Services Schedule:
Sunday Jan, 11, 10am Morning Prayer
Sunday Jan, 18, 10am, The Rev. Don Smith, Holy Eucharist, followed by annual meeting in Parish House
Sunday Jan 25, 10am, Morning Prayer
Sunday Feb 1, 10am, Morning Prayer with distribution of communion, Deacon Bette Kauffman
Deacon Bette's Homily given Jan 4th:
What could possibly go wrong? (Matthew 2:1-12)
I’m pretty taken by the story of the wisemen. Epiphany is Tuesday and it’s one of
my fave holidays of the church year. I love 12 th Night parties and have thrown a
couple myself.
One of the things that fascinates me about the story is, how did those 3 guys
prepare for what must have been an insanely risky, unpredictable journey….
without so much as an accurate map of where they might be going!
I like to travel but I plan my travel pretty carefully. Contemporary technology
makes it so much easier. And more predictable. Neverthelss, I am at this moment
on my way home—after my time with you folks—at the end of a week-long
journey that was fun and rewarding, but that also threw several unexpected and
rather unpleasant, costly turns into my lap.
[Details of story not necessary, but basically, car trouble in Denham Springs, no
local part available; rented a car to continue on to Ocean Springs after visiting my
kids, but… put scratches on the rental car in OS… still driving the rental… must
return to DH this week to turn in rental and retrieve my car.]
When I think about the wisemen preparing for their journey, I envision them
poring over maps and charts and esoteric scrolls and struggling to understand
ancient predictions and cyphers and symbols. Then spending days gathering
supplies for a trek by camel from who knows where across deserts, mountains and
plains, encountering who knows what along the way… toward a single star in a
vast heaven of stars!
I tend to believe in studying and planning and testing theories. I love maps and
charts and telescopes—extensions of the human brain. Yet the journey of the wise
men was first and foremost a journey of faith.
Study, planning and preparation give an illusion of control, yet the wise men
embarked into the unknown, across uncharted territory, from one watering site to
another, encountering travelers of unknown origins and intentions along the way.
It took something other than wisdom to overcome fatigue, boredom and second
thoughts on such a journey. We call them wise men, but given the hazards of travel
in ancient times and the fact of a guiding star that must have been invisible in the
day time, how “wise” could they have been? Not very, if you ask me! It was a
journey of faith.
But here’s a startling thought: If it weren’t for the wise men, Christmas might
mean nothing to us!
Today we celebrate Epiphany. We have all heard many times that “epiphany”
means “to show forth” or “to bring to light” or “to manifest.”
Being a visual thinker myself, I just imagine what we all have seen in hundreds of
cartoons: a light bulb going on over someone’s head!
Today, the light bulb going on over our heads is an important step in our journey
from the manger to a more grown-up understanding of Incarnation.
In Matthew’s Gospel, that more grown-up understanding is represented by the wise
men from the east, who show up in Nazareth to worship the baby Jesus and give
him gifts.
Tradition has it.., and this is important because we actually know very little about
this event from an historical point of view. So, tradition has it that one of these
gentlemen was Asian, one African and one Caucasian, and that is how they are
depicted in countless artistic renditions of the story.
All Matthew tells us is that they were gentiles from “the East,” a general reference
to all those mysterious, far-off lands and peoples known primarily to Jews like
Matthew as “not Jews.” And that of course is central to their importance to us.
We Christians have a strong tendency to want to forget that Jesus was born, lived
and died a devout Jew, never once giving any indication he intended to or thought
he was starting a new religion.
Thankfully, Matthew, but only Matthew, for this story does not appear in the other
Gospels. Thankfully Matthew tells us with this story that Jesus is for us, too. And
not just for us, but also for all the peoples of the world, and equally so.
We tend to think the concept of “diversity” was invented in the 20 th Century as a
tool of “political correctness.” We would be wrong. Matthew and early Christians
wrote and interpreted these stories about Jesus were there way ahead of us.
Here’s another slightly shocking thing about this story. Matthew calls these guys
“wise men,” which we often translate to “kings,” as in the hymn, or “Magi,” as in
the story, but in fact a better translation might well be “nerd or “psychic”!
We know they were people who believed that the positions and alignments of stars
and planets at the moment of a person’s birth were important indicators of who that
person was and how they mattered. Today we call such people astrologers and they
write horoscopes for mass media!
Of course, today we also have astronomers—the academic and scientific
descendants of the wise men. But the distinction between astrology and astronomy
is pretty much a modern invention. Two thousand years ago, they were largely
indistinguishable.
My point is that the meaning of this story of the wise men is the meaning given by
humans struggling to express and explain the miracle that God loves us enough to
live and die with us. That’s Incarnation.
All of us need to learn what the wise men have to teach about daring to march into
unknown territory, outside of our social and cultural and religious comfort zones.
We need to learn from them to go the distance and keep the faith, beyond what is
“perfectly safe” and makes “perfect sense.”
On any given day, we can wake up in the morning and choose—even when we
don’t particularly feel like it and when the world seems devoid of goodness, not to
mention angels and dazzling light—to journey toward God that day.
And Jesus used his short time on earth to show us how. He was “the Incarnation.”
But let us not trap incarnation in history. Jesus showed us how to practice
incarnation, how to live the love that put him here.
And there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to spread it around—back to God
and our neighbors—all of our neighbors, without condition—as ourselves.
AMEN
