Fireflies and Old Roads

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of the Epiphany January 6, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

I remember the first time I saw a firefly as a young child. It was up in Georgian Bay, three or four hours north of Toronto—a land of water, rock, and pine, spiced with the trill of loon calls at dusk. We were gathered around a campfire, watching the sparks float up and disappear into the wash of the Milky Way that sluiced overhead. At the edge of our little campsite I saw what I thought at first was an ember. I left my spot on a rock and went to investigate. This was no ordinary ember I quickly realized. It was something I’d never seen before—it looped and danced and winked with a lemony glow and vanished into the woods.

These were the heady days of Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone, so I hitched up my belt, tightened the strap of my imaginary pith helmet and set off in hot pursuit. The firefly wound its way through the forest as I tripped after it—over rotting logs, under tangles of deadfall. More than once I thought I’d lost sight of the winking stobe. Suddenly, I found myself in clearing. As my eyes adjusted to the new surroundings, I tried to spot the firefly. But instead of a single firefly I noticed that I was standing in the midst of a swarm of thousands. It pulsed and undulated with the hum of their tiny wings all around me.

I like to think of the Magi in tonight’s Gospel as embodiments of a kind of holy curiosity, a hunger for the divine light, and a willingness to go wherever that light might lead them. We call them the Wise Men, but you can be certain that most of their friends thought they were fools. Like Abram and Sarai. Like Moses at the Burning Bush. Like the prophets. Like the little child in the manger who will grow up to say things like, come and see, follow me, and love your enemies.

The Magi are a sign for us of the journey away from what we already know in the mystery of the Divine Light. Not so that we can become admirers of the light. Not so that we can write poems or theological treatises about the light, but so that we actually become participants in the light. Christianity, you’ll hear me say, is not a spectator sport. The invitation, the call, is to make the journey to the creche of the heart and to discover there the gift of God’s very self to us. We get a glimpse of that Divine life living itself in us and we slowly begin to realize that we don’t need any of the things that hinder the light. We let go of all that is not love. We surrender. We make a little space for that light, that life, to live itself in and through us. It starts to dawn on us that the Magi’s journey is our journey, a journey to the place we’ve always been. As T.S. Eliot writes in the “Little Gidding” section of the Four Quartets, “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

We’ve started a new calendar year, and I think that part of job in this season of Epiphany is rekindle in ourselves and our community this sense of adventure, this sense of journey into the divine life, this sense of holy exploration. The Magi are adventurers of the spirit. They take the risk. They walk away from what they think they know and understand, they give ear to that yearning, and follow that hunger, to a creche in Bethlehem where they discover infinite space wrapped in swaddling bands, eternity mewling for his mother’s milk in the mud and straw.

This attitude, this spiritual disposition of openness and receptivity, this capacity for wonder, awe, and mystery is captured in that little line, “Then, opening their treasure chests….” Of course, we all have pictures of them bringing nicely wrapped gifts to the manger as if it were a baby shower—a Santa Claus onesie, a bouncer, maybe a new mama spa coupon for Mary to get a massage and a pedicure. But opening their treasure chests is really about opening their heart, consenting to God’s presence and action in their lives, letting God live God’s life in them as self-forgetful, other-centered love. They open to a new way of seeing and being in the world. They open themselves to the workings of Divine grace in their lives so that God might do in them more than they could ever ask or imagine.

You see, they offer gifts in response to the realization of what God has done for them in the person of Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us. Once that sense of abundance and giftedness sinks in, there’s really only one logical thing to do—share the gift. Opening their treasure chests is their response to God lavishing God’s riches on them—strangers in a strange land, oddballs awed into the generosity they see revealed in the gift of God’s self to them in the person of Christ. No longer is access to God predicated on bloodline, or the result of human rule-following. These star-followers realize that God is for all—Jew, Gentile, and Magi alike—that everyone has access to the deluge of grace, mercy, and belovedness that is God’s free gift to all without exception.

That open treasure chest is diametrically opposed to Herod’s treasure chest that kept under lock and key. Herod’s world is a world of fear. He sees in Jesus’ birth not love come down to save us from ourselves, but an imminent threat to his carefully-ordered system of power and control. Herod’s world is a world where it makes perfect sense to slaughter innocents in order to maintain his hold on power.

My favorite part of our Gospel for this evening occurs when the Magi, who were tasked by Herod to report on the Messiah’s location, awaken from their dream, and go home by another road. The old road, the road pot-holed with fear, violence, backroom politicking, no longer holds an appeal for them. In their encounter with the child Jesus they discover an overwhelming joy that makes everything else pale in comparison. They depart, as we will depart this evening, as messengers not of old rutted roads, but of love come down and waiting to be born in each of our hearts.

Who, looking at the world these past few weeks, doesn’t pray for a different road than the one we’re currently walking down? Who, seeing the violence perpetrated against our Jewish brothers and sisters throughout the season of Hannukah, doesn’t pray for a world where the fearful huddling of Herod and his thugs doesn’t have the last word? Who, looking at the situation in Iran, doesn’t pray that we might go home by a different way? The Magi remind us that if we want the world to change, we ourselves have to change. Peace is first of all an inside job. The Magi remind us that a world that looks more like our passages from Isaiah and the psalm is predicated on us making the journey, following the star, adventuring out of old patterns and habits, to encounter with the gift of God’s very self to us—in a manger, yes, but right here and right now as well in the manger of the heart.

“Be transformed by the renewal of your minds,” Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans. That’s what the Magi are coaxing us towards. A renewing of the spirit of adventure and awe in our lives. An encounter with the person of Christ that leaves us changed forever. A putting on of the mind of Christ that we might see with his eyes, touch with his hands, and stand where he stands. All it takes is our little mustard seed of a yes to consent to God’s presence and action in lives. God takes care of all the rest. But it means a willingness to follow that firefly dancing at the edge of campfire’s light. It means following the glimmer, the hint, the leading of a star to find out that where we journey to is where we already are.