A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

January 8, 2006 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Seeing the Mystery

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 60:1–6
Ephesians 3:1–12
Matthew 2:1–12

“. . . to make everyone see what is the plan
of the mystery hidden for ages . . .”

Ephesians 3:9 (NRSV)

Every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth,
for Epiphany is manifestation. Every manifestation of Christ to the world,
to the Church, to a particular soul is an Epiphany, a Christmas day.

John Donne

Still Christmas here at Fourth Presbyterian Church as you can see—we’re holding on to the season as long as we can. The foliage is still in the chancel, and our Christmas banners are still waving. Everyone else has moved on, and I’m sure the shops are all storing—I don’t know what’s next—Valentine’s Day cards or something like that. But it is still Christmas here. And that’s good, because it is a recognition that Christmas is not a day but a season, a season that begins in the church’s year on Christmas Day and in many senses culminates at what we call “The Feast of the Epiphany”—epiphany, a Greek word, meaning manifestation or appearance and referring today particularly to the story of the visit of the wise men to the newborn child in Bethlehem.

I have my favorite email of the week to share with you. It was sent to me as a link to an Anglican website. This is “Ideas for Celebrating Epiphany” and comes from an Anglican church in Australia. Here’s one suggestion: “Picking up on the connection of Epiphany with the baptism of our Lord, we always eat lots of seafood at our epiphany parties.” I don’t know where they get the seafood piece from. Then they say, “If we hold the party where there’s a swimming pool, we have swimming contests culminating in the traditional Greek contest of the ‘Recovery of the Cross.’” You couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s amazing. This is what happens: “The senior ecclesiastic present”—don’t you love Anglicans—“The senior ecclesiastic present throws a cross into a pool and the contestants all go in and see who can retrieve it and return it to the senior cleric.” For older or adult people it’s a metal cross, so you dive in to get it, but for younger contestants it’s wooden so you just swim towards it and get it. And when you come back, “the winners are crowned and treated like kings”—so you get the kings in there. And then this Anglican minister goes on to say, “I should mention that we also bless the water, pray for all that make their livings from the waters and thank God for our baptisms.” So there you go: you get it all at once—those Anglicans in Australia!

Actually I thought it would be a great idea to start that tradition here, and rather like Easter morning, we could all go down to Oak Street Beach together on Epiphany and have cold shrimp and frozen crosses for Jesus. However, wisely the writer of this piece on the website has a caveat at the end: “It occurs to me that it would be difficult to do all of this in places where outdoor water is frozen at this time of year.” So at least he was thinking about us up here in the frozen north.

We don’t really have many traditions around Epiphany because as Presbyterians we are people who are only recently discovering many of the ancient traditions of the church. In our house, the only tradition is an occasional rendering of

We three kings of Orient are;
tried to smoke a rubber cigar.
It was loaded, we exploded;
now there are only two of us left.

I spent a little time in Europe a few weeks ago, and in many parts of Europe where the Catholic church was strong and continues to be strong and where there were also Eastern Christian influences, the stories around Epiphany are very important. There’s a great tradition in some parts for children to dress up and go around their town or their village and, almost like on our Halloween, they collect candies and chocolates and goodies. Where they receive hospitality, they will chalk up on the door or on the wall 20 C+M+B 06—the numbers standing for the year; the letters standing for Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, the names tradition gave to the wise men in the story. The chalk stands as a kind of a good luck charm or a blessing on the house, and even throughout the year you’ll find those letters still up. People don’t wash them off or anything like that.

I think for us in the Western European tradition, it has been more through art and poetry that the Epiphany story has been told. Every art gallery worth its salt has a smattering of paintings by old European masters entitled Homage of the Kings or Adoration of the Magi. For some reason it seems that for many modern twentieth-century poets this story had a particular meaning around it.

Sylvia Plath wrote a darkly funny poem called Magi in which she says, “They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.” A number of you, I’m sure, will know T. S. Eliot’s haunting poem about conversion, about his conversion to Christianity, in which the journey of the Magi is described in the voice of one of the wise men:

A cold coming we had of it
just the worst time of the year
for a journey and such a long journey:
the ways deep and the weather sharp,
the very dead of winter.

And an extraordinary poem, The Three Magi, which I came across recently by Stanislaw Baranczak, a Polish poet who was writing about the communist years in Poland, years of totalitarianism and oppression. In his poem, the three magi represent secret policemen who come to arrest the person whose voice is the poet:

The star of an ID
will flash before your eyes . . .
the gold of their watches will glitter . . .
the smoke from their cigarettes
will fill the room with a fragrance like incense . . .

