The Epiphany: Symbolic Story, Narrative Truth

Isaiah 60.1-6

Psalm 72.1-7, 10-14

Ephesians 3.1-12

Matthew 2.1-12

Epiphany means to reveal, to manifest, to make known.  The earliest Christians, in seeking to find words to express their encounter with God in Jesus of Nazareth and to make him known, found the medium of story or narrative as a helpful way to tell the truth of Jesus.  Truths that are too fantastic or too hard to comprehend are often told in story.  Using symbolic language and events, stories help us to understand the deep mysteries of God, mysteries which are ultimately ineffable.  The earliest Christians used stories to reveal who Jesus was, to manifest his truth and his glory.  It is important therefore, that we pay close attention to the stories of the New Testament, and that we come to grips with what their writers are trying to reveal to us is true about Jesus of Nazareth.  Later tradition will build on the stories, but it is always important to return to the stories themselves, plumbing the depths of their meaning and hearing in them the proclamation of who Jesus is – for the earliest Christians and for us.

This morning three new figures have been added to our crib scene – the three wise men who, guided by the star, came from foreign lands to worship the new-born king and to offer gifts.  But if we look carefully at the record of events as told in the gospel of the Matthew, we find that no number is mentioned at all: “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘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.’ ”(Matthew 2.1-2)  The writer of the gospel of Matthew is clear about the time, place and purposes surrounding the journey of these wise men.  The writer is clear about what they say upon arriving in Jerusalem; but about the exact number of travellers, the writer is vague: “wise men from the East”, an indeterminate number.  The tradition has supplied the number derived initially from the gifts which they brought to honor the king of the Jews whose birth the star had announced.  For the writer of the gospel of Matthew is clear in this respect: “On entering the house, [the wise men] 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.”  These foreigners, these Gentiles, come before Jesus acknowledging his kingship and his sovereignty, performing the traditional acts associated with the respect due a king: paying homage and offering gifts.  Nothing is random in this story and nothing is by accident.  The story is rich in symbolic meaning, and is in itself a deep theological statement about who Jesus is believed to be by the early Church community. 

In the first Book of Common Prayer the feast of the Epiphany is also given titled “the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.”  The Gentiles are all those who are not Jews.  For this reason these wise men are foreigners, they are non-Jews who come from the East and to whom the Christ is made known, or manifested.  They represent the nations of the earth.  By their visit the writer of the Gospel of Matthew is not just telling a story, but making a theological point.  The writer is reminding us of the promise made by God through the prophets, that the peoples of the nations shall go up to the Jerusalem, there to worship in harmony the God of heaven and earth:  “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.  Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’  For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 2.2-3)  The Christian tradition quickly picked up this idea, and for this reason the wise men are depicted as they are in so many crib scenes: one white, one asian, and one black – one representative from each of what were believed to be the three races of the earth.  The writer draws on the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures, but can also be seen as looking forward to a future time when “the kingdom of the world [will] become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah.” (Revelation 11.15)  The theological point is this: that God is not just the God of the Jewish people.  God is not just a local deity, but the God of all the world, the God of all peoples and of all nations, and that this God reveals the divine nature in a little baby.

The gifts themselves are almost a creative lesson on the nature of Jesus.  The first two mentioned – gold and frankincense – represent what you would expect for a messiah.  Gold is brought to represent to us that Jesus is a king.  Gold is, in all times and in all places, the symbol of money and power, of renown and prestige.  It is the gift appropriate to a king.  Frankincense is brought, to represent to us that this young child is God.  It is a symbol of dedication, worship and prayer – the dedication, worship and prayer due to God – and it was commonly used in the Temple at Jerusalem.  In bringing this gift of frankincense the wise men acknowledge Jesus as God.  Again, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew is drawing on the inherited tradition of the Jewish people to make a point; in the form of narrative the writer echoes the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…All those from Sheba shall come.  They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.” (Isaiah 60.3, 6b)  But the wise men in the Gospel of Matthew also bring with them another gift, a gift not mentioned by Isaiah or by any of the Hebrew prophets.  They offer to the child myrrh.  Myrrh is not a gift for a king or for a god.  It is a gift for the dead.  Neither gold nor frankincense will appear again in the gospels, but myrrh will.  It is offered to Jesus in wine to alleviate his suffering on the cross (cf. Mark15.23), and it is brought by Nicodemus to wrap the body of Jesus before it is placed in the tomb, according to the  burial custom of the time. (cf. John 19.39-40)  If gold is to represent Jesus’ kingship and frankincense his divinity, then surely myrrh is to represent his humanity, and the suffering and the struggle which is so much a part of human life.  Like the old man Simeon who at the presentation of Jesus hints at Jesus’ suffering by telling Mary that a sword will pierce her soul, so too these kings in their gift of myrrh hint at Jesus’ eventual suffering.  But this is the risk that God takes, and the cost of being so intimately involved in human affairs.

