Some Sundays are like that valley in Ezekiel’s prophetic vision. You look at the texts assigned by the Lectionary and see nothing but dry bones, just nothing that’s gonna preach, and you pray for the Spirit to blow in and put some flesh on things, to bring what looks dead to life.
Then there are the Sundays like today that offer an embarrassment of riches, even if we choose to focus narrowly on the Feast of the Epiphany, the “Twelfth Day of Christmas” that actually falls on Thursday, for that feast is both the immediate story, from the gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, is a broader and crucial declaration of universalism, is an overture toward the theology of gift in the tradition of Christianity, and is a lesson in civil disobedience. And rather than choose, I’ve just decided to preach them all, and trust that you will choose the one message you need to hear this morning.
But let’s just start with the story.
The idea of these kings, really a tiny part of our narrative, is all that we import from Matthew into our sometimes syrupy telling of the Nativity as children’s pageant, into the plaster or plastic creche we install on the mantle for a few weeks each year.
It is Luke that gives us the angel appearing to Mary, which we much prefer over Matthew’s angel appearing to Joseph. It is Luke that gives us the fictional census and the trip to Bethlehem, and therefore gives us the stable and the manger. It is Luke that gives us shepherds, for the Gospel of Luke more than any other focuses on the poor, the working class, women, and others without power.
In Matthew, the baby is presumably born at home. No shepherds come to visit. The visitation that does occur probably comes some months later when magi arrive from the East, a long trip in those days, having followed a star they understood as a heavenly portent. They are not called kings in the text, and the word used in the original Greek leads scholars to believe they were actually priests in a tradition that practiced astrology, likely Zoroastrians from what is today Iran.
The idea that they were kings appears to have developed because the text is traditionally paired with our reading from Isaiah 60, which declares that kings will be drawn to Messianic Zion. There is nothing wrong with reading scripture as being in dialogue with itself. In fact, that is the only way we can acknowledge and live into the evolutionary nature of scripture. But that also means recognizing when the scripture is misinterpreted, by us or by the ancients. So in the same way Mary Magdalene was erroneously transformed into the woman taken in adultery, so too were the Magi transformed into kings.
We are never given a number of Magi in the text, despite the classic song. There could be two, there could be two hundred. We have read the listing of three gifts as meaning three Magi, but that is just a guess.
That they follow a star, which is to say a light, brings us back to that reading from Isaiah and the theme of light, an overriding trope for today, for scripture equates light with salvation and truth, which is to say that scripture also equates salvation with truth, something our sisters and brothers in White Nationalist Christianity seem to have forgotten.
The great 20th century architect Louis Kahn said in a 1973 interview that “We are actually born out of light, you might say. I believe light is the maker of all material. Material is spent light.” It turns out there is science to back up this startling claim, which goes further still, for some scientists now believe light itself is data, which fits nicely into a theology that claims God spoke creation, making us and all that surrounds us God’s speech, or more poetically, God’s song.
Though we should also use caution, for the absence of light is part of creation as well, the dark season and dark of night part of the cycle in which life erupts, and fear of the dark not only springs from our original fear of what we do not understand and can not control, but also feeds narratives that justify the continued economic and cultural violence of those from northern climes where reduced sunlight and natural selection led to lighter skin over those from the regions where humans originated, where darker skin was the adaptive trait.
It is significant in the construction of Christianity that these travelers are not Hebrews. Epiphany comes from the Koine Greek for revelation, the same word used by John of Patmos for his imagined apocalypse. To reveal something is to make it known, to make it seen, so again, the idea of light as revealing. And in this case, the feast is a celebration that through Jesus, God is made known to the Gentiles, that is to non-Hebrews. While we might quibble with the historicity of this particular story, it represents a truth that is the only reason we are here, at The Park Church on the first Sunday of the year, for Christianity would grow from a weird little cult within the Hebrew religious matrix into a world-wide movement that was universalist in nature, that was not tied to one race or tribe. This Sunday is meant to be a celebration of salvation for the Gentiles, which pretty much means us.
The gifts the Magi bring will preach, especially the myrrh, for this was a substance used in traditional medicine and in embalming. Presumably it is myrrh as an anesthetic that is mixed into the sour wine offered to Jesus on the Cross, which he refuses, and myrrh is listed as being used to prepare the body for burial. In this, the first is the last, the birth foreshadowing the death, for the gospel authors were trying to make meaning out of an extraordinary life, one that changed not only their own lives, but also the course of human history. Why else give such an odd gift to an infant? As we so often do, the gospel authors are seeking to make it all make sense, birth and death and their place in the cosmic scheme of our relationship with the infinite.
Of course, giving is an important spiritual practice in the Judeo-Christian tradition, one that we celebrate during this service. Sometimes called the first fruits, sometimes called the tithe, followers of the Hebrew religion were expected to give back a portion of their income for the support of the vulnerable and the upkeep of their religious institutions. Sometimes the giving became extraordinary and symbolic, as when Hannah promises to dedicate her son to God’s service if she might only become pregnant. Jesus presumes the tithe, and calls those who would follow him to go beyond it, to give in ways that are also sacrificial. But the gifts today are not that kind of gift, nor are we meant to believe that they represent a burden on the givers or reflect a Hebrew understanding of offering. These gifts seem to be meant only in the context of the “kingship” of Christ and the story arc that leads to the tomb.
It is those kings that bring us back to the last of our major themes. The two gospels both try to make sense of why a man historically known to be a Nazarene might have also been descended from the House of David, and therefore the rightful heir to the Davidic covenant, why he might have been born in Bethlehem, whether that reflects historic memory or faithful imagining.
There are all sorts of reasons people migrated in those days. Luke gives us that fictional census. Matthew gives us something far darker.
Augustus Caesar famously said it was safer to be Herod’s pig than to be his son. Indeed, Herod dispatched sons and lovers seen as a threat, but as an Idumean practicing the Hebrew religion, his pigs were safe. So we have this story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, something no church has ever allowed me to write into the Christmas pageant. Herod is so paranoid that is willing to murder an infant on the off chance that it might inspire people to rebel, in the exact same way that Communist China disappeared Tibetan Buddhism’s 11th Panchen Lama, only six years old at the time, in 1995. And this is our final takeaway for Epiphany, for the Magi refuse to participate in infanticide in the same way Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, refuse to participate in the infanticide ordered by the Pharaoh in the Exodus narrative, for here we have scripture speaking to scripture, Matthew’s effort to portray Jesus as the new Moses, the new covenant maker.
What we have here is faithful people refusing to collaborate with evil, and specifically with powerful and paranoid egomaniacs,. These are acts of civil disobedience, ones that require courage, and ones we are called to today, for we too are asked to collaborate with evil, we too have to worry about infanticide inspire by a paranoid egomaniac, and this day, some mother’s baby will die because of systems we tolerate and sometimes endorse in our fear.
Twelve verses, just twelve verses that we gloss over, just three kings in the creche. Scripture is rich and has everything to do with how we live today. May we hear and celebrate as God speaks the Word, in all of Creation, in our living tradition, and in our present action in the world. Amen.