Sermon 1/3/16
Matthew 2:1-12
Light of the World
Maybe in
my second or third Christmas at my first church appointment, I read about this
great idea for a Christmas Eve service for children. I don’t remember where I
read or heard the idea. But the gist was this: You take several warm Christmasy
blankets and spread them all over the chancel area, and get a rocking chair to
sit in, and then, during the Children’s Sermon, you read a book to the kids,
while they’re all snuggled onto the cozy blankets. And the book serves as
message for the adults as well. I just loved the idea. I bought several copies
of a book I thought would be meaningful, and I had four people set up to stand
with copies throughout the sanctuary, to turn the pages along with me as I
read, so that the adults could follow along too – we didn’t have any big
screens that I could project the images on in my first church.
Everything
was planned, and I was so excited about it, and could just picture how awesome
the service was going to be. And then Christmas Eve finally came, and it was a
disaster! I got the kids all settled on the blankets, and started to read the
story. But kids are so so wound up on
Christmas Eve. They’re wearing these fancy outfits they’ve never worn before,
and probably brand new shoes, and they’ve been eating Christmas cookies all
day, and they just want to go home and go to bed so they can wake up and see
what Santa has brought. It is not exactly, as it turns out, the best time to
ask children to sit demurely in front of a congregation full of people and
listen quietly to a lovely storybook. The kids were restless almost
immediately, and a few pages in, they were bored and on the verge of revolt, I
could tell. I started to panic. The book was taking much longer to read than I
had planned, and I was losing what little attention from the kids I had. I
started simply summarizing what was on each page, flipping through the story
faster and faster. Of course, this left all of my helpers out in the
congregation scrambling to figure out which page I was on. Everyone was
confused, and no one seemed to be having this perfect experience I had in my
head. Mercifully, eventually I made it through the book and sent the kids back
to their seats. But I was devastated by how awfully everything had turned out.
All my plans, ruined.
A bit
later in the service, I made my way over to the choir loft to serve communion
to the singers sitting there. My hands were literally shaking with stress and
anxiety over my failed service. One woman, Dee, looked at me with concern in
her eyes. She asked, “What’s wrong?” I said, sarcasm dripping in my tone, “Oh,
everything is just going so well!”
Wasn’t it clear to her why I was so upset? But no, she just looked confused by
my response. After the service, her response was echoed by others. They had no
idea why I was so upset. They’d experienced a meaningful Christmas Eve worship
service, a celebration of the birth of Jesus, and apparently, I hadn’t ruined
everything with a poorly received story for the kids. Apparently, I was the
only one having a crisis. Apparently, I was the only one who had concluded that
the service had been ruined. In reality, though, the only one whose experience
was ruined was my own, and I had done that to myself. I had this picture in my
head, these expectations of how everything was supposed to go, and when I
didn’t find what I was looking for, when where things ended up on Christmas Eve
didn’t match the plans I had, I let it overwhelm me with disappointment.
Have
you ever experienced something like that? Have you ever had a vision or a plan
or had a picture in your mind of some event – where you had it all mapped out
in your head, how things would go, a journey, physical or metaphorical, where you
set out with a clear aim, or goal, or purpose in mind, only to find when you reach
your destination that what is waiting for you, what really happens, is not at
all what you expected? How did you feel, when things unfolded so differently
than you had in mind? Did you totally lose your cool like I did? Did you go
with the flow?
Our
scripture text for today is about a journey like this – plans all laid out, but
nothing unfolding as anticipated. Today is Epiphany Sunday. The word Epiphany
is from a Greek word that means literally “coming to light,” or “shining
forth.” Epiphany is the day when we celebrate the Magi, Wisemen from the East,
coming to see Jesus and bringing him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
This is significant because it represents that Jesus is light to the whole
world, celebrated even by these foreign strangers, not just the people of
Israel, not just a chosen few. Jesus is the light of and for the whole world.
We
really know very little about these wise men. They appear only in this passage
from Matthew. Matthew describes them as men from the East, which maybe may have meant they were
astrologers from Persia, interpreters of stars and dreams. The idea that they
were kings comes from a verse of a Psalm that talks about kings bringing gifts
to the Messiah – a loose connection at best. The number three was just layered
onto tradition over time, perhaps because three gifts are named, along with
traditional names for each of three wise men. But again, these ideas are not
mentioned in the Bible. What the Bible does
tell us is that these wise men came to the palace of King Herod looking for
a newborn king, since they had seen a star that was significant to them.
We don’t
even know why the Magi would be
interested in seeing a new king of the Jewish people, since they themselves
were not Jewish. But we do know that when they were looking for this new king,
they expected to find him at the palace. That’s right where they went –
straight to the palace, to have an audience with Herod. They expected, perhaps,
that Herod had a new child who would eventually become king, or some other
similar chain of events. Instead, they find a baffled and frightened Herod, who
has no idea what they are talking about. They’re sent to find this new king by
Herod, guided by additional details about the child’s likely place of birth,
and eventually, finally, they find Jesus with his mother Mary. They have
brought gifts for the child that would have been appropriate at the palace:
gold, frankincense, myrrh. Costly gifts. And so they offer these gifts to this child,
Jesus, who they find not in a palace, but in a normal home, in a small town,
the child of a carpenter and his wife, totally normal by every visible clue.
