January 4, 2004 - The Feast of the Epiphany
Isaiah 60: 1-6
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Ephesians 3:1-12
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Matthew 2: 1-12
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“Lo, The Star!”

"Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight."

Early in life someone taught me that little poem. I was told to look for the first star in the evening, the North star, I believe, and that by reciting those words and making a wish, that wish would be granted to me. I remember wishing upon that star many times, standing outside in my yard, under the expansive darkening skies of West Texas, anxiously awaiting the glimmer of that initial star in the evening sky, for the magic didn’t work unless you wished upon the first star 

Well, the magic rarely worked, as you might have guessed. I forgot what I would wish for – most likely for typical childish things – but part of what I was doing was trying to make a connection to something or someone beyond myself.  I was, I think, naturally curious about God, and so wishing upon a distant sun in a far-away galaxy that might somehow know of my presence was not beyond the realm of possibility.  I was perhaps, in my own child-like way, trying to find a larger connection between my life and the life of all creation, trying to find my place in a large and mysterious world full of wonder.  But of course, we know today this to be superstition and magic, this wishing upon a star.

Well, it was another star, not the star of the north, but, Lo! the star of the east, which led the Magi to the Christ Child.

Today we celebrate that event, which is called Epiphany.  Epiphany means manifestation or appearance.  The actual feast of the Epiphany is on the 12^th day of Christmas which is January 6.  While in our secular and commercial culture, Christmas now history, in our Christian calendar we today celebrate the manifestation of God among us, Immanuel, which is the capstone of the Advent-Christmas season.

While most people think of the Magi story as a tale of Christmas, it is a story most appropriate to our celebration of Epiphany, with its strong connections to Hebrew prophecy and its depiction of the household of God being expanded to include non-Jewish believers. 

In the Gospel of Matthew, the wise men come to Herod asking for the whereabouts of the newborn king of the Jews.  The text says they have seen his star in the east.  It’s interesting to note that at this point of the story, the star does not lead the wise men to the Christ child, but merely points in the general direction of the east.  Herod, immediately aware of the danger this child presents to his political power, gathers his scribes and priests to inquire of them where the babe could be found.  The scribes and priests quote Jewish scripture (from Micah) that pinpoints Bethlehem as the place of the event. 

So then Herod sends them off to Bethlehem and it is here that the star goes into action: “Lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was.”  So the star becomes a more active participant in the drama once the wise men are aware of tradition and prophecy. 

Lo, the star.  Some translations say, “behold, the star.”  Lo – or behold – is a way for the storyteller (for these narratives were first told before they were written) to signal to the listener that something important, and perhaps improbable, is about to happen.  The star leads them to the exact house of the birth, whereupon the wise men enter, fall down and worship the babe, and present him with the expensive presents of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Finally, the text concludes, an angel warns them to not return to Herod, so they return by another way in secret.

The birth of the Christ Child was in part the Christian fulfillment of Jewish prophecy – “Arise, shine; for your light has come!” as Isaiah proclaimed – but it also signifies the expansion of the gospel to Gentiles and to all humanity. 

That these Magi bow before the child is evidence of this.  They were not Jewish and had no hopes for a Messiah.  In fact, the Magi were astrologers, sages from Persia, ignorant of Isaiah and other ancient prophecies.  But yet they seek the Christ child.  Yet they yearn to know God more than before and they are led by the wisdom of their own tradition to a deeper understanding, a deeper connection, a deeper relationship, with the God of the Cosmos, manifested here as a vulnerable infant.  In some ways they, too, wished upon the star, that their wish for the fulfillment of their yearnings be found. So this babe fulfills the yearnings even of those who do not know fully what they seek.

Likewise, Paul refers to this universal aspect of God’s coming into the world.  Actually, the letter to the Ephesians is thought by scholars to not be from Paul himself, but from a close associate writing in Paul’s name, which was a common practice in the first century.  In fact, several of the canonical writings of Paul are like this.  But nonetheless we take them seriously as they reflect certain Pauline themes and certainly reflect the understandings of the early church.

Paul describes the mystery of Christ, how the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, partakers of the Christ promise.  Paul understands his mission to open the gospel for all humanity, that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.”  This is a bold and universal vision, typically Pauline, of the universal nature of Christ’s coming into the world as a sign of God’s intimacy with, and immanence in, all creation.  Of how God fulfills the yearnings of God’s own creation, for relief from alienation and existential loneliness.

