Sermon on The Feast of the Epiphany Sermon - Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters

[Music] Maybe given to me to speak in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Our men, please do be seated. [Music] Do you know what it feels like to be left out? Think back to school or university or maybe the first days at a new job. Probably all of us have felt like an outsider at some point or other. Whether it was because there was an in-crowd we didn't quite make it into. Or circumstances got in the way of us making friends or maybe we were just too quiet to push ourselves forward. Whatever the case, being left out really is no fun. It doesn't just leave us feeling lonely, it can make us feel like we're just not worth very much. Or reading the Bible from a certain perspective, we Gentiles that is non-Jews might feel somewhat left out, especially when we read the Old Testament. Throughout the Old Testament, God chose his people the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were set apart, chosen to witness to God's greatest miracles to belong to him. When the law was given, it was given to the children of Abraham. When the prophets came, they spoke to the children of Isaac. The place of God's dwelling on earth was the temple in Jerusalem, the capital city of the children of Jacob. And there are good reasons for this. The Old Testament books, the sources from which they derive, all of them were written for the Hebrew people and by the Hebrew people, especially the earliest sources for the Old Testament assume that everyone else already had their own gods. It was just that the God of the Hebrews was their biggest God of all. He was king over every other God. The Hebrews were the covenanted people of God. So they didn't just happen to be the people that he paid attention to. It was that they were obliged to be in relationship with him. They lived according to the law. The other nations had no such obligations and so of course they had no such relationship with him. And when certain people did want to become part of God's people, they could. Like Ruth, for example, who there were Moabites became one of the Hebrew people when she followed her mother-in-law and I only saying, "Where you go, I will go. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God." But all the same, even despite these good reasons, it can be hard to swallow the idea that God chose a certain people for His own. And if we've been around at the time, we wouldn't have been part of that people. Even the perspective that Bishop Graham Tomlin puts forward in his book The Wydening Circle. That Israel was chosen as a people of priests to lead everyone else to God, still creates a sense in which in the Old Testament there is a sort of in-crowd and an undeniable reality that most of us wouldn't have been part of it. And that's why this feast of the Epiphany is so important because today God chose to bring outsiders in. Of course we're all familiar with the account. The wise men visited Jesus from a far-off land to present their gifts to the baby in the manger, say they didn't come to a manger. They came when Jesus was a child. It took them quite a lot longer to reach Jesus. And there are a few other things that we can work out about these enigmatic travellers. So Matthew, whose gospel alone records the visit of the manejai, doesn't give us that much information, but there are some hints to work on. First, the fact that there is very little information given about the majori tells us that for St Matthew who was himself probably Jewish, the most important thing was that from a Jewish perspective, they were outsiders. So Matthew referred to them as "From the East" which is an offhand remark which reflected Jewish thinking at the time about how the world could be categorized. There were Jews who belonged to Israel whether or not they lived there and then there was everyone and everywhere else. And so you were from the north or the south or the east or the west, it didn't really matter where you were from if it wasn't Israel then it was from the east. If the Mayjai were, in fact, Mayjai in the technical sense then it's likely that they came from the Parthian Empire which spans from modern day eastern Syria to the fringes of India. from modern day Eastern Syria to the fringes of India. If may jai, then we know that they were Zoroastrians. That means that they followed the ancient religion based on the teaching of the prophet Zoroastra. And they were probably of the priestly, may just cast. Some non-biblical sources, such as the apocryphal Syriac infancy gospel, even speculate that the Magi were seeking Jesus on account of a Zoroastrian prophecy. If not true, Magi, in that Zoroastrian sense, then the wise men may just have been astrologers, of which there were many in the ancient world. It was a commonly held belief in the ancient world, but a new star would shine in the heavens at the birth of an important person. But whether Zoroastrian major or astrologers belonging to another faith or philosophy, the wise man who came to see Jesus almost certainly weren't followers of the Jewish law. So they weren't just cultural or geographical outsiders, they were theological and philosophical outsiders too. They were the sort of people that devout followers of the law would probably have condemned as impure. They certainly wouldn't have been allowed in the temple. And in fact they are the sort of people who probably some in the church still today would not like to see sitting in the pews. So why did they come from this far off place somewhere in the east? The travellers were a high enough standing to be given an audience by Herod. And that tells us something else about them, because