Imagine
if the Magi reacted like I did that Christmas Eve when my plans didn’t go as I
wanted. The Magi could have decided they had gotten it all wrong and taken
their gifts and gone back home, disappointed that they had come so far only to
find that this so-called new king was just a regular baby born to no one
special. But Matthew says they were overwhelmed, not with disappointment, but
“overwhelmed with joy.” Nothing went as planned, but they simply changed their
course as a new plan was laid out for them. They went where they were led. And
they were thrilled with it all. They
didn’t judge Mary and Joseph and Jesus by their outer wrappings. They
recognized the Holy in the child Jesus. The Epiphany is the coming-to-light,
the shining-forth of Jesus as light of the world. It wasn’t what the Wisemen
set out to see. But what was revealed to them by the light was nonetheless exactly what they were seeking,
overwhelming them with joy.
I’m
wondering what we are expecting, as we journey with God. As we begin a new
year, what destinations do we have in mind, what plans and schedules have we
made, what results are we looking to
see? What solution to our problems, what fix for our troubles, what cures for
what ails us we are expecting to find at the end of the calendar year, at the
end of our journey, at the completion of our plans? And then, what will we do
when, inevitably, what we find as the days unfold is not what we were
expecting. What will the light of Epiphany reveal to us?
One of
my favorite authors is Mindy Kaling. She’s the writer and star of the TV show The Mindy Project. Or you might know her
as a writer and actress on The Office
– she played Kelly Kapoor. In her book Why
Not Me? she spends one chapter of her book divulging, with great wit and
sarcasm, all of her beauty secrets. One of them? Stay in the shadows! We look
best, she insists, under the forgiving lighting of shadows, without the harsh
brightness revealing every detail that we’d rather keep hidden. I think about
this fact sometimes with my phone’s camera. On most smart phones, if you use it
to take a “selfie,” the camera automatically switches to a setting called “beauty
face.” I love it! It gives your skin a nice uniform glow, erases any
imperfections, and subtracts about 5 years of wrinkles and lines from your
skin. Selfies, after all, are pretty close-up pictures – and do we really want
to see everything about ourselves that the camera might reveal?
Epiphany
is a time when we celebrate that the light of the world is shining. But more
than just acknowledging the light of Christ, our task is to look closely at
just what the light of Christ is revealing in us. Our task is to let that light
shine into our lives and bring all of the dark places out of the shadows. What
would it mean if the light of Christ focused on your life and made visible
everything that has been hidden? What unexpected things might we see, discover,
when the Star of Bethlehem shines on us?
I’ve
been thinking about this in two ways: First, I think letting in the light of
Christ would make us deal with aspects of ourselves and our behaviors that we
try to hide in the shadows, or cover up with “beauty face” mode. Do you
struggle with envy or coveting what others have? Are you facing an addiction
that you can’t control? Are you holding on to resentments or conflicts with
others that you have been unwilling to resolve? God at work in us reveals all
those things – uncovers them, not so that we can be judged and condemned, but
so that we can be healed and redeemed and move forward. This is a time when so
many of us are making New Year’s Resolutions, and I think that the reason that so
many of us fail in our efforts is because we don’t really examine what’s behind
our feelings – why aren’t we happy
with what we have, always longing for what others have, for example? We start
out to change our lives on our own, without the grounding, the source of our
being. Jesus is the light, and we
can’t shine without that source, God, empowering us.
What
would it mean if the light of Christ focused on your life and made visible
everything that has been hidden and unseen? Here’s the second way: In 1 Corinthians
13, Paul writes, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face
to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been
fully known.” I think that may be our hearts’ desire – to be known fully,
completely – and also our deepest fear – that someone will see us – flaws and
imperfections and things we’d rather keep in the shadows. So often, we look at
ourselves and see only our failures. We
gloss right over the gifts we have, the way that God has created us, the
strength we have, the ways that we have been formed and blessed and placed in
this world so that we can serve and give and bless others. We don’t see in
ourselves all that God sees in us. And so we let ourselves off easy, because
we’re convinced that we can’t do what God knows
we can do and do well. When the light
of Christ brings everything in us
into view, when we let that light shine in all the overshadowed places, then we
start to see ourselves as we really are, as God created us, and as God is
calling us to be. God sees us, all that the light of Christ reveals in us, and
is overwhelmed with joy in us.
That’s
the journey of Epiphany. We find at the end of the long road we travel what we
didn’t plan or expect. Instead, we find the light of Christ, light of the
world, shining back at us, dispelling the shadows, revealing who we really are.
God isn’t disappointed in what’s revealed in us. God is full of hope at all
that yet might be in us. And I believe we won’t be disappointed when we embrace
God-revealed to us. May we, like the Wisemen, lay our very best gifts as an
offering of thanksgiving at the feet of Christ, overwhelmed with joy. For we
find there not-at-all what we expected, but instead, shining in the light, exactly what we’ve needed. Amen.
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