Epiphany 2022
Church of St. John the Evangelist, Kitchener
Arise! Shine: your light has come!
Into the darkness of these months of January and February, some of us make our first tentative steps into a new year trying on optimism like a still-new Christmas gift sweater that doesn’t quite fit: surely 2022 can be better. But the sweater scratches a bit. My own soul finds it a challenge lift my sights to a hopeful new when we’re plunging into another dark Ontario winter.
In the mixture of stresses and weirdness of pandemic time I now find myself grateful that we have in this bleak mid-winter a long long Epiphany season to carry the Christ light for us for these full two, depressing-for-many, months. (Hint: Ash Wednesday isn’t until March 2 this year).
When I was a kid here, my parents Terry and Eleanor used to throw an Epiphany party each year – a social highlight for the St. John’s choir, if I remember correctly – each Epiphany Sunday, after the morning service and before Evensong (which, following an afternoon of generous libations was always a bit, shall we say, a somewhat liquid liturgy, with hearts well warmed by mulled wine). With some fun cultural elements added to it – like the Gateau des Trois Rois – Three Kings’ Cake – the day of Epiphany was seared into the ritual patterns of my childhood and adolescence. There was an exceptional Lightness and Joy to the day, and then it seemed we were submerged back into the ordinary slush and freezing rain and damp cold of normalcy. Vestments turn too quickly it seems from a few days of dazzling white and gold to the green or Ordinary time and that sometimes seems a cruel trick as we sit here waiting for the real green of spring.
Epiphanytide sits in a strange place between the two “High” seasons of Advent and Lent that we tend to think about in terms of journeys, and it can be its own special gift and journey: it’s the gift of God’s Light and Love and Hope that we anticipated all Advent long, and received days ago at Christmas and now it abides with us, not just the Star of Bethlehem shining, but Christ’s own light with us. Epiphany, perhaps, can be a season that holds the Light for us when we are at our most vulnerable in terms of our own capacity to behold the light or to be light for others.
We are invited through the Scriptures in liturgy these weeks of Epiphany to encounter Christ in freshly human and freshly divine ways, to meet him again as an infant, as a child, as one coming to be baptised, and beginning his witness to God’s transforming love.
And it begins with a particular encounter of strangers. We know very little about the Magi, though what bits we can reasonably surmise from the biblical account and historical context paints a story that doesn’t fit prettily contained in a Christmas ornament. And as our Rector pointed out in a Christmas message a few weeks ago, they don’t belong, historically, in a nativity set, but come along at least two years later.
We’ve been duped into thinking they fit into a lovely pastoral scene with shepherds and angels and farm animals and a star and a manger and all is hush and silent. The scene was probably messier and noisier and infinitely more interesting.
I invite you to picture what sort of entourage would have been necessary for these travelling emissaries. There could have been nothing quiet about their arrival in the area. Enough tents and food supplies and assistants and guards and servants to make a long desert journey. Here were Persians, perhaps Zoroastrian priests, sages, wise men who may have served as counsellors the royal courts and, as such, it’s not unlikely that they were on a diplomatic mission in all honestly and good intentions to pay homage to a new king of the Jews.
And they choose to go to the court of Herod, not to the leaders of the Jews. Politically astute. Being political neighbours to Empire means being careful with how you trod in their territory. Best to obey the rules! And Herod, remember, was like a governor general, an imposed imperial ruler servant to Caesar and his version of holding the peace & increasing the wealth for Caesar meant a brutal colonial rule where crucifixions were a daily occurrence and were only one form of state-sanctioned murder.
These Persian Zoroastrian Sages, these foreigners never before seen in a backwater place like Bethlehem… well, it would have been not just something to cause a buzz, but it was likely to have been terrifying – as the rule for colonized peoples is to lay low and live in quiet, not to draw any attention of powerful people your way. In fact, there’s actually a miracle here that Mary and Joseph risk opening their door, but they do. Mary and Joseph were taught by their tradition to welcome strangers with generous hospitality because they may be angels, may be emissaries of God. And their gift of holy hospitality to strangers creates a sacred context of encounter and exchange of gifts as they receive the prophetic symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh and the homage of the Magi. Expecting a King, the Magi receive the hospitality of a tradesman, his wife and toddler and in the dust of a poor family’s hearth – not in the courts of Herod – they encounter the God of the Universe. Something happens in that mysterious and profoundly holy encounter that changes them, hugely, decisively.
