Matthew 2:1-12 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

2 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men[a] from the East came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising,[b] and have come to pay him homage.” 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah[c] was to be born. 5 They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:

6 ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd[d] my people Israel.’”

7 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men[e] and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising,[f] until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped,[g] they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Tomorrow is Epiphany, January 6th. Of all of our Christian celebrations, Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, All Saints, Good Friday, Maundy Thursday, of all of them, Epiphany is my favorite. I just love it. It touches my heart with awe and wonder. It is so deep with meaning, so overflowing with vision and the challenge of what it means to be a follower of Jesus the Christ. Part of the reason that I love Epiphany so much is that popular culture hasn’t adopted it. I love Christmas and Easter, but our culture celebrates them as such pop-culture events and has so commercialized them that is sometimes hard to cut through all the emotional baggage; all the hustle and bustle; all the expectations and obligations to find the vital spiritual roots of the celebration.

But at least here, this isn’t the case with Epiphany. Epiphany is the church’s and the church’s alone. There are no Epiphany displays at Home Deport or Walmart; nor are there any Epiphany TV specials; nor any family demands that we plan a perfect Epiphany party. No nothing like that; Epiphany can just be an authentic, spiritual time to grow our living faith. The celebration of Epiphany is nothing new. We have ancient Christian manuscripts from around the year 200 AD that Christians in Egypt were setting aside what is tomorrow January 6th to celebrate and reflect upon this important passage from the Gospel of Matthew, and it just spread from there. For over 1,800 years Christians like us have gathered all around the world to reflect upon and to allow the radical message of the arrival of the magi and the revealing of the Incarnation to challenge us and help us to grow in our practice of being Christian. Worldwide, it is considered the third most important celebration of the Christian year after only Easter and Christmas. And in many areas of the world, it is a bigger, more important holiday than even Christmas. There are all kinds of beautiful and theologically meaningful traditions in the celebration of Epiphany. Many of the churches in Europe, Latin America, and South America love Three Kings’ Day.

Whereas Christmas celebrates the birth of the historical baby Jesus who was fully human; Epiphany celebrates the Incarnation of the Christ-Child, God-with-us, the fully divine. As Pastor Eric reminded us several times throughout Advent, about this Emanuel, God-with-us. Or as theologian Richard Rohr wrote in a devotion last week, “Incarnation, the synthesis of matter and spirit, should be the primary and compelling message of Christianity. Through the Christ (en Christo), the seeming gap between God and everything else has been overcome ‘from the beginning’ (Ephesians 1:4, 9). Without some form of incarnation, God remains essentially separate from us and from all of creation. Without incarnation, it is not an enchanted universe but somehow an empty one.”[i] Christmas and Epiphany both reveal such deep and vital insights into our savior who is Christ the Lord. We need both the fully human and the fully divine to practice the miracle of the Incarnation and for a vital, robust practice of being a Christian.

Epiphany celebrates three huge events in the life and ministry of Jesus and has three scriptural passages. Each of these events reveals more and more what it means that Jesus is the Christ. First, it remembers the arrival of the magi in the Gospel of Matthew that we have read today. Second, it celebrates Jesus’ baptism by his cousin John the Baptist in the River Jordan when he was 30 years old and starting his public ministry. And finally, it recalls Jesus’ first miracle when Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding celebration. All of these events are epiphanies. The word epiphany comes to English from the Greek language, and it means a sudden insight that changes everything, an event that reveals that something is more than we could have ever imagined. All of these three scriptures recall events when everyone’s perception of who this Jesus was changes in flashes of sudden insight. This is Jesus but this is also the Christ, God incarnated, the greatest gift of all time.

Our reading today from the Gospel of Matthew which was written around 50 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus in what is today the country of Turkey, shares the story of the arrival of learned magi. Now if you look back at the scripture, Matthew never says that there are three magi, and he never says that they were all men, we just infer that. Matthew is only clear that there were three gifts and that these travelers where magi, which means they were probably astrologers or scholars who studied the movements of the stars and planets trying to discern divine messages, and probably lived in what is today Iraq or Iran.

In our modern age, it is easy to lose sight of how out of the box, how radical this gift of God’s self to us was, how this gift broke all the rules. Everything about the Incarnation of Jesus broke down barriers and is still breaking down barriers today. God sent the announcement of the birth of Jesus to a woman, Mary. To a woman. In that day and age, women couldn’t even be witnesses at legal proceedings because well they were women. Some Christian denominations still haven’t figured out that this gift of God’s self is for women too. They still want to preserve the old boys club. This gift was breaking all the rules. And those shepherds that was breaking down more barriers. Shepherds were at the bottom of the social-economic ladder. The angels didn’t go to announce the naivety to the rich, the famous, the well-educated, the powerful movers and shakers, the religious elites: No. The angels were sent to the least of these, the poor, the marginalized; breaking down more barriers. And tomorrow, we remember the arrival the magi. They weren’t even Jewish. They weren’t the chosen people. More breaking down barriers, more extreme out of the box….

