So,
Christmas is over- Mary and Joseph have packed away the tree and the
decorations and the swaddling clothes, and have been hunkered down with their
new baby in a peaceful little home in Bethlehem for some time now.
And to be honest, since the night when the
shepherds and angels and everyone showed up in a wild blur of glory and honor,
it’s been kind of quiet. Really, there is almost nobody bringing meals or
checking in on the young couple, a friendly hello here or a kind gesture there,
perhaps, but they are not living near life-long neighbors, friends of their
parents throwing a baby shower or aunties offering advice. They are kind of all
alone – maybe seeing friends of friends, and relatives of relatives from time
to time, but this was not the way they had imagined their family life would
start- not even once they rearranged their imaginings to include God-incarnate
crawling across the living room floor.
Joseph
rented them a little house with room for a workshop, not too far from THE
stable, actually, but near enough to town that he got a little business, enough
to keep food on the table, and news was sent back home of the child’s birth, a
few snapshots and updates now and then, “He just rolled over on his own!” “He
snores like grandpa and can NOT get enough of those mashed peas!”
"He took his first steps yesterday!” but no grandparents or cousins had
yet met the toddler Jesus. It had been just the three of them, Mary,
Joseph, and Jesus, in a kind of suspended rhythm of adjustment and happiness,
an in-between of sorts, settling into the miracle they shared, getting to know
each other, becoming a family.
Until the
day the pagans showed up and called their kid the king of the Jews.
Just when
the story had begun to lose its hard edges, when the nostalgia had begun to
descend and the lens soften, when this baby had begun to feel like he was theirs,
a reminder that he is not arrives in the form of sages from a far-off
land, astrologers, mystic-scholars who had been watching the skies for signs of
God.
Surprising,
perhaps, that those with no personal stake in the story, with no generational
anticipation of a Messiah, no claim whatsoever to the promises of Yahweh to the
people of Yahweh, are the ones Yahweh sends next. And their arrival
bursts the bubble and exposes the light to all the world.
Epiphany, we call this day. Enlightenment.
Aha! The breakthrough that changes your perspective, and lays opens
your life before you differently.
Sometimes
all the same things and people that were familiar and known one second look
completely other and utterly amazing the next second, and often because you are
suddenly seeing them through another person’s eyes. That's something
epiphany does.
The
Christmas moment was God WITH US, Epiphany is GOD with us.
Sweet and
cuddly though he may have just been, this isn’t your own private Messiah any
longer, folks. He belongs to the whole
earth, and all who live upon it belong to the same God who has settled
himself contentedly here in your lap. You are recipients of this miracle
as much as the next person, of course, but with just as little sense of what it
all means - maybe less, even, than these strangers (who are, in every way
imaginable, strange) seem to grasp.
I love the
crazy, cozy image of Mary and Joseph around supper with these visitors,
after their camels have been tended to and bedded down, when the strangers had
washed up and unpacked a little bit, and the lamps are lit and the table is
set. The meal at the table between these people who smell different and look
different and wear different clothing and speak different languages and whose
paths never, ever should have crossed in any conceivable way, but who were
right now breaking bread together, drinking wine together, sharing together
what used to be mostly their own private secret that nobody else could relate
to but them.
And I almost
can picture that star exploding right then.
It had
guided the Magi to the child, over desert and mountains, through night and day
and night and day and night and day they followed its singular purpose, driven
by the quest, knowing this is something big, being led right to it. And
then, from the moment they laid eyes on him, and Mary and Joseph laid eyes on them,
the cat is out of the bag, so to speak.
King Herod
is now chomping at the bit to stamp out this newly discovered threat to his
power, and the news is out, things are not business as usual; God has
really come, the world is topsy-turvy and strangers from a strange land are
eating with that nice couple down the street, normal as you please. And
then I imagine the star, it’s purpose completed, shatters into a trillion
pieces, filling the sky with bright mess, scattering shards of radiance from
one end of the globe to the other.
I picture
them staying a while.
After all,
it took many months, maybe years, to get there; they’re not just going to stay
one night and leave. At least, I wouldn’t. I won’t drive 2 1/2 hours to
my grandmother’s house just for an afternoon. No, siree. You’ve got to
make the visit worthwhile. Share a few meals, spend a night or three,
settle in long enough to catch up over morning coffee and debrief over tea
before bed.
So what was
it like, adjusting to being next to the miracle for a while?
Was it all
the more miraculous for its ordinariness?
How did it
feel to go from a distant star and a lifelong, theoretical quest for truth to a
flesh and blood child who smeared his high chair with carrot mash and crashed
out exhausted for naps, stunk up his diapers and cuddled the dog and threw
bawling toddler tantrums?
Because
here’s one truth: miracles are almost never as sexy in person as they’re
built up to be.