The writer of the Gospel of Matthew is not clear about the number of wise men which visit the Christ child, neither is the writer clear about their names, for that matter.  Their names – Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior – and their number are supplied by later tradition.  But Matthew’s silence on these points make sense, because the object of the story of their visit in the Gospel of Matthew is not to tell us about them, but to tell us about Jesus.  Every aspect of the story has symbolic meaning pointing to the nature and person of Jesus.  The writer wants to tell us clearly who Jesus is, and relates this story of the wise men to do just that.  Using the device of story the writer makes theological points; and therefore, the story serves as almost a kind of creed or catechism, revealing belief statements about God and Jesus: the God of Israel is the God of the whole world; God’s promises are bring fulfilled;  Jesus is king;  Jesus is God; Jesus is a human being, and therefore subject to suffering.  While the stories of the nativity are marvelous stories in themselves, they were not meant to be read primarily as such.  They are a way of using narrative to express a truth too deep for words.  It is helpful to remember that when we approach them.  It is helpful to search out not only what they say, but what they are trying to say; to see the ineffable revelation they seek to manifest.

First Sunday after Christmas: Experience of the Word

Isaiah 61:10-23
Psalm 147:13-21
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1.1-18

 “And the Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) It is this simple statement which separates Christianity from all the other religions of the world: the belief that God became fully a human being. Five simple words – five in the Greek too: “And the Word became flesh.” But if we believe this so strongly why have we spent the most part of the last 2,000 years making the flesh word? Let me try to explain. Christianity is founded not on words or creeds, but on an experience – the experience the first disciples had of Jesus. They kept no journals that we know, nor did they at first feel especially inclined to write down their experience in order to explain it. The oldest writings in the New Testament are not the gospels which tell the story of Jesus’ life, but the letters of Paul. The oldest of these, the first letter to the Thessalonians, was written some twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The oldest of the gospels, the Gospel of Mark, was written about forty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Clearly the Jesus experience did not initially move people to record it. It was only as the new faith expanded and letters were needed for communication, or as time passed and the original witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus began to die, that a need for recording that experience came about. 

 But, here is where the problem begins, because words are always limiting and can rarely capture in fullness the impact of a profound experience. People who are in love know this. Are there really words capable of expressing the experience of being held in the lover’s embrace? Those who have borne children, know this I am sure. Are there words which can adequately name the experience of giving birth? Those who have suffered deeply know this. Are there really words to give voice to the tragedy of watching your world fall apart around you, whether through losing a job or losing a loved one? Joy as well as tragedy are experiences which words cannot completely describe or convey. Words are only pointers to the experience. We use words to somehow capture the experience and to share it with others, but anyone who has had a profound experience, whether of joy or tragedy knows that words always fall short. If we can understand that, then we can begin to understand the situation which the early followers of Jesus faced. In Jesus they encountered something completely new and completely ineffable. In the person of Jesus they encountered the power of God unleashed and available in an unspeakable new way. The Word of God was not only made flesh in the person of Jesus, but in their own lives, in there own selves. The abundance of God’s spirit was poured out on them and new things began to happen. How does anyone have words for that? Well, the reality is that we don’t have words for it. We have language only for what we already know, for what we have already experienced — the Jesus experience had for those early followers no precedent. 

 When people sat down to write the Jesus story they were not writing history the way we would think, they were not writing science books or biographies, like we would today. They were trying to put into words the amazing experience they had had, an experience embedded in their encounter with Jesus. The writers of the gospels chose to write their experience in the form of stories about Jesus: stories which illustrated their experience of a Jesus who brought life out of death, who freed people from the demons which oppressed them, who lived in such a way that through him others experienced the loving generosity and bounty of God. But at the core of those stories was their ultimately indescribable experience. In writing them they hoped these stories would allow people to have their own experience of Jesus. They hoped that these stories would be the vantage point from which people could see that the word had been made flesh and was still living among us. 

