1-6-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Isaiah Arise and shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the people, but the Lord will rise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Lift up your eyes and look around, and they all gather together, and they come to you.

Your son shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried in their nurses' arms.

Then you shall see and be radiant, and your heart shall thrill and rejoice.

Because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you, and the wealth of the nation shall come to you, the multitude of camels shall cover you, and medium camels from medium together, and those from Sheba shall come, and they shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall recline the praise of the Lord.

The word of the Lord.

Give the king your justice, O God.

And then he shall rule your people righteously.

That the mountains may bring prosperity to the people.

He shall defend the needy among the people.

He shall live as long as the sun and the moon endure.

He shall come down like rain upon the mown field.

In his time shall the righteous flourish.

The kings of Tarshus and the Isle shall pay tribute.

And all kings shall bow down before him.

For he shall deliver the poor who cry out in distress.

He shall redeem their lives from oppression and violence.

A reading from Ephesians.

This is the reason that I, Paul, am a prisoner for Christ Jesus, for the sake of you Gentiles.

For surely you have already heard of the commission of God's grace that was given me for you, and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, a reading of which I will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ.

In former generations, this mystery was not made known to you, it was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.

That is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Of this gospel, I have become a servant according to the gift of God's grace that was given to me by the working of his power.

Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see how the plan of the mystery hidden in the other ages in God who created all things, so that through the church and the wisdom of God and its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

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

And calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.

They told him, In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet.

And you, Bethlehem and the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.

And then Herod secretly called for the Magi, and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared.

Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, so that I may also go and pay him homage.

When they heard the king they set out, and there ahead of them went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was.

When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.

On entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage.

And then opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Well, welcome to not only the season, but the feast of the Epiphany.

Epiphany is one of those words worth kind of nailing down really fast.

It's a word that we've kind of, if you're interested to know this linguistically, it was James Joyce that turned it into an aha moment.

If you've ever read Portrait of the Artist as a young man, had to read that in high school.

Aha moment.

But before James Joyce, an epiphany was actually an experience of inspiration.

It was really like a theophany.

God showed up.

People had an experience of God that completely refocused the way they saw the world.

So epiphanies in general are irreversible and they represent a complete change of how we experience life and God and one another.

Now sometimes you might hear the word used like, oh, I used to only eat the nacho cheese Dorito, and then someone gave me cool ranch and I had an epiphany.

There are flavors I was missing out on.

That is not an epiphany, that's a discovery.

So it's really important.

Epipanies are moments like when you become a husband or a wife or a parent.

Even if your marriage does not work out, or something happens to your child, something irreversible has happened to your identity.

Epiphanies are moments in which you used to have a prejudice and then you experience someone who defied your prejudice, and the switch has been flipped forever, unless you say my experience was wrong, which is really hard to do, right?

Epiphany is when our view of the world changes.

With that criteria, I think we get to examine how the magi represent an epiphany for us.

And I want to do this in three different ways.

The first is the traditional view.

If you go to Cologne in Germany, in German it's Köln, there's this giant, huge cathedral, the Kölner Dome.

It is massive.

You can see it literally from miles away because it's so tall.

The three kings are entombed there.

Their names, according to tradition, are Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.

Literally, their bodies are supposed to be there.

And there are some interesting sort of arcane three kings legends that have come out.

You can read them probably most succinctly in Umberto Echo's book, Baudolino, or in a contemporary version, which is a little bit nutty, but actually represents tradition well called Biff.

No, Lamb.

Lamb, the gospel according to Biff.

Now, in some ways, um, those are silly caricature books, but they do represent the tradition of the kings well.

That in general, these are rich, powerful, important rulers that came from more than a thousand miles away to come see the baby Jesus, and they followed a star.

Now, interestingly enough, if you've ever been in a Roman Catholic Church before, you've seen what the star looked like.

I should have drawn a visual.

There's like an X with a P in the middle.

You ever seen that?

An X and a P?

Tradition says that's what the star looked like.

The X is the Greek letter chi, and that P is actually the Greek letter ρ.

And you put those together and you get the first two sounds of the word Christos, which means Messiah in Greek.

So they followed a star that said Messiah because it spelled it.

That's what they came.

So if you're ever wondering where that Cairo came from, tradition says that was the shape of the star.

What's the epiphany?

Well, I think we could do like the hymn did and say, look, this is a really good sort of analogy for who Jesus is.

Three powerful kings come to worship him, so look, he must be the king of kings.

Gold represents kings.

Incense is something priests do for God, so he's like God.

And then myrrh is something tradition says we embalm bodies with, and it sort of prefigures his sacrifice.

