Epiphany

Epiphany

January 5, 2020

Matthew 2.1-12

+ It’s January.

And you know what January at St. Stephen’s means.

No, I’m not talking about the Annual Meeting on the 26^th.

It means Fr. Jamie is making his vacation plans for next month.

After all, as most of you know, January is my least favorite month.

So, planning my vacation is what gets me through this ridiculously long, seemingly unending month.

However, my travel plans are not as easy as they’ve been in the past.

I will be making a somewhat circuitous trip—rather than my straightforward flight to Florida.

I will be headed to DC first before I head to Florida to see my good friend Leslie who is in seminary at Virginia Theological Seminary and is interning at the National Cathedral.

However, trying to plan this trip with the fewest number of connections is driving me nuts!

Yesterday, I threw book across the room in frustration.

So, here I am complaining about such minor, First World things.

And what did we just hear?

We just heard in our Gospel reading for today about these wise men who traveled under worse conditions than anything I could even imagine.

Trust me, they didn’t worry about connections! They had plenty of other things to worry.

But, you gotta give them credit.

It would take great faith and great bravery to load up everything, including valuables like gold and spices into that time of highjacking and robbery, and just head off into the unknown. Following a star.

But these men did just that.

These “wise” men did something that most of us now days would think was actually naïve and dangerous.

Originally, of course, the word used for these men was “astrologers,” which does add an interesting dimension to what’s occurring here.

Astrologers certainly would make sense.

Astrologers certainly would have been aware of this star that appeared and they would have been able to see in that star a unique sign—a powerful enough of a sign that they packed up and went searching for it.

And it certainly seems like it was a great distance.

They probably came from Persia, which is now modern-day Iran.

How fortuitous on this Sunday, as we heading closer and closer to war with Iran, that we are commemorating these Persian wise men.

And they would’ve come in a caravan of others.

These Magi are mysterious characters, for sure.

We popularly see them as the three wise men, but if you notice in our Gospel reading for today, it doesn’t say anything about there being three of them.

There might have been four or five or even two of them for all we know.

Certainly, it might seem strange that I am talking about all of this today.  

Why ae we talking about the Christ child and the Magi?

It’s the beginning of January, after all.

Christmas already feels long over.

Most of us have put away our Christmas decorations.

Trees came down quickly in the first few days after Christmas, the rest in the days immediately after New Years.

Since we’ve been hearing about Christmas for months, we are maybe a little happy to see the Christmas season go away for another year by this time. 

We’re ready to put those trappings aside and move on.

The fact is: the Christmas season, for the Church, began on Christmas Eve and ends tomorrow, on January 6.

Tomorrow is the feast of the Epiphany, which we are sort of commemorating today.

It’s still Christmas officially.

Today is still the Second Sunday of Christmas.

The greens are still up (at least until after Mass today)

But, I think Epiphany is important for us, and so we’re gonna talk about it today.

And we’re still gonna Proclaim the Date of Easter, Bless the Chalk and have 3 Kings Cake.

So, what is the Epiphany really? 

Well, the word itself—Epiphany—means “manifestation” or “appearing.”

In this context, it means the manifestation of Christ among us. 

God’s own Christ, God’s own anointed One, God’s very Son, has appeared to us.

And in the story that we hear this morning, it is the appearing of God not only to the Jews, but to the non-Jews, as well, to the Gentiles, which we find represented in the Magi—those mysterious men from the East. 

That is also is very fortuitous to us on this Sunday in 2020.

If you watched the news and paid close attention, you no doubt heard about the awful anti-Semitic attacks against Jewish people during Hanukah in the last few weeks.

Anti-Semitism is something I simply do not understand.

I do not understand how Christians—people who profess to be followers of Jesus—can be anti-Semites.

I hate to break this news to those Christians with anti-Semitic beliefs but—Jesus was a Jew.

And not just any Jew.

He was the King of the Jews.

And that title alone, inscribed on the board affixed to the cross on which he died, could also be viewed as a form of anti-Semitism.

I am going to be blunt on this Sunday.

You cannot be a Christian and be anti-Semitic.

You cannot be a Christian and a Nazi.

You can’t.

It’s just not possible.

We are all inheritors of Judaism.

We are all children of the God of Israel.

And my prayer on this Feast of Epiphany is that that very statement—one cannot be a follower of the Jewish Jesus and still be an anti-Semite—will come as an “epiphany.”

Epiphany, after all, is all about the manifestation of God in our midst. 

