Epiphany 2013. (A sermon on Matthew 2:1-12)

Welcome, friends, to 2013 and to what is in all truth my favorite celebration of the ecclesiastical year – namely, the feast of the Epiphany!

I appreciate, of course, that, if church numbers are anything to go by, ‘Epiphany fever’ has not quite taken hold of the broader population of Dulwich Hill just yet. Indeed, I appreciate that for most people we are at the end of the downward slope that marked our interlude of holiday joy.

Christmas is well and truly over. No one is wishing anyone a ‘Happy Christmas’  or a ‘Happy New Year’ any more, and the in-store Santa’s – so vibrant and boisterous only a short time ago – have completely vanished, as if they all managed to grab that last sleigh ride back to the North Pole as the shops closed on Christmas Eve.

You might think you’d see a small number of them still hanging around, following up with the children on their Christmas experiences, but no!
The Santa’s have gone and the decorations are coming down, for it has now been a full twelve days since Christmas, and last night was the twelfth night, and whether or not you had a final twelfth night fling to mark the official end of the Yuletide Season, take it from me that today the period of peace and goodwill to all has officially come to a crushing halt.

The presents have been handed out, the cards have all been delivered, the champagne has been consumed, and the New Year’s resolutions have all been made, and we’re now at that ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ stage of the year when we start anticipating the next great family event – the arrival of the post-Christmas credit-card bill!

Why on earth did we spend so much on Aunt Lucy’s present? Why did we purchase so many decorations when we had neither money to buy them nor room to store them, and will the office girls that I kissed under the mistletoe now, in this period of post-Yuletide sobriety, file sexual harassment claims?  These and many other similar questions start to dredge their way through our minds as we try to sleep off the excesses of the last two weeks.

And here in church things are very quiet. All the good-hearted, well-meaning hanger-on-erers whose spiritual enthusiasm was driven to fever pitch by the festive season have gone home, ready to re-appear at Easter. Never mind! The really serious believers are still here – we stalwart ones, ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ (pace Shakespeare’s Henry V).

Sorry, I’m getting carried away, but it is good to know, isn’t it, that even when the days of religious merriment are over that there are still going to be a few stalwarts left: just us serious Christians, and Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus – our baby Jesus … and the three wise men of course!  Hang on a second … what are they doing here?!

Yes, it’s the Feast of the Epiphany – that time of year when we remember the visit of those mysterious characters who followed a star in order to find the young Jesus and worship Him!  And I love this story because it has to be one of the most ‘out there’ narratives in the entire Biblical drama.

The scene is generally depicted as a visit from three wise men though, if we stick to the Biblical narrative, we are not told explicitly that these characters were wise, nor that they were men, and we’re certainly not told that there were only three of them, though we are told that they brought three gifts.

Even so, what we do know about these mysterious characters is far more bizarre than what we don’t know.

We know for a start that they were ‘from the East’ (Matthew 2:1) which most probably means that they were from Iran (or Persia, as it was then known), and we can assume then that they would have stood out, not only because of their skin colour and their accents, but because of the way they dressed.

These people were foreign courtesans from some Eastern empire. They were advisers to their king. They would have looked very odd wandering the streets of the little town of Bethlehem, which must have seemed like Hicksville in comparison with Jerusalem, which was their first stop in Israel, let alone in comparison with their regular grand surroundings.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Bethlehem. I didn’t make it that far in my one and only trip to Israel/Palestine, but I do know from the contact we’ve had here with Bishop Riah (the former bishop of Jerusalem) and with the Mayor of Bethlehem, and through my membership and involvement in the ‘Friends of Bethlehem’ that it’s a pretty conservative sort of place!

It is now much as it was then, I think, and these guys would have been hard to miss! Indeed, I imagine that for some of the residents of the little town the arrival of these courtesans would have been the most exciting thing to have happened in years – the irony of course being that the Magi were only there because of a far more significant event that had taken place in Bethlehem that most of its residents would have been completely unaware of!

They were probably each eunuchs too, these visitors, which was the normal practice for men working in foreign courts in close proximity to the queen. That would have added to their queer appearance, even if only because of the squeaky voices in which they spoke their unintelligible language!

They are odd and quirky-looking characters – these visitors from the East – but most importantly of all they are ‘magi’. They are magicians. They are star-gazers, astrologers, and experts in the arts of divination. They use their magical powers to serve their king and their government, and for that reason it has to be said that, from Biblical perspective, these people were not only from the wrong country, wrong culture and wrong language-group. They are totally members of the wrong religion!

We have met these ‘magi’ in the Bible before, you may remember – most obviously in the Book of Daniel.

Daniel and his three friends, if you recall, were enrolled as magi in the court of the king of Babylon and they did many years of faithful service as magi in the Babylonian court and later in the court of the Medo-Persian empire – all presumably in the 6^th century B.C.

