A Homily by the Rev. Frederick Erickson, Parish Deacon, given at St. Mary in Palms, January 2003
Together with Easter and Pentecost the Feast of the Epiphany is among the oldest and most important of the Christian festivals--it was celebrated as a holy day hundreds of years before Christmas was. That is because the message of Epiphany was so important to the early Church. This message is threefold--first, the baby Jesus's true identity is as Royal Ruler of God's Reign--Jesus is the child of God who will die for God's people. Second, the love, justice, and mercy of God--the active presence of God in the world that comes within God's reign--belongs to everyone on earth. God has reached out in self-revelation to all of humanity, not just to one ethnic group with one language and culture. Third, this self-revelation of God continues to be communicated in new ways to each new generation of Christian believers.
The first part of the message of Epiphany is symbolized in the three gifts brought by the Wise ones--gold to indicate Jesus's royalty, frankincense to indicate His divinity, and myrrh (an embalming spice) to indicate His death. The second part of the message is symbolized in the persons of the three Wise ones themselves. According to tradition their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Caspar was shown in pictures as a Caucasian, Melchior as a middle-Easterner (and later as East Asian), and Balthazar as an African Negro. Just as in the story of the Garden of Eden it took the creation of both a man and a woman to show the image of God fully, so in this story of a new beginning for humanity it takes the presence of a representative of each of our main races to show humanity as a whole, drawn by a marvelous light to a particular baby. God's love comes to earth for the Gentiles too--this was so important a story for the Gentile converts in the the early Church precisely because they came to the Church as outsiders.
In ordinary talk currently we use the word "Epiphany" in only half of its full meaning. "I had an Epiphany," we say, meaning that we had a new insight about something important--something we hadn't realized before. There is something to this personalizing, "I had an Epiphany," as we will see in a moment. But it's also ego-centric--putting the primary focus on "me" and what I see and understand, in a "me-oriented" culture. Very Southern Californian.
The word "epiphany" focuses most basically not on the perceiver of insight but on the source of communication of insight. It means the manifestation of a meaning by an object or event out toward the perceiver--"epi" in Greek is a particle that means "out and away" and "phanein" means appearance or manifestation. So the "Epiphany" in today's story is Jesus Himself--the revelation of Who He truly is, as indicated by the three gifts and the three racially differing persons of the givers. Later in this season other true special meanings about Jesus will be shown--in His Baptism, in the beginning of His ministry as a prophet and teacher, in His first miracles. The Epiphanies--in the sense of manifestations about Jesus--keep happening in the Gospel stories throughout this whole season. It is God Who, in self-revealing, is showing what is most true about God's self and purposes. God is being Epiphany again and again in the Gospel stories.
Yet Epiphany also involves recognition in the eye of the beholder, and it is the perceiver's side of the meaning-making that is emphasized in our modern saying "I had an Epiphany." It takes a gift of insight to see what is true about God's presence and action in the world. It is easy to miss the signs that point to the truth. Here is what a great preacher said about that in the 5th Century--St. Peter Chrysologus, Bishop of Ravenna, in a sermon on this feast day:
"Today the Magi see clearly, in swaddling clothes, the one they have long awaited as he lay hidden among the stars. Today the Magi gaze in deep wonder at what they see: heaven on earth, earth in heaven, humankind in God, God in human flesh, one whom the whole universe cannot contain now enclosed in a tiny body. As they look, they believe and do not question, as their symbolic gifts bear witness: incense for God, gold for a king, myrrh for one who is to die. So the Gentiles, who were the last, become the first; the faith of the Magi is the first fruits of the belief of the Gentiles." (Peter Chrysologus, Sermon, in J. Robert Wright, Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church. New York: The Church Hymnal Corporation, p. 49.)At Epiphany it was the most foreign ones who had been traveling in search of God's purposes--the despised outsiders--who, inspired by God's grace were able to see the truth about this baby, just as on Christmas night it had been the very poorest of Jesus's own people--the despised shepherds--who, informed by the angel's announcement, came to the stable and were able to recognize this same improbable truth about a homeless child in a manger. The perceiver's view--the lenses through which the perceiver makes sense-- as inspired by God, are a part of the Epiphany transaction between God and humans. Think of how different was the wholly human view of Herod--looking through the lenses of the power and wealth he possessed in a fragile alliance with the Romans, just hearing about the baby all he could see was politics--a threat to his position. His reaction was violence rather than worship. At a word he could unleash military force and that's what he did. Had he succeeded in his unilateral pre-emptive strike against rebellion he would have brought the gift of death to the child--skip the gold and incense, cut to the myrrh. What about the guests in the inn--did they see God's Epiphany? No, warm in front of the fire, filled with the innkeeper's good wine and lamb stew, they didn't pay any attention to the family with the new baby who were camping out in the stable. They were in town on business, to pay their census tax and stay right with Caesar. And so, for different reasons than King Herod's they too were blind to the Epiphany that had just happened.
