What can we say January 1? 1st after Christmas / Epiphany

   How to play January 1? I’d expect low attendance (not to validate partiers from New Year’s Eve, just acceding to reality…). Is it the 1^st Sunday after Christmas? Yes – but at our place we will treat it as Epiphany Sunday, as January 8 will be the Baptism of our Lord. So many resonances. A New Year, God doing a new thing. Watchnight themes. Predominantly black churches commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation. Methodists attentive to John Wesley’s Covenant service commitments.

    First, texts proper for 1^st after Christmas, or skim down for the Epiphany texts after: Isaiah 63:7-9. Fascinating, and important: “I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord” – not just for me personally though! “Because of all that the Lord has done for” not “me” but “us.” An uphill, constant battle for the preacher: to persuade people to think of themselves as part of a community, a member of the Body, before thinking of themselves as individuals! And I love Isaiah’s subtle wording: “Surely” they are my people – the “surely” implying some doubt, some iffiness resolved.

   Psalm 148. What an elegant appeal to even the animals and all of nature to praise God – which, we realize, creatures are already doing simply by being. Thomas Merton: “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.” All of nature, if we see it from this perspective, is constantly in praise of its Maker. What a way to begin the year – the way we being every worship service: praise.

   We think, of course, of St. Francis of Assisi and his “Canticle of the Creatures,” inviting sun, moon, stars, all living things, to join in a mighty chorus of praise of God. I wonder how many sermons actually invite people into praise, or settle for being words of praise – instead of lurching toward some takeaway, some moral?

   Psalm 148: did Mary and Joseph sing this one during Jesus’ early days? “Praise him in the heights, all his host” (a la the angels on Christmas night?). Echoes of Job in this stirring tour of creation, including not just the pretty and photogenic, but also monsters, frost, stormy wind, wild, dangerous animals. All praise the Lord, even unwittingly, simply by being. Annie Dillard (in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) muses over the mind-boggling diversity and experimental dazzle that is creation, saying “There’s nothing God won’t try.”

   Hebrews 2:10-18. Christ as the “pioneer” of salvation. The Greek archegos is used for the founder of a city, the leader of a large army, the author, the instigator of things. How shocking, how subversive though: this archegos leads/wins “through sufferings.” Notice the plural. Jesus’ suffering was lifelong, not just the crucifixion, which was plural sufferings enough!

   The family language is moving. He was God the Father’s Son – and so we too are God’s children and hence his siblings. The sibling image is powerful, largely (to me) because siblings have this rivalry and difficulty in getting along! So it is in this new family of Jesus. Why would we expect otherwise?

   Matthew 2:13-23. Joseph had some fantastic, significant dreams while he slept. They must flee – now! – to Egypt, replicating Israel’s sojourn and return to the land. From my book Birth: the Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series), I wrote (or skip past this italicized section to get the Epiphany texts!), Immediately upon the birth of this child, history’s ongoing struggle of good versus evil got ratcheted up quite a few notches. A thin view of Christmas might elicit giggles over the image of parents with their sweet child. But a cosmic battle just got touched off. “Why do the nations rage?” (Ps. 2:1). The idolatrous, unholy powers, immediately upon Jesus’ birth, seemed to realize that their domain had been invaded.

   And so they recoiled – like that haunting moment in Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Lord of the Rings.” The wicked “eye of Sauron,” atop a high tower, casts its evil beam over the land, probing, ruling, intimidating, always watching for signs of good to be dealt with; “its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread upon which hung its doom.” When Frodo put on the ring of power, the eye was seized with some paroxysm of envy and terror, jerking suddenly in Frodo’s direction, far away. Jesus was born quietly at a distance of many miles from Herod or Caesar Augustus. But in that moment, there was a recoil, a leap to secure the borders, and police the people so the powers that be will remain unchecked. How astonishing, that this birth struck anxiety into the hearts of those dwelling arrogantly and securely in the corridors of power.

   An appalling, gruesome manifestation of this evil recoil was unleashed by King Herod. Notorious for his paranoia, famously feeling threatened by and then killing members of his own family, Herod flew into what for him was a typical rage, ordering the cruel slaughter of all male boys under the age of two in his realm. The arrival of the Christ child was no security blanket to shelter the people from harm. On the contrary, his advent actually brought on intense sorrow, such is the ferocious kneejerk retaliation of evil in our broken world against the good that would bring life – back then, and throughout history.

 

  The laments, the shrieks of the mothers of Judea have echoed through time, captured beautifully in fresco by Giotto. If we listen, we can still hear them, and also all mothers who have flailed and strained and crumpled to the ground in sheer agony as they have witnessed brutal violence against their children. A mother, wrenched from her small son in Auschwitz, was forced to watch with the rest of the horrified crowd as he dangled by a rope around his neck. A man in the crowd asked, “For God’s sake, where is God?” Elie Wiesel, who was there, said he heard a voice answer, “This is where – hanging here from this gallows.”