Epiphany is a moment of realization. 

In this feast we realize that God is truly among us—all of us, no matter our race or religion or our understanding of this event.

Epiphany is the realization that God is among us in the person of this little Jewish child, Jesus. 

Over the last month or so, we, as the Church, have gone through a variety of emotions. 

Advent was a time of expectation. 

We were waiting expectantly for God to come to us.

Christmas was the time of awe. 

God was among us and there was something good and wonderful about this fact.

Epiphany, however, gets the rap for being sort of anti-climactic. 

It is the time in which we settle down into the reality of what has come upon us. 

We realize what has happened and we accept it.

A bit of the awe is still there. 

A bit of wonder still lingers.

In this morning’s Gospel, the wise men are overcome with joy when they see the star stop over Bethlehem. 

But, for the most part, despite the joy they felt, we are now moving ahead. 

There are no more angels singing on high for us. 

The miraculous star has begun to fade by this point. 

The wise men have presented their gifts and are now returning to home to Persia. 

It is a time in which we feel contentment. 

We feel comfortable in what has happened. 

But, in a few weeks, this is all going to change again. 

We will soon face the harsh reality of Ash Wednesday and Lent. 

Now, I know it’s hard even to think about such things as we labor through the cold of January.

But it is there—just around the corner. At the end of next month.

The time of Christmas feasting will be over. 

The joys and beauty of Christmas will be replaced by ashes and sackcloth and, ultimately, by the Cross.

But that’s all in the future. 

Christmas is still kind of lingering in our thoughts today and, in this moment, we have this warm reality. 

God has appeared to us, as one of us. 

When we look upon the face of the child Jesus, we see ourselves.

But we see more. 

We see God as well. 

We see how God lives and dwells in a unique way in Jesus.

In this Child—God’s very divine Son—the divine and the mortal have come together. 

And for this moment—before the denial of our bodies in Lent, before the betrayal and torture of Holy Week, before the bloody and violent murder of Good Friday, we have in our midst, this Child.

We have God appearing to us, appearing to us, dwelling within the most innocent and most beautiful form of humanity possible. 

It is the Child Jesus we delight in now.

It is the Christ Child we find ourselves worshipping at this time.

And in the Christ Child we find ourselves amazed at the many ways God chooses to be manifested in our midst.

For now, we are able to look at this Child and see God in our midst.

With Lent coming upon us, we will find God manifested in other ways—in fasting, in penitence, in turning our eyes toward the Cross.

For now, we are the Magi.

We are the ones who, seeking Christ, have found him.

We are the ones who, despite everything our rational minds have told us, have decided to follow that star of faith we have seen.

We, like them, have stepped out into the unknown and have searched for what we have longed for.

We are the ones who have traveled the long journeys of all our lives to come to this moment—to this time and place—and, here, we find Christ in our midst.

We have followed stars and other strange signs, hoping to find some deeper meaning to our lives.

We have trekked through the wastelands of our life, searching for Christ.

But our Epiphany is the realization that Christ has appeared to us where we are—right here in our own midst.

And this is what we can take away with us this morning—on this day before the feast of the Epiphany.

This is the consolation we can take with us as we head through these short, cold, snow-filled days toward Lent.

No matter where we are—no matter who we are—Christ is here with us.

Christ is with us in all that we do and every place we look.

So, let us look for him.

Let us see him in our midst—here in our lives.

And whenever we recognize him—that is our unending feast day of Epiphany.

1 Christmas

December 29, 2019

John 1.1-18

+  I’ve been pretty open about this fact in my life.  I’m just not a big fan of  Christmas.

Others seem to start getting excited when the Christmas trees go up at Halloween.  Or the Christmas music starts being piped through the stores in October.

Not me.

Sparkling lights and songs about snowmen and all the rest do little for me.

It’s not that I hate the season.  I just feel a sort of robotic sense of nothingness about it all. I know.

I’m just more of an Easter person, I guess.

But, to be fair, I LOVE what our Church season of Christmas is all about.  I love the Nativity. I love preaching about the Incarnation, about God-made-flesh.

And so, I find myself during this season clinging to little bits and pieces to keep myself afloat until Christmas passes and we are into January.

Today’s Gospel is one of those lifesavers for me.  I love this Gospel reading because it is so different than many of the Gospel readings we get.  In fact, it is, by far, one of my favorite scriptures.

It’s a unique reading today.  Most of our Gospel readings are straight-forward narratives.  We get the story of Jesus doing this or that, or preaching this or that kind of sermon.

