I am going to begin this morning by going a little “meta,” and by that I don’t mean Zuckerberg’s civilization-destroying company. What I mean by “meta” is zooming out and looking at how the proverbial sausage is made, thinking about how we think about Epiphany.
Like other dates on the liturgical calendar, Epiphany wasn’t really a Congregational thing. Those Puritans and Pilgrims were a dry and cranky lot, only interested in the basics. Remember, they outlawed Christmas at one point. Thankfully that didn’t last too long. But there were plenty of ancient feasts and practices they still considered “Papist,” including Epiphany.
It was only a century ago, when the ecumenical spirit was in the air worldwide, that we started re-examining and restoring some of the Christian traditions we had thrown off, especially important as we grew closer to parts of the German church in America that were as much Lutheran as they were Reform.
Unlike the Feast of Christ the King, a 20th century fabrication, there is at least a real tradition, actual scripture, around Epiphany. It is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, as in the proverbial partridge in a pear tree and all that, and the date associated with today’s reading from Matthew, the arrival of wise people from the East at the home (not manger!) of Joseph and Mary.
The word “Epiphany” itself comes from the Biblical Greek for an appearance or manifestation, and so shares somewhat with the word “apocalypse,” which simply means to reveal or make known. Both lean into seeing as a way of knowing.
In particular, Christians have traditionally connected the story of the wise travelers with the gospel message to the Gentiles, that is, to people who were not ethnically or religiously connected to the tribe of Israel. Which is kind of important, because no good news for the Gentiles means no us, no Sistine Chapel, no Mozart Requiem, no Azusa Street revival.
Because there is that star, because there is that message to the Gentiles, pastors all-too-often slip into the sin of supersessionism, the wrong-headed theology that claims Christians replaced the Israelites in covenant with God, contributing to centuries of antisemitism, to Auschwitz and the Tree of Life Massacre.
Just as often pastors lean into the language of light, connecting to old tropes that equate good with whiteness and evil with darkness, not only paralleled in racism, but also ignoring the very real and important role darkness plays in life, in rest, in mystery. Christmastide, the season from the Christmas Eve service through Epiphany, as well as Eastertide, the season from Easter Sunday until Pentecost, are assigned white as the liturgical color, because white is assumed to be good.
It is not that all of those pastors are intentionally racist or antisemitic. It is simply that we have this slow construction of story, a soup of ancient superstition and scientific knowledge.
So let’s ignore those old tropes, and, as they might say on a television police procedural, let’s just stick to the story, ma’am.
Our reading is the story of a man who was willing to kill children if it helped him stay in power. And not killing children as collateral damage, as is happening in Ukraine. Intentionally ordering the slaughter of infants.
Yes, there is the baby Jesus, all that love and messiah and poo. Yes, there are the travelers, assumed to be three because there are three gifts, and traditionally called kings, though that isn’t what the text says. I mean, maybe there were even wise women on the trip, since the collective noun was masculine but could easily include both, though as the old joke goes, the gifts would have been more practical if there were wise women, and the house would have been cleaned, with warm bread in the oven.
The camels are just a guess, the drummer boy a cruel fabrication. What new mother wants a snare drum near the baby?
The entire story of the Magi is framed around Herod’s willingness to kill.
Herod here is Herod the Great, not his son, Herod Antipas, who would play a role in the executions of both John the Baptizer and Jesus, which honestly seems pretty low-key after all the baby-killing his father did.
Herod the Great was an unexpected king. His family had converted to Judaism, and he had proven himself a valuable administrator, effective in collecting taxes for Rome and shrewd in selecting his friends. But the throne, as weak as it was, was still held by Hasmoneans, the family of rural priests that had led the Maccabean insurrection a century earlier.
As pretty much always happens, the great heroes of past liberation had become the corrupt nepotists of the present, and when Judea was torn apart yet again by Hasmonean family in-fighting, Herod traveled to Rome asking for support. To everybody’s surprise, the Senate decided to throw out the Hasmoneans altogether, and named Herod King of Judea.
Christians only remember Herod the Great through this single story, but history remembers him as a great builder, expanding the Temple, building mighty fortresses, including the famous complex at Masada, and establishing the city of Caesarea Maritima, where Pontius Pilate would later establish his headquarters.
