Ephesians 3 : 1 12 Matthew 2 : 1 12 Sermon I ve told the story before about the time when I took some friends up to Chamonix for a day trip. And how, when we got there, the place was covered with a low mist, completely hiding the wonderful mountain scenery which I had been enthusiastically describing. There was just nothing to see. Had it not been for people walking past carrying skis we could have been in some village in the Netherlands. Above us there was only grey sky. Or so it seemed, until quite suddenly a gap opened in the low clouds, and there, towering above us, seemingly appearing out of nowhere was the most fantastic snow covered mountain brightly lit by the sun. The contrast with the dull wet streets was dramatic, and all the more so because a moment before my visitors had been making rather sarcastic comments about my promises of breathtaking scenery. The fantastic mountains were sitting there all the time of course, but we didn t see them, until the clouds parted to reveal them. That experience came to my mind this week, because it is a very good picture of what the word epiphany means. It is that moment of coming to realise something, coming to understand something, coming to know something, which we just had not seen before. So in the season of epiphany we come to think particularly about epiphany moments in our own lives, and about what mysteries there might be in life which we have not yet realised, understood, or known. So we begin with the story of the wise men visiting the baby Jesus. This may be a difficult story for us to take seriously because we inevitably come to associate it with nativity plays and the sight of small children wandering around with tea towels on their heads. But the story has a very prominent place in Matthew s gospel, so we can be sure that there must be more to it than that. And indeed there is.
This is a story of an epiphany, of people coming to realise something they had not known before, coming to a new understanding coming to know something for the first time. It works that way simply as the story of what the wise men experienced, and even just taken on that level there is plenty for us to contemplate. Their journey of discovery demonstrates an intriguing balance between divine revelation and human response. Clearly none of it would have happened had God not done something in the heavens. Everything that happens stems from that first sign mysteriously appearing in the sky. That is also what is described in the passage from Ephesians, in which Paul says that the mystery was made known to me by revelation. Not I worked out the mystery but the mystery was revealed to me. Indeed there is the claim that no one could ever understand God until God chose to reveal himself in Jesus Christ, In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed. (verse 5) Epiphany experiences are not our own doing. They come from somewhere beyond us. So in the story of the wise men from the East, it is clear that they are led by signs given from God; a star which they saw rising and which they followed until stopped right over the place where Jesus lay. This is the story of God creating an epiphany experience, actively revealing something to particular people, actively revealing himself to particular people, and whenever we sense that there might be more to life than what we have yet uncovered we do well to remember that. But of course this is also the story of those particular people responding. When they saw the sign of a new king being born, the wise men did not send round a circular email to tell all their contacts the good news, nor did they tick like on a facebook page, they actually went in person. They gave up their time and they spent some money, even to the extent to bringing valuable gifts. When they saw a sign of something significant they responded, they followed up, they went for it. And perhaps every epiphany requires both divine initiative and human response if it is to as meaningful and effective as it can be.
Which, as I have said, leaves us plenty to contemplate. Are there signs in our own experience of life which we should be doing something about? Are there hints going on around us that we should be following up on? That is worth thinking about. And what are the forces and the pressures which might block us from doing that, and what would it take for us to overcome those barriers? That too is worth thinking about. But as I have already suggested the story is about more than just the personal experience of the visitors from East. For the big, obvious, headline issue that jumps out from this story is that these men were foreigners. We are not even told what country they come from because that hardly matters, just that they came from away over there somewhere. And we are told that they were astrologers, people who study the movement of the stars for information about life, a practice which was both outlawed and ridiculed in the Old Testament. What screams out from the way Matthew tells the story is that these people are not like us and they don t understand our ways. Yet, at the very beginning of the story of Jesus Christ, at the very beginning of the story of God s new revelation to the world, it is these people to whom God reaches out, and it is these people who respond. Matthew wants all of his readers to realise something they had not known before, to come to a new understanding to know something for the first time. And this great revelation is the discovery that God has no interest in all our human division, no interest in the ways in which we label one another, no interest in the barriers we create. Getting to know Jesus as will do in the gospel is going to an epiphany, it is going to be an experience of discovering the God who was there all along, the God who is much bigger and much greater than anyone had imagined him to be. For it is not our God who be revealed, it is just God. For those who understood themselves to be a chosen people, this was going to be very difficult to see. The message that God has no favorites had always been there in their scriptures, the books which we have as our Old Testament, but the mixture of pride and patriotism which we are all familiar with in our world, had certainly clouded their vision. There was
the time of the great famine when God had sent his prophet Elisha to go and miraculously produce food, for a poor widow across the border in Sidon. There was the incident in which God healed Naaman, a Syrian man, of his leprosy (2 Kings 5). Jesus would later refer to both of those stories in trying to explain his own mission, when he said: I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed only Naaman the Syrian. (Luke 4:25) In response to that statement people rounded on Jesus and tried to throw him off a cliff it was a realisation they were not ready to accept. And twice in Matthew s gospel Jesus responds to people s request for some kind of sign from him of his miraculous powers, by telling them that the only sign he would give them would be the sign of Jonah. (Matthew 12:36, 16:4) You remember Jonah who was sent by God to go and save the people of Nineveh a foreign place full of non-believers. He was so disgusted by the idea that he got on a ship sailing in the opposite direction. Yet in the end, God found ways to persuade him and the people were saved from destruction. And that is the story which Jesus picks out as a sign of what his life is about of what he has come to do, and people were not happy. This was not an understanding they were open to. The story of the wise men is the story of those individuals coming to understand something new, and it is told at the beginning of the gospel because it is a sign of the kind of new understanding which Jesus is going to offer us all. If he is a revelation of what God is like, then we are going to see that his love is for all people equally. And that is wonderful news for us, because it means that this love is relevant and available for us, it means that all the promises of the gospel are promises for us no matter what our back ground might be and no matter what our past might contain. And it might still be challenging for us
because it means that the love of God is equally relevant for people who might be very different from us, people we might dislike or be wary of, or not want to associate with. There are so many areas in which new things might be revealed to us in the life and the death and resurrection of Jesus. Big things about life and its purpose and meaning, and also personal things about our experience of love and fear and guilt and forgiveness. And we may not know how or when or even why but we can certainly believe in the possibility of an epiphany experience and we can certainly believe that Jesus could be the key figure in the process something new being opened up for us. Perhaps Epiphany, coinciding as it does for us with the start of a New Year, it a time when we should be particularly open to that possibility.