“All that’s missing is myrrh,” says the poet, until at the end as he’s being taken away in the black Fiat car: he realizes that the myrrh is the suffering he will undergo at the hands of the state. It’s almost as if the artists and poets act like the wise men of our story in that they are helplessly drawn to this Epiphany story as we are, like the wise men searching, seeking for meaning in the midst of mystery.

Of course it is important as we reflect on some of these artistic and poetic accretions to the story that we don’t lose sight of the text. One important piece is to remind ourselves what’s not there in Matthew’s story: there’s no manger or stable or shepherds or heavenly hosts singing. That’s in Luke’s story. Nor are the journeying gift-bringers kings. They’re wise men, magi in the Greek, what the poet U. A. Fanthorpe calls “members of an obscure Persian sect.” And for that matter, we are not told how many of them there are in the text, only that the three gifts were given, and in tradition that moved to there being three gift bringers.

Matthew’s story is a complex drama, which culminates in the tragic outcome of the massacre of the innocent children of Bethlehem by Herod as he seeks to get rid of this possible usurper. That may help us as a way into the story.

The story of Epiphany is not about three kings but about two kings and two kingdoms: the corrupt, murderous, earthbound kingship of Herod and the humble, loving, world-changing, divine kingship of Jesus, the Christ, the anointed One. Biblical scholar Eugene Boring puts it like this in his commentary: “Herod represents the resistance of this world to the divine kingship represented by Jesus.” We see that in the story as death is wrought by Herod. Boring goes on to maintain that this conflict between the two kings dominates the whole of Matthew’s Gospel; it’s a way of reading the whole of Matthew’s Gospel. I might even go further and say that that conflict of the kings of the earth and the king of heaven is a dominating theme of all our journeys to discipleship as we seek faithfully to follow Christ. And the wise men are our exemplars in this, because they are primarily seers: they see the star at its rising; they recognize, they see the kingship of the little child born in this marginal town to a young peasant woman. One of the eighteenth-century Hasidic Jewish rabbis, Nachman of Breslov, once said, “For the true believer, believing is seeing.” Not seeing as in just observing or looking, but that special insight that George MacLeod of the Iona Community called “seeing with the eye of faith.”

A very helpful strong contemporary theologian named Tara Lennon, a United Church of Christ minister and writer, talks about this new way of seeing in the Epiphany stories. She writes, “Our new awareness of ‘Emmanuel,’ of ‘God with us,’ changes forever not just what we see but how we see.” And that is part of that transformation, that gift of faith. She goes on: “Over the long sweep of history there have been millions of us who have believed and continue to believe that there is a God who never lets us go and wants us to never let go. A God who doesn’t just share power but insists that we find—we discover our own power in this stuff of our lives.”

I put a quotation on the front of your bulletin this morning for reflection. It’s from John Donne, the great poet. This is from one of Donne’s sermons for Epiphany: “Every manifestation of Christ to the world or to the church or to a particular soul is an Epiphany, a Christmas Day.” There’s an old rock song from the seventies that is played all the time in Britain around Christmas, “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” by Slade—terrible song but here is Donne saying it can be Christmas every day.

I’ve got a friend, a young man, who’s been having a hard time in his life for a while. He has been struggling with many aspects of life and work, at times finding himself in the depths of hopelessness. We were talking recently, and he shared with me that something has changed in his life. He said, “I was lying awake one night in the wee small hours unable to sleep, feeling hopeless, and then I realized something, almost as if a voice had spoken to me that said, “There is no hope except for the free grace and reconciling love of Jesus Christ.”

There is no hope except for the free grace and reconciling love of Jesus Christ. That has led this man to a place of change and transformation and hopefulness, and that is “seeing the mystery,” an epiphany, a Christmas Day experience, acknowledging and bowing to the kingship of Christ.

Christmas and Epiphany is a story not about three kings but about two kings and our choice. Jürgen Moltmann writes:

“To us a child is born, To us a son is given, the government is upon his shoulders.” The liberator becomes a pleading child in our world . . . and this child will become the liberator for the new world of peace. That is why his rule means life not death, peace not war, freedom not oppression. This sovereignty lies on the defenseless, innocent, and hopeful shoulders of this child.

This child, visited by those able to see the mystery. As Gian Carlo Menotti, well-known librettist, puts it in Amahl and the Night Visitors:

The Child we seek
doesn’t need our gold.
On love, on love alone
he will build his kingdom.
His pierced hand will hold no scepter,
his haloed head will wear no crown;
his might will not be built
on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
he will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death
and the keys to his city
belong to the poor.

Thanks be to God. Amen.