Epiphany

Epiphany

Transcribed from a sermon given on

January 6, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Matthew 2:1-12

A new star appeared in the sky, but only a few people on Earth noticed.  It was a group of people who were searching; they were seeking in the sky.  They were searching for something special.  They were searching for some kind of message from God.  They were seeking something in their lives, and they studied the sky.  And in order to notice that star, a new star rising, they had to have studied the stars for a long time.  They had to spend every night looking and searching.  But then a time came when they saw something new, something different, something that wasn’t from the world as they knew it, but led and suggested of something more.  So they packed up and they left home and they traveled.  They traveled a long way. 

Now these days you can get on a plane in Arabia and go to Jerusalem. We don’t think of distances the same way they did.  These Magi, and we have no idea how many there were, by the way; it never says that there were three of them in the Bible; it just says there were three gifts.  This group of people traveled across desert, through various lands, at a time when it was dangerous to travel, when there were robbers on the road, and they had a lot of money.  So it was not an easy trip.  But there was something about that star that told them they had to follow it, they had to seek out whatever it was that it pointed to.  Something about that new light in the sky.

Finally they come to Jerusalem and they meet Herod.  Unlike the stereotypes of men today, they did ask for directions.  And they got good directions to the right town to go to.  And they went and they came to the home of Joseph and Mary.  Yes, Matthew does not indicate that it was a stable; this was their home.  Jesus was not an infant in a manger.  He was probably a couple of years old by this time.  But they went to their home and so they went to the child and they saw something in this child, something about this child that they knew that this was what they had been seeking for.  This child was what they had been searching the skies for.  This child was what their hearts yearned for.  And so they paid him homage, their worship, and they left their gifts, great gifts.

The first gift was the gift of gold, and gold represents kingdom and royalty.  And gold is worth a lot of money.  And gold, even in our culture right now, represents riches and money.  If you tell somebody, “I’ve got a lot of gold,” well that means he’s rich.  I’m going for the gold.  I’m going for the most.  It represents that they offered that which made them comfortable.  They offered Christ the things of the world, their material life.

The second thing they offered was frankincense.  Frankincense is – there’s a tree in Arabia that if you cut it, it’s like how you get maple syrup.  Well you would cut a tree and instead of maple syrup, this ooze that would come out would dry and it would be frankincense.  And then you would cut it off the tree and burn it and it makes a beautiful smell.  So they brought frankincense, which was also extraordinarily valuable, and at that time period was used as a major trading item.  It was quite literally worth its weight in gold at that time.

And frankincense is usually talked about as representing worship, because they burned frankincense, they burned incense in the temple of God.  All the different worshippers, it didn’t matter what God you were worshipping, you would burn incense.  And there’s a place in the Psalms that says, “May our prayers be like incense and lifted up to you.”  So the incense represented worship, prayer.  It represented their spiritual life.

And then there was the myrrh.  And if you were reading the words when we sang the first song, that third verse that talks about myrrh is one of the most intense verses in all our hymnody.  It talks of the pain and the suffering and the hurt and the sacrifice and the death of the child.  We don’t think of that as being part of our Christmas carols, but it is.  Because myrrh was used for embalming; it preserved the body.  And so it is generally traditionally to see the myrrh as looking ahead to Jesus’ crucifixion, to his suffering.  But myrrh also is used in healing ointments.  It was put with other oils on wounds or pain.  In fact, there was myrrh in the wine that was offered Jesus on the cross because it was a painkiller.  So it also has medicinal quality. 

So the Magi laid before the Christ child their pain and their suffering, their death, and their life. Then they got up and headed home.  But they weren’t the same as they were when they came.  So they couldn’t possibly go back by the same road that they had come.  They had to go back a different way.  Life had changed.  Everything changed with that encounter.

These Magi, these wise ones, represent all seekers, all people who are seeking God.  Because part of the idea of Epiphany is that Christ was made known to all people; not just to Christians, not to just the Jews, to all people.  The manifestation of God to humanity.  And so the wise ones represent everybody who is seeking, everybody who has that sense that there’s got to be something more.  Some people may actively be seeking God, and they’ll say, “I’m seeking God.”  But there are a lot of people in this world today who say they are just seeking, there has to be something more. 

