Isaiah 9:2 and 6-7
Matthew 2:1-12
Hebrews 13:14
“No Longer at Home in the Old Dispensation…”
And so we have come through Advent, we have soldiered through Christmas, and today we find ourselves on the day of the Kings: known in the church year as Epiphany Sunday. If I could magically transport us to Central America, I’d take us there now. Having been deeply influenced by Roman Catholicism, the Spanish culture celebrates this very day with extravagant feasts and festivals, with music and pageantry and dance. I’d take you to the great cathedral pavilion of Mexico City or the ancient streets of Antigua, Guatemala. The colors and sounds of celebration would sweep us into the procession, and together, we would dance.
Some of us spent a week with the nuns of the Guadalupe Retreat Center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in September, studying the complicated issues of Meso-American migration and let me tell you – the nuns know how to party. They know how to dance. I trust that in spite of their diminutive Mayan stature, they are out in front leading a procession even as we speak.
The kings represented in processions held in cities across the globe today will be dressed in finery, and they will carry the symbolic chalices of gold and frankincense and myrrh. But the kings I hold dear in my own Epiphany imagination are more like the kings in T.S.Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi, which has become an essential part of my own Christmas reading. They are battered by storms, exhausted by the length of the journey, and discouraged by all the sadness and suffering they have encountered along the way. Their clothes are tattered and the crevices of their faces are lined with dust and grime. The journey, for them, as Eliot says, was “a hard time.”
In my youth I imagined that the kings saw the star in the heavens at the time Jesus was born. And right away they began walking. They made their way over deserts and rocky hills, camels by their side. And they arrived in Bethlehem of Judea twelve days later to worship an infant king. In truth – if there is any real reckoning of truth in the great myths of the Bible – the journey of the Magi, or Kings, may well have taken two years to complete. Historians have used the best of astrological science to date the appearance of a bright comet at or around the probable time of Jesus’ birth. And they’ve aligned that with historical data dating the actual period of King Herod’s reign, thus calculating when his interrogation of the wise men could have happened. All this leads us to surmise that the Kings arrived in Bethlehem when Jesus was roughly two years old. This, by the way, explains why Herod, threatened by the birth of a rival King, ordered all young children up to the age of two to be slaughtered.
Webster’s dictionary defines an epiphany as a sudden, intuitive understanding, occasioned by an unexpected sight or event. So stay with me here as we try to picture a burly threesome of wise – maybe once regal – men, battered and journey-worn, arriving at the place where a two-year old child awaits, amidst his family. Mary and Joseph are humble folk; and they are at rest in a dreary dwelling which had clearly, at one time, been a stable for animals. “They arrived at evening,” says Eliot, “Finding the place was (you might say) satisfactory.”
The angel chorus was gone. The fields were deserted. There were no fireworks in the sky commensurate with the birth of a Messianic King. There was just a young child and his shy, young, timid parents.
And yet…. and yet… Something took place there that made an indelible impression on the minds and hearts of those three wise men. They recognized…something. They understood…. something. And they said to one another, “Were we led all that way for birth or for death? There was a birth, certainly. We had evidence of that. I had seen birth and death – but this birth was a hard and bitter agony for us, like Death – our death. “
“We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease in the old dispensation.”
Matthew’s gospel says the Magi “went home another way.” He could mean by a different route- or he could mean “altogether changed.” “No longer at home in the old dispensation.” Unsettled.
It can be true of journeys – can it not? Something happens…. something happens that realigns our understanding of the world- or our understanding of ourselves. It gives birth to a new understanding of our place or purpose in the world. And we go home a different way. We go home feeling unsettled – no longer as comfortable as we used to be in the old dispensation. And it might just be that that epiphany, for us, means the death of assumptions we have held for a long time, but never questioned.
Several times over the past years, I have had the privilege of taking a group of people from our church community to visit the Methodist churches of South Africa. South Africa is a place where my own epiphanies have been almost too numerous to recount.
On one of these visits our group spent an afternoon at an elementary school run out of the parish buildings of an inner-city church in Johannesburg. This school had a wonderfully talented and dedicated group of teachers, who had themselves been educated in the excellent schools for which Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was well known. Rhodesia had the best educational system in all of the continent, I’ve been told.
Residing now in South Africa as immigrants or political refugees, these teachers had pooled their talents and resources to open a school for the children who had fled oppression and terror in Zimbabwe under the rule of Robert Mugabe. Mugabe was a ruthless leader. Many of the children of this school were orphans – orphaned at the hands of the brutal regime. And, if you can imagine, in order to get to the South African border, a good number of the children had had to swim across the crocodile-infested Limpopo River, seeking refuge. It was a dangerous crossing that not all of them survived.
On the day of our arrival, we were the guests of honor for a little musical they had written about their lives. For a stage they built a platform and ingeniously, somehow, made it possible for the platform to move ever so slightly – to and fro, side to side, up and down (slightly). The platform moved as they performed their song and dance on it. “This symbolizes the way they see their lives as refugees,” we were told. “They’re never quite sure how stable the ground is beneath them.”