So somehow the kings knew that.

Jesus is the King of kings, they worship him, and they leave.

So it's sort of neat, but um, to sort of get they get his identity.

But I just want to tell you, as much as that's the case, I'm not really sure how that gives us an epiphany.

If we read it that way, that gives them one.

But it's a little incomplete because do you know what they do after they worship the baby Jesus?

They leave.

They don't stick around for his teaching.

In fact, we don't know that they convert to Christianity because there wasn't that.

You know, there wasn't Christianity without the growing up Jesus.

They worship the baby and they go home.

And um, I'll tell you, um, I'm one of these strange people that grew up really at an early age in church, and I got this kind of strange perspective that if it was right about Jesus, that was really what mattered.

And I'll tell you, some of the models of faith I had, frankly, were jerks.

They knew the right stuff, but they didn't treat people equitably or fairly.

It was as if instead of might makes right, they decided that being right just well made them right.

And friends, I want to tell you, I think that's wrong.

So if you love the kings and you love Jesus being the king of the kings, good, but please don't translate that to being right lets you do whatever you want.

You ever wonder why people don't like the church and find it irrelevant?

It's because of that.

I want to tell you at a basic level, the readings today are trying to help us really consider how God would like us to use and celebrate and support power.

Please consider Jesus was not born in an aggrandized purple cloth manger.

In all the pictures Mary's wearing blue, that woman owned nothing blue.

You could only own blue if you were a member of the gentry.

And if you wore it without belonging to the gentry, you were impersonating an officer and you could be killed for that.

Mary never had enough money to buy a scrap of blue or purple.

We dress her in that to show what she represents theologically, but she did not have the means.

How do we know it?

Because she has no pedigree.

Jesus was not born in a bassinet.

He was born in a food trough.

A manger is a place animals eat.

And please notice today the psalm for the day is really all about what the king is supposed to do.

Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the king's son, that the king may rule your people righteously.

And here's the critical part: and the poor with justice.

One thing in our reading today is not a tale of three kings, it's a tale of two.

There's Herod and there's Jesus.

Herod, by the way, is not even really Jewish.

His grandfather was from Ijumea, which is a territory that was conquered, and the people in Ijumea were forced to convert by the sword, not by Muslims, but by Jews.

It went like this: You can convert, you can leave, we will kill you.

Herod's a Jewish idea, by the way, not a Muslim idea.

Really important you hear this.

Herod's grandfather converted.

Herod is half Jewish.

If you know anything about Herod, he's terrible.

Herod is sort of like, well, Joseph Stalin, who, upon the death of Lenin, killed the rightful successor to the Soviet Revolution, that's Trotsky, and then killed all the generals who represented any kind of challenge to his power so that he could be a tyrant.

When somebody had power, Stalin was afraid, and the rest of Russia with him, they weren't afraid because of what would happen to Stalin.

They were afraid of what he would do next.

Like put them in a gulag.

When you hear the people of Jerusalem are afraid with Herod, no, they're not afraid with him, they're afraid of Herod.

Herod executed at least three of his own sons because he was worried they would usurp his throne.

Which is why Caesar Augustus said, I would rather be Herod's pig than his son, because he didn't eat pork, don't you see?

Half Jewish.

This is a contrast between a ruler who looks out for the poor and a tyrant who looks out for his own power.

I'm positive that's why we have the readings today.

Epiphany would not be for the wise men, Epiphany would be for us.

And I'll tell you, if you've ever wondered, how do you pray for a political official who you didn't vote for?

Psalm 72.

Give the president your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the vice president.

That he or she may rule people righteously and the poor with justice.

I've heard people say, I did not know how to pray for President Obama.

I just couldn't support him.

Pray that he'll rule with righteousness.

I've heard people say, I don't even know how to support justice soda my ear.

She's so liberal.

Pray that she will pursue God's justice.

I don't know how to pray for Ted Cruz.

Psalm 72.

God help him, help her, help them transcend themselves and pursue justice instead of power.

So there's a takeaway, right?

The epiphany could be for us.

Do we worship Machiavellian, means justify, ends justify the means?

Or do we say, God, lead us into righteousness?

Lead our people into righteousness?

Do we give up on people because we didn't vote for them?

Or do we ask God to inform them?

Do we criticize political officials and say we hate them, they're bad?

Or do we say, God help them deliver the poor who cry out in distress and the oppressed who have no helper?

Don't you think our country could use that epiphany today?

So at least maybe you got something.

Now, I want to do something totally different and frankly a little bit kooky, if you don't mind.

So to show my kookiness, I've now moved to the side.

Which is your left.

