Epiphany transferred: Isaiah 60:1-6, Ephesians 3:1-12 and Matthew 2:1-12
The James Webb infrared telescope has been described as a $10 billion gift to the world. It sees the sky at wavelengths of light that are beyond what our eyes can discern.
Nasa’s senior project scientist was thrilled and relieved after years of hard work.
A machine showing us our place in the Universe; thousands of galaxies in a grain of sand. Images of a ‘stellar nursery’ and a ‘cosmic dance’.
Human beings have long to scale the heights of heaven or plumb the depths of space - arts and science set on a celestial quest. The desire to know the source of life, to see beyond where darkness and light are both alike, to know what gives our earthly stardust breath, to measure the pulse of the very heart of God.
Today we travel towards our epiphany - the revealing of a mystery and a manifestation of love.
This is the moment when, U. A. Fanthrope puts it in her poem BC-AD,
‘... three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazardly by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.’
The love that flung stars into space, causing energy to pulse and atoms to form and life to be breathed into dust was made flesh and dwelt amongst us; perhaps no wonder then that cosmic signs singalled this birth.
Those who contemplated the skies not only followed a star but looked beyond it. They observed and inquired; they searched diligently and found. Then, they were overwhelmed with joy before a child, dependent on parental care and protection.
There they knelt. There they offered gifts.
They searched for the love that made us, and found that love with us.
Their worship and adoration left us a sign of who this child was and how he would gather nations to Godself.
Gold: the marker of authority and kingship, yes; but found with and among us. The one who purifies a people as his own.
Frankincense: the one whom we worship and love beyond all things; opening our hearts in worship and service.
Myrrh: the king of our hearts who loves us to the end, to the grave and beyond; who brings healing to the nations, a new creation.
A mystery has been made known.
The radiance of which Isaiah spoke breaks in that we might proclaim the praise of the Lord. For we, with our different races, cultures and languages can seek and rejoice as we are made members of the same body, shares of the same body, as Paul puts it.
He continues saying that this wisdom, rich in variety, is now made known to rulers and authorities.
The star-gazing wise men encounter one who is used by Rome to maintain order in an occupied land. Herod, like many rulers, rules with the assumption that all things are determined by power. He is fearful and fragile, crafty and yet intrigued; he operates through violence.
The magi move beyond him and walk haphazardly, as the poem puts it, into the kingdom of heaven. For Jesus is the one who embodies God’s very self as a tiny child, as as an adult demonstrates God’s ways with the world.
Herod is defeated by such a person, movement and kingdom; by those who, in the words of the ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, ‘refuse to believe that violence will determine the meaning of history’.
This story begins to shape the time we live in too.
The magi take a different road home for the kingdom of heaven - God’s loving ways reshaping our lives - is a journey. In sleep, their imaginations have already begun to form around a more peaceable way. Their dream reveals to them that the safety and well-being of children, of the most vulnerable, cannot be left to the Herods of this world.
We need to name that and seek alternatives, different routes for human flourishing, shaped by dreams that counter violence. Hauerwas continues: ‘God has given us gifts of bread and wine to be offered so that the world may know that there is an alternative to Herod’.
Fed by the body body that we are to become, how can we be part of that alternative?
Perhaps in part, by doing our job; by doing what is entrusted to us - in work, at home, at school, in communities. Allowing our curiosity to be stirred, connections to be made, being attentive to where we find ourselves and acting out of what is possible or purposeful.
And into that we bring the gift of our whole selves; and we pray that we will find the words and actions to reflect the radiance we see; that as we look around, we will be people who gather together rather than fragment, build up rather than tear down; seek the flourishing of others rather than their survival. As scientists and artists, pragmatists and dreamers, little by little a stellar - heavenly - kingdom will come. We join that cosmic dance.
May we who walk by starlight act with boldness and confidence through faith in God that the world might know a more radiant dawn. For God's love is worldly in focus, cosmic in scope.
© Julie Gittoes 2023
