A Meditation Offered on the Feast of the Epiphany

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Epiphany by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

The Feast of Epiphany is the ecstatic, explosive, opening onto of the Season of Light. In the darkest time of the year, we have trained the eye of our heart towards the staggering mystery of this Emmanuel, “God with us.” Through liturgy and hymnody, through prayer and the lighting of candles, through living simply so others might simply live, we have practiced discerning the light from the darkness, joy from strife, fear from love, scarcity and lack from the boundless riches of Christ. We turned off the lights and knelt before the creche singing “Silent Night” not to block out, repress, deny, or dissociate from the world (we’re not Gnostics after all), but to in order to pattern in ourselves, once again, where, in whom, joy, peace, justice with no one shoved aside or left behind, is to be found. Turning to Jesus, making of our lives a creche in which Christ can come to birth in and through us, we are vivified, enlivened, set free from the shackles of shame, blame, guilt, isolation, and fear so that we might be God’s justice for others in the precious work of building up the Kingdom. That our lives, too, might rain down as help for the poor, the lowly, the needy, and the oppressed. That our lives might be gifts to the God of the poor.

In the Incarnation, the Lord of Hosts, the Totally Other, the Transcendent, the unfathomable and uncontainable depths of the Father, comes to us as a child. The limitless, the infinite, takes on the limits and finitude of a mewling child. Not content with being merely monarchically transcendent, God in God’s humility comes down in the fleshly, diaper rash, spitting up, gassy, person of the child Jesus to serve and in serving to fashion for himself a people who likewise serve. Paul reminds us in the Letter to the Ephesians that, “in former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind.” But now, now, we have in this fragile child a revelation, an unveiling–in awesome, lithesome lineament of ligament and limb–of God’s love for humanity and all of creation. Now, now, we, “see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God.” Before Jesus’ birth we had scripture–the stories, commandments, the prophetic witnesses, the evocative poetry of Israel’s journey into the heart of God. Now, now, we have once and for all, the full disclosure of who and how this God of Israel is in the flesh, in a life, in the face of His only son, Jesus. 

And as Paul says, it is the Church that is the manger for the child Jesus. The Church is the cradle for the life of Jesus–in its prayer, its liturgy, its service to the poor–the Church (at its best) is an open place, a cradle for Christ to be richly treasured, held, nurtured, nourished, bathed in our love, suckled on the milk of our prayers that He in turn might come to life in and through each and every one of us. The Church is the cradle of the life of Jesus that is meant to point us to the ground of our being where Christ is always already born. The Church holds the precious life of the baby Jesus and begs us to hold him too.  And soon we discover that it is actually we who are held, unrepeatable, dear, precious in the arms of Jesus. We learn to hold, discover ourselves held, and then go as people whose call it is to hold all others in a heart as wide as the world. 

Our Gospel for this evening presents us with a clear choice of who and how we will choose to be in the coming year. We have King Herod consumed with fear that his power and control over Judea will be disrupted. Paying homage to the child Jesus means only one thing to Herod–that no one is paying him homage. It’s classic pathological narcissism played out on the geopolitical stage. Notice, too, that his fear is literally contagious–”He was frightened,” we hear, “and Jerusalem with him.” Herod’s fear is a virus more virulent and deadly than any we can imagine. Omicron might send children to the hospital, but only Herod slaughters firstborns across the board. Human beings in the grip of fear and desperate to hold on to power, prestige, and possessions have a capacity to wreak havoc far beyond any naturally arising virus and its seemingly endless variants. 

It’s important to really sit with the figure of Herod this night. It’s important to really see how captivity to fear plays itself out in our daily lives and in the stories that run our lives: those stale old stories of unforgiveness, stories of scarcity, not enough, and lack in ourselves and others. We trap ourselves in narratives of not being enough, but we also do that to others–faithfully, relentlessly, running them down for never being who we think they should be. Each of us has to see for ourselves the way our often unconscious Herods infect our encounters with others. Herod’s long dead, but his spirit is alive and well in each one of us if we have the honesty to look carefully and the willingness to be vulnerable enough to embrace what we see there.

If I’m always needing peoples’ approval–if I trade my unconditional just as I am preciousness in God’s sight for the conditional praise or blame from other people–I’ll live in constant fear of doing or saying something that brings disapproval. And when I interact with people I won’t be interacting with them in an authentic, compassionately responsive way. I actually won’t even really see the person. I’ll see my idea of who I need them to be for me. I’ll subtly manipulate them into giving me what I need from them. I haven’t slaughtered them, certainly, but I have “killed” who they are, sacrificed their true personhood at the altar of getting what I require from them. That kind of slaughter of the innocents happens every day as a direct result of not seeing how our lives are run, often unconsciously, by fear.

It’s also important to sit this night with the unconditional love we see revealed to us, for us, in the person of Jesus. This love shows us another way to live, to be–it’s the other road the wise men take when they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. Not returning to Herod means opening our treasure chests–giving ourselves away in love–to God in the person of Jesus that his life might liberate us so that we might be Jesus’ loving, life-giving, and liberating presence for others. Not returning to Herod means to pause, stop, be still and know the love of God that is always on offer–coming down like rain on the mown field and me with a HEROD logoed golf umbrella wondering why I can’t feel a thing. Not returning to Herod means making a little space for God to get at us, to allow, receive, the Presence that yearns to be present in us, for us, with us. Like the wise men, we, too,  have been warned in a dream–God’s dream for us–of the consequences of living from fear. We’ll inevitably cast out and be victims of being cast out ourselves. The virus of fear is coming and will get us unless we’re inoculated with love. 

It starts with leaving our home ground, allowing the being-drawn-onwards from fear, scarcity, and lack into that far country with those half-mad wise men as our guides. It starts with following his star and its rising and being overwhelmed with the joy and gratitude that there is another way to live than Herod’s cramped, fearful, scapegoating, bloody example. It continues with entering the house, opening ourselves to the unbounded love that pulses and radiates there and letting it work on us–through daily prayer, growing closer to the person of Jesus as revealed to us in the gospels, weekly worship in community, service to others. And it culminates in returning home to the very circumstances of our life we once left:  touched, transformed, transfigured by that love, our treasure chests emptied so as to be filled with that most precious gift no moth, or rust, can consume. Pure, unalloyed, deathless, indestructible, boundless, love born in you so you can pour it prodigally, wastefully, without counting the cost, for others. 

In Survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi writes, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” To not return to Herod is to ask questions, to be called into question, to be the place of the question arising. Each encounter truly perceived with the eye of the heart presents us with the question: Love or fear? And if love the question we treasure in our hearts with Mary is always: What does love look like in this situation? What shape will Christ take here? May our lives be the answer so that, “He shall indeed come down like rain upon the mown field, like showers on that water the earth.”