January 2, 2011

Clay Nelson

The Epiphany     Matthew 2:1-12

Welcome this morning to the second day of a new year. Baby New Year is one day old. It is also the Sunday that we celebrate the visit of the Magi to a babe in a stable — The Feast of the Epiphany. The beginning of another New Year and the beginning of the Season of Epiphany have a lot more in common than babies.

The Magi brought gifts that befit a king. The New Year brings something at least as valuable: The gift of time. I’m not sure what the baby Jesus did with his gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, but poet Kathleen McTigue invites us to consider what we can do with our gift of time:

The first of January is another day dawning,

the sun rising as the sun always rises,

the earth moving in its rhythms

with or without our calendars

to name a certain day as the day of new beginning.

separating the old from the new.

So it is: everything is the same

bound into its history as we ourselves are bound.

Yet also we stand at a threshold,

the new year something truly new, still unformed,

leaving a stunning power in our hands:

What shall we do with the great gift of Time, this year?

The promise of the gift is inviting. A fresh start always is. But as Clarke Wells pointed out in our first reading:

We cannot enter the New Year clean and pure as the shiny babes pictured in illustrations of New Year’s Eve. Neither we nor the world work that way. We enter a new year bearing the encrustations of our time-worn past.

Unless we were born yesterday we enter the New Year all too aware of our failings and regrets. That’s of course why we make New Year resolutions. We seek to leave behind the outworn and false, the bad habits or regrets of the past year — in order to create of this yet unformed year something hopeful and new. The problem is the person making them is the same one who made them last year. Or as Mark Twain observed, “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

Instead of making a list of resolutions doomed to failure I suggest using this time to reflect on the person we are bringing into this New Year to plant seeds of hope. Let’s compare ourselves to a river stone.

It is smooth, polished through the years by the flow of rushing water. It is hard in our hands, and sturdy. Yet, we know it is malleable. It has been shaped by the past, formed by heat and water, the passing of time and the conditions of the environment around it. If it could speak, it would tell of change.

We are no different. Who we are, where we are, what we value, what we love, has been shaped by the past – by our experiences in life. Even what we believe about ourselves, or God, or the nature of reality has been shaped by how we’ve experienced life. Like river stones, we are strong, and yet we are also malleable, changed and shaped by life.

And sometimes that life is cruel or at least unkind, unfair and harsh. Look again at the river stone. It may appear polished and smooth but it has scratches and cracks — signs of trauma. 

Jill-Beth Sweeny Shulthies looks our lives and observes that…

We are fragile.

We are not broken.

We are imperfect.

We are not flawed.

We are vulnerable.

We are not weak.

We are of this earth,

And yet the divine lives in us.

When I feel I am going to break,


I am the most human.


When I embrace my fragility,

I let you into my imperfect world.

We are fragile. We are not broken. We are imperfect. We are not flawed. What I appreciate most about the distinctions Schulthies draws in the beginning of her poem Fragility/Divinity is that the adjectives fragile and imperfect convey a sense of fluidity — that as human beings we are able to change and be changed by what is around us. In contrast, broken and flawed imply a more permanent state. 

We are fragile. We can break a bone — but it heals. A mark may remain, but we find we can use our arm or leg again. Even when we face an illness or disability that cannot be healed, it does not mean we are broken. It does not mean that we cannot experience wholeness and joy in our lives.

Epiphany celebrates this reality. Epiphany is all about experiencing life, not making resolutions. Epiphany is all about change embraced. Franciscan Friar Richard Rhor describes it this way:

An epiphany is not an idea. As D.H. Lawrence said, people can do anything they want with an idea, but a truly new experience changes everything. Before you can do anything with it, it does something with you!

Most of us prefer ideas and words; we are afraid of any authentically new experience. Unlike the Magi, we do not tend to allow stars to divert us to a new and unknown place. Most of us stay inside our private castles and avoid such questionable adventures. Yes, we avoid death supposedly, but we also avoid birth. We miss out on the great epiphany.

An epiphany is not an experience that we can create from within, but one that we can only be open to and receive from another. Epiphanies leave us totally out of control, and they always demand that we change. We would rather have objectified religion, which leaves us potentially in control and never having to change at all.

We have large and small epiphanies all the time: that intuitive perception or insight into the reality of essential meaning – after which one knows what one must do. Once we have had an epiphany we can’t go home again, or if we do, like the Magi, not by the same road. 

While following the star, did the Magi anticipate that the king they were looking for would be born of peasants and found in the humblest of surroundings? Such fragile divinity was not what they anticipated. For them the sight was the dawning of new light. For them Isaiah’s words became reality, Arise, shine; for your light has come. And what the light revealed was that true power never really belonged to the high and mighty who seek to wield it violently and cruelly and for their own selfish ends. True power is to be found in the fragile, imperfect, vulnerable beings we are. Even Herod can’t kill it. Our love, compassion, and humility reveal the divine within each of us. A divinity that is never flawed or broken. Gazing upon each other we see God in the most unlikely of places. Then the light dawns; everything has changed. As we stand at the threshold of a new year, stunning power in our hand, we know what we shall do with that great gift of Time, this year.

McTigue puts it this way:

Let us begin by remembering that whatever justice,

whatever peace and wholeness might bloom in our world this year,

we are the hearts and minds, the hands and feet,

the embodiment of all the best visions of our people.

The new year can be new ground for the seeds of our dreams.

Let us take the step forward together onto new ground,

planting our dreams well, faithfully, and in joy.