Okay, listen, there's four Gospels that made it into the New Testament.

And if you've ever read them, it's helpful to know, even the earliest Christian scholars notice this.

They're a little different.

In Matthew, Jesus says, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

In Luke, Jesus says, Blessed are the poor.

Well, Mike, they could be the same.

They could, but they're not.

In Matthew, Jesus gives a sermon up on the mount.

In Luke, Jesus gives the sermon, do you know?

On the plain.

On the plain, everybody's equal.

On the mount, do you remember there's a guy once upon a time went up on a mount and gave the law to people?

That's Moses, right?

No doubt, for Matthew, Jesus is like the new Moses.

He's giving the people the law.

Matthew, no doubt, is writing to a Jewish audience.

He never says kingdom of God.

If you're Jewish, you don't say God.

He says kingdom of heaven.

So Matthew is the one who says, has Jesus say, unless your righteousness is better than that of the Pharisees, you don't know God's kingdom.

Matthew is the one that says, I didn't come to change the law in one point, I came to fulfill it.

So Matthew's got this really high view of Jesus not changing Judaism, but guiding people into what it meant to be Jewish.

Which is why it's really interesting that Matthew is the only gospel that has the magi.

The magi don't show up in Luke, they don't show up in Mark.

And you're hearing me say that word magi instead of kings and wise men, and that's because that's the word in Greek, magi.

And you might be thinking, what's the big deal?

Well, the big deal is that magi doesn't mean kings, it means magicians.

You hear it, magi, magic?

It doesn't mean David Copperfield or David Blaine.

Now they could have been good illusionists.

It means, sorry, like astrologers and tarot card readers.

And I'm gonna go out on a real big limb here.

It means warlocks and witches, people who make potions and stuff.

Um, most scholars will tell you these people are more than likely Zoroastrian priests.

They've come from modern-day Iran, where Zoroastrianism was one of the biggest religions in the world.

Alexander the Great kind of wiped that out a little bit, but it was the official religion of Persia a long time ago.

So a lot of people will tell you, again, Zoroastrian people, Magi, doesn't say that they were three, doesn't say they were all men, just says they paid attention to the sky, they noticed, interestingly enough, the star, and they followed it.

And unlike Herod, who should have known to worship the child, these pagan wizards found God not from an evangelist.

Nobody came to them on a laundromat and told them how to convert to Christianity.

They found God by paying attention to the world.

And then they came and they worshiped the baby Jesus.

And then they left.

And they gave him these gifts.

I think if we go over here, we might say, listen, the Magi teach us to give gifts of extravagance.

The kind of gifts that matter are things like big chests of gold, frankincense, which by the way is like really expensive.

You know, we don't really have perfume that costs what ancient perfume did.

Frankincense is a resin, you know, it's tree sap, it dries up, and it's kind of hard to find in a desert because you know what there isn't are a lot of trees.

Um so so you have to go harvesting.

It's like finding moral mushrooms.

If you're one of those food people, like really hard to find morals, and same with um frankincense.

Sometimes we think, look, kings show us to be extravagant and important.

But I want to tell you, these gifts actually might mean something very, very different.

At the time of Jesus and the Magi, there's no paper currency.

All currency is metallic.

It's silver or gold, or maybe some mixture of them.

So when you think about people pulling out pocket change, there may very well have been gold.

Um, frankincense is really interesting, and I'll tell you if You go to the Middle East today, especially in a country like Dubai or Iran, you'll see these little thingies all over the place.

These are incense burners.

And um, they're just this great shape, and you'll find them all over in the market.

And um, you know, the way it works is you take some incense.

You can either have like a liquid version of it, or you can use the actual resin form.

Here's a little bag of frankincense right here.

You can see it's just these little crystals.

Again, it's it's it's resin, it's sapped, it's crystallized, it's dried out.

Here's a big chunk.

Uh this is really too big to even be useful.

What you do is you put it on this really hot plate, or you put it on a hot coal, and sure enough, as the resin heats up, it makes this lovely sweet smell.

Some people hate that smell.

Um, I think it's pretty sweet.

Now, the thing is, what you'll notice if you go again to Dubai or Saudi Arabia, particularly, or Iran, is people don't put this like to febreze the room.

You put the stuff here.

You may not believe me when I do this, but I just want to show you what you do.

You put that stuff there, and then you go like this.

Now, when it's really smoking, what it'll do, of course, is smoke your clothes.

Why would anybody want to do that?

It's perfume.

Or, just to put it a different way, before soap, it's deodorant.

Frankincense is deodorant.

It is.