that wasn't just a courtesy given to any outsider who happened to be travelling through Jerusalem, no matter how interesting their quest was. We know that they must have been wealthy. They were at least wealthy enough to offer very rich gifts of gold, frankincense and mer, and it's not impossible in fact it's probable that they travelled either with some kind of guide or perhaps with a guard. We think of three wise men on camels. I think it's much more likely that it was a large group of people. A grudge group of people with privilege. So why? Why come on such a long, uncomfortable journey with an uncertain outcome? If these people were rich, powerful, important, and from afar off land, going to somewhere they knew everyone would think they were strange, why didn't they just send emissaries to find out what this star was all about. The Greek word for this feast, the epiphany, which is what the major experience is epiphany. And that word literally means either the rising of the dawn, the rising of the sun to a new day, or epiphany, a revelation of the divine to human beings. It's a religious experience. So the Mayjai weren't coming just because they saw a star and thought, "Oh that's cool, let's follow it." Their journey wasn't a win. It wasn't so much a journey, in fact, as a pilgrimage. We. We think of the Magi as the principal actors in the Epiphany after its all that's then that got on their camels and traveled all the way to Jesus. But as recipients of a Theophony, a religious revelation, they were the actors, they were the ones being acted upon. The reason that the mage I came from so far away, although it were probably rich and powerful and could have just sent people in their stead, was because God summoned them. An understanding this gives us a new insight into the whole account. There weren't very many people that met Jesus as a child and a baby. Of course there was Mary and Joseph, two peasants from a backwater town in the middle of nowhere. Who were chosen not because of power or privilege of which they had absolutely none, but because they were devoted to God. Then there were the shapots, the untouchables of Jewish society who were ignored because they couldn't follow the purity laws. They lived out there in the wilderness and people thought they were kind of strange. Those two groups share with that Jesus was interested in welcoming the poor and the disenfranchised and the voiceless. But who do we hear about next? Gentiles. And not just any Gentiles, but Gentiles from far away who didn't believe any of the right things, the sort of people that would have made a Pharisee shudder. They were the people who were invited to worship God, become a human being. And of that group, Mary and Joseph, the Shepherds, the Magi, it was the Magi, his most spoke to Jesus' mission and ministry. They presented gifts, prophetic gifts, gifts, the prophesied who Jesus would be. Gold for a king, the king of Israel, frankincense for a priest, the great high priest, were told about in Hebrews, "Muhr, the oil of anointing for someone who has died." A gift for a sacrifice. Of course, we don't know if the mage I fully understood the theological significance of the gifts that they brought, but their actions prophetically pointed to who Jesus was and what he was going to do, not just for the children of Abraham, but for everyone. And again, we can't overlook the fact that it was outsiders who prophetically proclaimed Jesus's ministry. Whether they knew it or not, the Magi revealed Jesus as the descendants of Abraham who would fulfill the promise through your offspring, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. offspring, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. Through these gifts, the magi, outsiders in every way, proclaimed the universal scope of Jesus's mission. And so the Theophany, the religious experience which summoned the magi to Jesus. That made them anything but outsiders, no matter what anyone else thought. God reached into their reality and he used symbols and meaning which was familiar to them to summon them to the birth of his son. Through his grace, God gave the Magi sufficient understanding to worship Jesus as the King of Israel, the great high priest, the perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world. And so the Epiphany is a love letter from God to anybody who has ever felt, unloved, or unwanted, or out of place. It's a message that there are no outsiders in the kingdom of God. Geography didn't get in the way. Lineage and culture didn't get in the way. Philosophy and theology didn't get in the way. God removed everything that should have made the major, the last people we would see before Jesus. And he called them anyway. They had the freedom to respond to his call and they used it and they were transformed by his grace. And so as we start 2025, if you have ever felt unloved, if you've ever wondered whether you in fact do matter to God, whether you've ever wondered whether you in fact do matter to God, whether you've ever wondered whether you have a place in this church or any church, if you've ever worried that you don't belong because you don't believe or think the right things or you don't know as much as the next person in the pew, if you've ever worried that you look or feel or act differently to other people in church, Epiphany is your answer. You are always welcome just as you are. And equally, if you have ever looked at Skans at someone in this church or any church because you thought they didn't fit, a epiphany is your answer. There are no outsiders here. We are the descendants of the Mayjai, not just welcomed but summoned this morning and every morning by the Father to kneel before the Son. Amen.