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The Journey Goes On
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
January 4, 2009
The Epiphany of the Lord
Isaiah 60:1-6, Matthew 2:1-12,
Ephesians 3:1-12
I’ve tried; I really have.
In the twenty two years
that I have been a pastor I have tried to celebrate Epiphany. I mean, it
sounds important, doesn’t it? At my last church we used to print the full
title right there at the top of the bulletin: “the Epiphany of the Lord.” It
sounds like something that should be accompanied by floodlights and fanfare and
maybe a circus ringmaster saying, “Ladies and Gentlemen: the Epiiiiiiiphany of
the Lord!” But it’s not something I’ve grown up with. Those little
Presbyterian churches of my childhood didn’t make a big fuss over Epiphany and
the Baptist churches I moved on to never mentioned it. But then I became a
pastor and became convinced that following the Christian calendar was a good
idea. Advent, for instance, was four weeks of helpful waiting and preparation
for the coming of Christ. Lent was forty days of journeying with Jesus toward
his death and resurrection. Those two seasons added layers and layers of
meaning to my celebration of Christmas and Easter. I was grateful for them, and
felt I owed as much to those other seasons and special days on the church
calendar. Pentecost was a good one: the birthday of the church. Trinity Sunday
was not bad: a whole day for a single doctrine. But Epiphany? What was that
really, and what was I supposed to do with it?
I started with a
children’s sermon.
On the first Epiphany of
my pastoral career I said something like this: “Good morning, boys and girls.
Today is the Sunday before January sixth, and January sixth is Epiphany. Can
you say “Epiphany”? (Mr. Rogers voice). I thought you could. Epiphany
is a Greek word. It means, literally, “to shine upon,” and maybe you could
think about it like this. If you hear a big noise behind your house in the
middle of the night and you want to find out what it is you might get a
flashlight and shine it out there, and then you might see that some dogs have
gotten into the trash cans. When you shine your light on those dogs you see
what is making the noise, and that’s what Epiphany means: it means seeing
something for what it really is. When we use that word in the church we’re not
talking about shining a light on a bunch of noisy dogs, we’re talking about the
light that shined on Jesus, that showed him for who he really was:
“The Son of God.”
It wasn’t a bad children’s
sermon, though I can’t help wondering if those children didn’t forever afterward
associate Epiphany with dogs and trashcans. What I wanted them to associate it
with is the light that shines and the One it shines upon. Epiphany is always
associated with light. In some traditions it is known as “The Feast of Lights.”
I’ve often wished that there were some way to flood the sanctuary with light on
this day, to push the button on the dimmer switch and hold it until the room got
brighter and brighter and brighter, until you had to squint and shield your eyes
from the dazzling light of Epiphany. That would make the day special, wouldn’t
it, to see everybody coming to church with dark glasses on? Or to see them
feeling their way out of church afterwards, temporarily blinded, so that people
walking along Monument Avenue would say, “Oh, look Ethel. It must be
Epiphany!” We haven’t figured out how to do that yet, and so we do what the
church has always done on this day, we flood the worship service with
references to light. Listen to the reading from Isaiah, for example:
“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon
you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but
the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall
come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”
Maybe it’s that line about
kings that links this passage to Psalm 72, which we used as a call to worship
this morning. Isaiah talks about kings coming to “the brightness of your dawn”
while the psalmist talks about them coming to bow down before the chosen ruler
of Israel. “May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute, may
the kings of Sheba and Seba bring him gifts. May all kings fall down before
him, all nations render him service.” It’s a short step from that passage to
the story in Matthew 2 about wise men coming from the East to bow down before
the one who has been born “King of the Jews,” and present him with gifts. Go
back to the Isaiah text and you find that (lo and behold), “they shall bring
gold and frankincense and proclaim the praise of the Lord.”
And so it starts with
light, a flicker of starlight in the sky, but enough to start these wise men on
their journey. By the end of the story the light is shining on the very house
where Jesus is, revealing him as the one who has been born king of the Jews. In
a way that is more than just metaphorical it dawns on the wise men who this
little boy is, and they bow down before him, and shower him with gifts. If it
were a Hollywood movie light would fill the room and spill out onto the street,
and the people of Bethlehem would first gasp with wonder and then break into
spontaneous singing and dancing. It is Epiphany, after all—the first Epiphany
ever—and some sort of celebration is in order. But I’ll say it again: I’ve
tried to celebrate Epiphany and for whatever reason it rarely makes me feel like
singing and dancing. We troop out these same old camels and wise men every
year, the same old star; we sing songs about Three Kings and their gifts of
gold, frankincense, and myrrh; we say, “Arise, shine! For your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you!” But is there any sense in which
this feels like a celebration? Will any of you exchange gifts on January 6?
Will there be any feasting or music or gathering of friends and family? No.
Probably not. Epiphany will be a day like any other.
It will be Tuesday.