And you will see if you go, like once I tell you, like you go to Dubai, you go to Iran, you'll see this is how people flavor their clothes.

You ever live somewhere where everybody stinks?

I don't mean like, let me tell you, in the United States, it's hard to find a place where everybody stinks.

It's hard.

I mean, you almost have to live in a different country, and you have to be there long enough where you don't realize you stink.

And you go home and and and your family says, You stink?

And you don't know that because everybody smells like you back where you were visiting.

Um, this was the ancient answer to that.

Perfuming your clothes.

What about myrrh?

It is true that uh myrrh is sometimes used as a burial spice to take away, what you know, again, some stink.

It's also true that if you live in the Middle East, particularly again the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, that myrrh is thought to be an extremely nutritious vitamin.

People brew you hot water and drop some myrrh in there and they drink it.

You can try this at home.

I would start small.

Umrrh is also resin, just like frankincense.

It smells very bitter.

It does.

This is this little but harsh smell.

Um, but people thought it was medicinal, and they still do today.

So um, so what if the magi showed up not with these precious gifts?

What if these were people who read and write horoscopes, Libras, Year of the Tiger, and all of that?

And uh they're curious because they look at the world and they see this star, and then they realize uh we should probably give this kid something.

What do we have?

Well, we've got some zip fizz or crystal light, that's our myrrh.

We got some deodorant, and we got some pocket change.

So let's let's give him what we got.

What if we thought about giving Jesus what we got instead of what we don't have?

I don't know about you.

If you have a purse, you probably have more than I got.

I got keys in my pocket, and I have my wallet, and I have my phone.

I have those things pretty much all the time.

I'm not giving my keys away, I know better than that.

I'm not giving my credit card away, I know better than that, and my phone, good Lord.

If they got into my phone, that's my whole identity.

What do I got?

I think what I have and what we have that we so often undervalue is the gift of ourselves.

That is the present of our presence.

And I don't want to sound like uh cooler than I am, because I'm just going to tell you in general, I'm not good at giving this gift.

I really like to think about what I'm doing tomorrow and a year from now.

I like to think about that really a lot of time.

What groceries I need to make that complicated recipe I'm going to do tomorrow.

I like to think about that stuff.

And sometimes I will talk to somebody and I'll say, How is Christmas?

And they'll say, Eh.

Okay, well, sorry to hear that.

Hope you have a better new year.

I didn't have any money to fix their Christmas, and I didn't have any fancy incense, and of course, what I neglected to do was to give them a gift of being present with them.

Which, to be honest, if you've ever been sad or grieving or lonely or excited, you know is worth more to you than gold or incense or more, period.

Somebody who makes room for you.

Often I'm so busy living into the future that I miss the present.

And I wonder if that's what the magi offer is just the gift of their presence.

Isn't it funny?

And this is an interesting thing to think, that weird drift, I don't know, Wiccans or Warlocks or something get it right when we often don't.

I'm pretty sure that's what Matthew is trying to tell his people.

Instead of to be so quick to write these people off, to be affirmative.

Isn't it interesting?

That potentially Zoroastrian astrologers are interested in the king of the Jews.

It would be like, well, being interested in the next Dalai Lama, don't you think?

How interested are you in that?

Well, I don't value that.

Why not?

Why not?

This is an interesting thing.

Why not?

We often talk ourselves out of being interested in other people before we've given them room to be present.

What if that's the gift of the magi?

Some of you know I like to run and I sometimes like to run.

Often when I'm running, I'm thinking like, oh my gosh, it's so cold, and the cold air is hurting my lungs, and there's only a mile and a half to go.

And I always have this opportunity to think, you know, what if there was just this?

Instead of thinking about what I'm going to do when I'm done running, or how I'm going to be glad I did it, what if I thought about just running?

There's a movie I don't necessarily advocate, but it's this movie with Jack Nicholson called As Good as It Gets.

And there's a line in the movie in which he says, What if this is as good as it gets?

What if it's as good as it gets?

That somebody says, Christmas was ah, and you say, This might be as good as it gets, listening to what you have to say about ah.

What if we could talk ourselves into being present with people instead of talking ourselves out of it?

What if that's the gift of the magi?

Not that they offer their extravagance, but they offer what they have to someone who is not of their same ethnicity or race or religion.

Somebody who probably their kosher food laws would actually be offensive.

What if they made room for somebody else?

Maybe it's not their epiphany we're reading about.

It's an opportunity for us to have our own.

Now I want to tell you, I probably said this two years ago.

Two and a half years ago, I went to Iran and as a tourist, and um man, what a wonderful country to visit, by the way.

What a wonderful country full of honestly the most hospitable people I think I've interfaced with on the planet.

