Epiphany 2026

Blessed be God, Father's Holy Spirit.

Blessed be God's people.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, I offer to you all hearts, all desires, and from you those secret desire.

Glad to all into our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love for you, and perfectly magnify thy holy faith through Christ's life.

Amen.

Let us pray.

Lead us.

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, with the reign of you, and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

As you be seated on children, gracefully God, as the same way as a shallow.

Our lesson today is revising a rise daughter, a shine daughter, where your life has a daughter.

And the glory of the life has rise a body daughter.

And your daughter.

And all your daughter.

God's glory on the ear.

And honors to the right hands of your daughter.

You shall come to your daughter.

And your daughters shall be carrying a mother's assessment.

Because they have to say you shall be carried over to your daughter.

They shall bring everything upgrade as well.

So their nations shall bring you their wealth or being led by their honor the word of the Lord.

So may God be resolved to us and let us show us the life to us.

Let your ways be out of the God.

Let the peoples praise you, O God.

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy.

Let the peoples praise you, O God.

Let the peoples praise you.

May God give us a blessing.

For God as a spirit of cowardice.

Rather share the suffering than the Savior of the God.

Glory be to thee, Lord Christ.

Now Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod.

Suddenly sages from the east came to Jerusalem asking, Where is the one born king of the Judeans?

We have seen his star and his ascent and have come to reverence him.

When King Herod heard this, he was shaken, and all Jerusalem with him.

Then calling together all the chief priests and religious scholars of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was being born.

They said to him, In Bethlehem of Judea, for it has been written by the prophet, that you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, by no means are at least among the rulers of Judah.

For from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people, Israel.

And he said unto Bethlehem, saying, Go, search diligently for the child, and when you found him, bring me word, so that I may also go and reverence him.

When they refugee, they left, there suddenly was the star that they had seen, and it was a scent going before them until it stopped over the place where the child was.

When they saw that the star had stopped, they rejoiced.

The joy was absorbed.

On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary and his mother, and they fell down and reverenced him.

Then opening their treasure, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and herb, and having been born in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

If you're wondering what happened to the Gowers didn't gain any chorus, well, they're just not here today.

If you're wondering why we sung the wrong hymn, it's because I wrote the wrong number down.

So here's nice to know that church is like real life, it's full of mistakes, and better together.

Okay.

Happy 11th day of Christmas to you.

If you're familiar with the song A Partridge and Pear Tree, that is because Christmas is indeed twelve days.

Tomorrow is the twelfth day of Christmas, and January 6th is the epiphany.

So we're opening that present a little bit early, uh, because I want to talk about the baptism of the Lord with you next week.

Epiphany means to make manifest, and it prepares us for that.

So I try to think liturgically, we get white, which is like the pure light of Jesus.

We get that at Christmas, we get that at Easter, right?

That's followed by a red, the day of Pentecost, or right after Easter, the Epiphany, and then that's followed by green growth, right?

And then those are followed by blue penitential both seasons.

So we get that kind of track twice in a year.

And I think the real question is that we get to ask ourselves every year, not only how did God make God's self-manifest, but to whom, and then how shall we do it ourselves?

So I'm going to offer you a traditional story about I really don't like the word sages.

The translation is in some ways great today from the gospel, except for the word sages, because it might make you think these are wise people.

The word in Greek is magi, from which we get the word magician.

And to be clear, if you know anything about the 300 and King Leonidas at Thermopylae, when Xerxes was going to invade Greece, he went to Thermopylae, and of course he consulted his magi as to whether or not there were portents from the heavens that said he would have victory or not.

How did they do that?

They cut out sheep and looked at their livers.

I don't think that's what I would call a sage.

I think that's what I would call a wizard.

So, this is not a story about philosopher kings.

It's a story about probably Zoroastria and Priests.

Because they're from the East.

Now look, anybody in the room been to Cologne, Germany before history?

Cologne, Germany, the Calar Dome is this huge church.