Here, in this story, we don’t have construction. We have evil. The Slaughter of the Innocents, the traditional name we give to the massacre Herod ordered, is evil. Angels and dreams may have spared the life of baby Jesus, but plenty of other children died.
We happily drag the Three Wise Men, the Three Kings from the Orient, across infancy narratives and into our decorative creches, but we barely talk about those dead children.
Because we don’t like to talk about evil. We are too pragmatic and too post-modern to call things evil, finding the word embarrassing except in moments of Facebook hyperbole. We don’t want to be that guy, after all, some of us have been called evil, because of decisions we made about our own bodies, because of who we love, because of how we express our gender. So we prefer to downplay the whole thing, to minimize the threat, to take a live-and-let-live approach. We tell ourselves they don’t really mean it. He won’t be that bad once he is in office.
We can go on and on about the gaslighting of white Christian nationalists, but nobody gaslights better than a polite moderate.
And in the end, there is just one problem with appeasement, with trying to get along with evil, and that one problem is history. Trying to just get along with evil always ends in cataclysm.
There is real evil in the world, and just because an autocratic patriarchy has misused the word doesn’t make it any less real.
When white Christian nationalists try to use our public schools for indoctrination rather than education, it is evil.
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution exists solely because those who enslaved and brutalized other people were terrified that those people might rise up and exact a bloody revenge. Today it easier to own an assault rifle than it is to own a car, and the babies of Bethlehem now bleed out on the floor of an elementary school in Texas.
When Damar Hamlin collapsed on the football field on Monday night, the anti-vaxx movement kicked into high gear, spreading disinformation, blaming his heart attack on the Covid-19 vaccine. The people who spread that misinformation are evil.
4Chan, the website at the center of so many massacres, is evil, and so is Hiroyuki Nishimura, the man who owns it and profits from it. Q Anon is evil. It may be wacky, but it is not harmless, as the anniversary of the January 6th insurrection on Friday reminded us. Elon Musk is an evil little rich boy, was evil even before he bought Twitter and re-established it as a platform for hatred, spreading lies and destroying lives.
Ron DeSantis scapegoating the LGBTQ+ community is not harmless. It is straight-up Nazi-level evil which has fired up brown shirts like the Proud Boys.
Jesus denounced hypocrites. He denounced greed. He denounced self-righteousness. Jesus, who we claim to follow, was not bashful about naming evil.
The Christmas story isn’t just some saccharine tale of a kind innkeeper and a baby in a manger. It is a story of empire and autocracy and a battle for the soul of a people. It is a story filled with fear and violence and evil. It is a story filled with hard-headed courage and the foolishness to believe in the power of love. It is the story of elders clinging to life until they have seen the Messiah with their own eyes, like Toronto Maple Leafs fans waiting for a Stanley Cup.
I call out and name the beauty in the world from this pulpit, the holy miracle of the every day, of stars and west-bound travelers and us, because we need to be reminded sometimes, because they are constant epiphanies, manifestations of that holy mystery we name as God, but we won’t be calling out much if we allow our greed and laziness and fear to destroy the planet’s capacity to sustain life.
Taking another route home, avoiding it, isn’t going to deal with the evil in the world, and crossing a border is only a temporary solution. We need plans. We need action. We need to call the wicked back to community, and if they refuse, we need to strip them of their power, completely.
As I shared with you some months ago, there is no such thing as an acceptable amount of kudzu, and there is no such thing as an acceptable white Christian nationalist. Better that every church in America should fail than that we ever end up in their Handmaid’s Tale dystopia.
I’m not keen on Putin or Communist China. I worry about fentanyl and the uncontrolled chaos at the border. But what really scares me is right here, just up the road in mama’s basement, deep down an internet rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and armed to the teeth.
If you are more concerned about drag queens in the public library than you are about AR-15s in the classroom, you aren’t misguided, you are evil, and I don’t want you anywhere near political office.
So yea, Epiphany, la-la-la and stars and camels and kids with fake beards. Whatever.
In “Love in a Time of Terror,” one of his last essays, the great nature writer Barry Lopez cataloged many of the evils confronting us, but he also wrote about love, about being fully in, in community and in nature. He closed with a question. He asks, in light of all of the evil, “is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning word?”
Amen.