Daniel and his friends were presumably made eunuchs too (all for the sake of the Kingdom of God) though if you know the story of Daniel you know too that that is really where his kinship with the greater swathe of magi ends!

Daniel and his friends are wiser than the other magi. Daniel can interpret dreams when the others can’t, and in many and various ways Daniel and his three friends demonstrate time and time again their superiority over their professional peers, and there is a very simple reason for this: Daniel and his friends are servants of the one true God and the rest of the magi are not!

I know that most of you, like me, are open to insights offered us by people coming from completely different religious traditions to our own. Let’s be honest though: this attitude is not evident in the Hebrew Bible!

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t an evolving understanding of God in the Biblical story and I’m not saying that there isn’t room for a variety of different faith perspectives within what might be called the confines of Biblical religion. Even so, when it comes to magic and the art of astrology I can assure you that both the Old and New Testaments of our Bible agree that this is a religious tradition that has no credibility whatsoever!

 “Those who divide the heavens, who gaze at the stars, who at the new moons predict what shall befall you.  Behold, they are like stubble,” says the Lord (according to Isaiah the prophet). “The fire consumes them; they cannot deliver themselves from the power of the flame.” (Isaiah 47:13‑14)

Likewise Jeremiah: “Thus says the LORD: “Learn not the way of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens because the nations are dismayed at them, for the customs of the peoples are false.”(10:2‑3)

And in the New Testament the magi don’t normally receive any better treatment than they did in the Old. Two magi turn up in the book of Acts – Elymas the false prophet in Acts 13, and Simon Magus in Acts 8, who tries to buy the Holy Spirit for money. Both receive short shrift from the Apostles.

In short, these magi are not respected members of an alternative religious group, worthy of serious consideration for the vital contribution they have to make to the broader religious landscape. Their spirituality is not affirmed as an authentic expression of godly intuition.  Rather, from a Biblical point of view, these magi are members of an idolatrous pagan religion that is entirely incompatible with the worship of the God of Grace!

I always feel duty-bound each Epiphany to read my stars.

In years past I used to have to part with some coin at the newsagent to do this. I’d flick through the magazines until I could locate Athena Stargazer. Now I can just look her up online!

Mind you, I did have a problem when I tried to do that this year. I Googled ‘Athena Stargazer’ and the no.1 result was my Epiphany sermon of 2007 (complete with my readings for the year)!

I did manage to locate my horoscope nonetheless, even if Athena has now moved into graceful retirement.

Here’s what my stars say, according to Mystic Meg of thesun.co.uk:

Passion-stirring planet Mars goes deep into your personality zone to give you a sexy confidence that warms up a current relationship or ensure you’re noticed by someone special.

Forgiving a friend can be a good move, especially when you show you won’t make a habit of this.

A favour is repaid in a generous way.

Words to live by (surely not)!

This is not Biblical religion, people!

It might be all very cute and harmless (though I suspect it gets rather expensive if you call the 800 number that Meg recommends for a more personalized service). Either way, be assured that these astrologers are not recognised mouth-pieces of the God of the Old and New Testaments.

These people do not worship the God who made the heavens and the earth.  They do not seek for God in the right way. Their predictions are not to be relied upon or even listened to. These magi are, from the Biblical point of view, superstitious pagan idolaters who are strangers to the Biblical truth and not remotely part of the people of God, and yet … when we look around the Nativity scene … there they are, standing with us – the magi, and when we ask them how they got here they tell us that they saw it in the stars!

‘Who invited them?’ – that’s the question. Who invited them to join our holy huddle – to stand alongside us really serious believers at this auspicious time of year? And the answer is that God did! And that’s why they’re here. He gave them a star, and they followed it, and they have just as much a right to be here as the rest of us!

Yes, it’s Epiphany – the feast that celebrates the inclusiveness of the Gospel invitation.

Some of us might have thought that it was St Paul who broadened the scope of the Christian message to include non-Jews and slaves and women and all sorts of persons but no, it all has its beginnings here at the very beginning of the life of Jesus.

The rich and the poor are there. Persons of all religions and races are there. Representatives of every branch of humanity are there – invited to join hands with us in our worship of Jesus. For our baby Jesus is their baby Jesus too. Our God is their God!

Friends, it wasn’t my idea! I would have happily settled for a holy huddle of like-minded, middle-class, wholesome white people, but God had other ideas. God gave us a Gospel of inclusiveness, and if God has chosen to include everybody – the rich, the poor, the slave, the free, the educated, the uneducated, the likeable, the unlikeable, the strong, the struggling, the solidly orthodox and the barely-recognisably religious – then we’d better shove over and make room for them too, and wish them all a Happy Epiphany!

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill on January 6, 2013.
2013! Whoo!

To hear the audio version of the sermon click here.
To see the video version of the sermon click here.