Epiphany – George Yandell
As the story goes, they were very wise, even smart enough to be kings. On top of that, they must have had an unlimited personal line of credit. Surely they spent a bundle on the gifts they brought and then left in hardly the kind of place where they usually stayed overnight.
Matthew tells us that they are ‘from the East.’ Some traditions suggest they are from different parts of Asia, Africa or even Europe. Indeed, given that Jerusalem can be seen as the intersection of those three great continents, it’s easy to understand how those three wise men could come to represent the three portions of the known world coming together. Coming together to pay homage to the newly born king of the Jews. And indeed, the king of the world. So there is in Epiphany the telling of an extraordinary hope: The peoples of the earth coming together united in recognizing what’s important. All people offering gifts to the ruler of the universe. [Adapted from an article by David Keck in “The Christian Century”, December 5 edition, 2018, p. 22]
In addition, they read stars well enough to find their way across a perilous desert and all the way back home again. It’s when they got home that makes me wonder what on earth they must have said. That they found the one who made the very star they followed, the Ruler of the Cosmos, helpless on a bed of straw in a manger? When they began telling something like that around the courtyard, being a king and having executive privilege and all must have come in mighty handy. But somehow, the record carefully neglects letting us know how it all came out back in their own precincts, save that history shows that the Orient waited a while before it ever heard and reckoned with the Good News.
You and I go to the manger every year and don’t seem to find it all that hard to locate. Just now, we’ve been once again. We’ve seen the star and borne the gifts, even if we do have a way of giving them to everybody but the one whose birthday we claim to be celebrating.
We’ve made a lot of the usual fuss, often with considerable inconvenience and at great distances, and, heaven knows, we’ve spent a wad ourselves. Like the three kings, we’re back on familiar turf, settling down pretty much back to normal.
Yet if we will, we, too, have a whale of a story to tell all about what we found in a manger. But unlike those royal magicians, we don’t have executive privilege. We can’t expect people to believe what we say just because we say it. We learned long ago—or should have—that nobody believes much of anything until they are shown.
We’ve found the King of the Universe at Christmas, we tell them, and by the way, he’s that baby in the cow stall. He’s the Word, the Prince of Peace, and he became flesh and moved into the only overnight place he could find. But nobody much listens. Nobody pays attention. Nobody, that is, until all our talk and song and tinsel and light itself becomes flesh. That’s when God’s peace and justice and good will and joy to the world come alive in our time … in us. [Paragraphs 1, 3-5 adapted from Lane Denson’s sermon in Synthesis Jan 2013]
In him is our peace. For it is in the Holy Child of Bethlehem that all the claims of the earlier prophets are combined and fulfilled. It is now for us to whom the light has come to present our own gifts. Our pilgrimage need not be as long as that of the Magi, for we can find him in any location now— especially in our neighbors in need.
The gifts we bring may not be material gold and its like. The light that has come shines through us as we give our time, our care, our understanding. We’re like stained glass windows, lots of different colors and shapes, much like the earliest friends of Jesus. Of course, if we possess worldly treasures, we give them too. But our best gift to Christ, whether in church ministries or toward the least of those who belong to him, is in the offering of ourselves, our souls and bodies, as a sacrifice to him who gave all in sacrifice for us. [The above 2 paragraphs adapted From King Oehmig in Synthesis Jan 2013]