Sermon for the Feast of the Epiphany

by CCW | 6 January 2013 15:27

“They departed into their own country another way”

With Matthew’s account of the coming of the Anatolian “Μαγοι,” “wise men from the east,” the Christmas scene is now complete. Everything which belongs to sight and sound, to art and music, to prayer and praise is finally completed. The crèche, itself an image, is now a crowded place of images, images derived at once from holy scripture and holy imagination. The rich fullness belonging to the story of the birth of Jesus reaches its climax with the adoration of the magi. Christmas is now complete.

And over. Epiphany marks both the completion of the mystery of Christmas and inaugurates a new and different kind of consideration. The journey of the magi impels another journey, yet one that conveys a sense of disquiet and unease. “Being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way,” Matthew tells us. “No longer at ease,” it seems, as T. S. Eliot suggests, having been profoundly changed by the mystery which they beheld in Bethlehem. Somehow what they worshipped and adored stays with them and begins to have its way within them. Something has changed. There is a questioning wonder about what we have been given to see. The question is whether we have been changed by what we have seen.

T.S. Eliot’s puts it this way in his poem, Journey of the Magi:

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

In our Parish, we have had both birth and death during Christmastide, the baptism of Carter Jarrett Savill and the death of Herb Phillips. Birth and death belong to the rhythms and patterns of parish life.

The awareness of our limitations, of which death is the greatest and ultimate limitation, is the birth of philosophy. It is an ancient theme, constantly reworked and replayed in a myriad of ways. The death of Enkidu gives birth to Gilgamesh’s quest for wisdom in The Epic of Gilgamesh. The death of Patroclus occasions a philosophical crisis for Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. And so for Plato, for Augustine, for Dante, for Shakespeare, for Descartes, the list goes on and on, the awareness of our human limitations, in one way or another, gives birth to reflection and wisdom.

The adoration of the magi is part of that ancient and modern understanding. The story of our humanity in its deepest truth and dignity is found in our thinking upon the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity, a story which, with the birth of Jesus, is written in the very flesh of our humanity.

A story, but what kind of story? No doubt, you have heard the joke that had the Magi been women, they would have got there on time and the gifts would have been practical. Right! But where, then, is the story? Or is it all the stuff of legend about the three magi, about the star, and about the ox and ass? True, Matthew does not tell us how many “μαγοι” there were, beyond mentioning three gifts, and, apart from the star which he does mention, neither he nor Luke tell of any ox and ass. But the question is who didn’t or doesn’t know this? In other words, how did we become so unwise?

How does anyone know that it is just a legend, meaning that it really didn’t happen, anymore than anyone can know absolutely what happened historically? My point is that we do not and, more importantly, cannot know because we confront certain historical limits to knowing in that way. What is the stuff of legend assuredly, in the sense of being added to the story at least a century or more later, are the three magi-kings with names and biographies, zip-codes, e-mail addresses, Facebook accounts and cell-phone numbers, if you will. Is anything added or taken away from the biblical vision of the harmony of humanity and divinity and the created order in the manger at Bethlehem by including “sleepy cows and asses” for instance?  Or perhaps that refers to us!

[1]The Christmas story is not a linear narrative. The Church’s celebration of the Christmas mystery gathers into that holy scene so many different things. It is a deliberate collage of images signifying a profound truth. Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, in their wonderful collaborative painting known as The Adoration of the Magi, portray a vast pageant of people and creatures all coming to the stable, including a peacock and a pheasant, and horses equipped with fifteenth century saddles. The painting, rich in symbolic meaning, captures the essential aspects of the biblical story in a colourful and imaginative way that serves to deepen the understanding and to awaken awe and wonder about the divine engagement with our humanity. They knew that the biblical story does not mention a peacock or a pheasant any more than they supposed that everyone and everything was literally collected together at one time in that holy place so long ago and far away.

No. The story of Christmas is a narrative of purpose that arises out of an awareness of human limitation. The Nativity of Christ is followed by the Feast of Stephen, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, and the Feast of the Holy Innocents; things which should awaken us to the quality of the Christmas narrative. We are bidden to be wise, to come and adore the mystery of the Word made flesh in the intimacy of the story of God’s engagement with our humanity. We are made aware of the human condition in all of its hopes and aspirations and in all of its despair and disarray, things to which the Christmas mystery so profoundly speaks.

“When I am told,” writes Thomas Paine in his 1794 treatise The Age of Reason, a loaded title, I might add, “that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this – for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so – it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.” There are a whole host of assumptions about reason and evidence in such a view.

It has all the force and clarity of skeptical argument that we associate with the Enlightenment; it assumes a certain kind of reason but remains remarkably blind to any form of thinking other than its own. This is not unlike Thomas Jefferson removing from the New Testament all the miracle stories of Jesus. What is the problem? For Paine, the form of revelation concerns him and as such he fails even to consider thinking the content. “Revelation,” as he says, “when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.” Immediately? Meaning what exactly? Personally and individually? Privately?

The consequence of such assumptions, too, is clear: “my own mind,” he says “is my own church.” Now there’s a limitation, to be sure, but without knowing it! Such a view rejects altogether the objective nature of revelation which is about mediation. Something is made known to us which goes beyond the vagaries and the limitations of merely empirical ‘evidence’. It means paying attention to the meaning of the story.

The American educational philosopher, Neil Postman, reminds us of “the necessity of a transcendent narrative of purpose,” without which there is only power and no truth. What is required of us is to reclaim the wisdom and the understanding in the Christian story, to come and adore its truth. It means the engagement of our minds with the story of God’s engagement with our humanity.

We come to these stories, but have we learned to worship? Have we learned to be wise apart from our own conceits? “A cold coming we had of it,” as T.S. Eliot imagines, about coming to Bethlehem. But it is not the journey to Bethlehem but from Bethlehem that is far longer and far harder and yet more necessary, a journey in which we are “no longer at ease” but are being challenged to reason upon what has been mediated to us. That is the true nature of revelation. We have to think it. Then, shall we worship and, then, perhaps, shall we begin to be wise.

“They departed into their own country another way”

Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 2013

Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/01/06/sermon-for-the-feast-of-the-epiphany/

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