I wish you could have seen them dance. I can picture the warmth of their smiles and the brightness of their eyes even now. They reached out to shake our hands and greet us with a remarkable sense of dignity and poise. The children were – in and of themselves – a kind of epiphany. Like the wise men who found the young Jesus, I can’t quite explain why but I found there in their countenances something … something that is hard for me to put into words.
But these are the words of the song they sang for us:
“My home, my home, my home, is far, far away,
Where is my Jesus? In heaven, yes I know
There is no hunger in heaven, yes I know
There is no sorrow in heaven, yes I know
There is my father in heaven, yes I know.”
Now, I was raised in a traditional, New England family – with strong values, and a pretty solid respect for the so-called Puritan work ethic. I was raised to believe that success comes from hard word. The mantra went something like this: be kind and honest and trustworthy, and expect to work hard for every reward.
If, as we learn in high school Physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; then the equal and opposite reaction to hard work is success. Life, in this sense, is usually fair and predictable and manageable, with enough self-will and determination.
And, for the most part, these lessons have proved to be true. For the most part….
But those refugee children in Johannesburg turned my long-held assumptions upside down. They unsettled- maybe unseated- my soul. And I went home a different way. It’s fair to say I’ve not sense then been quite at ease in the old dispensation. I saw…. Something. I understood…. Something. There was a death – a death of some old complacency. And there was a birth. Born was the realization that some terribly difficult realities befall some people, even though they have done nothing at all to deserve that. And even though they work very hard, success is seemingly unachievable. Born in me was a sense of urgency.
Remember the words of Isaiah? “And a little child shall lead them.” The little child might be the infant Jesus. It might be a refugee child in a school in Johannesburg. There is a new and more peaceable world out there- and maybe it’s the children who can see it – and can lead us there.
Last September, the nuns in Cuernavaca took us on journeys out into the countryside to see a number of small communities, and meet people who are succeeding in establishing a working economy, succeeding in building a wholesome life amidst the creeping scourge of poverty that pervades much of Meso-America. We met women who have formed a vegetable and fruit cooperative that enables them to sell their produce at a profit. We met a community of women who support their families by pooling their talents to sew and embroider clothing that they can sell. We met people of courage and dignity and pride. And I caught a glimpse of the kind of Utopia that we spoke about in sermons during our Advent season. It was encouraging.
But we also met people who, try as they might to support their families, simply could not do so in the face of drug-spawned violence and the poor working conditions so endemic to their time and place. You see, wages in Mexico benefit you and me in many ways- making it very affordable for us to purchase goods; but leaving laborers in Mexico impoverished; rendering them willing to risk everything to get to safety, and to arrive at a place where they might be able to earn a living wage.
It’s been said that the longest journey in the world is the journey from the head to the heart. For two long, arduous years those three wise men labored to find what they had hoped would be the new Messiah for the Jewish world. It must have been confusing, and shocking and frightening and unsettling to find a small child at their journey’s end. But what they saw there, they saw with the eyes of their hearts. They would have been steeped in the wisdom of the prophet Isaiah, and so perhaps they heard the voice that said, “And a little child shall lead them.”
My prayer for all of us in this new year is that we might trust the eyes of our hearts. That we might think of all life as a journey – a journey where epiphanies found along the way might unseat our assumptions, and where the simplicity of a holy family, or the trusting eyes of a young child might foreshadow a kind of utopia we had not yet even imagined.
At the end of this service, as we sing “We Three Kings” I invite you to come forward, if you’d like to, and place a candle in the tray here on the communion table. I invite you to think of that candle as a light of hope as this new year dawns. It might be a light of hope for some child you already know – or for a child you’ve never met who is caught in the snare of a world where politics and economics have built a seemingly impenetrable barrier to safety and success. It might be a candle representing your prayer for a friend who is struggling with despair or illness. It might be a candle lighted to represent your determination to consume less, to purchase less, to pollute less – for the sake of our beloved earth that groans in travail as the climate rages. It might be a candle lit in the hopes that you might live in the chambers of your heart more and more in this coming year – and less and less in the lobes of your brain. It might be a candle lit simply because candle light stills and becalms us.
I’ll close with one last story. A few days before Christmas, Glenn Formica, the immigration lawyer who has been so helpful to Malik and Zihaida, introduced Steve and Laura and me to a new family – the Torres family who live in Waterbury. We talked with the father, Miguel, as Nataly and Keneth sat at the table and drew pictures, occasionally entering into the story their dad was telling us. Their mother, Glenda, was abruptly deported at the end of last summer, leaving her husband and two children feeling vulnerable, and lonely and afraid. Their story is painful indeed. One can see and feel the confusion and pain etched across their little faces.
When we finished talking, Keneth handed to us a lovely little drawing of a Christmas tree. And on each little ornament were printed letters that formed the words “I want my Mommy home.”
My mind can conjure up all kinds of legal conundrums and barriers to bringing his mother home– but my heart feels the story, and my heart just can’t let it go. So I’ll light my candle for Keneth and his sister, Nataly. They gave to me a light of epiphany that shone all the way through my Christmas.
Amen.
Carleen R. Gerber
The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme