EYEWITNESSES TO MAJESTY

 

 

Scriptures:            Isaiah 61:1-4

II Peter 1:16-21

                                                                                                                                  OK, I want you to be honest now.  It’s time for some truth-telling.  How many of you got up out of bed yesterday, Saturday, and said to yourself, “Oh wow, today is Epiphany”?  Hmmmmmmm.  That’s sorta what I thought.  And to be perfectly honest with you, I didn’t do that, either.  Oh, it  helped to be singing through The Messiah later in the day at the “Messiah Party” as a tribute to the Day of Epiphany, but my thoughts were not focused on it as a major church holy day as, say, they would have been 12 days before when we woke up on Christmas morning.

          In a way that’s strange.  The word “epiphany” means “manifestation” or a “miraculous appearance”, and it is intended to mark how Christ was shown to the world.  That’s a pretty important event, for after an obscure birth in a backwater town, hidden back in a stable and attended only by lowly shepherds, suddenly here come these great and powerful wise men, who were even warned not to follow the star by Herod himself, and they attest to how significant this birth is going to be for years and centuries to come.

          The Eastern churches in Christianity place a great deal of emphasis on Epiphany – in fact, they observe Christmas and Epiphany together, since in their belief it is at the moment of birth itself that Christ becomes manifested.  The Western churches separated the events, based on the tradition that it took the Wise Men several days after the birth to arrive at Bethlehem, and also, I suppose, because they really wanted to observe the twelve days of Christmas.  When I was working for the National Council of Churches one of the members of the Communication Commission was the Greek Orthodox Church, and one year we offered them the opportunity to put a service on NBC at Christmas time – and they chose instead to film a major Epiphany service from one of their large churches in Florida, and we then aired it on television a couple of weeks after Christmas.

          So, there are valid reasons in our church traditions for making a big deal out of the Feast of Epiphany – at least as big a deal as Christmas.  On this day the full scope of God’s intention behind this birth is revealed.  As W.H. Auden says in the monologue I did for you last week from “For the Time Being”, “we have seen the actual vision”; but then comes the warning:  “and failed to do more than treat it as an agreeable possibility.”  What the Wise Men’s visit does for us is to affirm the validity of the vision and move us to do more than treat it superficially.  What this visit does is to say that what we are dealing with here is not some obscure sentimental story about a baby being born in a barn with a few mystical and magical overtones.  No, in the persons of these three the whole world has come to see what this is all about, and what’s more they come in an attitude of adoration.

          Try translating this into contemporary terms.  Suppose this birth took place in the back room of a dingy hotel in an obscure place like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, because the inadequate local hospital is too crowed.  The place itself is a bit newsworthy and might draw a few lines of local copy, similar to the stories of deliveries that take place in taxi cabs.  The only other unique thing here is that a number of coal miners, who don’t even know the parents, leave their jobs to come see the new-born, thereby losing a day’s pay.  Rather strange for our economically-oriented society, but still hardly worth more than a back-page story in a couple of regional newspapers or a brief, sneering mention on Fox Headline News on TV or the Internet.  But then a few days later three of our greatest scientists – say, three Nobel-prize winners – appear at the hotel.  And what’s more, they are there not just to observe and analyze but to give their allegiance.  This is the one, they say, whom we will follow and love and try to apply what he does to our own world.  He is the one to whom we will bring our gifts – which are the advances in knowledge of the scientific community.  Even odder:  the scientists and the coal miners both seem to approach him with the same attitude, and to anyone who is in the room this seems exactly right.

          Now the world starts to pay attention.  Fox News and CNN and all the networks are there with cameras rolling.  Presidential advisors, university trustees, heads of scientific institutions all would like to have the three scientists report to them – urging them to bring along charts and experiments and explanations for their peculiar attitude.  Perhaps foreign powers will secretly try to get them to defect so that they can control this strange, new power let loose in the world.  But the three scientists, returning to their own laboratories by unspecified ways, will only say, “What we have seen and adored and pledged our lives to is a power beyond our ability to analyze or graph or experiment with or place under human control in any way.  We can predict that this power will change the way we think about one another, and we can only say that this is what has been revealed to us.”

