve like this. Three camels will plod up the road to Bethlehem. They will come from the East, far beyond the Arabian Desert, perhaps from as far as the Caspian Sea. The camels will carry three kings, the wise ones, the Magi. They will follow the wild star, the destiny they had never seen before, and they will follow it, wherever it goes, to find the Kings its shining will show them.

The kings’ journey will end in a new kind of king. Their restlessness will rest at last. They will fall to their knees and give him bright gold, sweet-smelling frankincense and bitter myrrh, brought so far with so much love.

So here we are tonight, following the love, to find God-with-us. We come, as people have come all through the ages, to bring our own gifts to this Child, God’s gift to us.

And now we find ourselves here today. These Sundays after Christmas have been all out of order, I have felt discombobulated. This time in our church year serves to remind me that God’s time is different from our time. Chronos, counting time in an orderly fashion, is not how the church year does it. We live in Kairos, God’s time. Here we have the Magi arriving on the scene as if the birth of this baby just happened. But the feast of the Epiphany is this conglomeration of things happening in chronos as well as kairos. In Isaiah we hear Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. And in Matthew’s gospel we hear there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. They were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

All of these stories we have read recently show us who Jesus is, how Jesus is related to God and to us, they show us how God works in our lives, in the lives of those who came before us and in the lives of those who will come after us, they show us what incarnation is, and they show us who Jesus’ family is, these stories all serve to show us that things are different now. With the birth of Jesus, everything is changed. The light has come into the world. God has shown the strength of his arm, and has scattered the proud in their conceit. God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, and has sent the rich away empty. God has come to the help of God’s servant Israel, God has remembered the promise of mercy made to Abraham and his children forever. And because Jesus changes everything, we, like the magi, must go home by another road.

Incarnation is dangerous, the birth of this child totally disrupts this family and the world in which they live, this child even causes his parents to have to be refugees, they flee to Egypt to hide from Herod who would have the child killed. The birth of this child in our lives totally disrupts us as well. The birth of this child calls us out of our complacency, the birth of this child calls us to this new thing that God is doing in our lives. The birth of this child was dangerous, the birth of this child is dangerous in our lives, because we cannot be the same ever again.

When we baptized Mary Ellen and Syra on the Sunday after Christmas two things happened. One is that Syra screamed. Harold Oberlander suggested to me that if we really were aware of what was happening in baptism, that we were dying with Christ to be raised to a new and absolutely different kind of life, we would all be screaming too. And, Mary Ellen danced. I don’t know if any of you could see her, but she was up here at the altar dancing. Being baptized in Christ should also make all of us dance for joy. Screaming and dancing, that is what the birth of this child makes us do, and we must go home by another way.

Our lives are changed by incarnation, our lives our changed by this Light coming into the world, our lives our changed by baptism; God has God’s way with us and we can never be the same. We will spend our lives saying yes to the new creation God intends for us, or we will spend our lives saying no to who God calls us to be. Saying yes is dangerous, saying yes to God is to enter a relationship that brings us outside of ourselves and causes us to confront our fears and our prejudices, saying yes to God moves us from narcissism to selflessness. Saying no to God means that we can be secure in the way things are, we can live a life untouched by injustice, untouched by prejudice, untouched by the pursuit of greed.

So, what does it look like to bring our own gifts to this Child, God’s gift to us. And what does it look like to go home by another way? What does it look like to live a life of incarnation, what does it look like to carry the light into a world of darkness? On this route home we are called to be Light bearers. We are called to be Love bearers. We are called to bring God’s Love to dark corners, to mountaintops, to raging waters. We are called to bring God’s Love to a fragmented society, to a culture that is pulled apart by greed and by consumption. We are called to bring God’s Love to a culture that values contingency and impermanence over commitment, fidelity and covenant.

God’s Love, God’s Power, is the most powerful integrating force in creation. God’s Love moves us from brokenness, from fragmentation, to wholeness, to healing. You and I bear the scars of that brokenness, we bear the scars that fragments cut us with, and we bear the healing Love of God. It is that Love, that Light that we carry into the world. The work that our baptism equips us for is out there, and it is about bringing the Light into the world.

How do you bring God’s Love and God’s Light into the world, how do you bring God’s wholeness into your work or your school? It is our call, to bring God’s transforming love to those who have not yet seen or felt or known that love. Be the light-bearer, just like those wise ones of so long ago,
and you will go home by another way.

The Lord has shown forth his glory: Come let us adore him.