You can see it for like five miles away.

It's huge.

And if you follow the tradition I'm going to now talk about, inside are Balthazar and Melchior and Caspar, the Magi, and their kings, and what do you know?

They're white.

This is what we love doing.

We love making people look like us.

And of course, what they came to do is bring valuable and expensive treasures that no peasant would have.

And they do this to symbolically proclaim who Jesus would be.

So gold is, of course, saying he's a king, and frankincense, that's like what priests do.

So Jesus is going to be like the priest's king, and then myrrh is used when people die to embalm them, and they're predicting his death.

And while all of that symbolically makes sense, it would have made no sense to the Holy Family.

Can I be clear about that?

I mean, Mary and Joseph would have been like, what the heck are you giving us symbolic gifts for?

He's just born.

Why are you trying to kill him already?

So I don't think there's a real epiphany there.

I mean, the reality is you already know Jesus is the Messiah and he's going to die.

I mean, if you didn't know that, now you know it.

I don't see how that's profitable to Matthew's gospel.

I don't see the invitation to change my life around that story.

So I'm going to tell you differently.

Let's talk about gold for just a second, right?

This is like a monetary economy, but it's pledged that we don't have paper money.

So I've got a$20 bill in my pocket.

What did people use in the olden days with coins?

Which were made of, what do you know, silver, or if it was like a$100 bill, gold.

You don't have to be wealthy to have a$100 bill, especially not now with inflation.

I remember in the 80s there, my grandfather, who was a farmer, and he wasn't well-to-do.

He always carried a hundred dollar bill in his wallet.

Did anybody else do that?

Grandfather?

It just was like a thing.

It was like his contingency fund, right?

It was before credit cards and EFT.

So we don't know how much gold they gave the holy family, but let's not presume it was gold bricks.

Because Jesus grows up to be a day laborer.

It's not like he's won the lottery here.

It could be a hundred bucks.

Frankincense, here it is.

Sort of a off-white amber color gone from a tree.

Sure enough, you do burn this incense in a temple setting, but you know what's interesting, having been to the land of the Magi, I went to Ron in 19 or 2016, to see how this was alternatively used.

Turns out, since it's tree sad, when you heat it up, it becomes fragrant, which you can do a couple of ways.

You can chew it like gum, tastes really floral and perfume.

I don't recommend it.

I don't love the taste, but if you had something really gross or you had an abscess tooth that was rotting in your head, you probably chewed it so that you didn't taste rotting flesh.

How do people use it today still in Jubalic and Amman and parts of Iran?

Just like we do in church.

They take a hot coal or they take like an electric little altar, for lack of a better word, and they put that gum on there, and it gets so hot, it starts to smoke a little bit.

You don't want it too hot, or it'll just smell it burned, right?

And sure enough, they stand over it and they washed it on their clothes.

The ancient world smells really bad.

I mean, when you have open sewers, and hey, you're walking down the city street, and it's time to go potty, so you just do, right?

It's stunk.

It could have been really expensive preach craft, but you know what else?

It could have been deodorant.

And then there's another resin colour.

Sure enough, you can involve somebody with her.

You could.

Why might an agile have it have their own kit?

Well, for the same reason teachers drink an urgent C when they first go back to school and drink free season, because it's drinking.

Your immune system.

So it's still true today that we pulverized her, put it in some hot water to make it tea and drink it.

Don't do this with her oil, it will make you horribly sick.

It needs to actually be her like resin.

The oil is too concentrated.

So please don't go home and say, oh, the priest said I could drink this herb oil, but I'll be invulnerable to it.

You'll get really sick.

You could polarize this and make a tea out of it.

Why am I telling you this?

Because, hey, when you consider that this is maybe$100 and some axe body spray and some emergency.

Imagine didn't give out of their wealth, they gave out of what they had.

And I sure would love for you to hear this when we think about stewardship and what God calls us to do.