Beautiful buildings and topography and culture.

Was I scared?

No, but you know, I'm silly, maybe, but I wasn't.

It was fantastic.

And people were out of their way to actually be extremely kind.

They heard I was an American and they wanted to take selfies with me because they'd never met an American before.

It was the last day of my trip, and my trip leader told me that I um was not allowed to go anywhere on my own because she didn't want an international incident.

This is sort of funny.

Um, I'd been doing this all week.

But anyway, she told me not to do this.

So I kind of broke a rule in the letter, but I kept it in spirit.

I went to a tourist shopping store across the street from the hotel.

And I tried to be good, you know.

This was me trying to be good.

I didn't go wandering the streets like I had done every other day.

So I went there and I I by the way, I try not to be the hero of my own story, because let me tell you, I fail at this more than I succeed.

So this is one time I felt like I was successful.

I had nowhere to go.

I was stuck in that rug shop.

And I knew it.

So I think this helped me say, I'm stuck, and whatever happens, happens.

I met this guy who worked at the rug shop, and he was super interesting because he spoke English actually fluently.

Uh the most interesting part was he learned it by studying some at Oxford and then visiting South Africa for an extended time.

And then I think he had like maybe a really good friend from like rural Mississippi.

So when you combine all that with his native Farsi, it was incredible to behold.

His intonation, his cadence was unlike anything I've ever heard.

And we visited for about an hour and a half, and this is one of those great things.

If you if you've really experienced true Middle Eastern hospitality in a store, there's actually zero pressure for you to buy something.

If it's true Middle Eastern hospitality, the first thing they do is they say, Here's some tea.

Now, there's places that are pushy.

This wasn't one of those places.

And this guy and I sat down and talked for an hour and a half.

We talked about some of the stuff in the store, quite honestly.

Um, but that wasn't really it.

Uh he told me about his background.

He asked what I did.

I told him I was a priest.

He said, Oh, that must be so difficult.

Everybody says that.

It's interesting.

Um I said, no, actually, it's not so bad.

Uh he um went on to talk about like what he does.

Now, I didn't ask him about this, but you know, if you know anything about um the Islamic Republic of Iran, alcohol is strictly forbidden.

And he said, Well, yeah, here's what we do.

We we um we go to Dubai and we buy it and we bring it back.

And here are some of my friends, and here's the party.

And you know, it's like Iranian college students, you know, like they've got like a drink in their hand, they all look really happy.

Um, they could be severely beaten for doing this.

But here he is, sort of showing me this.

And um maybe I was safe because I was leaving, I don't know, or maybe he thought because I was a priest I'd make some room.

Um but it was just sort of interesting to hear about how he lives in society and how his friends live.

And then he did something really, really interesting.

Um he said, you know, this is so interesting.

He uh he took a risk to tell me that he was gay in Iran.

He said, you know, I could never tell my parents this because not only could I be disowned, I could be turned into the authorities and imprisoned and beaten.

I've been afraid of disappointing my parents before.

I have never been afraid my parents would conspire to ruin me.

I didn't know how to be empathetic, because again, I don't know how that feels.

He went on to tell me that this is something he could never tell any of those people in those pictures.

Not only could he lose his friendship, he could lose his life.

I've never worried about losing my life.

I know what it's like to worry about losing friends.

I've never worried about my friends engineering my death.

Maybe it's because I had nowhere else to go.

It was just that.

And instead of him burdening me with his fears, he gave me the gift of his presence.

Never.

It isn't about me being successful as a listener, it was about him going to the deepest part of himself and offering me what he had.

The epiphany wasn't about what he did, the epiphany was about who he was and how to be present with him in a moment, and how to make room for people that I don't know in this country, and people that I think I know in this country to say, I will hold the gifts of your presence right now.

I'll just hold them.

See, I didn't think the epiphany is about us getting it right, seeing the light of God and saying, There it is.

I think the epiphany is about us seeing the Christ child in one another and giving the gifts of our presence to the Christ child in one another.

Earlier I said people are tired of the traditional church in the United States, the church that makes no room for them.

No one is ever tired of somebody receiving the gifts of their presence.

No one.

People are desperate for it.

And we live for a second-rate version of it, sorry, on social media, and it's so attractive because we think people care and they don't.

What people care about is somebody sitting with them in real time and listening and not thinking about the grocery list.

And if we could give that gift of our presence, we would show people the light of God.

We wouldn't just learn about Epiphanes, we would be Epiphanes.

The gift of our presence is worth more than our gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

I'm positive we do this feast so that we can eat that up and then go and feed a hungry world.