Epiphany!
Waiting in a Time of Crisis
Christmas isn’t a day. It is a season. And it isn’t a season that starts just after Halloween, overshadowing Thanksgiving because consumption is more marketable than gratitude. It is a season that begins ON Christmas Day and goes for 12 days after that until this day of Epiphany which comes this Tuesday, even later in the Orthodox calendar.
The point is not dates or accuracy, the birth of Jesus probably didn’t happen historically on the 25th of December. It is the meaning of the whole timetable. First, we have Advent – 4 weeks of waiting. In a culture of immediacy, we teach the blessing of anticipation. Then we have Christmas Eve which helps us imagine the irrationality of the Jesus Plan, “God enfleshed” born not in a palace or in power, but in the backwoods amongst the margins of the empire.
And then we have Christmas. And it goes through 12 days, with lots of history and meaning to each day in different traditions, but perhaps most familiar to us from the carol, which also has a history to it, the strange gifts offered by “my true love” symbolizing religious messages.
We finally come to Epiphany, which is a feast day commemorating the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, represented by the Magi, and celebrated with traditions like gift-giving alongside prayers and blessings. The word epiphany comes from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning “appearance” or “manifestation,” even “to be revealed.”
In the process of Christmas, we have waiting, imagining and then revelation. It is quite a stark contrast to the process of acquiring wisdom, or even knowledge that we promote culturally today. The arrival of the Christ is a wisdom that arrives in its own time, like the sunrise in the morning. You cannot force it, nor make it arrive on your timeline. You can’t commodify it or control it. You have to wait for it to be revealed.
As we move into a new year in which things like AI and crypto are going to be front and center, the wisdom of the ancients looms large. It is an illusion to believe that we can create intelligence, at least any intelligence that would also have the wisdom necessary to make it useful rather than initially helpful as it barrels towards heartless decisions. We are not in control of such things, but are subject to the flow of life and death, of wisdom and growth. We have to wait on revelation, we cannot create it.
As we near this day of Epiphany, I consider the magi of the story in Matthew’s gospel, these “wise men” who come from the east following a star to some unknown place, learning along the way of danger and bad intentions and choosing to return home by another road. What makes them wise is not that they have all of the answers before they step into the manger to praise the infant, but rather that they are open to looking for revelation, prepared to wait for answers and then to understand those answers might change. They don’t own information; they respond to it.
The work of Christmas is not over, friends. It is just beginning. We can respond to this revelation once more as a calendar turns, the revelation of God with us, of holiness enfleshed and here to show us a new way. The great Dr. Howard Thurman says it best…
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
The work continues. Where? Maybe that is to be revealed to you. When? Wait for the sign. How? Just keep walking and the way will be made clear, even if it isn’t the road you were planning to take.
After a year in which so much changed, and empire came crashing down on people in terrible and catastrophic ways, can we imagine that the story will be any different in the year to come? Yes, we will need action, but we will also need people willing to wait in the chaos and seek the wisdom that is being revealed, the wisdom that we cannot manufacture or buy. There is something we cannot anticipate, but simply must wait upon. What is it? No one knows yet.
Merry Christmas. May it be particularly epiphanous for you.
The verse by Thurman has always been a favorite. I read those lines each new year as though they are my marching orders for the days to come.
Beautifully written! We are the outliers, the ones who understand Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, and their purpose. There was a time when we were mainstream, but marketing and greed took that away, and we let it walk. For 45 years I've been trying to keep these holidays as way to hold the current crisis du jour in my heart, and bless it. We need to bring it back, and become the "plural" in pluralistic. Too much fundamentalism has destroyed the mystical in our culture. We no longer look for the "magic" as a part of our spiritual experience, except to demonstrate individualism. We desperatel need the communal experience to keep our mystical understanding of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit a daily experience. Thank you for being the kind of Pastor that calls us to bring the mystical to our hearts!