Date: January 6, 2008, Epiphany Sunday
Texts: Isa 60:1-6; Ps 72:1-7, 10-14; Eph 3:1-12; Matt 2:1-12
What happens when Jesus gets here? What happens when Jesus arrives?
That’s the question of Epiphany. What changes after Advent?
We just finished our season of Advent, our time of anticipation. And I think it’s safe to say that the passages we read on those Sundays, and the sermons we heard, were a bit disorienting—not quite what we expected of Christmas. There was some cognitive dissonance, some disconnect, between our Christmas world and the world of the passages from Scripture.
I’m assuming none of you could escape the holiday cheer, even if you wanted, and I don’t know why you would want to. It was everywhere, illuminating every corner with multi-colored, blinking lights. It was on the radio. It was in the stores—that jolly old Santa with his contagious smile. It was in our homes—trees, lights, presents, wreaths.
But the world of the Advent Scriptures was very different. On the first Sunday of Advent we had Jesus talking about the end of the world. Then we had John the Baptist talking about leveling the people, chopping them down like trees with an ax. And we had passages from Isaiah talking about life in the deserted wilderness. Very dismal stuff when compared to our everyday lives of Christmas cheer.
Why? It’s because Advent is a season of longing, of expectation. Every year the stories from Scripture help us re-learn, to remember, how much we need Jesus. More than that: we take time to feel in our bones the desperate longing of the world for the arrival of Jesus—the savior, the redeemer, the liberator, the prince of peace. We take time to begin to long again for peace, the prince of peace.
Now, this Sunday is Epiphany. It’s a fancy word that means revelation, or made known, or appearance. This is the Sunday where we find out what happens when this one we’ve been expecting finally arrives. And what happens?
What happens when Jesus gets here? On my first attempt at a sermon, I thought a political reading of our passages would be appropriate. I mean, the Iowa primaries were this week. But I decided against it because usually all my attempts to say something provocative ends up not being very interesting. We’ve all heard it before.
But I can’t resist making one point about the text, then I’ll move on. The story in Matthew is about two kings: Herod and Jesus are both called “king,” in the first sentence of chapter 2. I’ll read it: “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’” (2:1-2). King. Both are called kings. But there cannot be two kings.
That’s the tension Matthew wants us to feel—it’s the tension that runs right through Herod’s palace, and drives him mad. And so he plots to have this child king from Bethlehem killed. But the Magi don’t fall prey to Herod’s deadly schemes: “And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road” (v12).
Herod helps us see the challenge of Jesus—something that presidential candidates and Washington politicians don’t understand. They don’t get it because they have domesticated Jesuses, confortable Jesuses. Either a Jesus who is their buddy, their co-pilot; or a Jesus who is merely an interesting religious figure, kept at a mildly interested distance.
In both cases powerful leaders fail to see what Herod saw: if you want to keep your authority, it’s better to kill Jesus because the real Jesus is a challenge, a constant spur in the side of power—that is, if the people who follow him keep his memory and revolutionary presence alive. And that’s what we are about.
But the Magi are more interesting, and they offer us a different response to the advent of Jesus. First let’s debunk some popular myths. The passage doesn’t say how many there are. We don’t know. Three? Maybe. Could have been 5 or 10 or 15. Who knows. And who exactly are they? They are probably astrologer-priests from Arabia or Persia. But what’s most important for the story is that they are not Jews—these people aren’t part Israel, the people of God. They are gentiles, which simply means “nations.”
And what’s absolutely remarkable is that these gentiles are able to see what the people in the know can’t: they see Jesus, the king of the Jews, and they aren’t even Jews! They come from the East. And they want to see this King of the Jews that no one else is looking for. So they show up in Jerusalem—obviously kings belong in the palace. And they end up asking Herod, the legitimate king of the Jews, they ask him about the whereabouts of the newborn King of the Jews.
Herod’s priests and scholars tell him that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem. (Aside: our political world is not so different; presidents always need priests for religious legitimation—Billy Graham, Tony Campolo, Rick Warren, etc.). So the Magi head South a few miles to Bethlehem, and entered the house, where they saw the promised child with Mary, and offered him royal gifts, gifts fit for a king—gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
This is where those OT readings we heard come in: Isaiah and the Psalms. In Isaiah 60 we read about the prophesied time of Epiphany, when the light shall pierce through the darkness. And then Isaiah says,
Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…. The wealth of the nations shall come to you… They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.
And here in Matthew, we find people from the nations of the East, bringing gifts—gold and frankincense—to Jesus, worshiping Jesus.
But the Psalms reading focuses our attention on the culminating moment of the passage from Matthew–worship. Psalm 72:11, “May all kings fall down before him, all nations give him service.” To fall down before him–that’s worship.
