More than any other feast day on our liturgical calendar, The Epiphany fills me with childlike wonder. Tonight, adults eat a cake containing hidden surprises, like a box of Crackerjack. And accomplished professionals play with a set of toys. Not really action figures; not dolls. Figurines! On Christmas Eve, we stood our Three Kings back in the entry way of the church. By this past Sunday, we had moved them to a corner of the chancel. Now, look, we have crowded them in our crèche up here with Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds. Wondrous childlikeness!
So I begin with a story from my childhood.
For years, my parents, my three siblings, and I took long Sunday afternoon walks in the Blue Hills southwest of Boston. Where exactly we ended up and how much ground we covered was unimportant. What mattered were the experiences in store for us. To see the array of differently shaped leaves on a sassafras tree. To smell a whole hillside of wild blueberry bushes long before we reached them – and, at least for a few short weeks around the 4th of July, to taste the life of those bushes concentrated into tiny, sweet, round bundles. To hear the sharp crunch of a thin layer of bog ice breaking under our feet like glass. To touch walls and domes of rough, gray granite, basking in their warmth or recoiling from their cold.
Those wonderful childhood walks owed everything to my father’s profession as a scientist. Not that he delivered lectures on Sunday afternoons in the Blue Hills, or wrote out formulas, or conducted laboratory experiments. No, he was led by wonder at the complex beauty of God’s world and led us in turn with wide eyes, open minds, and warm hearts.
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No one could mistake the Wise Men for children. They were professional star-gazers, the scientists of their day, and royal officials. Nevertheless, they embarked on a journey of wonder; not a commute, a quest, or a crusade. Why? Why would Magi from the East travel all the way to Jerusalem? Perhaps the Jews’ unusual belief in one God intrigued them. Perhaps they wanted to see for themselves the magnificent Temple in Jerusalem dedicated to that one God. Perhaps. Tonight’s gospel lesson encourages us to celebrate that God led the Wise Men by the light of a star, the star of wonder, to God’s living light in Jesus the child (Matthew 2:1-12).
But wait. A figure is missing from our nativity scene here at St. Paul’s. Do you sense his shadow? It looms large over Matthew’s story of the journey of wonder and the wonder of Jesus’ birth. The shadow, the figure, of King Herod.
Installed by the Romans, Herod the Great had been King of the Jews for 30 years when Jesus was born. During that time, he oversaw the greatest building boom in his people’s history: fortresses, palaces, and a massive renovation of the Temple. The Romans let client kings like Herod retain much autonomy. But they did make two demands: keep order and make sure wealth flows back to Rome uninterrupted. The high cost of Herod’s building program, coupled with the heavy tribute he owed to Rome, wrecked long-standing economic relationships in Palestine and gave birth to a new profession: the tax collector. Herod also had four sons and a succession plan to divide his kingdom among them.
Innocent as doves, the Wise Men head straight for Jerusalem, Herod’s capital city, asking “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we have observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage” (2:2). How would you expect a pampered, petty tyrant to respond to such a threat to order, revenue, and dynasty? “When King Herod heard this, he was frightened and all Jerusalem with him” (3). Everyone knew the dangerous dance Herod performed between the Romans and his own people. So Herod, under the guise of honoring Jesus at his birth, seeks to destroy him. The Magi, now wise as serpents, avoid Herod and return to the East by another road.
Feel the irony in Matthew’s story. Herod, the King of the Jews chosen by Rome; Jesus, God’s chosen King of both Jews and Gentiles. The Wise Men led by wonder; Herod and his regime driven by fear. The tyrannical fragility of adult fear; the liberating strength of childlike wonder. Willing tribute; forced taxation.
Wonder leads the Wise Men wide-eyed, open-minded, and warm-hearted to the unexpected: a king born to poor parents in an obscure village, rather than in one of Herod’s palaces. Wonder leads them away from danger and to the road home. Wonder leads to their great generosity: gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
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I am not the only professional here at St. Paul’s tonight on this feast of The Epiphany. I see teachers, clergyfolk, doctors and nurses, engineers, librarians. Wasn’t it wonder, wonder at books, at the human body, at ideas, that originally led us into our professions? And I see others tonight who, led by wonder, have professed vows to partners and spouses or religious communities or God, or who have taken on commitments to energy conservation and simple living.
But isn’t it also true that as we grow into our various professions and commitments, the tyranny of fear threatens to cool our hearts, close our minds, and narrow our vision? Fear drives us to delve tunnels and launch rockets on others. Fear drives us to bomb and invade the most densely populated strip of land on earth. Maybe we all grow up too soon. Maybe we all spend a lifetime trying to unlearn fear and relearn childlike wonder.
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American poet Lisel Mueller imagines the painter Claude Monet, in his eighties, face-to-face with a professional who wants to try and cure Monet’s faulty eyesight. I end with some lines from Mueller’s poem.
“Monet Refuses the Operation”
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
…
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps.
…
… Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), pp. 186-87.
