The Festival of the Epiphany, 01/06/2017

Sermon on Matthew 2:1-12, by Walter W. Harms

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem ²and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

³When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him.⁴When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. ⁵“In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

⁶“‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’^]”

⁷Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. ⁸He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

⁹After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. ¹¹On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. ¹²And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Did you receive any gifts today? No? Well, you should have. This day called Epiphany in the Holy Christian and Apostolic Church is the day that was first observed as the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ and as the day those “Wise Men” or Magi from the East visited Jerusalem and then Bethlehem. They presented Jesus with gifts, three of them from which we get the idea that there were three of these visitors (no where in God’s Word are they enumerated, their names or camels mentioned). In the Eastern church this is the day children receive gifts, and there is a good gift for you today

The truth of this visit is that, while they presented Jesus with gifts as the King of the Jews, they received a greater gift. They received acceptance as persons who were not only not Jews and observers of God’s Law, but they were what we call Gentiles and really persons we would not associate with the Christian church at all. They were not kings, they were not wise men either. They were astrologers (like persons who write the daily horoscopes in the newspapers), fortunetellers, psychics, and magicians (the word derived from the word, Magi). They are hardly persons many of us would welcome to our worship services, if we knew their profession.

The gifts to Jesus were those used in their “professions.” They might be used for worship (the frankincense) and the myrrh for burial purposes and gold as a gift fit for a king, but that was not their intent when they presented them to Jesus. That’s for sure. They were simply expensive gifts, fit for a king! Sorry to disillusion so many of you.

The gift you receive today and the gift that keeps on giving is the revelation of who God is, what he thinks about you, and what he has done and continues to do for all people. That is the revelation, the gift, and is certainly the epiphany, the revelation of this day.

God shows us with this portion of Holy Writ that he accepts us, all of us, yes, all of us. We don’t have to perform to get his attention. We don’t have to act a certain way. We don’t have to belong to a certain group or denomination. He gives us his acceptance all the time, if we would only realize that glorious fact.

We may consider God a tyrant at times, inscrutable, incomprehensible, so far removed from our place and time that he cannot understand us or our situations in life. We may feel there is no way he could understand the situations of our time, as the terrible atrocities going on in Aleppo, or what is happening to the Christians in the small towns around Mosel in Iran.

Yet we see him as a refugee with Mary and Joseph, fleeing for their lives to Egypt from the brutal hostilities of that madman, King (yes, king) Herod the Great. You must remember that they escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the few possessions they could carry. We’ve all seen similar pictures like that. No doubt the gifts of the Magi were going to be a nest egg for them, but now had to be used for that escape. Jesus and his people will always find themselves targets of ridicule and sometimes gross persecution. No wonder we often hide our Christian faith from others.

The inscrutable God who is our Jesus knows all about terror within and without. He understands when what we had planned doesn’t happen, and as a result we are reduced to circumstances we never would have thought we would find ourselves in. He revealed in this Epiphany text that he understands more than we can imagine.

There is more. He doesn’t show himself as some kind of ghostly apparition that fades in and out of our lives. He comes in flesh and blood. He is truly human. He knows the frailties of human existence. He knows how we struggle with temptations because he was tempted as we are. He knows as we do, people who say they are loyal and then betray us in more ways than one.

Even more importantly, he takes upon himself the burdens of our gross lapses of moral behavior, our wickedness we seem to hide so successfully from others and sometimes even ourselves, the innate pride we have that we are better than so many others in so many ways they can’t be counted, and our lack of charity to those caught in their sins and crimes and those who lack the courage to be anything but burdens to our society. This is the beginning of that “show” that starts with this Epiphany of our Lord.

This Jesus experiences all we do but does it without betraying his loyally and unity with his Heavenly Father. He comes to heal and we want him to heal all of us, even though he didn’t even do that during his lifetime on earth. He accepts all kinds of people even people like us who more often than we think resemble these so called “wise men.”

This Jesus does something that should happen to us. He suffers the punishment that we deserve when he was finally believed to be terminated by the religious leaders and the cowardly civilian authorizes. He doesn’t just die. He goes through hell itself when God his Father forsakes him. Now that is hell! That’s where we deserved to go, but because this Babe of Bethlehem grew into a man and then did for us what we never even wish to contemplate, we will never have to even consider that as a possibility.

The gift of Epiphany keeps on giving even today. Jesus gives us himself today in the Blessed Sacrament. In this unbelievable act, Jesus comes to us, each of us and reminds us that he is with us, each of us, singly and as his church always. It will never end.

What a gift today! Go home lift a toast to thank him for the gift of his presence, his guidance and the Spirit he has given. Amen.

Walter W. Harms
Austin, TX
E-Mail: waltpast@aol.com

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