Matthew 2:1-16
If you are celebrating the twelve days of Christmas, today is the day for pipers. Flautists or bagpipers, take your choice. Tomorrow is dedicated to percussionists. And then Christmas is over and Tuesday brings the festival of Epiphany. When I was a child, we celebrated Epiphany by gathering our old, dried Christmas trees in the church parking lot and setting them ablaze in the evening dark. It was glorious! That custom would break so many rules today; but not to worry, Christmas trees are now treated with so much fire-retardant you can’t burn them if you try.
Setting bonfires in the dark reminds us of our pagan ancestors who burned logs at Yule to celebrate the winter solstice and the turning of darkness toward light. We live in the perfect place to internalize the longing for light in the darkness, and warmth in the cold, and life in the face of death.
Epiphany is the season we need right now. It begins with a star, blazing against the Middle Eastern sky over several months, alerting astrologers to a momentous event, the birth of a new king. They went to Jerusalem, assuming a royal birth would be known in the seat of power, but the court hadn’t heard the news. They were busy bringing as much darkness to the country as they could. Busy with corruption and intrigue, murder for power. Notice the sages didn’t leave their gold there. (Someone should tell folks making pilgrimage to our Oval Office not to leave the gold in the court of the false king.) Instead they followed the star to a stable nearby in Bethlehem. The king they found was still a baby. Poor, not rich. Humble, not obsessed with power. Filled with love. Someone to grow into a man with a vision of equality and shared resources and transforming hope. Full of God’s light.
Jesus’ followers told this story about his birth to affirm that he was indeed Light for the world – the whole world – even sages from far away. The baby in a manger was indeed a king who brought us an entirely different way of living. Light in our darkness. Love challenging division. Hope overcoming despair. Life overcoming death. Epiphany is the season of inspiration and new ideas. It’s when the world gets bigger and everyone is invited to “see the light” and come together.
Jesus himself lived as a shining light of hope and possibility, pointing to a new way of being God’s people. He was always the light in contrast to darkness. He traveled Palestine to teach about love, and shared the road with Roman soldiers. He gave food to people who were truly hungry. He healed people whose illnesses brought them to the edge of villages and the edge of life itself. When people spoke of his movement as light, it was because they lived in very dark times. I love Christmas lights, but their light is a little too easy to give us a sense of what Jesus the light meant to people. Better to think of campfires in Gaza, or sheltered flashlights in the subways under Kiev. The season of light in darkness is indeed beautiful, but it is also strong. It speaks of hope that can look despair straight in the eye and not waver. It calls for courage and conviction. Christians are people who have seen the light of God’s way and will not allow darkness to win.
Maybe the best line in today’s story is this one: Being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they returned to their own country by another road. Like the song says, they looked at Jesus, and then at Herod, and they went home another way. Jesus and Herod represent a pretty clear choice – love and life or power and death. The sages don’t go back and tell Herod he’s wrong, but they take the back roads and go home to live by another light.
I’m surprised these days how many people I meet are worried about the darkness rising around us. It’s easy to make a list of things that are wrong – lying, cruelty, warfare, demonizing immigrants…these are clearly not ways of light or living in Jesus’ light. We’re lucky to be relatively safe and able to have a voice that speaks out, but our influence doesn’t seem to be growing at the rate we think it should. Maybe that’s why this year the sages seem so important to me. They left their gifts and went home to live, guided by the light they had seen. They encountered goodness, and I like to think they went home to spread that goodness. Maybe the early followers of Jesus told this story because it spoke of what they themselves were doing. They had seen Jesus, they had named his truth as Light, and they were doing their best to live by that light, even in the darkness around them. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot put it out.
I’m getting a little tired of shaking my head over all the things that seem to be going wrong. I suspect our energy is better spent doing what we can to be the light. If we can’t change what those in power are doing, then maybe it’s time to just do what’s right, to go home another way, the Jesus way. I’d like to propose that we spend the season of Epiphany lifting up ways that we can let the light of God’s light shine through us. I suggest we stop making lists of what’s wrong and list what’s right. What are the good values we want to live by, and how can we do that? I’m going to put paper on the church door so we can make a long list of what’s light in our world. Let’s list our values, our projects, our positive dreams. And then let’s use our time together, the sermon time each week, to explore what those good things mean and how they show up in our lives. Let’s shine as much light as we can to encourage each other and push back a bit on the darkness. Maybe that will help us describe another way to be home.