Sermon for The Day of Epiphany
Today we have chosen to honor the day of Epiphany, although technically Friday was Epiphany and today is the Name of the Lord, or the Baptism of the Lord. Epiphany is an older celebration, it has more history to it, and do I have to say anymore than that. When your colleague in ministry is a professional historian, and a pastor, and you have hooked your wagon to his star, well this is what can happen. So, taking the big hint, I think it might be good for you and I to glean a little of history of Epiphany, which is ours to consider this morning.
The term epiphany means "to show" or "to make known" or even "to reveal." Epiphany had its origin in the Eastern Church, those churches which today we call Orthodox churches. The first reference about epiphany is found in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, these writing suggest that Christ’s birth (when God was “revealed”) was celebrated on Jan 6th.
In Western churches, we remember Epiphany with the coming of the wise men to bring gifts and visit the Christ child. The Wise Men or Magi who brought gifts to the infant Jesus were the first Gentiles to acknowledge Jesus as "King" and so were the first to "show" or "reveal" Jesus to a wider world as the incarnate Christ. This act of worship by the Magi, which corresponded to Simeon’s blessing that this child Jesus would be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles" (Luke 2:32), was one of the first indications that Jesus came for all people, of all nations, of all races, and that the work of God in the world would not be limited to only a few.
In Germany, until the roman church adopted December 25th as the Christmas holiday in the Fourth Century, January 6th was the day of celebration. To this day, the initials of the Three Kings – (who were given names later on, they have no names in the Biblical record) Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, their initials C+M+B—plus the year are inscribed in chalk over doorways throught German-speaking Countries on the eve of Jan 6th to protect house and home. In many parts of Europe, Christmas celebrations do not end until Epiphany.
The English called the Epiphany Twelfth Day, and in Sweden and Denmark they varied in what they called it, depending perhaps on how much glügg they had shared the night before. Shakespeare called it the Twelfth Night of December, and wisely subtitled his play, perhaps because all of the confusion, "Or, What You Will." He wrote his play for the twelfth night partyers, to which the play does not refer in any way. Call it what you will, the Council of Tours ordained in 567 that there should be a festal tide of twelve days for Christmas, one day for each month of the year. It was a latecomer, for Epiphany is an older holiday than Christmas, and originally did not commemorate Magi at all, but celebrated the Baptism of the Lord in some places, and the wedding at Cana in others.
In places where Dionysius had been honored as the greek god of wine, the Church promoted Jesus in his place, serving up the flowing cups. I have friends who honor Jesus as the Dionysius in their patio, his head wreathed in electric grapes.
In the Gospel of Matthew the writer begins with the birth of Jesus, to show in the nativity story all that John tells in his prologue: He came unto his own, and his own received him not. He recounts a tale of the cruel Herod trying to subvert the revealing of the Christ Child.
The Monday after Epiphany, in England was called Plough Monday, when healthy young men festooned in ribbons were yoked to ploughs and called Plough Bullocks. On Plough Monday they ploughed up the pathways of neighbors who failed to tip them with coins, and they were accompanied by one of their group dressed in drag who was called Bessie. Plow boys also traditionally performed this 19th century East Anglian dance when they couldn’t work during the frosts. It was called Molly dancing and was an annual rite in the freezing, blustery peat bogs, where men would go making fun of local festival dances. Half of them would dress as men and half as women, “Mollies,” dancing for money or beer. If they didn’t get either they were likely to stir up some mischief. In the Noho we just call that Ordinary Monday. Anyway you probably get the idea that the Feast of the Epiphany a festival dating back for thousands of years, first celebrating the birth of Christ, and later the last of the 12 days of the celebration of the birth was a time of merry making, and you would be right. Even Mardi Gras begun in New Orleans in the 1870’s borrows heavily from European customs, and begins on Twelfth Night/Epiphany and continues until Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.
