Sermon for the Feast of the Epiphany
“When they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts;
gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”
Epiphany. Such a rich and wonderful word. It signals something intellectual, something grasped in the mind but in such a way as to move our hearts. Christmas gives way, finally, to Epiphany. But what is Epiphany? The after-glow of Christmas? The post-Christmas ‘hang-over’ as we enter into the dreaded and dreary bleakness of the winter? January, as the forgotten poet of Stanley, Nova Scotia, Alden Nowlan, reminds us is about the truth of winter, “a truth that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.”
So it is good to stay inside where challenges of another sort await us. They are the deep and great challenges of the Epiphany season. Our thoughts turn away from what has so easily become the cloying sentimentalities of Christmas, all tinsel and wrap, on the one hand, and so over-laden with impossible expectations, on the other hand. Our thoughts are turned from the God made flesh to the God who came in the flesh. We are awakened to the mystery of God. We turn, as the 17th century Anglican Bishop John Cosin puts it, from considering “His coming in the flesh that was God” to “His being God that was come in the flesh”; in short, “to turn ourselves from his humanity below to his divinity above.”
The paradox is great. In making this turn we discover a far greater truth about our humanity. In thinking God we learn the deeper truth and meaning of ourselves. There is no greater truth for our sad and weary world where we are well along the way to losing our humanity. And in a myriad of ways: the nihilism of terrorism and consumerism; the techno-gnosticism which negates ourselves by the folly of turning ourselves into little more than digital apps; and the techno-scientific exploitation which wreaks such havoc upon the natural world and the human community. All signal a loss of our humanity through human arrogance and over-reach, on the one hand, and intellectual and moral folly and blindness, on the other hand.
