Pam Shellberg’s Homily from January 7, 2024

Epiphany  January 7, 2024                            Homily   Matthew 2:1-12                                          Pam Shellberg                 

Since the 4^th century, the church has observed epiphany as a liturgical season, with gospel texts that manifest, reveal, unveil what the incarnation of God in Jesus means. If Christmas celebrates the fact of divine life come to us, the fact of God become human, the fact of God-with-us, then Epiphany celebrates the truth of us-with-God, unveils for us the divinity of our humanity in Christ, reveals the divine glory in which we and all creation dwell.

Today’s gospel, which comes from the gospel of Matthew is read every year and is almost iconic for the season of Epiphany – the magi journeying to the infant Jesus. This story most certainly reflects what had come as an epiphany to Matthew in the late first-century, an insight to a truth so profound that Matthew had to illuminate it for his people, most of whom were Jewish – God’s promises as known to the people of Israel had actually been intended for all humanity since forever. The details of Matthew’s story confirm their present reality as the fulfillment of a prophecy by the Jewish people’s great prophet, Isaiah, who said, “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn; they shall bring gold and frankincense.” Paul affirmed the very same truth to the Christians at Ephesus when he said that the mystery revealed to him – his epiphany – was that Gentiles were also heirs to the same promises of God given to the Jewish people. For both Matthew and Paul, the wisdom of God – in accordance with God’s eternal purpose – was made known by its rich variety.  The wisdom of God was unveiled in the rich variety of Jewish scriptures, in Jesus the messiah, in Gentile believers, in stars studied by astrologers, in their dreams.

In an immediate sense the story challenges us to collectively manifest this epiphany in also being open to the rich variety of ways others might arrive at the Christ. Perhaps it can also encourage us to be open to the rich variety of ways we might find ourselves continually arriving at, continually returning to the Christ. Biblical scholar Eugene Boring says of this passage:

Even this “most Jewish” of the Gospels is aware that it is not necessary first to have the biblical and Jewish hope before one can come to the Messiah…In following the light they have, the magi find the goal of their quest in bowing before the Jewish Messiah. The task of the church is often to discern the ultimate quest that is expressed in non-biblical and non-theistic ways in contemporary life, and continue Matthew’s witness that the yearnings even of those who do not know fully what they seek are met in the act of God at Bethlehem” (Boring, Matthew, 144).

Our task is to continue Matthew’s witness to the yearnings of those who do not know fully what they seek.

Our task is to continue Matthew’s witness to our own yearnings when we do not know fully what we seek.

But, while epiphanies offer flashes of divine presence or spiritual insight, it often takes a long time – it usually takes a long time – for human beings to live into the truths they illuminate. Behind that single paragraph of Paul’s letter and Matthew’s iconic tableau are literally decades of reluctant resistance to this epiphany about the Gentiles, decades of conflict, grief, and fear during seismic changes in Jewish identity and the instability of the newly emerging but not-yet-Christian identity.

It seems that the manifestation of the divine in one’s life – or the divinity of one’s life – is never unambiguously glorious. This should be no surprise to a people whose central story of faith begins with God’s incarnation but doesn’t resolve before there is crucifixion and death. This is the pattern of the Christian life – epiphanies come at a cost, a trace of which can be found in all of the season’s stories.

I think a trace is left for us in the very last line of today’s gospel: “And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road,” sometimes also translated, “they returned to their home by another way.” Epiphanies will disrupt our understanding of home; they will ask us to step off what we’ve known to be familiar roads.

T. S. Eliot suggests just this in his poem, “Journey of the Magi.” Here the magi’s trip sounds nothing like we imagine with our Christmas card images of camels loping steadily and peacefully along the crests of sand dunes, carrying kings dressed in silk and velvet robes. And after several stanzas describing a very difficult journey, the poem closes with a magi’s final reflection:

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.

We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

The magi, returning to their home countries, now found their people alien, found their old gods alien. Yet they could not “unsee” what they had seen, and the birth which had been the goal of their quest, the birth which met their yearning for something they didn’t even know they were seeking, meant the death of their old and familiar ways of being, of navigating their lives.

In Matthew’s story, the magi return home by another way because to return to Herod would mean to collaborate with a tyrant, to possibly put themselves in mortal danger, and for sure to betray the epiphany of the Christ.  That’s what happened – they had come into the presence of the Christ, not merely an infant named Jesus, but the before the Christ manifest in that infant. I’m sure in that moment it was just as Isaiah said, that glory appeared and there was radiance and sight and the thrilling of hearts and rejoicing. And then what happened next was not unlike what happened to Matthew – as he could no longer be at ease in the old dispensation of Judaism where Jesus was not believed to be the Messiah; not unlike what happened to Paul after the revelation of Christ to him on the Damascus Road – as he could not be at ease in the old dispensation where Gentiles were outside the promises of God.

And it is not unlike what happened to me about 12 years ago, when I was teaching New Testament at Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine. One night I dreamt I was dusting my living room which had a couple of walls covered with floor to ceiling bookcases holding scripture and theology books. Running a rag behind a case to knock down some cobwebs, my hand hit hard on something. Curious, I started to empty the shelves so I could pull the case away from the wall. Moving it aside, I discovered a wooden door – my hand had hit its doorknob. My heart started to race a little bit, in the dream, as I remembered a room I’d closed off, thinking I’d never need it, thinking I could better use that door as a wall for another bookcase. I turned the knob and opened the door to a room bathed in a beautiful aqua light, lit as if by sky lights, a room filled with easels and drafting tables, loaded with cups of paint brushes and pencils, sketch pads on shelves, and blank canvases leaning against the walls. I woke up instantly, in a sweat and panic stricken, thinking “oh my god, look how close I came to forgetting that that room ever existed!”

It was an epiphany, not merely a flash of insight, but a divine gift, a spiritual gift whose meaning was crystal clear in the moment, as it still is today – illuminating that a too narrow focus on books, on words, on the things of academia – had blocked off access to an entirely different dimension of myself, one that shimmered with what I knew was a divine radiance.

But the truth is, to this very day, some 12 years later, I am still trying to live into what the dream meant, what the epiphany unveiled. Because, you see, a room with books and bookcases was my own country. A classroom with chalkboards had been home. My own country was in the stacks of the seminary’s library. Home was creating a syllabus, doing research and figuring out how the pieces of a scriptural puzzle went together.

But now had come the epiphany and I couldn’t “unknow” the deep truth of it – there was another radiant room that would be more truly home – and I was going to have to get there by another way. An unfamiliar way. Not with the cairns of books or the maps of syllabi to guide me, and not with the silk and velvet robe of academic regalia. But by a sometimes still painful unclutching of the gods of that old dispensation.

The season of Epiphany and its particular stories help us to see exactly how the incarnation of God celebrated at Christmas is incarnated in our own lives – even as they do not back off from what epiphanies of divine presence in us will ask of us. And so I’d like to close with words from a poem by Wallace Stevens – words that speak my deepest hope for us in our epiphanies about where and what “home” is and about the routes that will most certainly take us where we most yearn to be, even if no longer by ways most familiar and recognizable to us.

Yet always there is another life,

A life beyond this present knowing,

A life lighter than this present splendor,

Brighter, perfected and distant away,

Not to be reached but to be known,

Not an attainment of the will

But something illogically received,

A divination, a letting down

From loftiness, misgivings dazzlingly

Resolved in dazzling discovery.