Epiphany means that something wholly new has happened.  It is something that cannot be explained by philosophical theory or scientific experiment.  It is something that comes to each one of us personally.  The Magi of old by their visit affirmed that here is the manifestation to us of divine love, and that this is not a realization that they could have reached by their own calculations.  This is why we truly refer to them as “wise men”.

We know the experience of epiphanies in our own lives.  They come to us as sudden realizations that bring us to an understanding greater than we have had before.  An epiphany is an “aha” moment which some describe as having found the last piece of the puzzle and now the whole picture has become apparent.  One of the great epiphanies of history is when Archimedes realized how to estimate the volume of a given mass and shouted “Eureka” – which literally means, “I have found it!”  The author James Joyce made use of epiphanies through much of his writing.  You may recall the movie that John Houston made of Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”, back in 1987.  At the end of it Gabriel Conroy, standing outside on a hotel balcony while the snow falls, realizes that he knows little about the inner life of his wife after she reveals to him that as a young girl she had loved a young man who died.  As he stands in the snow Conroy explores his shifting views of himself, his wife, the past, the living, and the dead, and in this moment of epiphany begins to see how change can take place at the start of a new year.

Epiphany moments change us.  The Epiphany of the Christ changes the whole world.  This is the revelation we receive on this day.

The author of the letter of II Peter (who, by the way, was most likely not Peter the apostle but a later follower of his) affirms that it is this revelation that is the basis for our faith and not any human calculation when he says, “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made know to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.”  Like us, the author of II Peter was not really an eyewitness to the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the Christ.  But through this kind of language he is trying to get a response from his readers.  There are two Greek words that can be translated as “eyewitnesses”.  One, obviously, refers to someone who sees with his or her own eyes.  But the other word refers to someone who has reached a high level of insight – an epiphany moment, as it were.  This author probably had both meanings in mind, for what he is saying in this passage is that faith can become real both for those who have seen the actual event and for those who understand the true significance of what has been seen.  The author identifies with those who were actually there when he says, “…while we were with him on the holy mountain” – just as we identify ourselves with those who actually saw the birth of Jesus when we re-tell the stories of the shepherds and the wise men.

But our author then goes on in the next verse to point to how people of faith can also be there on that holy mountain:  “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”  The Spirit comes to us, indeed, as a “lamp shining in a dark place”, and the imagery of “the morning star” brings a dawning awareness in each of us of the immediacy of Christ’s presence.  As we struggle to understand the meaning of this revelation for our lives, even though we have not seen it directly, the light of the Spirit can make even that far-off event feel immediate for us and help us to know that in a very real sense we, too, are eyewitnesses to the majesty of God’s revelation.

And even though we are eyewitnesses to majesty through insight alone, we still can make an appropriately prophetic response.  As we heard, Isaiah testifies that, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me…..”  Then, notice what it is that the Spirit calls him to do:  “…to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives…to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn…..”  In other words, to bring this back into more contemporary language:  to bring comfort to those suffering personal tragedies, but at the same time to show a people what it means to be free from the limiting bonds of prejudice and of having the will of majorities forced upon minorities; to preach about God’s forgiveness to those suffering from guilt, but at the same time to be agents of God’s justice upon those who are arrogant in their use of power.

The Spirit of God points through prophetic scripture to the demands of God laid upon those who would respond to this revelation – this Epiphany.  Even though we are neither Magi nor Nobel-prize-winning scientists, we are eyewitnesses to the same majesty that the Magi saw because of our faith.  In the W.H. Auden reading that I did for you last week one of my favorite lines is, “To those who have seen the Child, however dimly, however incredulously, the Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.”  The wise men who saw the Child knew what their task was:  to proclaim to all the world that God, Godself, had come.  We who see this Child – this Man – this God-Who-Became-Human – also recognize that the time being for us is filled with tasks:  tasks of giving comfort and demonstrating freedom, tasks of love and justice.  We turn our eyes inward so that we can be eyewitnesses of Christ’s majesty, and this act of faith then allows us to turn our eyes outward to see the needs of the world which call to us.  This is the meaning of Christ’s Epiphany:  a revealing of God to those who have eyes to see if they will but use their faith to look.

 

Amen.

 

Dave Pomeroy

                              First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

                              Las Vegas, NV

                              January 7, 2007