Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Feast of the Epiphany
January 6, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Matthew 2:1-12
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:
"And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who is to shepherd my people Israel.'"
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage." When they had heard the king, they set out; and 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. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
I first heard the term “epiphany” in a freshman English course. We were studying Flannery O’Connor and discussing one of her characters in the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a woman who has a sudden insight about another person that then leads her to do a surprising and dangerous thing. In the discussion, the professor referred to her sudden insight as an “epiphany.” It was a word I had never heard before but that I instantly liked.
I was to learn in time that James Joyce was the person in our own tome who first applied the word “epiphany,” to his own life and to his writing. He used the word to describe times when the significance of an experience shone out at him, moments which were sudden spiritual manifestations in which the essence of a common object or an action appeared radiant to the observer. This idea became so important to Joyce that he wrote up seventy such epiphanies that happened in his own life between 1901 and 1904—seventy epiphanies in four years.
I believe many of us, myself included, are looking for epiphanies in our lives—wanting to see radiance in common things, waiting and hoping for insight to flash up before us so that we can better see where the treasures are in our lives, where the meaning is, and what to pay attention to and follow. We seek radiance, insight, light in our darkness, even if that light is hard to take or will mean we might need to change some things, or like the character in O’Connor story, to risk some things.
The three wise men from the East in our gospel were seeking after their own sort of radiance. It came to them, as the story goes, in the form of a star that according to one strand of the prophetic tradition, that of Isaiah 60, would be found in the city of kings, Jerusalem. They were, according to this prophecy, to travel a great distance and to honor this new king with gold and precious spices.
At the center of this same prophecy along with the new king was the city of Jerusalem. Predicted to be restored as an urban center of prosperity and power, Jerusalem was the three wise men’s fabled destination. And so it made perfect sense to them that Herod, the current king of Judea, would be able to point them in the right direction to find the new king in Jerusalem, his city.
But Herod, a man who had fought and connived for his throne for many years, according to Matthew’s story, is terrified by the question that the wise men brought to him. There was no new baby in his house and there better not be one in his city.
And so Herod summons his scholars to search for another answer to give the wise men about where to go to find the new king. And what they do is they come up with another prophet’s words on where a new Judean ruler might be born. That prophet is the prophet Micah who says: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.”
These are not the words of a prophet who hopes for the re-establishment of the imperial city. No, these are the words of a prophet who voices a peasant hope for a leader who will bring well-being to his people, not by great political ambition, but by connection and attentiveness to their needs.
And so off the three wise men go to Bethlehem, a dusty, unpretentious, out of the way little town nine miles and a world away from Jerusalem. It is there that they have what you might call the Epiphany of a lifetime. The new king of Israel, the one to whom they are bringing their precious gold and incense and myrrh, gifts fit for one born in palace, is a peasant child, born of peasant mother in a stable.
And like so many of our own epiphanies in life, their epiphany had a kind of pull-the-rug quality to it. Radiance, real radiance, they and we discover, often comes from an unexpected source, from something that is more human than high and mighty. The light not only reveals that a very common thing is more beautiful and more holy than previously thought, it reorients us, so to speak, it sets us on another path. We find that after God’s epiphany, after our epiphany, we go home as the passage says, by a different way, guided now by a different star.
Christian writer Anne Lamott describes an epiphany like this that occurred at her mostly African-American church in the Bay area one Sunday morning. It happened between one of the newer white members who was dying of AIDS and an African-American woman in the choir who was also member there.
“Shortly after the man with AIDS started coming, his partner died of the disease. A few weeks later he said that right then and there, in the hole in his heart that (his partner) Brandon's death left, Jesus slid in, and had been there ever since. This man has a totally lopsided face, deformed, ravaged, emaciated, and when he smiles, he is radiant. He looks like God's crazy nephew Phil.
There's another woman in the choir who is huge and beautiful and black and as devout as can be, who has also been a little stand-offish. She has always looked at him with confusion, when she looks at him at all, in his goofy, ravaged joy. She was raised in the South by fundamentalists who taught her that his way of life — that he — was an abomination. It is hard for her to break through this. I think she is a little afraid on the most primitive level of catching the disease. But he has come to church almost every week for the last year, and won almost everyone over. He missed a couple of Sundays because he was too weak to come. And then a month ago he came back, weighing almost no pounds, his face even more lopsided, as if he's had strokes, but he talks of grace and redemption during the prayers of the people, of how safe he feels these days.
So on this one particular Sunday, when it came time to sing the first hymn, "His Eye is on the Sparrow," I noticed that he couldn't stand up to sing. The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen, and only the man with AIDS remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap. And the big black woman watched him rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side, and bent down to lift him up, lifted up this white ragdoll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, and he was draped over and against her like a child, and they sang. And it pierced me.
The two, the black woman and the man with AIDS, of whom she was so afraid, were trying to sing. But (as they did) they both began to cry. Tears were pouring down their faces, and their noses were running like rivers; but as she held him up, she suddenly lay her face against his, put her black weeping face against his feverish white one, put her face right up against his, (allowing) all those spooky fluids (to) mingle with hers.”
The Epiphany is about God’s radiance being found not in Jerusalem but in Bethlehem, not among the high and mighty but in all that is human, merciful and generous. And, I believe our epiphanies, our little moments of glimpsing the radiance of the common object or the light that comes into the world through a humble action, or seeing in a flash the meaning and significance of things, are connected to that Epiphany, with a capital “E.” It is a radiance as fragile as a flickering candle in the dark and as brilliant and strong as a star in the night sky. It is the light of Christ Jesus: the peasant infant so helpless that he had to rely on others to hold him up, the priest who himself was sacrificed and the king who was the shepherd of his people.
Works cited or consulted
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms and The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
Walter Brueggemann, “Off by Nine Miles (Isaiah 60:1-7; Matthew 2:1-12) The Christian Century, December 19-26, 2001,
Anne Lamott “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” in Word by Word: Anne Lamott’s On-line Diary from Salon, January, 1997 For the complete entry to include an exciting story about a plane trip, go to: www.salon.com/jan97/lamott970106.html
James Allison, “Living by the Word,” The Christian Century December 25, 2007