But today, in our Gospel reading, we get a hymn.  Or at least, a portion of a hymn.

We get a poem.

It is a beautiful poem really explaining the Word and what the Word is and does.

In Greek, the word for “Word” is “Logos.” But, “word” is maybe not the best way to translate “logos.” Another way to translate the word “logos” is to say “essence.”  It is the very essence of what it conveys.

In that sense, the “Word” of God brings us the very essence of God.  In the Logos of God, we find God.

But…what is John trying to tell us in his poem?  John is talking about Christ, of course.  In this passage, he is making clear to us that Christ is the Logos—the Word of God, the very essence of God.

When we hear the words of Jesus, we are not just hearing the words of some brilliant prophet or some very wise sage.  We are, in fact, hearing the words of God—words that contain the knowledge and essence of that God.  What came from his mouth, in a sense, came from the mouth of God on high.

It’s kind of heady stuff we’re dealing with here.  This concept of the Word—or Logos—of God is really the heart of all Christian theology.

In a sense, it conveys perfectly what we are celebrating in this Christmas season.  The God we experience at Christmas isn’t simply sitting on some throne in some far-off heavenly realm.

 God is not sitting back and letting creation work itself out.  What this passage shows us, more than anything, is that God is busy.  God is at work in our lives—in the world around us.  

God is moving.

God is doing something.

More than anything what this scripture is telling us is that God is reaching out to us.  And not just one or two times in our history.  God has always been reaching out to us.

From the first day of humankind to this moment—from the beginning—God is reaching out to us.

God is calling out to us.

God is talking with us and communicating with us.

And we experience this most clearly in the person of Jesus, who has come to us as this simple baby.  This baby, who will grow up to speak to us in human words, is the very Word of God.  This baby is the Wisdom and Essence of God.  This Word of God that we hear is Christ and Christ, as we learn in this passage, has always existed.

Even before Jesus came to us as this baby, Christ always was.  And Christ always will be.

The God we find and recognize in Jesus is moving toward us, even in moments when it seems like God is distance and non-existent. Here, in this Christmas season, in this Child we celebrate and worship, God’s presence is renewed.  God comes forward and becomes present among us in a way we could never possibly imagine.

There is wonderful antiphon that we can find in the Monastic Breviary used by the Order of the Holy Cross, an order of Episcopal monks.  The antiphon used for the Benedictus at Matins or Morning Prayer on Christmas morning is this wonderful verse of poetry:

“While all things were in quiet silence, and that night was in the midst of her swift course,
your almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down out of your royal throne.”

There is something so wonderfully powerful about imagine of the Word “leaping” out of heaven and descending among us.

There is no apprehension in that act of leaping.

There is no holding back.

Rather there is almost an impatience on God’s part to be one with us.

God comes to us in our Gospel reading today not cloaked behind pillars of fire or thunderstorms or wind, as we found God in the Hebrew Bible.

Instead, God appears before us, as one of us.

God’s word, God’s wisdom, God’s Essence leaped down to us and became flesh just as we are flesh.  God’s voice is no longer a booming voice from the sky, demanding sacrifices as find in the Old Testament.  God instead speaks to us as one of us.  And this voice that speaks this Word of God is a familiar one.

We cannot only understand it, but we can embrace it and make it a part of our lives. It continues on in what Jesus still says to us today.  It continues on in the Spirit of Jesus that dwells within us and that speaks in us in our lives.

The Word is among us.  It has leaped down to us, here where we are, on this cold Sunday morning after Christmas.

This Word is spoken every time we carry out what Jesus calls us to do.

The Word leaps out of us when we reach out to those in need.

Whenever we are motivated by the misery around us—when we pray for those who need our prayers, when we reach out to those who need us in any small way we can—that is the Word speaking and leaping forward.

And more than that—that is the Word at work in the world.

So let the Word—that Knowledge and Essence of God—be in us and speak through us.

Let us all be open to that wonderful reality in our lives.

Let our voices be the voice of the Word and Wisdom of God.

Let our lives be loud and proud proclamation of that Word in the world around us.

God’s almighty Word has leaped down to us.

On this First Sunday after Christmas, let us truly rejoice.

Christmas Day

December 25, 2019

 + I’m a church geek.

You know how you know I’m a church geek?

Because one of my greatest pleasures in life is doing the Christmas morning Mass.

Yes, I know.

Christmas Eve is beautiful.

