Communion Meditation: God Exposed
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Epiphany – January 6, 2008
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6/Matthew 2:1-12]

“Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.”

In the church’s year Epiphany – also called Theophany – is the celebration of God exposed. The word epiphany literally means “to manifest” or “to reveal.” The term used in the Christian East theophany more specifically seeks to articulate a manifestation of the Divine (theos – God, manifested). However, they were also used in ancient cultures to describe the coming of a king or emperor, reflecting he quasi-divinity of rulers. I want to focus on the notion of manifestation or exposition – God exposed.

God exposed – sounds like something you’d see while waiting to check out at the grocery store doesn’t it? Standing there you can get all the “real news” of celebrities – and those who long to be – exposed. Exposes used to be a big deal, like the expose that brought down ‘Boss’ Tweed and the Tammany Hall political machine in 19th century New York. Then there was the famous exposure of the unsafe American food supply done by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. I think it was also around that time that Stanford White, the famous architect, was murdered by Harry Thaw, the pampered son of the Pittsburgh industrial family. Thaw shot White in full view of the people gathered in Madison Square Garden to avenge White’s actions toward Thaw’s wife, the former Gibson girl Evelyn Nesbit. I could also add the attempt at expose on the Congregational minister and champion of abolitionism Henry Ward Beecher. For this one I’ll simply point you to Debby Applegate’s outstanding biography, The Most Famous Man in America, and leave it at that.

In each case the expose implies bringing some deep, dark secret to the surface. The image expose conjures up is shining a light into a dark place to illuminate the seedy goings-on hidden there. We live in an age where expose has become almost old-hat or ho-hum. Television shows keep us fully apprised of the seedy actions of celebrities and even the normal press, as it did on Saturday, reminds us when a celebrity falls from grace – or in the case of Ms. Spears, falls yet again. It’s like we’ve almost become numb to expose, to the fruit of the muckrake, because it’s become such a part of everyday American life – it’s like we can’t be shocked. What a tragedy.

The Epiphany, thankfully, reminds us that there is another kind of exposure that can come – one that can open us to a renewed understanding and appreciation of what it means to be human. To use the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Arise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.” God exposes the darkness of humanity, the cloak of self-deception under which we have hidden and fooled ourselves. The Epiphany shines a light into the darkness of our numbness, of our complacency, of our sin (that self-centered, self-focus which keeps us from loving God and neighbor).

God shines the light of God’s love into our midst and opens, restores, elevates humanity to the dignity we had and abandoned by self-centered sin. As the great teacher of the early Church, Cyril of Alexandria wrote, “Christ made our poverty his own, and we see in Christ the strange and rare paradox of lordship in servant’s form and divine glory in human abasement. That which was under the yoke in terms of the limitations of manhood was crowned with royal dignities, and that which was humble was raised to the most supreme excellence. The Only Begotten, however, did not become man only to remain in the limits of that emptying. The point was that he who was God by nature should, in the act of self-emptying, assume everything that went along with it. This was how he would be revealed as ennobling the nature of humanity in himself by making it participate in his own sacred and divine honors. . .” [On the Unity of Christ quoted in ACCS vol. XI, p. 27-8] Wisdom from the fourth century – it still fits. The Christmas-Epiphany mystery reminds us that God has identified with us to know us, to redeem us, to restore us to our true dignity and relationship for which we were made in God’s image and in God’s likeness; and, ultimately, to show God’s great love for creation.

God, then, is exposed as among us, as the one who calls us to loving relationship and hope-filled living, even with darkness all around us. What both Christmas and Epiphany – its culmination – do is to bring the focus of redemption to the very beginning of Jesus’ life and, consequently, to our lives – from beginning to end. As the late Roman Catholic Biblical scholar Raymond Brown points out in his important work, The Birth of the Messiah, the coming of the Magi points us to a shift in understanding of when Jesus is revealed as the Messiah. The first Christians came to believe because they encountered the Risen Lord, which led them to tell the story, which was either accepted or rejected. In the story of the Magi we see that happening already; the Magi, representing us (i.e. all the people of the world, Gentiles), get it. Herod doesn’t get it. As Brown says: “. . .the christological moment (i.e. the moment of revelation of who Jesus is – the Messiah – the Son of God in power through the Holy Spirit), which was once attached to the resurrection and then to baptism, has in the infancy narratives been moved to the conception; it is the virginal conception that serves now as the begetting of God’s Son.” [p. 181]

God exposed is God desirous of being known by all and from the very beginning. Another teacher of the early Church Gregory (sometimes called “the Great”) wrote: “All the elements bore witness that their Maker had come. In terms customary among men, we may say that the heavens acknowledged this man as God by sending the start; the sea acknowledged him by turning into a solid support beneath his feet; the earth acknowledged him by quaking as he died; the sun acknowledged him by hiding its rays; the rocks and walls acknowledged him by splitting at the moment of his death; hell acknowledged him by surrendering the dead it held.” [Quoted in Nocent The Liturgical Year vol. 1, p. 269-70]

Epiphany is truly God exposed, God manifested to the whole world. God continues to desire exposure and you and I, we are to be the means by which God continues to be exposed to the world. We are reminded that the manifestation of God isn’t about magic; it’s not about flash and show. God doesn’t work that way. Showing up as a baby in an obscure town, born to obscure parents isn’t how someone into flash and show shows up. What that tells us is that if God is willing to show up that way to save us, then just maybe God is willing to show up in you and in me. What a concept – God is willing to come through you and through me. Rather, God manifests, exposes, God’s self as one of us – taking on our life, and our death and transforming it. God continues to speak through the written Word, the Bible, through the simple signs of water, bread and cup, the sacraments and through the church – us. God exposed is God present in the every day and the ordinary. God present in us.

Now, what should have paparazzi flashing and headlines screaming has become [yawn] “ho hum” – Why? Well, it’s because our world has grown numb, but it is also because CHRISTIANS – CHRIST FOLLOWERS haven’t allowed it to take effect in our lives and show God’s presence and God’s love in the way that we live. Gandhi said it best, “Christianity hasn’t failed – it’s simply never been tried.” God exposes God’s self and we yawn – so what? It’s time for us to wake up and realize just what God has done and is doing among us. So, I challenge you – as I challenge myself – at this beginning of the New Year to be open today to a fresh touch, to a new experience of who God is and what God is calling each of us to be. We must open ourselves to God exposed; for you, for me, for us; to God exposed in you, in me, in us; to God exposed, through you, through me, through us. God exposed – people different … now there’s a headline -- “God exposed – people different!” -- and one our weary world needs. God exposed – people different. Go make news – God Exposed.