 But what did we do? We made the gospels, and the rest of the Bible for that matter, a rule book. We took the writings of those first disciples attempting to put into words their experience of Jesus, and used them not necessarily to encounter Jesus, but all too often as something to beat our brothers and sisters over the head with. Instead of the gospel narratives being the way through which we can experience the Word made flesh in our own day, in our own way and in our own lives, they have become quite literally the Flesh made word. Perhaps that is the progression of events with human beings: we have an intense experience; we attempt to express that experience as best we can; and then as time passes we forget the experience and put more and more emphasis on the description of the experience or worse yet we confuse the description of the experience with the experience itself. Many Christians today put more emphasis on the description of the Jesus experience, that is the Bible exactly as it is written, rather than on the Jesus experience itself. The results of this convey little of the original liberating experience of Jesus. 

 And so we come back to the Gospel of John. Because of today’s gospel reading, Christmas is a good time to reflect on our own experience of Jesus. Christmas gives us the opportunity to open ourselves up again to a deep experience of Jesus. We have all had experiences of Jesus. Everyone of us can remember a moment when our experience of Jesus moved us to say. “Yes, I believe. Yes, I want to follow this Jesus of Nazareth.” The reminder that the Word was made flesh should move us to experience that Word, Jesus, in the daily encounters of our lives, in the day to day fleshiness of our existence. The Bible, holy pictures, and even church services may point the way to Jesus, but they are no substitute for Jesus himself. Once, some Greeks came to Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples and said to him plainly, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” (John 12:20) They had had second-hand accounts of Jesus, but now they wanted to see him for themselves. They did not come wanting to read a story about Jesus, or to look at a picture of Jesus. They wanted an experience of Jesus for themselves. The shepherds likewise, after seeing the heavenly host of angels, did not say to themselves: “Well, we’ll catch the full story tomorrow with the morning gossip.” They said “Let us go now to Bethlehem and this thing that has taken place.” (Luke 2:15) Even the magi came to see Jesus for themselves and offer their gifts. Is anything less expected of us? I don’t think so. We too should long to see and experience Jesus for ourselves. Like I said, second-hand accounts – even the gospels – are not enough. We must go out and search for Jesus in our world, and set aside time to encounter him in our prayer. If we do not, then we become like the person who has read every book on sailing, but has never actually been sailing herself. Is she a sailor? For all her knowledge, she has never had the experience of being on the open sea, an experience which no book can fully convey. 

Like advertisements used to say: “Accept no substitute.” God did not send a book from heaven to reveal the divine love. God sent God’s only begotten Son to reveal that love and to share our human condition. God did not send a book to read or a picture to look at or a service to attend. God sent God’s own Son with whom we can have a relationship, whom we can know, whom we can experience. As Christians we must be committed to knowing Jesus, not just knowing about Jesus. The Word became flesh for our salvation, let us not make the flesh word for our convenience.

Christmas: Listening to the Voices

Isaiah 9.2-7

Psalm 96

Titus 2.11-14

Luke 2.1-20

Perhaps it is because there is a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas, or perhaps it has been the recent rains, but as I thought about preaching tonight a line from one of my favourite poets – Edna St. Vincent Millay – returned to me over and over: “…the rain is full of ghosts tonight that tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply.”  And if tonight is not exactly full of ghosts, it is most certainly full of voices – voices that tap and sigh upon the glass of our spirits and listen for reply.  It is a night full of demands and requests, of voices issuing commands, making invitations, singing praises; voices of emperors and of angels, of wanderers and of shepherds.  The night carries with it the booming voice of power and the silent voice of the heart.  All of them within the context of this one magical and mysterious night, the night when earth and heaven meet and the Word is made flesh.  On this night it is God seems almost desperate to get our attention.  In the night – in the dark – when our vision is compromised and our hearing sharpened, it is the voices which we hear most clearly; it is often when the presence of God is most keenly felt.  The dark almost seems to prepare us to listen to God, and sometimes to attempt to make a response.  Diane Reiners was  a volunteer at St. Paul’s Chapel – the church closest to Ground Zero in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11.  With others, she provided hospitality and care for those still working in the rubble and debris of the World Trade Center.  In an interview at the time, she said, “We will generally have about 600 people come through each night.  The night visitors are quieter, they tend to come in alone or in pairs.  Conversations about religion, about faith and God, seem more frequent at night.”