Which makes me think I
still don’t get it, I still don’t understand Epiphany. If Epiphany is always
associated with light then maybe what I need before I can truly and joyfully
celebrate it is an experience of darkness. I searched back through my memory to
see if there was such an experience—to see if I had ever been literally or
figuratively “in the dark”—and I remembered celebrating my brother Ed’s eighth
birthday in a cave on somebody’s farm in Southwest Virginia. The whole family
went down into it with flashlights and a birthday cake, complete with eight
candles. We finally came to this huge underground room, and when we had put the
cake down on a big, flat rock in the middle we gathered around it, sat down,
turned off all our flashlights, and waited for the dramatic moment when Dad
would strike the match and light the candles. We waited a long time. Dad said,
“Look how dark it is. Can any of you see anything?” We couldn’t. I held my
hand up in front of my face and couldn’t see that. Finally, long after I was
ready for him to do it, Dad struck a match and the whole room filled up with
light. Everything was transformed. The thick darkness that had surrounded us
only a moment before was driven back, and there in the glow of that single match
were the faces of the people I loved most in the world. At the very least,
Epiphany should be something like that: the celebration that comes when you have
been in the darkness a long, long time, when light finally fills the room and
shines on the face of love.
We don’t have much
experience of that kind of darkness. We have flashlights and floodlights and
Jesus, who is the light of the world. There has never been a time in my life
when that light was not available to me. So, what’s the big deal about
Epiphany? We sing the hymns and tell the stories and try to celebrate something
we have never been without. But what if we had been without it? Isaiah talks
about darkness covering the earth and “thick darkness” the peoples. It reminds
me of that plague from the book of Exodus when God sent darkness so thick it
could be felt. Stumble around in that kind of darkness for a while and see if
you don’t feel like celebrating when the lights come on. Even if you’ve been
without power for a few hours you know what kind of whoop goes up when it comes
back on again. Four years ago the world was still reeling from the tsunami that
devastated South Asia on December 26, 2004. Do you remember that? It happened
on a Sunday morning. I found out about it just before worship and we took time
during the service to pray for those affected by that disaster. Most of those
who survived didn’t have power, or water, or food, or shelter. Many of them
didn’t have the family and friends they had had just a few days earlier. But
even before that most of them were without something we take for granted.
In the days that followed
I looked at a map of the dominant religions in that part of the world and found
that most of the people there were Buddhist, or Hindu, or Muslim. That’s not
surprising; I would have almost guessed it. But when we took up a special
offering for tsunami victims a couple of weeks later we sent it through Baptist
World Aid, the compassionate arm of the Baptist World Alliance, which cares for
those in need regardless of tribe, caste, color, or religion. The people who
work for Baptist World Aid, however, are Christian people, and I wouldn’t be
surprised if—when one of then handed a Hindu child a bottle of clean drinking
water—she did it in the name of Jesus. She wouldn’t have intended any
disrespect toward the child’s religion. She certainly wasn’t trying to
“convert” the child. But she might have handed the child a bottle of clean
drinking water in the name of Jesus simply because Jesus was her reason for
being there. Something in her experience of him revealed God’s heart to her, and
what she found in that heart was love for the whole world—Buddhist, Hindu,
Muslim—you name them, God loves them. And that’s what Epiphany is really
about. It’s not about light so much as it is about what that light reveals: the
love of God for the whole world.
Maybe this is why I have
trouble celebrating Epiphany. Maybe it’s not an experience of darkness that I
need but an experience of exclusion, of being left out. I searched back through
my memory again, and this is what I found: eight or nine years ago I went to a
Benedictine monastery for a spiritual retreat. There was, on the corner of the
desk in my little room, a card inviting me to attend all worship services in the
chapel, but asking that I please not take communion because, “it would suggest a
unity among Christians which, sadly, does not exist.” And so I went to all the
worship services, morning, noon, and night, but at the one that night they had
communion. I say they had it because I sat there in my pew and watched
everyone else go forward. “What?” I thought. “Was the body of Christ not
broken for me? Was the blood of Christ not shed for me?” It made me angry, and
as it did I recognized that I was feeling something I had rarely ever felt
before: I was feeling excluded. As an educated, white, middle class American
man, there is very little that has not been available to me. On that night, in
that chapel, the Lord’s Supper was not available to me and it made me feel left
out.
Somewhere in the
experience of the early church it dawned on those Jewish Christians that the
good news about Jesus was good news for the whole world. Paul states it clearly
in our epistle reading for today. He says, “In former generations this mystery
was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy
apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow
heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus
through the gospel.” Strangers, foreigners, outsiders have been welcomed into
the treasury of God’s grace. That’s what Matthew is trying to tell us in his
story of the wise men: they came from the East, and although they would not have
been Buddhists, Hindus, or Muslims, not at that time in history, they would not
have been good God-fearing Jews, either. They came following that little bit of
light they had before them and it led them to a place in Bethlehem of Judea
where they dared to knock on the door. When they did—and don’t miss the
significance of this—the door was opened to them, they were made welcome, and
bowed down to worship a little boy named Jesus. And even though it wasn’t a
Hollywood movie, light began to fill the room and spill out onto the streets.
It was the first Epiphany, and all the reason anyone would ever need…to
celebrate.
—Jim Somerville,
© 2009
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