Matthew 2:1-12
Christmas has a fixed date every year, even if it is most certainly not the actual date for the birth of Jesus. That means Epiphany has a fixed date every year too, January 6th, at least for most of us. Some Orthodox traditions as well as some Middle Eastern Christians still use the Julian calendar for religious purposes, which places the feast on January 19th.
If you are keeping score, that makes January 5th the Twelfth Day of Christmas in our tradition, leaving you on Epiphany Eve with swans a’ swimming and lords a’ leaping and so on, retail value just north of $218 thousand and considerable maintenance costs, the geese and maids not producing quite enough milk and eggs to feed all of those pipers.
Like many churches these days, we choose to celebrate Epiphany on the first Sunday after the New Year, not really being “holy day of obligation” sort of folks.
Easter moves, as you know. It is the Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox, which changes from year to year. There is even a Latin term for identifying the date of Easter, the Computus Paschalis. Though again, traditions using the Julian calendar for religious purposes often arrive at a different date.
Christianity is not alone in having movable observances. Not surprisingly, the calculation for determining the date of Passover, the feast that brought Jesus to Jerusalem and led to the climactic events in his story, is similar to the Computus Paschalis, “paschalis” derived from “pesach,” ancient Hebrew for the infinitive “to pass over.”
Passover begins at sundown on the night of the first full moon after the Spring equinox. Except the Hebrew calendar is lunisolar and has to add in leap months seven out of every nineteen years, which can sometimes force Passover to the second full moon after the equinox, most recently in 2016.
For Muslims, the holy month of Ramadan begins on February 18th this year. Well, maybe, depending on whether you accept the date decreed by the Saudis, or insist on a local sighting of the first crescent moon, the traditional method. And because the Muslim calendar is strictly lunar rather than solar, with no leap months, it falls between ten and eleven days short of a solar year annually, meaning everything, including Ramadan, moves in relation to fixed calendars.
Many religious observances are still based on the time of day, which was not precise in ancient times, before modern science and the powerful computers we all carry in our pockets. For example, the Ramadan fast is from dawn to sundown. For Jews, it mattered whether you had time to finish plowing and get back to the house and cleaned up before the sun went down, marking the start of sabbath.
To help people figure out when exactly it was dawn, the rabbis taught that “It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that it is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.”
Epiphany is ancient Greek for appearance or manifestation. In modern usage, it means a sudden insight or perception. In Christian tradition, it represents the visit of the Magi and the idea that salvation through Christ was available to the Gentiles, in a way the dawn of universal salvation. The Magi follow a star. Jesus is the light of the world. There is a sort of theme here. But in the end, Epiphany is about spreading the gospel beyond one Jewish reform movement.
Sitting on this side of crusades and colonization, centuries of antisemitism and cultural destruction, we can be a little uncomfortable with this idea. Some, and I count myself among this group, are unwilling to accept that the holy chose in an act of individual agency only one couple out of all the people in the world to create only one chosen ethnic group out of all the ethnic groups in the world, that only one personal experience of the holy in only one member of that group matters, the experience of the holy in Jesus, that all other spiritual paths are less or even, in the minds a Fundamentalists, damnable.
We look at the missionary tradition and find theological arrogance and grotesque evil. That toxic legacy has made many Christians uncomfortable with evangelism, and that before Christian nationalists partnered with billionaires to seize control of our nation.
As well-intended as our critique of Christian evangelism and forced conversion in later ages is, I think we get it wrong when we try to apply that to early Christianity, to Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch, to Paul establishing churches, to Junia leading her church. They were not converting people to a religion, to an institution. The Way of Jesus was neither of those things.
Early Christianity was an experience. It was a community. It was a way of life.
People were bringing friends and acquaintances into the joy of their life together, a life together where they found meaning, where they found hope.
Yes, they were asked to believe in Jesus. They were asked to believe his good news, that God’s just and caring kingdom was unfolding in the world, that this new world could be seen and lived through acts of compassion and reversal and healing, where people were no longer crippled by sin, where the lowly were celebrated, the corrupt brought low, where absolutely no one was so unclean that they could not find a place at the table.
It would be centuries before this movement so filled with revolutionary confidence and joy bowed to earthly power, became anti-revolutionary.
Today, we see a consolidation of wealth not seen since the Middle Ages. Tech bros use AI and algorithms to lock us into our own pods, fed a steady diet of digital anesthesia on a subscription basis, addicts unable to escape the Matrix. People spend more and more time in their own homes, facing little screens, Tik-Tok’ing their way to oblivion. Our young are fed a steady stream of glamor Instagram, violent pornography, and a Pinterest lifestyle that is a death-spiral of the superficial.
And honestly, sometimes the Matrix looks appealing. Engaging in the world right now is hard work. You just want to buy the thing you need, not answer endless customer satisfaction surveys and tip every person you encounter at the new suggested rate north of 25%, and you better check the math, because all too often it doesn’t math. You lose hours to phone trees and companies that will do anything to keep your money while denying you the services you purchased. And all of that is assuming you have enough privilege that you don’t have to worry about being swept up and disappeared by authoritarian forces, dox’ed and destroyed because you have the audacity to say that a child in Gaza should have human rights.
I get it. Utopia has never existed and people have always been messy, but things feel as fraught today as at any other point in my lifetime. There have been plenty of times in recent weeks where I’ve longed for retirement and a small home, just me and my dog, maybe one or two people, and maybe not that many.
This is precisely why being here is more important than ever, precisely why the revolutionary teachings of Jesus, made more radical as it spread beyond a Jewish reform movement into a brutal Roman Empire, matter, why that old rabbinic parable matters: If you can look at any woman, any man, and fail to see that they are your sister or your brother, you are still in the dark.
Let us welcome the Three Kings who are neither three nor kings, the shepherds who smell of sheep and smoke, the Syrian woman who longs for healing, the un-sheltered schizophrenic whose demons may yet be exorcised. Let us tell our friends that here is actual reality, where the wisdom comes not from a datacenter and algorithms, but from an ancient story and a living tradition, a liberator in Egypt, a revolutionary in Galilee, hard-headed Abolitionists in Elmira, and you, on a winter morning in a historic building where people still gather, sisters and brothers by choice, community and caring.
Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Holy Mystery,
the prophets spoke of an age of peace.
We’re still waiting.
It is one thing to call us to our better selves,
it is another for us to answer that call,
to move past fear and hate
and self-justification
to courage
and openness
and love.
We pray for our American military
ordered into an illegal war,
for the people of Venezuela,
caught between autocracy and anarchy.
Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies,
so we pray for the real narco-traffickers
in China and Mexico,
for the government officials who facilitate this deadly trade,
and for the many families who grieve,
overdoses in the U.S.,
narco-wars in Mexico,
and a petro-war in South America.
Mostly we pray that in this place
we can safeguard hope
and fan the flames of courage,
that we might turn
anger and compassion
into action.
We live in a fearful time,
but so did Jesus,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…