What Time Is It? Gal. 4:4-7; Matt. 2:1-12

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1 Matt Dodrill Epiphany Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 31 December :00 a.m. service Dallas, Texas What Time Is It? Gal. 4:4-7; Matt. 2:1-12 So here we are on December 31, and many of us can identify with the words of the great theologian, Dr. Seuss: How did it get so late so soon? It s night before it s afternoon. December is here before it s June. My goodness, how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon? He s right, isn t he? How is it already the eve of a new year? Wasn t January 1, 2017 just yesterday? Five minutes ago, you were a freshman in high school. You blinked and your kids were all grown up! Is AARP calling already? How did it get so late so soon? It s hard to tell time when it s going by so fast. Yet, one of the highest callings of Christian discipleship is to answer the question, What time is it? Matthew, the author of the first Gospel, is a time-teller. In the time of King Herod, he writes, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem. From his gold-draped office, Herod overhears them asking his receptionist about a king of the Jews, so he takes his comb out of his back pocket and slides it through his greasy hair before straightening his red tie and Giorgio Armani suit jacket. You can almost hear the theme music swelling as the scene takes shape: You re so vain, you probably think this song is about you, don t you? Soon discovering that this song is not about him, Herod does what only those with voices can do: He called. He called to order an assembly of chief priests and scribes, a board meeting with clergy who became a party to his sins by laying hands on him. Only power can do that. Only power can summon and assemble, and only the words of the powerful can so effectively commission those who ve been gathered. So we hear the words of Herod s great commission: Go search find bring. What will come of Herod s call? What will come of his words? In the opening scene of the 1997 film Contact, we re given a frontrow view of our planet. From the

2 edge of Earth s atmosphere, we can hear a wall of sounds beaming from our world. Radio broadcasts, hit songs, newscasts, and TV shows. As the camera starts to pull back from Earth, past the moon, past Mars and the rest of the planets in our solar system, all those sounds start to age. We begin hearing news and music from the 1980s, then the 70s, 60s, 50s. As we pass Saturn, we can hear Richard Nixon s voice: I m not a crook! By the time the earth is no longer in view and we traverse the edge of our galaxy, we have to lean in closely to hear the sounds. Because as the broadcasts get older, they gradually dwindle. We re light years away from the earth now, and we can barely hear music from the Roaring 20s. Finally, the sounds peter out as we continue moving further from the earth in silence. All those sound waves head into space, and they just keep going like a radio broadcast that continues relentlessly whether there are listeners or not. And the transmissions do not return from whence they came. Herod s words are transmitted from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, broadcast into the world. By these words he assembles a council, and by these words he summons and commissions the wise men. These Magi from the East these political advisors who read the stars and make predictions for this man now embody the words of their tyrant king: Go search find bring. Herod will make it known through the words of Death that he is not accepting applications for King of the Jews at this time. That job is not open! Will Herod s words return to him? Do the words of Death ever return from whence they come? And what does this have to do with time? When the fullness of time had come, says the Apostle Paul, God sent his Son. Paul knew about a different time, the all-encompassing time of Jesus. It s easy to take the fullness of time to mean the right time. But Paul means something more cosmic, more all-consuming. What would it mean for the Creator of all things the One in whom and through whom all things exist to become one with the creature? It would mean that every creature across time and space including time and space themselves would be drawn into the flesh of its

3 Creator. 1 It would mean that all time would be transfigured by his time, the time of the Nazarene born in Bethlehem. The fullness of time means that there is no time that is not already transfigured by the Son s presence. As the fourth century church father, Athanasius, once said, God became what we are that we might become what he is. Put differently, God comes into our time that our time might be taken into his time, making every creature throughout time a contemporary of Jesus Christ. This reminds me of a story about the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. In the early sixties, Barth visited the United States on a lecture tour when evangelical theology was coming to prominence, preoccupying itself with the question of when a Christian was born again. After one such lecture, a young man raised his hand to ask a question. Professor Barth, he began, I was wondering, when were you saved? Having spent the entire night fielding questions from ivory tower academics, Barth seemed to receive this question as a respite from his 1 The first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Selflabor, an easy question requiring an easy answer. When was I saved? he began. Well, that s easy. I was saved 2,000 years ago. Karl Barth understood that on the night when Mary gave birth to the Messiah, all of time was drawn into his flesh, and every human across time and space was born again. Twenty-five years prior, Barth had written about the miracle of Christmas while another man was propagating a vision of a new humanity. That man s name was Adolf Hitler. Barth, who was banned from teaching in Germany because of his anti-nazi views, asserted that we cannot achieve a new humanity apart from God. The new humanity doesn t begin with the Hitlers and Herods of the world; it begins in Mary s womb, where the Spirit acts as the agent of this new beginning and where the dividing walls of hostility are broken down in the flesh of Jesus. 2 In these days, it seems necessary to emphasize that as well as being evil, racism is a heresy that betrays a fundamental error concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ. If same Word who made it in the beginning. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 1. 2 Ephesians 2:14-15