Both Paul and Matthew are pointing to the radical nature of God’s universal love for us and for all creation.

In fact, this story of the Christ child being born is a radical story.  We have heard it so many times, we don’t really understand it anymore.  It has become so culturally ingrained, even secularized outside the walls of the church, that we don’t hear the story as ancient ears would have heard it.

This is not a God born of royalty.  This is not a God who is honored among creation while he was in the flesh.  This was a God born outside of wedlock (according to the laws of humanity, then, illegitimate) in a forgotten corner of the world, born among the animals (at least according to Luke, though Matthew places the birth in a house).  So while this birth was marginal from a human standpoint, the various traditions are clear that the angels heralded the birth.  This conflation of divine and profane elements surrounding the birth points to its radical nature.  If you were inventing a story about the birth of a savior or of a God, you would hardly conceive it in such a fashion.

This tells us that our own quest for God, for truth, happens on the simple everyday path. That the realm of the holy is not segregated from the rest of life, but it indwells all of life. God is to be found in some rather surprising places – in this story, as well as in our own lives.

So this drama of the birth of Christ suggests something of our own interior world, of our own quest to follow the star and find the birth of holiness in our own life, in our own being.  Like the magi, we are searching in the dark for new possibility.  Like the magi, we may have only a distant star to guide us, if that. And like the Magi (and here is the promise of the story), we will find God in our lives, active, at work, a real presence in our real lives. 

There is still an eastern star in the sky, in this season and all seasons, leading us to find God in surprising places. Where is the star leading you?  These stories in the Bible are not merely history lessons, though they contain history.  They are, moreover, faith history—the historical record of a people’s faith experiences that inform our own. They invite us to look at our own lives, at our own interior realms, to where the star may be leading us to a fuller relationship with God.

We sometimes think that God works in the world only in miraculous ways. Just last Sunday evening we witnessed a rather amazing culmination of events that sent the Green Bay Packers toward the playoffs.  Some have suggested divine intervention as responsible for this victory.

It surprises me we are so quick to attribute a sports victory to divine intervention but we so often fail to see how God is moving in our own lives. We see the epiphany on the field, but not working in us. I think that God makes God’s self present to us in the ordinary and common avenues of our lives – in the Bethlehems and the deserts and the long nights of journey that we make.

The message of Epiphany is not that everything will be okay, not that we will achieve success, fame, even happiness, by following God.  The message of Epiphany is that there is one made flesh who was with us, and is still with us, as we are a part of the Body of Christ, in whom, and in whose example, we might know God more fully. 

Several years ago I was leaving Milwaukee for, Dallas, by airplane.  It had been a particularly long stretch of gray, dull days here.  My own life had likewise been gray and dull and clouded by difficulty.  On that day, the plane rushed down the runway and finally pushed away from its gravitational hold, finally soaring toward the clouds.  There was turbulence, lots of it, as we passed through the storm clouds that had hovered over the city for days.  But then we were above the clouds.  Up here, above the clouds, it was bright—so bright I needed my sunglasses.  It was clam.  The plane no longer roared against the earthly pull—it seemed to soar along with, not against, the currents. 

This was where as a child I thought heaven was—above the clouds. And in a way it seemed like heaven—sunny, peaceful, removed from the helter-skelter of activity on earth.

That day it struck me that in my own life, beyond the darkness, there was great light.  We live in a great darkness.  It cannot be otherwise.  Isaiah proclaims,  “For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.”

But beyond the shroud of darkness there is intense light.  We cannot live there for long, for like the airliner we must return to earth. But on earth we get signals.  At times the divine light shines through, even as a star on a lonely night in a forgotten corner of the world. A light breaks forth into the darkness to remind us we are loved, we are known, that God is present.  Lo, the star. 

It is mere magic to wish upon a star, a childish fantasy.  But this star, this little point of light from God’s great reservoir of light, has broken through the darkness to point us to the holy enfleshed, this child Christ Jesus, our brother, our messiah, our Lord.

And in this epiphany of finding Christ, we, like the Magi, have found the One who calls us beyond ourselves into the larger life of service and love.  In our own infancy of holiness we offer ourselves, all that we have and all that we are, into God’s service.

Amen.