The prophecy of Isaiah tells us that this is a time for joy, it is a time for us to grasp our liberation in the revelation of God:
"Arise, and Shine, for your light has come." "You shall see and be radiant," the prophet says to us, "your heart shall thrill and rejoice." We are promised that all peoples (called "nations" before that word came to mean nation-states) even all the oppressed "nations" (like the nation of g/l/bt people, hidden underground in all lands. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms. Isaiah's prophecy is an announcement of return from Babylonian Exile, and the prophet rejoices that this little group--this remnant--has returned, and calls it to be the Light to guide others on the way home. So we see here a vision of life for all in a God-renewed Jerusalem of the Spirit.
Our religious ancestors regardless of the limitations of their scientific understanding and notwithstanding their lack of psychological sophistication, possessed a capacity for complexity that should humble the most educated among us. And grappling with the deep things of life were not restricted to life crises but seen, rather, as a function of the imagination--imagination and its intimations of the divine.
What the church has come to designate as the season of Epiphany is a showcase for that imagination. I would argue that regardless our “churchy” celebrations of Christmas and in spite of the religious spin on those celebrations,
Christmas is a cultural and social event. It evokes a lot of sentimentality and provokes a lot of spending but does not invoke much in the way of religious grappling or imagination, unless of course, you think that figuring out how reindeer fly is a worthy mental exercise.
Because Epiphany is just sort of passed through or ignored outside of Greek or Russian Orthodox traditions, and because of the singular focus of the season—Light—it still has the power to claim us for religious grappling and imaginative undertaking. Epiphany is not a personal “aha” moment – those moments which are symbolized by a light bulb going on over a character’s head. That is not what our ancestors had in mind for this season.
The 18th century Hasidic Master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov once said: “For the true believer, believing is seeing.” That is what Epiphany asserts, as well. Emerging as it does out of the Christmastide, Epiphany insists that our new awareness of “Emmanuel,” “God with us,” changes forever not only what we see but also how we see. All four of today’s readings attest to that realization. A new way of seeing as a result of a new way of believing, the magi go home by a different way, after encountering the Christ.
As we bring all of our ancestors forward, the reading becomes an exercise in hallowing and lends itself to a sense of wonder and gratitude. The moment is not about meanings. It is about shared hope. Whether we are talking about Peter overcoming his Jewish bias to reach out to Gentiles; or “Matthew” seeing the distance between heaven and earth bridged by the humility of John and Jesus; or “Isaiah” consoling an exiled and fragmented people with the promise that their suffering will transform them into beacons of justice for the entire world; or the psalmist’s understanding natural occurrences like thunder, lightning, and wind as expressions of God’s creative power, a power God wants to share with people, we are talking about a long history of shared beliefs that change the very way in which we view life and life’s events.
The fact that our ancestors got some things wrong—they thought heaven was a canopy hanging over a flat earth and that the male, lord God lived above that canopy; or that Isaiah was written by one prophet; or that Matthew was the first Gospel historically; or that Peter was the first Pope—these are secondary to the larger truths we have inherited. Over the long sweep of history there have been millions of us who have believed and continue to believe that there is a God who never lets us go and wants us never to let go as well; a God who doesn’t just share power but insists that we discover our own power in the stuff of our lives; a God who likes to be surprised by the “not yet” of our choices; a God who takes the leftover bits and pieces of our broken relationships and shattered dreams and dares us to look at them through our tears--tears that create a prism through which all the colors of life can be seen. We share all of that with all who came before us and all who will come after us. What a glorious moment this is. Our Epiphany.
Remember W. H. Auden's wonderful Christmas oratorio, "For The Time Being", how the magi tell why they have followed the Star: the first one says that since Nature, lovely as she is, is not always truthful, that to "discover how to be truthful now, is the reason I follow this Star." And the second says that history has no facts which have ultimate endurance, so that "to discover how to be living now" is the reason I follow this Star. And the third says that the works of philosophy and introspection, all those intellectual pursuits, good as they are, leave no time for laughter and kisses, squeezing and smiles, so that "to discover how to be loving now" is the reason I follow this Star.
The three together then form a chorus which says "the only thing we know for certain is that we are three old sinners, that this journey is much too long and that we want our dinners and that "to discover how to be human now" is the reason we follow this star. Amen.