4 we want to put Christ back in Christmas, let s recover the subversive nature of this season as Karl Barth did before us. This will require us to grasp the Word and the words made flesh in the manger. Jesus, like Herod, did what only those with a voice can do: He called. He called to order an assembly of Jews (Mary and Joseph) and Gentiles (the Magi). In the original language, the word church means called-out assembly, and prior to the Christians it referred to something like a Greek town hall meeting. Whereas Herod assembles town hall meetings with words, God assembles them with the Word. And this is why, despite declining numbers in attendance across the American landscape and all the anxiety that comes with that, the church is going to be OK. The same cannot be said of Herod s assembly. You see, Herod s words will not return to him. They go out like a broadcast into space, into the void, never to return from whence they came. Despite the havoc they wreak, the words of death have no substance, no recourse to life. In the Christian tradition, evil has often been described not as a thing, but as a lack an absence of goodness and being. A good God creates only good things, so evil must not be a thing at all. The word theologians sometimes use to describe it is surd. A surd is completely irrational and inexplicable. We cannot explain its existence or its origins, nor can we understand how it operates. You might imagine a child digging a large hole in the backyard and then trying to pick the hole up and place it in the wheelbarrow. As hard as the child might try, and as frustrated as she might get, she just cannot interact with this hole this lack. Evil is like that. It cannot be given in any substantive way, nor can it be received. It only receives us, cutting into our humanity like a parasite until there s nothing left. And it touches everything. Nothing escapes death. There is no time that is not bound for death, no time that does not belong to death! Nobody offers their bodies, their dreams, their words without it all collapsing into the nothing called Death. Yet there s an immense draw to Death, a profound attraction. Those religious leaders who laid hands on Herod and blessed him are intoxicated by Death. Death has agents, you know. And sometimes those agents wear stoles and clergy collars and have good preaching voices. Make no mistake: God is their point of reference. But they are intoxicated by the words of

5 Death because Death s power to kill mimics God s power to give life. What these agents don t understand is that there s no reciprocity with Death, no process of exchange, no giving and receiving of gifts. With Death this lack, this surd there is no thing to be given or received. The words of death are transmitted into space, traveling deeper and deeper, relentlessly, until the sounds cease along with everyone it takes captive. But the surd-made-flesh in Herod s commission cannot overcome the Word-made-flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. First in Mary s womb and now in Bethlehem s manger lies a child whose light shines in the darkness, creating in himself a space and a time that transfigures all time including the time of Herod. This Light touches everything. Now, there is nothing that escapes Jesus. There is no time that is not bound for Jesus, no time that does not belong to Jesus. The Magi now stand between the words that have no recourse to life Go, search, find, bring and the Word of life who will draw them into his own words: Abba! Father! The church will survive because it s assembled by the Spirit of God s Son, whose words Abba become our words. Unlike the words of Death, the prophet Isaiah says that God s word will not return to him empty! 3 It s never broadcast into a void; it echoes back to the Father through the Son, in whom we have been adopted as sons and daughters. Through the Spirit of adoption, the church shares in the reciprocal love of the Father and the Son the reciprocity that undergirds the universe, the process of gift-giving that constitutes the very life of God. The Magi will be drawn into this great gift of the Son, and they will offer themselves back to the Father through his words: Abba. This gift-economy is already on display in the giving of frankincense, gold, and myrrh. So, what time is it? It s the time of the Spirit of Jesus, who draws all time into the words he offers to the Father: Abba. And since it s Epiphany the season when Jesus is manifested to the Gentiles we need to take note of where this manifestation takes place. As some of you may have noticed, my daughters, Paisley and Adeline, have a unique clothing style. They 3 Isaiah 55:11

6 don t wear their clothes inside-out accidentally. They do it because they want to. On occasion and some of you have probably been on the other end of this conversation someone will politely say to one of them, Sweetie, do you realize that your shirt s inside-out? After looking themselves up and down for a moment, the girls shoot a glance at their well-intentioned interlocutor, and the contorted look they give you is such that you begin to feel stupid for wearing your clothes right-side-out. After a few moments of judging you for your impoverished clothing style, they give a gentle shrug and respond, We know. Brothers and sisters, on Christmas and Epiphany, the outside becomes the inside, and the edge becomes center. The Magi did not expect to find their king among a group of peasant Jews sleeping in a feeding trough in Roman-occupied territory. What if you were told that a king would be born out of wedlock to a homeless teenager in an over-policed ghetto on the other side of Dallas? Would you believe it? drawn to that space. Despite appearances, the poor and destitute literally have time and history on their side. If discipleship entails the craft of time-telling, then we must learn to say that the time of the Spirit is the time of the wretched of the earth. For truly, just as we feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner, we do it unto Jesus. 4 Christmas and Epiphany are all about recognizing that our God is an upside-down God, a God who draws the edges to the center. People will certainly ask us along the way, Don t you realize that your God is inside-out? May the Spirit of adoption transform our minds so thoroughly that our natural response will be to shrug and say, We know. Amen. Jesus entered the periphery so that all of time and history could be 4 Matthew 25