The Feast of the Epiphany

Today is Epiphany--the Magi and the gifts.

Thought I'd share my sermon from yesterday at St. James, Higganum.

Gospel Matthew 2/1-12

"This great day, I met them on their way, Three Kings of East upon their fine horses riding.
This great day, I met them on their way. Three Kings of East with all their fine array."

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany. We celebrate it today by greeting the Three Kings of East.

A dream told them not to go back to Herod after they found The Child. And if we read further in Matthew we would see that a dream told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and go to Egypt. The Magi 'went home by another road' and Joseph went to Egypt. There are dreams aplenty these holy days.

The Magi were most probably astrologers and philosophers in Persia. When they saw the Star they had been waiting for, they had to travel all of what we call the Middle East to reach Israel. So Jesus was a totter, at least by the time they got there.

If we read even further in Matthew, we would discover that Herod ordered the slaughter of all the male children under two after the wise men did not come back to him to tell them they'd found the Child. That is the Holy Day we call the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a horrible day of mourning and unimaginable suffering.

I used to have a big, tan Webster's unabridged dictionary. It was about the size of a pickup truck. And once I looked up the definition of 'epiphany'. I've never forgotten it. An Epiphany, according to that dictionary, was "a sudden, intuitive understanding of the deep-down meaning of things, usually caused by what is common, ordinary and day-to-day".

That definition is remarkable to me. But, oh, so true....

The Magi were wondrous and mysterious. The names we've given them: Gaspar, Melichior, Baltazar--only add to their strangeness.

They were men of authority and power. When they arrived in Jerusalem, they asked to see the King and Herod granted them an audience.The Magi were regal--they could talk to Kings.

Imagine how it must have been when they arrived in Bethlehem. Bethlehem, even today, is a 'half-horse town'. In the first century it was even humbler. The people must have come out to see these strange and exotic strangers from half-a-world away.

And they had come to find a King, a Child living in splendor surrounded by servants in a palace. Instead, beneath the Star, they found a simple home, probably only one room, and a teen-age mother with her small Child. They might have turned back, thinking they had come in vain. But they had an Epiphany--a sudden, intuitive understanding of the deep-down meaning of things--and they knelt down before that humble Child and gave their rich gifts.

We need to have our eyes wide open all the time. We need open ears and open hearts to see the un-concealing of the Holy in the ordinary and commonplace and day-to-day.

We spent the first part of this week in Baltimore with our three grandchildren. Tegan is four years old. I tell people there are hurricanes and tornadoes and Tegan. She if a force of Nature. She was tearing around the house, running and yelling and she stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at me. "I love you, grandpa," she said and then she was off again, running as hard as she could.

A child, simply being a child, something ordinary and as it should be, and in that moment I had a sudden, intuitive understanding of the deep-down meaning of life. The common and day-to-day love of a child. An Epiphany for me.

So, my prayer for you and me is that we keep our eyes and ears and hearts wide open in the days to come so that we might find the miracle and wonder of the deep-down meaning of things, the unconcealing of the Holy, in what is ordinary and commonplace and day-to-day.

Just that. May you have Epiphanies of what is Holy every day, every moment, on and on....

Amen