Theologically, this is a huge statement in the Gospel of Matthew. Here at the beginning of this gospel, Matthew is reminding everyone who hears this passage that the gift of God Emmanuel, God born fully human and fully divine, is a gift to all. Matthew makes it clear that these magi were of a different culture, a different nationality, a different ethnicity, a different socio-economic class than everyone else at the nativity, and Matthew recognizes them as authentic spiritual seekers who understood the big picture of this birth. By Matthew placing this event at the beginning of this gospel, it gives an extravagant welcome. In an age, when we have so many people who say that they are spiritual but not religious, this has some huge insightful epiphanies that those outside the church can teach us who are inside it. Matthew is saying it doesn’t matter, where you are from, your past doesn’t matter, your ethnicity, your nationality, insider or outsider, nothing matters. Jesus welcomes all. Matthew is telling the readers that the gift of Godself in human form was a gift for all, all of the world.[ii]

I have three take-aways that I want us to consider from this first Epiphany. First, I want us to consider how open we are following the stars that God sends our way. If God puts a star up for us to follow, would we be willing to drop everything and follow it? As the magi show us that might mean defying empires and tyrants;[iii] it might mean risking it all; putting our lives and well being on the line. It means opening ourselves to God and stepping out from our own culture, our own way of doing things, our own comfort zones, and even being open to change. Following one of God’s stars means making ourselves open to epiphanies and the unexpected, to gifts that transform us.

Second, I want us to consider our gratitude for this gift. We need to engage the Incarnation as the greatest gift of all time. The gift that was given to us. This is the gift that had the angels singing and the shepherds yelling praises and sharing all that they had seen with everyone they met. And the miracle of this gift continues right into Holy Week and that first Easter Sunday. The great miracle of Holy Week is not the self-sacrifice of Jesus; it is not the suffering and death on Good Friday; the great miracle of Easter is the regifting of the Incarnation through the resurrection. It is the triumph of love over death. Love is the miracle that Jesus would come back to us after what, we, humanity did to God. The great miracle of Easter is not atonement; rather the unimaginable miracle is that the greatest gift ever given would be regifted, would willingly regift himself to us after we not only rejected and denied him, but utterly destroyed and tortured him. This goes beyond unconditional love. This is unimaginable love. Jesus came back to us through the resurrected Incarnation, and our gratitude for that gift that was re-given should change everything. It must transform how we see everything, and how we live every day.

I want us to listen to this amazing quote from theologians Jovian Weigel and Leonard Foley, “Jesus is no longer visible, audible, touchable, but he left another sacrament like himself. Not just one body, but a body formed by many bodies, many persons—the followers of Christ. Until the end of time, the Church is the sign or sacrament or visibility of Christ. The Church bears the burden and the glory of saying to the world: ‘If you want to see and hear the love and forgiveness of Jesus, look at us, listen to us.’”[iv] My friends, our transformational gratitude needs to be the star that shows the way for today’s seekers and pilgrims.

We need to practice our gratitude for the Incarnation. It is not just a doctrine that we need to believe. The Incarnation is a way of life that needs to embody our faith in action. This is why we need to take those sweet, beautiful Christmas stories of Jesus’ birth so seriously. We live in age when so many are blind to God’s presence among us and this world needs us to make them aware of the realness of the Incarnation through humility and gratitude for the gift that can and will transform everything. We can forgive freely, we can welcome extravagantly, we can be love and grace in action. We can get our hands dirty, we can sweat, we can cry, we can comfort, we can plant seeds that will feed and nourish generations who we will never know. Through God, we can make the Incarnation real; we can allow the Christmas / Epiphany / Easter miracle to happen 365 days a year by allowing God the freedom to work through us. We are the church! We can be the star that calls this world to God’s transformation. The gift and the responsibility of the Incarnation lies with us!

This life changing gratitude brings us to our final takeaway. As we end our reflection today on this Epiphany 2020, I only have one question for all of us: What gift do we bring? What gift do we bring?[v] This is our homework for tomorrow, for Epiphany. Sit down, read the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew verses 1 through 12, and write out your list. Write out your list of the gifts you bring. As a Deacon of the Church of the Holy Cross what gifts do you bring? As a Trustee what gifts do you bring? As someone who works with the children or leads us in worship, what you gifts do bring? No matter if you think you are too old to have important gifts or too young to have important gifts to give, what gifts do you bring? If the church of Jesus Christ is going not to just survive in 2020 but is going to thrive in 2020 God-with-us, wants the gifts that we have. Not a gift you bring out of obligation or requirement but the gift you give to Jesus the Christ because of the love. It doesn’t matter how big your gift is or that your gift has all the bells and whistles. All that matters is: the love. Make your list and check it twice! What gifts do we bring?

[i] Richard Rohr. “Living “en Christo” Sunday, December 22, 2019. Available at: https://cac.org/living-en-christo-2019-12-22/?&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dm&utm_term=organic.

[ii] Matthew 2:1-12 in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. Pp. 212-217. Daniel Harrington. The Gospel of Matthew. Sacra Pagina V. 1. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991.

[iii] Joe Kay “The Story of the Magi is an Invitation. Will we Show up? Sojourners. Available at: https://sojo.net/articles/when-wise-men-refused-collaborate-empire?fbclid=IwAR1tTthqsXzvwQscBLLS4FJzvk0PPPDgzncwexlJFLdY-awd13-_Nz7Xlp0.

[iv] Jovian Weigel and Leonard Foley, “Live like Francis,” Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2016, p. 33.

[v] Miroslav Volf. “One-Way Giving: The Magi Didn’t Give Gifts to Each Other.” Christian Century, December 27, 2003.