Solemnity of the Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6,9
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
God has richly blessed us this morning as we celebrate the arrival of the three kings at the manger. Today we baptize three infants - two princes and a princess, who at the very least rule the lives of their parents and routinely receive their obeisance. And these royal children are bearing gifts, the most precious gifts they have, which they will present to God this morning - themselves. In baptism, they are giving themselves to God, and God is giving himself to them. It's God reaching out and filling human life with his life, with his love, with his wholeness, with his eternity.
The Feast of the Epiphany is one of the Church's oldest feasts, first observed in Egypt toward the end of the second century. The feast celebrated the adoration of the kings at the manger as well as the baptism of Jesus when a voice from heaven declares, "Thou art my beloved son with whom I am well pleased." Both of these are epiphanies, acts manifesting, showing forth his identity.
Egypt, of course, has milder winters than most places. The Egyptian Church had little difficulty contemplating baptism and bathing in water in January. When the feast was introduced further north, with its stiffer climate and darker days and longer nights, the Church there directed its attention on the light and warmth of the babe lying in the manger. In the north, Epiphany became primarily associated with the kings. But a single theme unites baptism and the three kings - God reaching out to humanity.
The three kings, of course, were neither three nor kings. We don't know how many there were, and they were magi, the equivalent of magicians or astrologers. In the 8th century, the great Anglo-Saxon saint known as the Venerable Bede sanitized the magi, giving them names and identities. The first he called Melchior, an old man with white hair and a long beard, not unlike the traditional imagery of God the Father. Melchior brought gold to honor Jesus' royalty. The second, Gaspar, was a ruddy, beardless youth who brought incense, a sign of Jesus' divinity. The third was Balthasar, a black man with a thick beard. He brought myrrh, an anointment or resin used to anoint corpses before burial. It foreshadows Jesus' death.
Over the centuries, the legend became more colorful. The magi were invested with exotic homelands: Persia, India, and Arabia. Others identified the three as descendants of Noah's three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the progenitors of the three races of humanity; it's the holy idea that all of humanity welcomed Jesus. (1)
It's all charming and delightful and enriches our religion, and we happily incorporate it into our life here. But we should not let it camouflage the reality. We'd call the magi "quacks and maybe even charlatans. The Old Testament actually provides even choicer language for such persons [and condemns them] as idolatrous deceivers to be avoided by godly folk. A rabbi wrote not long before the birth of Jesus: 'He who learns from a magi is worthy of death.'" (2)
The exotic magi, therefore, have a lot in common with the ordinary, humble shepherds who came to the manger. The religiously respectable also held the shepherds in contempt, despised them, and considered them irreligious, beyond the pale. So those welcoming the baby Jesus, the Messiah, Israel's hope, are smelly, immoral outcasts and strange, despicable foreigners.
But here's the good news: the outsiders are brought inside. The message is that God comes to all people, that God loves all people - not just respectable religious people like you and me. As much as it shocked and scandalized Israel two thousand years ago, even more it should shock and scandalize the Church today.
Since the years immediately following the resurrection, the Church has endured intense internal fights about who's in and who's out. S. Paul provoked the rage of other Christians because Paul insisted that pagan converts to Christianity didn't have to be circumcised and didn't have to eat kosher food, because Paul insisted that God's love and inclusion is not limited by human identity markers. To our shame, those fights continue in the Church to this day - fights about who's in communion with whom, whose out of communion with whom. It's very sad, pathetic, and today's gospel challenges Christians to rise above it.
The presence of the magi and the shepherds at the manger, the animal's feeding trough holding the body of Christ, shows the inclusive nature of God's love, that God has come for everyone. On Christmas Eve, we heard the angels tell the shepherds that the good news is for all people. But still today in the Church we often try to draw a small, tight circle of salvation. Sure we can be pretty good at loving our neighbor in the next pew, especially if our neighbor is not all that much different from us, but God's challenge to us is to broaden our sympathies, to open our hearts and minds, to understand more widely, to love the different. That's why we give thanks to God for the blessing of a diverse parish - people of different values, different views, different lifestyles, different backgrounds, different races, different means, different interests, different abilities.
The Church is not a club, not a way to distinguish those who are in God's favor and those who are out of God's favor. God accepts everyone. God loves everyone. He loves those we dislike as fully and infinitely as he loves us. It's arguable that the Church's original sin was to build barriers between those it deemed righteous and those it deemed damned. The gospel, God's love, is not the Church's possession, but a gift for all people. The gospel is not a divine threat; the gospel is not a promise of impending judgment; the gospel enriches life and gives hope.
Ponder deeply the mystery of the manger, the magi and the shepherds, and we see the folly and malice of our judgments. We will not focus so much energy on determining who's sound and who's unsound, who's moral and who's immoral. We will focus our energy on loving one another, especially the unpopular, especially those different than us. At the manger we see divine hospitality. God reaches out to the marginal, the ignored, the despised; he reaches out to sinners; he loves everyone. And that's his call to us. That's what we try to do and to be so that our lives will be an epiphany to other people, so that our lives will make other people aware of God.
The manger has transformed the way we see human beings. It's no longer us and them. We now see all people as brothers and sisters, members of God's family, all welcome before God. We look for the image of God in all people. We have hope that all people, be they Muslims or Buddhists, atheists or agnostics, or even the wholly apathetic, all people may be welcomed into God's kingdom. We have hope that everyone will be united in heaven. While the manger may fill us with warmth, and even sentimentality, the manger is a radical and challenging vision.
We baptize today not so that Cameron, Heath, and Madeleine will escape God's fury, but so that they may be with him more fully, so that their lives will be bigger and richer and deeper, so that their character will be more marked by joy, and peace, and mercy, and faithfulness, and patience, and kindness, and openness, and trust, and goodness. We baptize today so that they will know Jesus and adore him and be united with him, so that they will embrace their purpose in life to serve and to love other people. We baptize today so that they will honor every human being as a member of the one family of God.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1. Douglas Hare, Matthew, John Knox Press (1993), p. 13.
2. Scott Hoezee, article in The Lectionary Commentary, Roger E. Van Harn, ed. Eerdmans (2001), p. 6.
© 2006 Lane John Davenport