What was it
like for Joseph and Mary and for the strangers from the East, to fall into some
daily patterns together, to have almost nothing humanly in common and yet get one another at a level nobody else
on earth could, because your very presence represents to the other that this
really is real, something really big is really happening.
Like pregnant Elizabeth validating pregnant Mary’s experience, sharing the
miracle and being church– this wonky little collection of folk are now church,
if church means, and I think it does, the ones reminding each other that God
has come, that God is here, and that our very lives are part of the wonder and
life-giving, love-bringing conspiracy of God. But also maybe getting
annoyed because they load the dishwasher wrong and forget to take their shoes
off in the house?
And then,
just after the dream warning not to go back to Herod, and the Magi bypassing
Jerusalem altogether to return home by another road, (Oh, wasn’t Herod steaming
mad when then never swung back by the palace! Didn’t he pace on his balcony
with his eyes on the horizon day after day, the realization slowing dawning
after one week, two, three, that they were NOT coming back and there wasn’t a
darn thing he could do about it!).
Just after
the hugs and blessings and goodbyes, the little family turning back inside,
sighing, and expecting, perhaps, that life might get back to normal, normal is
redefined again. Epiphany keeps going, see. It doesn’t actually let you
turn back; by its very nature Epiphany’s path is almost always that of
another road.
Their road
is revealed when, like the one who told him two years ago not to be afraid to
take Mary as his wife, an angel messenger invades Joseph’s dreams again, take
the child and his mother and flea, right now, go to Egypt. Get up! NOW.
It’s your
turn to be the strangers from a foreign land, Joseph. God-with-us, who was born
in a stable and is now a homeless refugee, and you along with him; foreigners
in a foreign land.
Some
traditions hold that the little family settled in Egypt with the Ishmaelites,
that they were received warmly by the way other side of the family tree,
way back before Egypt became the land of their captivity, the place God had
freed God’s people from, the place that represented all that they were
delivered out of – back from the time when it was all the same trunk, the roots,
the beginning. Father Abraham - father of us all, descendants as numerous as
the stars.
It’s like
baby God is on a sightseeing tour of the greatest hits.
I have
been at this project for quite some time, you see…
I am the
God who delivered you out of the land of Egypt, you shall have no other gods
before me. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not recognize
him. So to the
land of Egypt they went, (part of the Roman Empire at the time), seeking safety
and welcome in the hospitality, hearts and homes of strangers, who are part of
the whole story anyway, while back home among the God’s chosen people, the
children of Israel, “King of the Jews” Herod’s terrible wrath and fear
commanded the deaths of all the male children under two in an effort to stamp
out the light of the world before the flame caught and spread.
Then was
fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
‘A voice was
heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her
children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’
And I hate
that part of the story and will never understand it, and don’t have a whole lot
to say about it, except to notice both that God’s love doesn’t keep madness
from happening but suffers it with us, coming as a homeless, transient peasant
child, whose identity is revealed to nameless sheep-herders and pagan
foreigners and NOT to the powers that be, no matter how loudly they rattle
their sabers and fiercely they demand to be in on the secret. And also that as
sweeping and awful as Herod’s act of terrible evil was, it seemed not to make a
dent whatsoever in the God-with-us
project; and while Herod himself is long dead and gone, love endures forever,
profoundly and mightily in small acts of kindness and care, and the everyday,
transformative sharing of life by ordinary folks that puncture the darkness
with God’s light every moment of every day.
After
Herod’s death the little family goes home for the first time, to Nazareth, to
raise their first grader in Galilee among their own people, in their own
village, with the grandparents, and the lifelong neighbors, and streets they
grew up on, and the tiny, provincial world that had cradled and shaped them
before their lives were ripped open by the light of the world.
How was
little Jesus shaped by those early wanderings, I wonder?
What did he
absorb from the Magi and the Egyptians, the welcome of strangers, the arduous
journeys and the life-altering dreams?
How did
Epiphany bend his path?
And what
about those Magi?
The
journeyers, and secret-sharers, the extended family of the God, long-distance
soul-friends across barriers of every kind, pen pals in a miracle, who brought
epiphany onto the scene as much as they received it themselves, and then went
home by another road?
How did
their trajectory change after encountering the light of the world?
And what of
us?
Epiphany is
our holy invitation to the miracle being revealed in our own lives, and
shimmering in all the world.
Whatever
this year has to bring, God is here.
Whatever the
world goes through in the coming days, weeks and months, nothing can disrupt
the God-with-us project.
This truth
does not belong to us. We belong to it.
So Arise, sisters and brothers, and shine, for your light has come.
We are
Epiphany’s offspring: light-bearers and hope-tellers, descendants of the
foreign magi who set out in trust that God will appear.
Love has invaded
the whole earth and summoned all people to its unquenchable light that shines
brightest in the ordinary moments of with-us-ness between friends and
strangers, in this messy, real, world. So like the
adventurers of old, we will watch together, open and ready, for the appearance
of God with us, each and every day.
Amen.
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