Really beautiful.

But Christmas morning.

I don’t know.

It’s just just…something special.

I think that is what Christmas Day is all about.

This sense of it all being just…a bit more holy and complete.

It’s become kind of a Christmas Day tradition for me to share this poems from the great Trappist monk and poet, Thomas Merton. I love it:

Make ready

for the Christ

whose smile,

like lightning

sets free

the Song

of everlasting

glory

that now sleeps

in your paper

flesh like

Dynamite.

Make ready

for the Christ

whose smile,

like lightning

sets free

the Song

of everlasting

glory…

For me, that captures perfectly this strange feeling I have experiencing this morning how I LOVE a Christmas Day mass

And now—this morning— Christmas is here.

This morning, we celebrate the Light.

And we celebrate the Word.

We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our collective and personal darkness.

We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our despair and our fear, in our sadness and in our frustration.

And we celebrate this Word that has been spoken to us—this Word of hope.

This Word that God is among us.

We celebrate this “Christ

whose smile,

like lightning

sets free

the Song

of everlasting

glory

When we think long and hard about this day, when we ponder it and let it take hold in our lives, what we realized happened on that day when Jesus was born was not just some mythical story.  

It was not just the birth of a child under dire circumstances, in some distant, exotic land.  

What happened on that day was a joining together—a joining of us and God.

God met us half-way.

God came to us in our darkness, in our blindness, in our fear—and cast a light that destroyed that darkness, that blindness, that fear.

 God didn’t have to do what God did.  

God didn’t have to descend among us and be one of us.

But by doing so, God showed us a remarkable intimacy.

Another quote I share around Christmas on a regular basis is this one from the great Dominican theologian, Meister Ekhart:

“What good is it  if Mary gave birth to the Son of God [two thousand years ago]? I too must give birth to the Son of God in my time, here and now. We are all meant to be the mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.”

I love that quote and I think it’s very true.

That is what we too need to do in our lives.

We too need to give birth to Christ in our own time, here and now, in our own ways.

We need to bring this forgiving, loving, accepting, inclusive Christ to the world in which we live.

We need to be bearers of the Christ, just as Mary was, to those around us.

Right here.

Right now.

We need to be the people through whom God is born again and again in this world.

We need to bring God into reality in this world again and again.

Why?

Because God is a God of love.

Because we are loved by God.

Because we are accepted by God.

Because we are—each of us—important to God.

We are, each of us, very important to God.

Each of us.

And because we are, we must love others.

We must give birth to our God so others can know this amazing love as well.

Knowing this amazing love of God changes everything.

When we realize that God knows us as individuals.

That God loves us and accepts each of us for who we are, we are joyful.

We are hopeful of our future with that God.

And we want to share this love and this God with others.

That is what we are celebrating this morning.

Our hope and joy is in a God who comes and accepts us and loves us for who we are and what we are—a God who understands what it means to live this sometimes frightening uncertain life we live.

This is the real reason why we are joyful and hopeful on this beautiful morning.

This is why we are feeling within us a strange sense of longing.

This is why we are rushing toward our Savior who has come to visit us in what we once thought was our barrenness.

Let the hope we feel today as God our Savior, who comes to us in this Child,  draws close to us stay with us now and always.

Let the joy we feel tonight as God our Friend comes to us in love be the motivating force in how we live our lives throughout this coming year.

God is here.

God is in our midst today.

God is so near, our very bodies and souls are rejoicing.

And God loves us.

My mother’s favorite poet was the great Anglican poet Christina Rosetti.

We, in the Anglican tradition, get to hear from Rosetti quite often in this Christmas season.

She was able to sum up this whole season so perfectly and eloquently:

 Love came down at Christmas,

love, all lovely, love divine;

love was born at Christmas:

star and angels gave the sign.

That is what we are experiencing this day.

Love came down.

Love became flesh and blood.

Love became human.

And in the face of that realization, we are rejoicing today.

We are rejoicing in that love personified.

We are rejoicing in each other.  

We are rejoicing in the glorious beauty of this one holy moment in time.

Christmas Eve

December 24, 2019

+ Most of us, throughout our lives, find ourselves clinging to life’s little pleasures.

Occasionally, something fills us with such joy and happiness, that we find ourselves just wanting to savor that moment, cling to it, hope it will never end.

They don’t happen often.

And we can’t make those moments happen by own concentrated will, even if we try really hard.

Even more often, we don’t ask for those special moments.

