Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Evensong, St. George’s, Halifax
“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”
On behalf of The Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, let me thank the Parish of St. George’s for the great privilege and pleasure of being here this evening for this service of choral evensong and for the wonderful music provided by Garth McPhee and the choir. Boyd and Buxtehude, words of Sedulius and a tune named St. Venantius – it doesn’t get any better! Thank you.
Epiphany is the most theological of the seasons of the Church year. It is God in your face, as it were, and yet speaks profoundly about who we are, who we are in God’s sight. The whole focus and emphasis is upon what are sometimes known as the divine attributes, the attributes of God. Three of the essential attributes of God that are made known in the season of the Epiphany are “the infinite wisdom, power and goodness” of God, concisely named in the first of The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion as found in our Canadian Prayer Book. They are attributes that belong to the theological reflections of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. For Christians these are all made manifest through the humanity of Jesus Christ.
Epiphany is pre-eminently the season of teaching and therein lies the modern dilemma and challenge for our divided, confused, and despairing world. The Magi-Kings from Anatolia came to Bethlehem bearing gifts to the one to whom the star brought them. Unlike the Caesars of the world whose veni, vidi, vici, “I came, I saw, I conquered”, captures the dominance meme of the regimes of power, the Magi-Kings viderant, venerunt, et adoraverunt, “they saw, they came and they adored”; in short, they worshipped. The gifts they present are gifts which honour and teach, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”. Epiphany is the pageant of mystical theology. We participate in what we behold. We are in the midst of great mysteries. Gold signifies that Christ is King; frankincense that he is God; and myrrh that he is sacrifice.
Such things are both revelation and redemption; the revelation of God and the redemption of humanity. But only through something taught and learned. That makes all the difference – then and now. “They departed into their own land another way”, having been warned in a dream, Matthew tells us, “not to return to Herod”. There is a sense of ominous danger that foreshadows the richly allusive but disturbing story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents; the theme of myrrh and sacrifice, the theme of redemptive suffering. “How vain the cruelty of Herod’s fear”, as we sang. But they return, as T.S. Eliot famously intuits, “no longer at ease”, no longer comfortable and secure in their former assumptions and outlooks. The suggestion is that they are changed by what they have been given to see. Such is the purpose of Epiphany. It opens us out to the presence of God and to the purpose of God for our lives. The intent is to change how we see, how we think and feel about God and about the suffering realities of our humanity. But what kind of change?
