Musings

Jan

07

By Another Road

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, January  6th, 2019 (The Feast of the Epiphany)

Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-2; Matthew 2:1-12

On Christmas Eve, I had the distinct honor of helping to dress the several hundred children who participated in our Bishop’s Christmas Pageant. I was stationed in the angel department, elbow deep in halos and wings, and the cuteness was totally overwhelming. But I have to confess, when I escaped from angel-land to watch the hordes of tiny humans process to the manger, it was the kings who totally captured my heart. You see, the kings had the best costumes: bedazzled crowns, plush robes…and they also had the most creative costume adaptations. One king wore neon blue rainboots and a spiderman hoodie under his costume (it was very Love Actually). One girl couldn’t decide what she wanted to be, and became the nativity scene’s first angel-shepherdess-queen.

But all cuteness aside, the pageant costume confusion points toward the real ambiguity of Epiphany, of the wise men who made their way to Bethlehem to worship the Baby Jesus. As with all things Nativity related, we make a lot of assumptions about the story based on the ways we’ve seen it portrayed. But if we really take a look at the text, the Epiphany story raises more questions than it answers. Who, exactly, are these mysterious wise men? Are they kings? Matthew never says so, but every pageant in Christendom suggests otherwise. How many of them were there? Matthew never gives a number, yet we have become so convinced that there were three of them (perhaps because of the 3 gifts they brought?) that, over the years, the Church has even given them names. Where did they come from? How far East, exactly? India? Japan? Hawaii? If you do some geeky linguistic archaeology, there’s evidence to suggest that our strange visitors were Zoroastrians from Persia, but even that is just a guess.

The truth about the Epiphany is: well, we don’t really know what happened.

But what we do know is this: God is using an astonishing number of tools and strategies to draw all kinds of unlikely people to the baby in the manger. And none of God’s moves come from the “official,” “church-sanctioned” playbook. God is breaking all kinds of rules here. We may not know who, exactly, the magi were, but we can be fairly certain that they weren’t Jews. There’s a significant boundary crossed, right there: Gentiles, foreigners, worshippers of another God seeking audience with a Jewish king to worship a Jewish Messiah. What’s more, these wise men have quite the dubious background, which Nadia Bolz-Weber describes perfectly:

“they were Magi, as in magicians, and not the cute kind you hire for your kid’s birthday party. More likely, they were opportunistic, pagan, soothsaying, tarot-card-reading astrologers. Yet history made them out to be kings, maybe because the reality that they were magicians is too distasteful, since no one really wants the weird fortune-teller lady from the circus with her scarves and crystal balls to be the first to discover the birth of our Lord.”*

And yet, that is exactly what happens. Then, to go with the sketchy astrologers, we we have the star itself – the natural world collaborating with God to herald this cosmos-altering birth. And, for good measure, Matthew closes the scene by telling us that God spoke to the magi through a dream. Because why not?

The Epiphany story is a collage of all the sources of revelation that the Church has scorned in its long history, all the things that we have come to fear, or see as heretical: non-Christians, leading the way to Christ, aided by divination and astrology. Interpretation of natural phenomena. Dream analysis! And yet God shamelessly uses all of these suspicious strategies to point toward this extraordinary thing she’s doing: joining heaven and earth, coming to live among us in a human body.

Despite our best efforts to describe and contain the divine, our God cannot and will not be put in a box. The story of Epiphany is a beautiful testament to the ways in which God transcends all human categories and constantly disrupts our expectations of where, how, and to whom God will appear. God is an opportunist, who will use any tools at her disposal to draw us back to her love, from tiny humans in mismatched pageant costumes to stargazing Persian magicians. So what unexpected means is God using to speak grace to you? What unexpected road might you take to reach the Christ Child? This Epiphany, may the God who spoke through strangers, stars, and dreams open our eyes and our hearts to the wildness of God’s love.

*Bolz-Weber, Nadia. Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (New York: Convergent Books, 2015), 73.