So we come together tonight, in the dark, to hear the voices once again: the voice of the great Emperor Augustus that makes itself heard all the way from Rome even to the small village of Nazareth in far away Judea; the voice of Joseph seeking a place to stay for himself and his pregnant wife, also the responding voices of inhospitality; the terrified yet determined voices of the shepherds; the heavenly voices of the angels, telling the birth of the Christ, singing the praises of God and announcing peace: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!” (Luke 2.14); the unspoken voice of Mary who “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2.19); the eternal voice of God proclaiming the divine word in an astonishing way – in the person of a new-born baby.  Tonight these voices all make claims on us.  They all “tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply.”  And they come in the dark, so perhaps we can listen just a little more carefully.  They come in the middle of the night, so perhaps we can engage with them with fewer distractions, a little less protected, a little more vulnerable.  Perhaps in the quiet and dark of the night we can listen to them afresh and hear the good news in a new way, an inspiring way; a way which will carry a message for us; a way which move us to make a reply.

To each of us different voices will speak, different parts of the story will be relevant, and reveal for us new things.  Some days ago someone told me that for the first time she realized that Jesus’ birth in the stable was a real birth, with all the pain, mess and blood which a real birth entails.  For her, the voice of the Christmas story was the voice of Mary crying out in the pain of childbirth; the voice of the undoubted midwife who must have been there, encouraging Mary to continue pushing, as she wiped the dirt and sweat from Mary’s brow.  In a sense, this was her good news for Christmas, the deep realisation that the Son of God became a real flesh and blood human being, and came into the world in a real flesh and blood way.  Whose is the voice that speaks to you this Christmas?  Augustus, Joseph, the shepherds, the angels, Mary?  Whose is that voice which springs to you from the story?  In the dark of the night, whose voice comes to the sharpened ears of your spirit, tapping and sighing on the glass?  Whose is the voice that carries for you the good news of Christmas and the incarnation?  In the bustle – even chaos – we have created around the the celebration of Christmas, is there enough night, enough dark, enough quiet to hear any voices at all?  If we are to listen to the voices of the Christmas story, then we must be willing to tune our ears and hearts – because they will not yell at us – willing to live with the story, willing to carry it with us in the depths of our being in such a way so that we are able to really hear the voices, and hear them speaking to our lives and our experience

In the quiet and dark of the night the voices of the Christmas story speak to us powerfully, but they also “listen for reply.”  The message they bring to us demands from us a reply, a response.  They ask that their words be vindicated by our own illumination and conversion.  I suppose the voice that speaks most clearly and deeply to me in the Christmas story this year is the voice of the angel to the shepherds: “Do not be afraid.”  I am reminded that every time angels appear in the New Testament they always say these words first: “Do not be afraid.”  Certainly this past year has brought much to make us fearful and anxious.  Increasing divisions in our country, continuing economic difficulties and uncertainty; and of course, the terrible murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School have again disturbingly reminded us how unspeakable violence and cruelty can make itself known even in the most peaceful of places, even in the most unexpected of circumstances.  But I still hear the angels say: “Do not fear, see – I am bringing you good news of great joy.”  I am not always sure exactly how that good news will manifest itself, but I am convinced that as individuals and as communities our response is to be one of trust.  Our reply to the circumstances of our lives and of our world must not twist us into a hopeless, frightened little people, but draw us closer in trust to the God who sends angels to shepherds with astonishing news.  My response to the Christmas voices that speak to me this Christmas season must be one of trust – to trust and to keep trusting; and one of hope, hope in the God who makes light to shine in the darkness. The voices of the Christmas story require of those who hear them a response, and each of us must make the response which our own spirit calls us to make.

If we read and re-read the Christmas story without paying heed in a deep and creative way to what its voices are saying to us, the story will become for us just another story among the myriad of stories which we know; simply a part of our inherited customs to be taken out, dusted off, read once a year, then returned to its place of distant honour.  It will cease to be for us a living word with the power to  challenge and transform lives.  But if we take it seriously, its voices will not let us rest.  Like the ghosts in Millay’s poem those voices will haunt us, in the best sense of the word.  They will continually and persistently come to us.  In the night, the dark, the quiet, they will “tap and sigh upon the glass” with their message and their invitation.  They will invite us to get caught up in the message that they bring, they will invite us to make a response – a reply – which draws us closer to the Great Voice, the one who spoke all things into being.  Carry the story and its voices around with you and allow its voices to haunt you.  Find the voice in the story speaking to you.  Allow a place of darkness and quiet for its power and challenge to come rushing to you.  So that you may make your reply, and with the shepherds glorify and praise God for all you have heard and seen, for all that has been told you. (cf. Luke 2.20)