Latin is generally referred to as a dead language. You may be surprised to know that it wasn’t exactly that vibrant to begin with. The Romans may have had a mighty empire, but they were all roads and legions, not culture, which generally came from the Greeks. It was Greek, not Latin, that was the lingua franca of the eastern half of the Empire, including the province of Judea where Jesus lived and died.
While we go to great lengths to paint Jesus as a rustic, if there are echos of history to be found in the gospels, then the historic Jesus was likely a polyglot, speaking Hebrew, the language of his religious tradition, Aramaic, the language of the streets, and Greek, for he interacts with a significant number of Gentiles, including Roman soldiers.
The generation of Jesus followers that would record the story and spread the faith throughout the empire read and wrote in a form of Greek known as Koine, even reading the Hebrew holy texts in translation, and sometimes importing mistranslations into their new covenant with God. They also imported Greek ideas into their new faith, soon called Christianity, pulled by the gravity of Platonic thought and later by Neo-Platonism.
And so it is that we come to Epiphany. In truth, Epiphany is tomorrow, the 12th day of Christmas, though Mainline Protestants, if we celebrate it at all, tend to do so on a convenient Sunday.
It is all Three Kings, though the text never gives a number and never calls them kings. I suppose “Some unknown number of Persian Scientists” Sunday doesn’t fit on the church calendar, though it is probably more accurate, for these astrologers certainly thought of themselves as rigorous scientists.
Epiphany is, of course, a Koine word, a root that comes in many forms with multiple prefixes, but that generally means in the verb form to make known, to show or to make manifest. An inscription from a little over a decade after the execution of Jesus reads “theon epiphane sotera,” which translates as “god revealed, savior,” though the inscription refers not to Jesus, but to the Roman emperor Claudius.
Traditional Christian thinking celebrates Epiphany as the revelation of Jesus as the Christ to the Gentiles. This one particular branch of the Hebrew religion understood itself as radically open, no longer bound by race or tribe, and it would spread first and most quickly among Gentiles who were already attracted to Hebrew belief, who were attached to synagogues throughout Asia Minor and Greece and who were known as “theophobes,” or God-Fearers, which had a much more positive connotation at the time than it might have today.
This might be though of as a second form of Hebrew “universalism.” First came the critical move when they stopped thinking of their tribal god as one among many, something called henotheism, and began to believe that there was only one universal God, creator of heaven and earth. Their ethical monotheism was hard won, later making them resistant to Christian claims about the divinity of Jesus. Still, the Hebrews believed they were a privileged people, specially chosen by that singular creating God. The Christian cult would throw open those doors, erasing that sense of privilege, an opt-in faith.
Universalism as a framework, an idea of inclusiveness, would reappear many times throughout history. The form that would eventually be expressed in the Unitarian Universalist movement is one such expression, but probably not at all what you think. That Universalism was a rejection of a particular Calvinist doctrine, that of predestination. Named after a second generation leader in the Reform Branch of Christianity, Calvinists might have gone a bit too far in trying to figure out God, though they were not the first nor would they be the last to make that mistake.
They had decided that since God knew everything and was all-powerful, God must already know who would be saved and who would be condemned. This meant that from the moment you were created, you were either among the elect or doomed through no choice of your own. Never mind the ways this doesn’t square with the idea of freewill, the simple truth is that many would consider a god who created sentient beings predestined to eternal torment a monster. The Universalists argued that a God of Love would have to make salvation universally available. While our heritage springs from Calvinism, we were not particularly hardliners, and we have long since accepted this form of Universalism.
A more recent form of Universalism created shockwaves in some Christian communities during the last decade. Rob Bell came from a fairly Conservative Christian tradition, and was the founding pastor of a mega-church in Michigan. But Bell had a problem with a certain point of Conservative Christian belief, the notion that only those who fit within a fairly narrow definition of “saved” Christian would know eternal life. Like the anti-predestination Universalists, Bell objected to the god this created. As he wrote in his 2011 bestseller “Love Wins”:
Many have heard the gospel framed in terms of rescue. God has to punish sinners because God is holy, but Jesus paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.
Let’s be very clear, then: we do not need to be rescued from God. God is the one who rescues us from death, sin, and destruction. God is the rescuer.
He would go on to write that:
We shape our God, and then our God shapes us. A distorted understanding of God, clung to with white knuckles and fierce determination, can leave a person outside the party, mad about a goat that was never gotten, without the thriving life Jesus insists is right here, all around us, all the time.
Arguing that love wins and God is good, Bell proclaimed the doors of heaven to be open to Muslims and Hindus and all good people. Needless to say, his universalist salvation was resoundingly denounced by many other Christians.
Now, I don’t care if you buy Bell’s universalism, the anti-Calvinist universalism, the universalist salvation that takes in all who believe that we traditionally celebrate on Epiphany, or even the universalism of the ancient Jews who decided that there could only be one God, and that God must be good. They all happen to work for me, but maybe not for all of you.
Our tent is built wide enough to take in universalists of all stripes as well as atheists and doubters and those who check all of the boxes of the traditional creeds. But our tent is built that wide precisely because of something we see taking place in each of these moments of universalism, the ability to re-examine old ideas, to think creatively.
Hope United Church of Christ exists as it does precisely because of the sort of open heads and open hearts we see in each of these moments of universalism, because of a willingness to go deep into our tradition and bringing it into conversation with new experiences, new contexts. Hope exists as it does because when John Robinson said goodbye to the Pilgrims at Leiden, Holland 500 years ago this July, he gave them permission to continue to think, to learn, to critically engage their faith, proclaiming that there was “yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word.”
Light. Truth. Made manifest. Revealed. Epiphany.
We call this “continuing testament,” the radical notion that no single generation gets to shackle all that follow, for every generation brings new gifts, new ideas, new experiences and encounters with the divine. We sometimes express this as “God is Still Speaking,” though we should immediately add “and We are Still Speaking Back.”
The good people of Hope wanted a Baptist in 1881, but they chose Congregationalism in 1883, inspired by this church’s first pastor, the Rev. Mr. George Prescott. They chose a denomination that ordained women when no other Christian denomination would ordain a woman. They chose a denomination that upset a whole lot of folks when it spoke out against slavery.
Ninety years ago, just as Hope was celebrating its first fifty years as a Congregational Church, the Congregationalist movement itself joined with another movement known simply as Christian. From them we learned the right of Christian conscience, the idea that the individual Christian must decide for themselves what they did and did not believe, that if, after study and prayer, their conscience demanded that they reject a belief, dogma, or practice, that was okay.
When this combined and open-minded Congregationalist and Christian Church later merged with the German Evangelical and Reform Church, well represented here in Wisconsin, to form the United Church of Christ, we carried forward this tradition of open-minded and open-hearted engagement with our traditions and the world around us, as well as a commitment to being a church in the world, a church committed to changing lives and a society that did not value all lives equally.
This is our living tradition, this is the extravagant hospitality of the United Church of Christ and of Hope. It is not a consumer product, not a pick-and-choose religion that misappropriates other cultures and tells us only what we want to hear. It is an arduous journey across the desert, bearing gifts, following the light, driven by hope, open to what might be revealed.
So while the entire Three Kings story might be a myth, and that seems more than likely than not, let us listen to it with open hearts for the light and truth that might yet break forth from this story, the truth that anyone can opt-in to the Kingdom of God, a kingdom defined not by dogma, not by creed, not by race, but by love, a love that will always win in the end. Let there be light.