Portsmouth Abbey      

The gospel today is the story of today’s celebration, a story of an epiphany to wise men from the east. Epiphany means manifestation, appearance and recognition, in this case the appearance and recognition of the reality of Jesus’ true identity, i.e. he is God. It is also his recognition by the whole world, the world outside Israel, by the Gentiles, by us. And it is celebrated in many different ways. In some places it’s the day Christmas gifts are exchanged. Other places celebrate with gigantic bonfires. When I first visited my cousin in southern Germany I noticed the inscription over her front door, the letters “C+M+B,” flanked by two digits of the year. It’s the custom there each year on the feast of the Epiphany to use blessed chalk to write over your front door the year and the initials of the three wise men to bless your home for health, faith, good fortune, humility, goodness and mercy, the way Jesus’ home was blessed by his presence and recognized by the three wise men. Prior to the visit of the wise men to his home, the child Jesus had only been seen by some poor shepherds but now he is seen by noble persons, not in a manger but in the house where he lived. This child who had only been seen by his fellow Jews was now seen by persons of other religions. They seek, find and see this child the son of God because all good people do seek God.
 
These three wise men or kings as they are sometimes called are often depicted as representing the three races of humanity. But the Bible simply says they came from the East, because really wise people were believed to live in the east. One tradition has their names as Balthasar king of Arabia, Caspar king of India, and Melchior king of Persia. The pictures of Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar represent all of us, young, middle aged and old, white, black and oriental, rich and poor. Jesus Christ is Lord and savior of us all. The more accurate tradition says they were not kings but Magi. The Magi were the priest caste of the Persian Empire, roughly the same area that Abraham came from. They were not Jewish, but followers of the great prophet Zarathustra, the first man who taught there was one God alone. And their religion said that a great Savior would come into the world and establish the reign of the One Wise Lord by destroying all evil. Their culture was very skilled in astronomy and believed that the positions of stars and planets manifested the God's will, and indicated events in their lives. Apparently in about 5 BC there was a most unusual conjunction of planets which indicated to them reading the stars the good news that this Savior had been born in that strange land to the West, near Jerusalem, the Holy City of the Jewish people, many of whom were still living in Babylon, which by then was part of the Persian empire. And so they undertook a long journey, to pay homage to the Savior of their world, following basically the very same route that Abraham took 1800 years before when he left Ur in Babylonia for Palestine. 
            
They, strangers-gentiles-unbelievers- recognized who Jesus was. They recognized in a helpless baby what the Chosen People could not recognize even in an adult miracle working Jesus who demonstrated to them his divine power over nature, demons and disease. The hard-hearted people of Jesus’ time saw only what they wanted to see, and they got what they wanted in short-term healings, but disregarded the vision and messages of the prophets. Fortunately the apostles and other disciples were not so hard-hearted; they came along over time. And so can we. They learned that following Jesus, that belonging to the Chosen people, the true faith or church did not mean that God was going to live up to their expectations and be and do what they thought they had been taught. God was full of surprises and did the unexpected. He still is and still does.
 
Are you ready for that? Every Day has an Epiphany – some concrete manifestation of God and his goodness somewhere, somehow, in someone. Will you recognize Him? But that’s too easy, you say. The lesson of Christmas, of God becoming man in Jesus Christ, as a helpless baby in Bethlehem, is that God works through and appears in the very ordinary mundane everyday situations in our lives. Every day does have an Epiphany: will you recognize it? Like in what looks to be only bread and wine in this Eucharist? Are you like Jesus’ contemporaries, who could only see the conventional, the usual, what they wanted to, what they were conditioned to see? Or are you like the Magi, who could see the signs of God’s will and presence around them? The Gospels tell us: “Seek and you shall find; Knock and the Door shall be opened for you.” We should be like the three magi, and trustingly seek as they did. Let us have faith in God’s promises. Let us have the courage to keep that faith throughout the journey of our lives. We should be alert to the work of the Spirit who warns us of the schemes of the hostile Herods around us. Those magi must have been confused when the angel told them to take a different route back home. But they listened to the warning. Let us see what God reveals to us, and disregard what would distract us. God has promised us that if we seek we will find Him waiting to welcome us and save us. But above all, let us keep the faith. Over Christmas-time we have been celebrating the events of the beginning of God’s saving work in history. As we return to the usual routine of our lives may He bring that work to a successful conclusion in each one of us. Every Day has an Epiphany. May each of us see how we can make the presence of God, the manifestation of God, a reality in our lives, in this community, in our nation and in our world.