This is about worship. Will the Magi get a chance to worship the king of the Jews?—which is Jesus not Herod, despite his title. That’s the driving question of the passage. They announce their intention to Herod at the beginning of our passage, verse 2: “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to worship him.” Then later, in verse 8, Herod lies about his intentions: “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and worship him.” Finally, in verse 11, at the end of our passage, the magi get to worship Jesus: “On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and worshiped him.”
To “worship” literally means to bow down or lay down and kiss someone’s feet (Gk, proskuneo). It’s a gesture of total submission, of complete humility. And it’s the outsiders, Persian astrologers, royal priests from a foreign land with foreign gods, who teach us what to do when Jesus gets here. It’s a scandalous story. It’s not the Messiah’s people who show us what to do—the priests of God serve as pawns in Herod’s plots and stay in Jerusalem. We don’t learn anything positive from them. We learn what to do when Jesus gets here from people in the East.
A few weeks ago my friend graciously invited me to join him at one of the most holy celebrations of worship in the Muslim calendar. It’s called Eid. So, I went. They held the celebration at the Dorton arena on the State Fair grounds in Raleigh.
What I saw there pictures what it might look like to see the Magi bow down, to lay prostrate, and kiss the feet of Jesus—to worship. 6,000 of them, in rows, bowing, in all sorts of ways: Bowing while standing, bowing while sitting, and then completely laying face down on the floor.
Looking back on all those people, completely synchronized, bowing, showed me like I’ve never seen before that worship is something we do with our whole bodies. It’s something we do with our lives, not just in our heads. And worship is primarily about humility and submission, something we do when we approach kings, like the Magi did with Jesus.
I think worship is what Augustine is getting at in the quote on the front of your bulletin. I’ll read it:
What is it to believe in Him? It is in believing to love, in believing to delight, inbelieving to walk towards him, and be incorporated amongst the limbs or members of his body.
Belief isn’t something stays in our heads. For Augustine, belief is a verb, and it’s a verb that involves our whole bodies, it’s a verb that leads to worship—to love, to delight, to walk towards him.
And walking towards him, towards Jesus, looks like those magi walking towards Bethlehem, walking into the house where Jesus is, and worshiping, laying prostrate on the ground, bowing in humility and submission—just like my friend, together with all his Muslim brothers and sisters.
So, back to my original questions: What happens when Jesus gets here? Well, we walk towards him. And what in the world does that mean, Isaac?—you probably ask yourself. Augustine is helpful here, the end of that quote: “to walk towards him, and be incorporated amongst the limbs or members of his body.”
Church, our assembly, is the way we walk towards Jesus. The way we get together here is our journey towards Bethlehem, to the feet of Jesus. We find his body as we come together as his body. We find him all around us, passing through us.
And the temptation is to end there, in worship, in the presence of Jesus. But that’s not where the story ends. What happens next for the Magi? They go. They leave. They return home. They are called into worship so they can be sent out. That’s exactly the shape of our worship service: at the beginning we are called to worship, and at the end we are sent out, blessed so we can be a blessing for the world.
Friday, Mary Jo and I were talking about our service today, and the passages. And she highlighted something from Ephesians that best articulates what it means to come together and worship, and then be sent out, just like the Magi. It’s verse 10 of the passage we heard from Ephesians 5: “so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”
That’s our calling. We get together for worship so we can receive that power of Christ that comes to the humble, the ones bowed down for worship, so we can proclaim the wisdom of God.
And what does that wisdom look like? What does our king Jesus send us out to do? What is the good news that the Magi must now take back to their people and their homes? It’s that Jesus is king, and now that he’s the king, he’s looking for followers, people who will join him in his mission, servants in his kingdom. And what does this king do when he takes his throne? Our Psalm tells us, Psalm 72. I’ll read the end of it again:
May all the kings fall down before him, all nations give him service. For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.
What happens when Jesus gets here? When Jesus gets here, people get together and start joining his kingdom-work. They do the stuff that he does. And the Psalm tells us what that stuff looks like. And if people can’t see why Jesus makes a difference, it’s our fault. It’s our fault because we haven’t shown what the presence of Jesus looks like. We haven’t given anyone reason to believe. We haven’t given anyone something to join, a movement of hope and peace.
That’s our commission. That’s what it means to believe that Jesus finally arrived, that the anticipation of Advent wasn’t for nothing.
Epiphany means to reveal, to make known. We are called to be the people of Epiphany, to show what it means for Jesus to be here, in our midst. And it’s that Psalm that tells the wisdom of God poured out for the world–so I’ll close with that passage again:
May all the kings fall down before him, all nations give him service. For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.