Sometimes we start seeking and searching when things are really tough, when the world is falling apart, when we’ve got an illness, when we’re in grief, when we’re recovering from addiction, when we’re at our bottom and we realize there’s got to be more to life than this.  And it leads us to seek.

Some people start seeking when they reach the epitome, when they’ve accomplished all their goals, when they’ve gotten the job that they were seeking for, when they now have the house and the car and the family and the kids and everything that society told them that if they got those then they’d be happy.  And they realize that there’s still something missing, and they begin seeking, looking, wondering.  All of us here have undoubtedly had a time in our lives when we were seekers, when we were looking for something more.  The Magi looked and they saw a light.

Think back for yourself when you might have been seeking.  What was the little light that you saw?  Did you read a book?  Did you talk to a friend?  Did you go to a meeting?  Did you have an “epiphany” in nature?  What was the light?  What was the star?  What was that little something, or big dramatic something, that told you, “I’ve got to follow that.  I’ve got to find out where that’s going to lead me to”? 

Now it could be a very long and complicated journey that goes in many directions.  My seeking took me to yoga philosophy and all kinds of Eastern traditions before coming back around and finding Christ again.  The journey is not always a straight line; it can go across deserts, through dark places, sometimes you can lose sight of the star and not know if it’s there at all.  And along the way each one of us has gotten help.  We can’t make that journey alone.  We have to ask for guidance.  It might have been parents, it might have been friends, it might have been a book, but somebody wrote that book, so that person who wrote that book, or the Bible, that person helped you, guided you.  We have to be willing to go to even Herod and ask for directions and get guidance and support and help.

And then eventually, eventually, if we keep putting one foot in front of the other… There’s a thing called a labyrinth, some of you may be familiar with it. There are a number of them around the country. It looks like a maze, but it’s not a maze, because there are no dead ends.  It winds around, but if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, it eventually leads to the center.  You may think you’re going way in the wrong direction, but all you need to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other.  And if you keep putting one foot in front of the other and following whatever that light is that is calling you, eventually you may find for yourself the Christ child. 

You may finally encounter Christ.  You may encounter Christ in a song, on the beach, at church, who knows?  Who knows when Christ will make Christ’s self known?  But you will encounter Christ.  And it’s at that moment, at that moment when you have the most important decision of your life to make, because you can either bow down and worship, like the wise ones, or you can react in fear, like Herod.

The king was afraid.  The king was afraid because here was another king.  And of course Herod wasn’t a real king; he had no real power.  He was a puppet of the Romans.  He didn’t even have the bloodlines of a king, but he saw himself as a king, and a real king terrified him.  Because a real king would mean that Herod was no longer in control, it was no longer about him.  He wouldn’t be in charge anymore. 

And when we encounter Christ, when we encounter the true king, our egos are terrified, because if we really worship Christ, we’re not in charge anymore.  It’s not about me and I anymore, and that can be pretty terrifying.  But if we can get past our fear and we can worship.

What we’re asked to do is to offer to the Christ child our gold, the material world, the focus on things, the focus on security, and give that to Christ.  All our concerns about finances and security and all those fears, to hand them over to Christ.  And we’re asked to give Christ frankincense; our worship, our prayers, our spiritual selves, our devotion.  And we’re asked to give Christ our myrrh; our pain and our sorrows and our heartbreak and our suffering and our very lives.  And Christ will accept these gifts.  And once we’ve handed over our gold, then it’s up to Christ to take care of our needs.  And when we’ve handed over our worship then we can feel the joy of that relationship.  And when we hand over our lives and we hand over our suffering and our pain and our sorrow, the myrrh becomes the healing balm in Christ’s loving arms.

And of course, once we’ve made that choice and offered our lives to Christ, we can’t go back by the same road we came.  We’re not the same person.  The rest of our lives go in a totally different direction.  Oh, nobody outside might notice, but inside we know; we make different choices, we take different paths.  Our life is transformed when we finally find that which we seek, that which our deepest soul seeks, or actually once that which we seek has found us.  Amen.