January 6, 2008 Epiphany
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 72; Isaiah 60: 1-6; Matthew 2: 1-12
The Prophet Isaiah said, “Arise shine, for your light has come, and the
glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick
darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear
over you. Nations will come to your light.”
Epiphany is about the gifts of light that God’s manifestations give us as
they arise upon us, but we need to hear the ethical imperative in the Isaiah passage
as well as the gift. We need to hear that once we receive the light of epiphany, we
have a moral duty to be bearers of that light for the people who are covered with
thick darkness to see.
If you allow yourself to think of who those people are you will feel in your
heart why this is imperative. Think of the families of Iraq whose children have
been slaughtered in far greater number by us than the children of Bethlehem who
were slaughtered by Herod. Think of those in our community who are having to
choose between buying food or fuel or medicine right now. Think of those in our
church struggling in the darkness of sickness, depression or grief. It is for their
sake that we need to think hard about how Epiphany can change our lives.
The word epiphany itself comes from a Greek word meaning manifestation.
An epiphany is a glimpse of some manifestation of God within or around us. The
title of this sermon is “Transforming Epiphanies,” and it has two meanings. One
is that epiphanies are gifts that God gives to transform us. The wise men see the
star and are transformed, launched onto their pilgrim journey toward the light.
Isaiah puts it this way: “Then you shall see and be radiant.” An epiphany can not
only show God to us, it can show God through us. It can guide us to the source of
light and transform us, making us radiant with that light ourselves—or not,
because an epiphany can also be a light that we hide under a basket.
So the other meaning of the title is that there is something we need to do to
transform epiphanies from being nice things that happen in our day that we soon
forget about (or fail to see altogether) to being life-changing events that lead us
onto the next stage of our pilgrim journey. To transform an epiphany is to take the
gift of light given to us and make it a gift we give to the world.
This is not hard work once we actually attempt it. There is an energy
within epiphanies that will guide and empower us if we submit to it. Our task is
only to see, to open our hearts and minds to receive, and to open our lives to give
to others what we have received. This may bring us into dangerous conflict with
worldly powers, but it is not hard. What is hard is getting through all the
resistance in us to open to God.
God is in all things and all things are in God. The possibility of epiphany is
within and around us always, but for some reason we resist perceiving epiphanies,
consciously or unconsciously. Even when we want to see them, we find we do not
know how, or find we are blocked. Much of the time it seems as if we are covered
with thick darkness like the rest of the world. It is distressing enough for our own
sake, but when we are moved by compassion or justice or love to help others, we
really need to know how to see and be guided by manifestations of God within and
around us. We need signs, we need inspiration, we need some light to shine.
So it is good and exciting that there is a movement today to renew ancient
Christian practices that can help us break through our resistance and see the
manifestations of God in our daily life.
One such ancient practice is contemplative prayer, the state of silently
dwelling in God’s presence. The centering prayer or meditation that we practice
in Prayer of the Heart is designed to open us up and make us completely receptive
to God’s presence and action within us. The more we practice this receptivity, the
stronger our eyes of faith become, and the better able we are to perceive
epiphanies and draw guidance and power and light from them.
Another practice that is coming back is the tradition of making pilgrimages.
Books are coming out with titles like, School of the Pilgrim: An Alternative Path
to Christian Growth, and Sacred Travels: Recovering the Ancient Practice of
Pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is about encountering God in epiphanies not only at
sacred destinations, but all along the spiritual journey. As one book puts it, the
saints of the past have seen life as a pilgrimage everyday, constantly mindful and
“on the lookout for significance, for signs and rumors of transcendence.” (In
Search of Sacred Places by Daniel Taylor) In other words, we can learn to live
like wise men following stars every day.
A third ancient Christian practice that is being renewed is one that we tend
to take for granted—the one we will do together at the end of this service. Long
before Jesus, Jews and other religions had rituals of breaking bread and sharing a
cup together. Even before Jesus taught us that we could become one with him and
one with God by eating the bread and drinking from the cup, this simple ritual had
mysterious and mystical power, full of love and life and light.
Jesus transformed the meal into the most intense of epiphanies. He taught
us to see that with the most generous hearted love imaginable, God is delivering
himself through Christ into our hands to be eaten—God in the wheat, God in the
grape, God in the soil and sun and rain, God in the hands of Christ breaking the
bread, God in the blood of Christ shed through his nonviolent resistance and
sacrifice. Buddhist teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh talk about eating mindfully—
seeing into the food we eat, seeing into the miracle of it, but also seeing in it the
care and work of the farmer who raised it and the many people who helped bring it
to our table and the inter-connectedness we share with all life. If we can learn to
see into communion deeply, if we can be as present to God during communion as
we can be during centering prayer or on a pilgrimage, epiphany may open up to
us. We may perceive the love and life and light of God that we are taking into our
every cell as we eat and drink.
But there is something more that can happen. Thomas Keating has written
a book entitled Manifesting God. In it he says, “When we consume the
consecrated bread and (cup), the elements are transformed into our bodies through
the natural process of digestion. In receiving the Eucharist, however, something
greater takes place according to St. Augustine: we are consumed by the divine
energy and transformed into God.” (p 35)
This insight of Augustine may be the key to understanding how we can get
past our blocks so that we can see epiphanies and open to their transforming
power, and so we can transform epiphanies into a source of guidance and light that
we can shine out into a world of darkness.
The key is that we need to give up our consumer mentality. The consumer
mentality sees the highest goal of the spiritual life (as well as the material life) to
be consuming something that builds us up and makes us better or greater, richer or
more powerful. We hunger for spiritual experiences as we hunger for rich foods
or new clothes or home improvements. But with epiphany, what we consume is
just the beginning. If all we do is consume it, the epiphany is not totally
transforming. Complete transformation comes not in consuming God, but in our
consent to God consuming us, swallowing us into the infinite flow of love and life
and light.
As consumers, we long to find God within us or to have visions of God in
the world. But to see ourselves consumed by God goes against the individualistic
and egotistic goal of consumerism. To be in God is to stop being a self-important
individual. It is to lose this life and gain a new identity as a distinct, beloved but
tiny and humble part of something infinitely vast. It goes against the American
grain, it seems like a defeat, and yet submitting ourselves to be consumed by God
opens us at last to what we have been longing for as spiritual consumers—the
greatest power in the universe flowing through us.
The magi began as scholars. They studied the stars and looked for signs.
Once they saw the star rise, they practiced the disciplines of contemplation and
pilgrimage, they transformed their epiphany by responding to it by allowing it to
move and guide them to give the gifts they had to share. This response
transformed them into gifts themselves. They were consumed by the light that
they had consumed from the star and the Christ child, and they became a light that
we still look to that guides our own pilgrimage to the light. They serve as a model
of what we are called to do and become for others.
All pilgrimages and epiphanies begin in the silence of our hearts. The
theologian Henri Nouwen wrote in his book Gracias! A Latin American Journal:
“When we have met our Lord in the silent intimacy of our prayer, then we will
also meet him in the campo, in the market, and in the town square. But when we
have not met him in the center or our own hearts, we cannot expect to meet him in
the busyness of our daily lives.”
Let us pray together in silence seeking the epiphany that is always within
us, the light that shines in the darkness within us.
Let us pray…
Sermon 01/06/2008