January 6, 2008
(The Epiphany)
Watch the Skies
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Isaiah 60:1-6 Psalm 72:1-7,10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12 Matthew 2:1-12
(From The
Lectionary Page)
It seemed like Dιjΰ vu all over again, bundling up against the cold and heading out into the snowy darkness, with only a sliver of a moon for company. The difference was that it was 6:00 in the morning last week in Kansas City, rather than 10:00 at night a few years ago on Beaver Island, MI; and I was doing a 2-mile power walk through my neighborhood rather than spending a couple of days on a northwoods retreat. In days of yore, I did a post-Christmas retreat on that small island in Lake Michigan, 20 minutes by plane off the coast of northern lower Michigan. The island is the winter home to about seventy hardy humans, countless black dogs of shared parentage, and God only knows how many other assorted critters whose ancestors either made it safely to the island across an ice bridge, or who were stowaways on the summertime ferries. It was a wonderful place to spend some winter time, in measured solitude and quiet, broken only by the moaning of the ice in the harbor and the squeaking of snow underfoot as I hiked about. Luck and the calendar were on my side, the moon was new and the skies clear. I saw more stars at night than most of us are ever privileged to see. During the course of the retreat, I engaged a nightly ritual -- bundling up against the frigid cold and heading out into the darkness of northern night to stargaze.
What had I come to see?
What does any watcher of the night-time sky come to see?
It is an apt question on the Feast of the Epiphany -- the day upon which we hear the story of the wise men from the East traveling to Bethlehem because they had seen an unaccustomed star in the sky and believed that it foretold the birth of a king for the people of Judea. And so they traveled from the East -- where, exactly, we do not know; how many of them, exactly, we do not know. But we can surmise that the journey took some time and was arduous, as journeys were in those days.
T.S. Eliot evokes something of what it could have been like in his poem, The Journey of the Magi. He writes:
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
for a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter...
...At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly...
What had they come to see? The birth of a king in what to them was surely an insignificant country. What must it have been like to be guided by the star to Bethlehem of all places and to find the child in the arms of a young peasant woman? Can you imagine a scene more paradoxical, more filled with folly, than that of learned men in strange garb, speaking an unaccustomed language, bearing costly gifts, recognizing divinity in the child Jesus, and bending their knees and touching their foreheads to the ground in homage? What a place for God to be revealed! And in such a way!
We understand an epiphany to be a revelation; a way in which God is suddenly and in an unaccustomed way made manifest to us. Epiphanies are, by definition, life-changing events. For the star-gazers of Matthews Gospel, the world, the ordered heavens with the predictable, unchanging movements of the stars suddenly was thrown for a loop. The extraordinary broke in on the ordinary. And everything changed.
Eliot ends his poem this way:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down this
Set down this: 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 places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods...
What, indeed, had the stargazers come to see? A king, perhaps, such as they were used to. And instead, they found a child, and saw in his face the face of God. The same God who set the stars in the heavens and separated the day from the night. A God of infinite majesty and power who chose to take on human form and be born not in wealth and power and privilege, but in poverty and rustic anonymity. Imagine the story they might have told upon their return. Imagine the incredulity with which their story would have been met. What folly their journey might have seemed to their peers who thought they knew for certain the ways of the world and the purposes of kings.
What had they come to see? What, indeed, do WE come to see on this Feast of the Epiphany, 2008? What journey do we follow in search of Christ? With what eyes of faith do we seek him? Do we expect to find him wearing, for us, the trappings of middle-class privilege and status quo? Or does God reveal to us his face in the faces of the downcast who are among us? Are we willing to risk the voices of the world singing in our ears that such a journey is folly? Are we willing to risk the death of our old ways making room for the transformative power of God made manifest in us? These are our Epiphany questions. The answers await.
We of course do not know for sure that the magi returned to their homelands changed men, their old ways of understanding their world shattered by the extraordinary epiphany in Bethlehem. What we do know is that the ways in which God reveals himself to us through our experience of Scripture and the sacraments has the power to change our lives in radical ways indeed...
...If we open our eyes and our hearts, and risk the folly of the journey ourselves.