Whatever they have encountered makes them want to protect the vulnerable, tender, loving, precious, holy thing they have come upon, makes them open to hearing mysterious direction from God to go home by another route, and gives them enough courage to risk the ire and repercussions of Herod, whose killing machine was close on their heels.
The wise men, these religious and political and cultural foreigners do the right things for honourable reasons and still are caught up in the political power machinations of a brutal, murdering, colonial ruler serving his own greedy ambitions within the Empire. Whatever was going on here in the contrast between the destructive force and hubris of empire and the tender, loving, small, vulnerable presence of God changed them. The encounter with God in this strange, poor place shocked their expectations and awakened in them a realignment of their orientation.
As we make our way to Christ anew this Epiphany, what is waiting for us under the bright burning of his Star-Light? What waits to be revealed to us in the vulnerable and tender places in our lives, in our neighbourhoods? What within the life of this community here at St. John’s is the tender, beautiful, new thing that God is birthing here in our midst that requires our protection, our work of nurturing and raising well?
I started hanging out here in person back when St John’s was just beginning the fall stewardship campaign and I have to say that the three weeks of reflections – with deep thanks to the Wardens, James, Simon, Mohan and others in the Stewardship group – those reflections spoke to me of the ways in which this community has learned to look for God in the neighbourhood, to pay attention to where love calls us out to be God’s hands and feet, as Desmond Tutu might remind us, with that gleeful smile of his that could and did, literally, disarm the forces of Empire by its focus on what, right here, and right now, is the work of God’s love awaiting us. I saw a glimmer of that here, and it pulled me in, as a sign of Christ’s light. You might not think you’re disarming the forces of evil on a grand scale when you put a picnic table out on the lawn and make an outdoor living space for those who otherwise have none, but it’s all part of the same story of God’s love. Arise! Shine: Our Light has come and we can shine it in healing ways in and from this place.
As we make ourselves to Christ anew this Epiphany, we might want to ask ourselves: what powers are being revealed by the power of God’s Light for the delusions and lies that they are? Like glittering prizes they dazzle like the stars in the sky but the more possessions and shiny accumulations
The Light of Christ also unmasks illusions, revealing so much of the powerful forces around us to be not the saviours or the solutions to our frustrations that they purport to be. I’m thinking of the powers that work to persuade us that we are not enough, not wealthy enough, not secure enough, not competitive enough, and that the way to satisfaction is to climb over everyone else – these powerful lies that work their way into our lives and can have the effect of colonizing our time and attention, distracting from what actually nurtures flourishing life.
Thanks be to God we’re not stuck on our own trying to navigate by the stars and searching amongst the many bright shining things in our dark winter nights for what might guide us – we have been given the Christ light already. Arise! Shine: Our Light has come. Jesus takes the place of the star of Bethlehem as the Brightest and Best of the Stars of the Morning, and calls us into a heavenly constellation in which we take our places as bearers of God’s image and Christ’s light and the Holy Spirit’s comfort in each encounter awaiting us.
May we here in our liturgies and in the ways we care for one another and for the world around us, in our life as community may we help each other to know that Christ light, and to carry it together into our neighbourhoods; to illuminate for us those who are hurting, and the needs that we can fill; to shine attentive care on the tender new ideas for ministry in this place that need nurturing; and to warm the vulnerable and give protection. To encourage musicians finding their voices anew and to support artists working out their vision; to offer deep listening to those needing to talk out their lives to find vocation and meaning; to help all who are learning what is needed to navigate and to thrive in the sometimes difficult stuff of daily life.
May we make these encounters with Christ in our lives real, as real as they were for the Magi and their strange entourage coming face to face with the true God in what they saw in this vulnerable young family. May we like the Magi receive a reorientation of our expectations and allegiances, and travel home a different way perhaps a little wiser to the ways of empire. May we today ponder the gifts given to us as we lay our offerings of praise and thanksgiving at the feet of a tender, holy family whose hospitality has shown us the face of God.
Arise! Shine! Your light has come. Thanks be to God.
The Reverend Dr. Preston Parsons