   Of course, thanks to a good angel who had warned Joseph, by stealth the homily family fled to Egypt. Legend has it that lions and leopards in the wilderness bowed their heads and wagged their tails in homage. Palm trees bent low to provide food for them. Two thieves pounced on them, but then relented when Mary wept – the same robbers who were crucified next to Jesus thirty years later. The symbolism of this flight to Egypt would not have been lost on Jews of Jesus’ day or careful Bible readers today. This child, who had come to be the deliverance of the people, descended to Egypt, as Joseph and his brothers had centuries earlier, only to return in peace to the land of promise.

   Still in his infancy, Jesus was a refugee, joining the ranks of countless throngs of people through history pushed out of their homelands, in desperate flight to survive grisly armies, rulers and thugs. I have known Jews who managed to slip out of Europe and elude the Nazis; a neighbor of mine was hidden in a potato sack and thrown onto the back of a truck by her parents, whom she never saw again. Refugee camps dot the globe. Particularly haunting are those camps in the land of Israel to which Jesus came. In Bethlehem itself, camps like Dheisheh and Aida have been the home for thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes, living in harsh conditions for generations now since the war in 1948.

   SO... our texts for Epiphany. Early in the pandemic, with political rancor soaring, I wrote in a post that Ephesians 3:1-12 could not be more timely: not losing heart? Breaking down the dividing wall of hostility? Reconciliation? No less timely now… Check out the story of St. Francis with the Wolf of Gubbio (in my Conversations with St. Francis, or really anywhere – he made peace between a snarling wolf and the citizens trying to kill him), or Francis showing up on the 5th Crusade against the Saracens, befriending the sultan, Malik-al-Kamil.

   Isaiah 60:1-6 is powerful, even if at first blush it feels a bit childlike, as in the song “So rise and shine and give God the glory glory.” The dead stand, as people formerly downtrodden, about to receive extraordinary news. They shine, not because they have pretty faces or are in a chipper mood, but because the reflect God’s glory, like Moses did in Exodus 34. I love Oscar Romero’s benediction: “When we leave Mass, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt. Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong to face the world’s difficulties.”

   I wonder always about sermon preparation outside – and in this case I’ll go out in the chill of night, or I’ll light a candle in the basement to reflect on “light in the darkness.” Isaiah’s great vision of a gathering always draws my mind toward the emotionalclimax to “Field of Dreams,” when all the car lights are lining up to come see baseball in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. Or there’s John August Swanson’s visually moving painting, “Festival of Lights.”

   And then the ultimate Epiphany text, Matthew 2:1-12, risky to preach as it’s overly familiar and verges toward the corny. Tell them something they may not know – like we don’t really know there were 3. Christian art has depicted 3, 4 7 or even a dozen! “Amahl and the Night Visitors” uses the recognizable names Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar – but many others have been used, like Perozadh, Yazdegerd, Basanater, and Karsudan. The Bible leaves them unnamed.

   Did Matthew see a comic element in them? We have the bawdy scene in “The Life of Brian,” when the magi show up at the wrong house; and Owen Meany’s moaning over “We Three Kings”: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying doesn’t sound very Christmasy to me.” Christmas pageants can be funny, the wise men wearing cardboard crowns, trying to muster a wise face.

   It is comic – but the joke is on the pious, Bible people who miss Christ’s coming, while astrologers, non-Jews who practice illegitimate arts find the Christchild. God is so very determined to be found. A Libra, a Pisces and a Taurus worshipping Jesus – a Capricorn? What are Capricorns like?

   Not funny though are their cheekiness and the peril they were in by asking the paranoid, bloodthirsty and ruthless King Herod, “Where is the king of the Jews? We have come to worship him.”

   If we fume about the commercialization of Jesus’ birth, should we blame the magi for instigating all the gift-giving? Yet it is a season to “traverse afar” and give to those we love. If the Christ child is the one we love, notice they brought gifts of immense value, what was precious to them. Can we give Jesus, and those who are marginalized who bear his image, not just our relatives, not our leftovers but what is especially valuable to us?

   I’m always intrigued by the suggestive ending: “They left for their own country by another road.” Frightened by Herod? Of course they did. But isn’t there some mystery here – that once you’ve met the Christ child, you don’t keep plodding along the same old pathways. It’s a new day, a new road. T.S. Eliot ended his poem about the magi with “We returned to our places… but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.” Jesus doesn’t make my life easier or more comfortable. The closer we are to Jesus, the more we sense our dis-ease in this place.