God's not interested in you giving gifts you can't afford and you don't have.

God is interested in sharing who you are and what you have.

Not all of us have the same gifts.

Thank God.

Sometimes there's the thought that there are the gifts of the clergy, and somehow those are better, and they really are.

Truth is, communities need people who are skilled at putting on a really good shrimp boil.

And knowing how and when to clean trees on the church campus, and how to manage the HVAC system, and how to clean the lemons.

Are those high gifts?

Yes, they are.

Because they make this work.

And they make it work well when we gather together.

So I don't think God is calling you to be a sage.

I think God is calling you to give who you are and what you have when it brings people together.

That's what I think.

Where's the real epiphany for me, though?

Why you really think through this carefully?

Because this is probably going to sound really heretical and unorthodox.

And I want to be clear that whether or not these were white European kings or Persian magi, which they probably were, they didn't convert to Christianity.

Because there was no such thing.

The baby Jesus wasn't a Christian, he was a baby.

They didn't come back and start new Jewish communities in Persia.

What did they do?

They paid attention to the king of the Judeans, which is of the size of Delaware.

Remember, they lived in the biggest empire in the planet.

Bigger than Alexander's, actually.

What was Judea then?

Yeah, Delaware.

They didn't go converted to the high civilization of Judea.

They had Persepolis.

I've been there, it's pretty cool.

Yep, they didn't convert.

What did they do?

They paid attention to somebody else, and here's the really interesting part of what the story is the ending.

Having gone and visited somebody who they entertained and celebrated without converting their own story.

When you hear that, they didn't convert.

But they did go home different.

They went home by a different road.

And I would say this, having grown up in different religious traditions, if we ever meet somebody and go home the same way we came, all we meant was a projection of ourselves.

If you go to a laundry mat to try to intellectually convert somebody to your version of Christianity, and you go home the same way you came, you failed.

Because you didn't met a human being.

You met a projection of yourself.

Truth be told, when you meet another human being, whether they think or act or dress like you, when you meet another human being really, you will always go home different.

You'll probably go home.

But you'll probably be different.

Boy, wouldn't that be an epiphany.

Why don't you imagine this?

Pilgrimage from your church to watch the next Dalai Lama selected.

And what do you do when you see the Dalai Lama picked?

You give them gifts.

And then you go home.

I would love.

I would absolutely love to go to the Hajj in Mecca.

I don't know if you know about this.

This is when like six million Muslims descend upon the city during one particular week.

I can't go.

You have to have a Muslim passport to go.

You may say, well, that's so weird.

We already know the truth.

By the way, you were born Christian, you didn't choose it.

I mean, let's just be honest about that, right?

It's really convenient when we're right and we were born into being right.

Convenient, isn't it?

I know the truth, but I didn't pick it.

If you don't find six million humans from all over the globe moving in synchronously, circumambulating a particular shrine, shaving their heads and wearing the same white clothes so that they can be equal.

If you don't find that moving, you should leave.

Because people in their piety are moving.

Why am I not going to convert to Islam?

Because Christianity is my native speak.

Why didn't the Magi convert?

Because their native tongue was being a Magus, not being a Jew.

Boy, in a world in which we are struggling with things like Christian nationalism and bipartisanship, like deadly bipartisanship, here's an epiphany.

You can celebrate another human being's way of doing things without having to adopt it yourself.

And to put this in like fancy coinage, you need to realize that a lot of what we do in church anyway wasn't original to us.

There's a word called syncretism.

This is when you meet another way of doing it.

You say, that is so good, and we don't have that.

And how can we honor that in our own part of us?

I don't know if you realize that every Shabbat in every Jewish household there is.

There's two candles on the table.

Which is why we have two on the table.

Or that the rosary came, company say there's meeting Muslims who were counting the 99 names of a Bab, bees, and they said, We wish we had that.

So what'd they do?

They put a cross on it.

