As much as I enjoyed my first Sunday with you, the majority of appreciative comments I received on my sermon last week had less to do with its content than its brevity. So relax: however awful today’s sermon may be, it’ll be over before you know it.
This has been quite a week for news: yesterday’s capture of Venezuelan president Maduro, the horrific New Year’s Eve fire in Switzerland, the Rose Bowl annihilation of Alabama by Indiana to name a few. But the story that has touched many of us the most was of the untimely death of Tatiana Schlossberg, the environmental journalist and daughter of Caroline Kennedy. Just before Thanksgiving The New Yorker published her moving and brilliant essay, “A Battle with my Blood” [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood]. In her piece, Ms. Schlossberg recounted her experience of the sudden onslaught of terminal leukemia, the lengths to which she and her family had gone to treat the disease, and her sadness at the prospect of dying before she really got to know her new daughter. I have rarely read a piece that affected me so. How could someone so sick write so powerful an essay? How could someone so vital be cut down so early in life?
When we think of the Kennedys, we think of tragedy. Part of what moved me so much in Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay was the empathy she felt, even in her own suffering, for her family:
For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
You’re probably thinking that this is a bummer way to open an Epiphany sermon, but remember that the holiday’s name, epiphany, actually means manifestation. When we observe Jesus’s epiphany we celebrate the manifestation of his glory to the entire world. For me, Tatiana Schlossberg’s New Yorker article was an epiphany, a manifestation of a grace and power in the human spirit that we encounter only rarely.
Matthew’s gospel story of the “wise men from the east” following the star to Bethlehem makes real this manifestation of divine glory in what J.A.T. Robinson called “the human face of God”. Whenever I hear this story, my mind immediately goes to one of my favorite artworks, Fra Angelico’s large tondo painting of “The Adoration of the Magi” in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where I used to live and work. [https://www.nga.gov/artworks/41581-adoration-magi] If you’ve been to that museum you’ve certainly seen it. It’s both beautiful and startling at once.
In Fra Angelico’s picture we see the traditional tableau of the wise men kneeling before Jesus and the holy family. But there are some additional touches that always surprise me. One is that there is also a large crowd who have followed the Magi to the manger. Another is that a group of emaciated men—probably lepers—raise their arms in praise as they joyously join the throng in adoring the baby Jesus. A third shows one viewer who appears to be shielding his vision from the sight of so much glory. The birth of this baby will transform both the world and individual human lives.
I don’t know if Fra Angelico ever read the letter to the Ephesians, but if he did he must have been struck by a passage from the reading we heard this morning:
In former generations [the mystery of Christ] was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. [Ephesians 3]
For the author of Ephesians the whole Jesus experience is an indescribable miracle, and its proof lies in the very existence of the church, a community which includes in one body what we had previously thought to be irreconcilable opposites. Jews and Gentiles now live together in the company gathered around Jesus. Wise men from the east worship the child in the manger. Lepers rejoice at the one who will heal, touch, and include them. Jews and Gentiles go to church together. Human divisions have been healed. We are all of us members of a body which transcends definitions and categories..
It is easy to become sentimental about things like this and to pretend that the tensions between us are not real. Our nation is divided over its purpose and meaning. Families, relationships, households become torn. Even churches have been known to have conflict over their leadership. These problems are real. MAGA and Woke are not getting together anytime soon.
And yet: when God’s glory is made manifest—at the Bethlehem manger, in a New York City hospital room, in what Robert Frost called “the countless ties of love and thought” that invisibly connect us one to another—when we glimpse even for a moment the depth and grandeur of God and God’s hope for us—we realize that the hard categories we had put so much trust in are not fixed but fluid. Jew, Gentile, Black, White, Gay Straight, Blue, Red—all of these identities, while important markers, do not tell the true story about us, our destiny, or our world. We are all in the words of Ephesians, “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise of Christ Jesus through the gospel”. It’s not that we have no differences; it’s that all our differences go together to make up the fullness of the divine and human community of which we are a part. All this diversity adds up to something ultimately beautiful, glorious, and good.
As we gather on this Second Sunday after Christmas to celebrate the Epiphany, there are no words that will erase the pain of the suffering we have seen this week and to which all of us are liable as vulnerable, mortal creatures. Christianity will always stand in the paradox which embraces both the cross and resurrection. Something big and deep and good is going on in the universe which puts all our experience, sorrow and joy, into perspective. As our passage from Ephesians puts it, even in our sorrow we proclaim “the news of the boundless riches of Christ” as “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God” begins to unfold.
God and God’s purposes are working themselves out even now in God’s world, in the human community, and in you. The Epiphany of God in Jesus begins at the manger, continues over centuries, and is alive even and especially in your life, experiences, and relationships. As this unfolding season will demonstrate, the epiphany of Jesus is only the beginning of God’s manifestation in the world. Everywhere we turn we now see what was hidden being revealed.
In a world racked with conflict and pain, let us rejoice in the unfolding of the mystery which begins in this visit to the manger, continues in the church and world, and finds its culmination in each and every human life and relationship. You too are an epiphany of God. This is the kind of news that can turn tragedy into triumph, estrangement into reconciliation, death into life. So, together with Jesus, let us bring this long-hidden secret out into the open and make it manifest to ourselves and to each other as we serve our broken yet beloved world. Amen.
