Communion Meditation: God Exposed
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Epiphany Sunday – January 4, 2009

Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6/Ephesians 3:1-12/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.”

Epiphany is the Church’s celebration of God exposed. Extra! Extra! Read all about it. God exposed! That sounds like something you’d see while waiting to check out at the grocery store or when you go flipping through the channels and encounter one of the myriad ‘tell-all-reality’ shows, doesn’t it? Standing in line, between the gum and grit, you can get all the “real news” -- or at least the exciting news -- of celebrities, and those who long to be, exposed. Exposes used to be a big deal, like the exposes that would bring down politicians or expose some environmental danger. What immediately comes to mind is Upton Sinclair’s famous exposure of the unsafe American food supply in The Jungle. The recent political campaign had its shares of exposes and near-exposes, didn’t it? The most memorable is Mrs. Clinton’s claim to have been under hostile fire in Bosnia – and the speedy retraction. Pesky stuff those video recordings. Now the internet is an even peskier thing – and a good tool for the ‘exposer’ to boot! Oh, and lest I forget “real theology” in Wisconsin – now there is the expose of Brett Favre coming out of the Jets’ locker room.

In each case, and we could spend the better part of the day coming up with things to say, 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. However, it’s become so common that we live in a time where expose has become old-hat or ho-hum. Television shows keep us fully apprised of the seedy actions of celebrities and even the normal press, as it has every day since the Favre information has come out, reminds us when a celebrity falls from grace. 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. How sad to think what it takes to shock us, to move us, to outrage us these days. What a tragedy.

Well, it’s my task to shock you and, believe it or not, the celebrations of Christmas and Epiphany, coming just twelve days apart, are meant to be shockers. 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 a manifestation of the Divine. However, those terms were also used in ancient cultures to describe the coming of a king or emperor, reflecting the quasi-divinity of rulers. Right now I want to focus on the notion of manifestation or exposition – God exposed.

We talked, briefly, about various kinds of exposes, but the expose I want to focus on is a real scandal – the Incarnation, the enfleshing of God. This has been a scandal – remember the word means ‘tripping stone’ – from the very beginning of our Christian faith. However, the Incarnation is at the core of our Christian faith. As contemporary English theologian and spiritual writer Kenneth Leech points out, “The belief that the Word of God, the eternal self-manifestation of the Creator of the universe, took to himself human nature is so basic to orthodox Christianity that without it the entire edifice crumbles and falls. Without the incarnation, the belief in the Word made Flesh, there can be no Christianity, no Christian theology, no Christian spirituality. Yet no belief is more outrageous, more scandalous, more extraordinary, more incredible than this. So much so that it has been relegated by many conventional Christians into the world of Christmas legend, where it cannot and does not affect the central framework of one’s life and faith.” [p. 236]

It is my thought that the Epiphany gives us another opportunity to think about this profound, remarkable fact of God-with-us, Emmanuel and 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, building upon the message of the Incarnation revealed at Christmas, 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 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] 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 and, ultimately, to show God’s great love for creation. It’s what Paul is talking about in the letter to the Ephesians, we are, all of us, sharers in the promise God made long ago.

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. 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, 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 word. God continues to desire exposure and 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, about flash and show. Rather, God manifests, exposes, God’s self as one of us – taking on our life, and our death and transforming it. As Leech writes, “because of this union of natures [human and Divine], all humanity was called to communion with God in and through the flesh. The human is the gateway to the divine: there is no other way to God. . . . St. Augustine can still insist: per hominem Chrisum tendis ad Deum. You come to God through Christ as a man.” [p. 239] God ennobles our humanity and what we do. 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 almost from the beginning we’ve pushed the scandal of the Incarnation under the rug of dogma, doctrine and debate and out of the real transformative relationship it was meant to produce in our lives. Our world has grown numb and 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. God exposes 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 – 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. Let me close by pointing us all to the example of the Congregational minister and literacy advocate Frank Laubach – who graced this very pulpit. This is something I found in philosopher and spiritual writer Dallas Willard’s wonderful book The Divine Conspiracy:

Frank Laubach wrote of how, in his personal experiment of moment-by-moment submission to the will of God, the fine texture of his work and life experience was transformed. In January of 1930 he began to cultivate the habit of turning hismind to Christ for one second out of every minute

After only four weeks he reported, “I feel simply carried along each hour, doing my part in a plan which is far beyond myself. This sense of cooperation with God in little things is what so astonishes me, for I never have felt it this way before. I need something, and turn around to find it waiting for me. I must work, to be sure, but there is God working along with me.”

From a lonely missionary post in the Philippines, God raised Frank Laubach to the status of Christian world statesman and spokesman for Christ. He founded the World Literacy Crusade, still in operation today, and without any political appointment he was influential on United States foreign policy in the post-World War II years. But he was forever and foremost Christ’s man, and always knew that his brilliant ideas and incredible energy and effectiveness derived from his practice of constant conscious interface with God. [read p 24].

Do you see what Laubach did? He opened himself to God exposed.

You and I, 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 and one our weary world needs. God exposed – people different. There’s news to be made – people, ordinary people, living in touch with God. Don’t read all about it….just do it.