God's Epiphanies, God's self-revelations are gentle, subtle, and often ambiguous. To see their signs and interpret them rightly requires an insight which is itself a gift from God. The Epiphanies of God are easy to miss. AND they didn't stop at the end of today's Story, or at the end of the Gospels, or even at the end of the Bible. They are continuing today among us. Even more profoundly, as those who are Baptized, you and I are not only the perceivers of Jesus's Epiphanies around us, WE ARE EPIPHANIES OURSELVES. The third message of Epiphany is that we are the bearers of Jesus's life in this place and time--we are senders of the signals of Epiphany as well as perceivers of them.
The capacities to see and to be Epiphany, like those of our call to Baptized ministry more generally, are very specific to who we are and what we have experienced. Here are a few sources of Epiphanies for me: the religious poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, both priests of the 17th Century Church of England, that I began to read as a freshman in college and still read again and again; J. D. Salinger's early 1960's novel Franny and Zooey which I used to re-read; the lives and works of Ghandi and of Martin Luther King--I recognized King as a prophet in the tradition of Amos and Jesus as he called on America to live up to its ideals, and marching with him three times I felt I was seeing God's will alive and active in my own day.
There was also a big Epiphany in my childhood. For a few years during Lent my parents and I ate a very simple meal on Wednesday nights, put the money we saved on the cost of that meal in a little paper-box bank, and brought the money to church at Easter to give for those who were hungry. We had corn meal mush one week, creamed eggs on toast on another, vegetable soup with whole wheat bread. In my body I was connecting with those who didn't have enough food. My parents were being for me an Epiphany--in their active concern for hungry people--walking the walk as well as talking the talk--they were showing me God's love and God's will. I know that the way I have tried to live my life as an adult has been powerfully led by those Wednesday night meals in those Lents of my childhood--certainly those meals helped me recognize Dr. King when I saw him firsthand and they have helped form me as a scholar and teacher and deacon.
For other people Epiphany times appear in sunsets, but although I love sunsets they aren't quite my thing as Epiphany experiences (although I can almost get there in a grove of pine trees). What about each of you? Where have your Epiphanies come? If you are retired and live alone, you have special access to Epiphanies that remain hidden to those who are younger and distracted by busy-ness. If you are exhausted at the end of a work day, or if you have the energy and metabolism of a teenager or grade schooler--in each of those circumstances you have special access to Epiphanies. If you have had a lot of formal education or you didn't graduate from high school, there are Epiphanies of God's being, will, and purpose waiting for you to see and hear. And there are Epiphanies for you to be for others, exactly because of who you are.
In presenting us with Epiphanies and giving us the grace to recognize them, to share our insights with one another as members of the Body of Christ, and to be Epiphanies ourselves, God asks nothing less of us than that we join with God as co-creators and as co-authors of the greatest of all Stories--it is our responsibility to read the signs of our own times in and through the circumstances of our own lives and to continue the Story of salvation here and now. That Story didn't stop with the Bible, and if we don't continue it and add to it presently, in recognition and in action, it will cease to live. It will become just a museum memory. I hope you can now see why it is essential--our duty and privilege as the Baptized--to add today in our offertory to the gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh from today's Gospel Story--joining with the wise Magi we must bring to the creche before this altar the gifts of cans of peaches and beans and packages of white socks that belong to the baby Jesus here and now, to the child born homeless and hungry this year in Los Angeles. The peaches and beans and socks add to a living Story that continues to grow. As the seasons of Epiphany and Lent unfold this year let us pray that God will prevent our blindness and inattention, like that of King Herod and the comfortable residents of the inn in Bethlehem--so that we will not miss the new Epiphanies God is continually placing around us as self-revelation--gentle, subtle, ambiguous Epiphanies--waiting for our responses of awareness and action in the signs of our own times.