They just happen when they’re meant to happen and sometimes they come upon us as a wonderful surprise.

Now, having said this, I’m going to admit something to you that will come as no surprise I’m sure.

I really am a church geek.

I love being in church.

I always have.

And the best times to be in church were always Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.

One of life’s pleasures for me has always been Christmas Eve.

And more specifically a Christmas Eve Mass.

Some of my most pleasant memories are of this night and the liturgies I’ve attended on this night.

Another of life’s small pleasures is Christmas morning.

I especially enjoy going to church on Christmas morning.

The world seems to pristine, so new.

Well, maybe not tomorrow with a blizzard, but you know what I’m getting at…

And one of my greatest pleasures as a priest, is to celebrate the Eucharist with you on this evening that is, in its purest sense, holy.

And tomorrow morning I am looking forward to celebrating the Eucharist right here.

I also understand the tendency we all have of getting caught up in society’s celebration of Christmas.

It’s easy to find ourselves getting a bit hypnotized by the glitz and glamour we see about us.

I admit I enjoy some of those sparkly Christmas displays.

I understand how easy it is to fall to the temptations of what the world tells us is Christmas.

But what I think happens to most of us who enjoy those light and airy aspects of Christmas is that we often get so caught up in them, we start finding ourselves led astray into a kind of frivolousness about Christmas.

We find ourselves led off into a place where Christmas becomes fluffy and saccharine and cartoonish.

Christmas becomes a kind of billboard.

That, I think, is what we experience in the secular understanding of Christmas time.

The glitz and the glamour of the consumer-driven Christmas can be visually stunning.

It can capture our imagination with its blinking lights and its bright wrapping,

But ultimately it promises something that it can’t deliver.

It promises a joy and a happiness it really doesn’t have.

It has gloss.

It has glitter.

It has a soft, fuzzy glow.

But it doesn’t have real joy.

The Christmas we celebrate here tonight, in this church, up here in northeast Fargo, is a Christmas of real joy.

But it is a joy of great seriousness as well.

It is a joy that humbles us and quiets us.

It is a joy filled with a Light that makes all the glittery, splashy images around us pale in comparison.

The Christmas we celebrate here is not a frivolous one.

It is not a light, airy Christmas.

Yes, it has a baby.

Yes, it has angels and a bright shining star.

But these are not bubblegum images.

A birth of a baby in that time and in that place was a scary and uncertain event.

Angels were not chubby little cherubs rolling about in mad abandon in some cloud-filled other-place.

They were terrifying creatures—messengers of a God of Might and Wonder.

And stars were often seen as omens—as something that could either bring great hope or great terror to the world.

The event we celebrate tonight is THE event in which God breaks through to us.

And whenever God beaks through, it is not some gentle nudge.

It is an event that jars us, provokes us and changes us.

For people sitting in deep darkness, that glaring Light that breaks through into their lives is not the most pleasant thing in the world.

It is blinding and painful.

And what it exposes is sobering.

That is what Jesus does to us.

That is what we are commemorating tonight.

We are commemorating a “break through” from God—an experience with God that leaves us different people than we were before that encounter.

What we experience is a Christmas that promises us something tangible.

It promises us, and delivers, a real joy.

The joy we feel today, the joy we feel at this Child’s birth, as the appearance of these angels, of that bright star, of that Light that breaks through into the darkness of our lives, is a joy that promises us something.

It is a teaser of what awaits us.

It is a glimpse into the life we will have one day.

It is a perfect joy that promises a perfect life.

But just because it is a joyful event, does not mean that it isn’t a serious event.

What we celebrate is serious.

It is an event that causes us to rise up in a joyful happiness, while, at the same time, driving us to our knees in adoration.

It is an event that should cause us not just to return home to our brightly wrapped presents, but it should also send us out into the world to make it, in some small way, a reflection of this life-changing joy that has come into our lives.

Tonight, is one of those moments in which true joy and gladness have come upon us.

That’s what makes this a holy time.

So, let us cling to this holy moment.

Let us savor it.

Let us hold it close.

Let us pray that it will not end.

And let this joy you feel tonight be the strength that holds you up when you need to be held.

Tonight, God has reached out to us.

God has touched us.

God has grasped our hands.

Our hands have been laid on God’s heart.

This is what Christmas is all about.

God is here, among us.

This feeling we are feeling right now is the true joy that descends upon us when we realize God has come to us in our collective darkness.

And this joy that we are feeling is because the Light that has come to us will never, ever darken.