You might call that appropriation, but I'm going to tell you, I think that's secretism, when we show respect for it and we say, I can learn from that, and I've got a different native tongue for me.

So what would it be like to say Tibetan Buddhas have something of value?

And I'm still Christian.

Well, I think it would be an epiphany for the world.

It sure would be an epiphany for the church that raised me that said, you're either completely right or you're completely wrong.

Now, there's an adage I used to share with our school chapel kids, and you can finish it for me.

If you don't have something nice to say, and the truth is that's where you start.

But I think what the magi offer us is a different way of phrasing that, which is if you don't have something nice to say, just think about it until you do.

Because that's the difference between tolerance and respect.

Tolerance means I'll put up with you what we both know you're wrong.

It'd be nice if we had tolerance in a country right now, wouldn't it?

We really give up a lot for some tolerance, but it's not God's goal.

God's goal is respect.

Now, just going back to the gifts for one second.

When I went to Iran in 2016, I freely moved around the country.

I didn't tell you, I had a whole lot of stereotypes about the country, which you probably also do, and most of them are wrong.

And part of why I went is because Rick Steves, like Rick Steves Europe, said it was his favorite country in the world I'd ever been to, and that traveling is by definition a countercultural act, particularly when you go to a place where the media would like you to be afraid of.

I hope we all understand that there's a difference between the Iranian government and Iranian people.

I sure would like to think there's a difference between Americans and the American government, or I have no hope for you or me.

I don't even mean that as a joke.

I desperately mean that.

My hope in America is Americans, not the government.

What did I find when I went to Iran?

Well I found that they were really, really concerned, having learned on the two day of the trip, that I could then walk all around the town with an escort.

What they did not want to strike a company was an international incident.

So the last day of the trip, they decided that I could only stay in the house.

So that I wouldn't have a bad thing happen to me, or I could maybe walk across the street, which is what I did.

I went to this really large, like carpet emporium where, boy, the guy spent like an hour and a half with me, and he wasn't a hard salesman, like he'd ever been.

It's like, hey, have some tea, let's talk, have some food, buy something if you want.

I don't really care, but I'm just going to make some room for you.

And in making room for me, there was this man who talked to me.

He was young, he was like 30.

And I guess he decided as a foreigner, like I was a relatively safe person, and he found out I was a Christian priest, and said that must be like difficult, but you, I mean, how do you decide whether it is or not?

I don't know.

And then came the real gift of the magic.

He put on his phone and he showed me he and his friends having alcohol.

Which, by the way, you can like die for that, but depending how much you have, you certainly are going to be arrested for.

And then he said, and I guess it's because I'm in this company, I don't know how he knew this, but he just sort of said, you know, the thing is, I'm gay.

And I can never tell my family or my friends.

Because the consequences would be, well, send you.

And you may be wondering what that has to do with the gift of the Magi.

You see, I didn't have gold to give him, and I didn't have frankincense to give him, and I didn't have any word to prepare him for his burial.

If I told on him, that's what he would need.

What I had was a moment as somebody who was going home the next day for somebody to tell their story to that they couldn't really safely tell anybody else.

Unless you think I'm the hero of the story, that wasn't the gift of the magic.

The gift was he told me.

That was his gift.

As he said, I can be myself for just a minute as somebody else.

I still got on an avarance flight.

Just like the way I came.

I flew from Houston to Dubai.

And then I flew to Tehran.

And I flew back from Tehran to Dubai.

And then I flew back to Houston.

But I went on a different way.

We don't make New Year's resolutions in the church.

We do.

We make commitments to Christ.

If you are looking for a way to make a commitment to Christ this year, that will matter for the world and not just you.

When you meet somebody, share enough of who you are that you go home to something.

When you're ready to make out a judgment and a condemnation, I think until you have something positive to say before you say anything.

And not only Christians, and especially not only disappearance, and that God's love is so dangerous about ways to be used.

And if we would just treasure chests, you know.