Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany
“They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them, and asking them questions.”
Epiphany is, par excellence, the season of teaching. It begins with the Magi-Kings bearing gifts to the Child Christ, gifts that primarily teach; “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” as one of the hymns puts it. And then, on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we have this Gospel story, the only Gospel story about the boyhood of Jesus. He is found in the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. He is with the doctors, the teachers of the Law. He is both listening and asking questions and providing answers. He is at once both student, humanly speaking, and teacher, divinely speaking. Epiphany is about what God makes known to us through the things of humanity.
This Gospel story challenges us about education. It does so from within the meaning of the story of the Epiphany itself which is primarily about adoration, a concept which we have, perhaps, lost or forgotten in our contemporary culture and which then effects how we think about education, about the teaching. T.S. Eliot’s marvelous poem, The Journey of the Magi, begins with an arresting quote from the 17th century preacher and divine, Lancelot Andrewes.
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey;
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
Eliot goes on to reflect on the nature of the journey, talking about the hardships of the way, “the camels galled, sore-footed and refractory,” though the biblical account makes no mention of any camels, about the recalcitrance and uncertainty of the servants, and about the unfriendly reception in the towns and cities along the way; in short, “a hard time we had of it,” referring to the journey. About that journey, he says,
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?…
He reflects on the ambiguities of life and death that somehow belong to the uncertainties of the journey. Birth and Death. Our lives, too, are often described and spoken about as being a kind of journey. But what kind of journey? Education, too, is often described as a kind of journey, an adventure in learning, and so forth. But, again, what kind of journey?
