If you’ve been around Trinity for a while, you may already know that my husband John and I served for seven years as missionaries in Central America and the Caribbean when we were newly married. Por eso somos hablahispanos. That’s why we’re both Spanish speakers. What you may not know is that our two sons were born in Nicaragua, and our older spoke Spanish as his first language. I was reminded of this when my husband unearthed some ancient VHS tape and had it digitized. The camera captured two year old Amos on the day his brother Aaron was born. He looked… miserable.
Not only had Amos been unseated from his place of honor as the only child, his mother was preoccupied with a usurping infant and his father was wandering around the house with a giant black recording device affixed to his face. You remember how big they were, those early home cameras that you could insert an entire VHS cassette into? John kept trying to explain the value of this distracting machine to a toddler. Unconvinced, Amos would scurry off to his mother who was holding his brother, and then run back toward his camera-wielding father in tears. It was a world of hurt for the child. There was no escape from his disappointment. Until… until he noticed that the video camera had a red light on it that would shine every time John started recording.
And what it recorded at that moment of his noticing was a complete transformation. Amos’ teary face lit up in a broad smile, and he excitedly deployed one of the few complete sentences he could say at the time. La luz, Papa, la luz! The light, daddy: I see the light.
We’re all looking for the light, aren’t we? And that’s as it should be, because God’s first act in creation was to summon light. Light for the day and night skies, light to illuminate the obscurity, “inner light” which is what he Quakers call the sacred aspect of ourselves. “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” said the Psalmist. “I am the light of the world,” said Jesus. And when we find the light we are seeking, it changes everything.
They had seen the star at its rising, those light-seeking wise people from the east, and it stopped over the place where the child was. “When they saw that the star had stopped,” the Gospel says, “they were overwhelmed with joy”. It was like “La luz, Papa, la luz!” on first century steroids. The magi already understood that everything would be changed by the light they were following; they just had to get to where it was, and give homage to the one illuminated by it.
Unfortunately, their journey took them through some conflicted territory. There are a whole host of peculiarities in Matthew’s account of the travels of those wise people, and also in the ways that their story has become mixed up with other birth narratives in popular culture. The Gospel doesn’t actually say there were three kings, and we don’t really know how much time passed between the sighting of the star and the magi’s arrival in Jerusalem.
And King Herod was not known for his close relationship with the chief priests and scribes, whom he consulted about the arrival of the magi. But Herod’s paranoid order to kill all children under two years of age suggests that theirs had been a journey of more than a year. That means that the wise ones were not with the baby Jesus at the same time as the shepherds, despite the witness of every Christmas creche you’ve ever seen.
But in many ways, it’s just as well that Matthew’s account doesn’t stand the test of history, because the story of the magi has greater value in its use of symbol. As Matthew—the most Jewish of the Gospels—is so frequent to point out, “this happened to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet.” What then were wise people coming from the east but “nations [coming] to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn,” to paraphrase Isaiah. And although “darkness shall cover the earth—covers the earth even now—and thick darkness the peoples; the Lord will arise upon you.” The Lord has arisen among us: that’s what we’ve been celebrating these past twelve days. Christmas has happened; now it is the work of the Epiphany—the season of revealing—to interpret it.
So what, besides that fulfillment of prophecy, did Matthew want us to learn from these wise ones? At its simplest, the Epiphany story is about curious people crossing boundaries in search of a transcendent kind of light, getting caught in a political intrigue along the way. Which—it bears mentioning—did not significantly impede their journey, nor diminish their joy in its culmination. But neither did their encounter with the illuminated child bring an end to the danger surrounding his birth. Indeed, it may actually have amplified it. And so after the magi delivered their gifts—gold and frankincense also symbolically recalling our Isaiah text—they left for their own country by another road. That is to say, they went back to where they came from, but not in the same way. Their way, and ours, are forever altered when we find the light we are seeking.
At the parish my children grew up in, the rector had a longstanding tradition of bidding the congregation to leave church by a different door than they came in on Epiphany.
I’m not going to ask you to do that today—I think it will create some traffic problems if we all try to do it at once—but I will confess that I’ve found it to be a rather powerful symbolic act. So I invite you to try it sometime—go home by another route—and you’ll reminded of how hard it can be to break our embodied patterns. In fact, I suspect that the power that enables us to choose a new way almost always involves a measure of grace, that unearned gift of God that gives us both the eyes to see the light, and the courage to follow it.
You all know what grace is. Whether or not you think of it in theological terms, grace is what allows us to imagine and do new things. We often experience it as a kind of inner illumination that shines on new possibilities and then compels us to explore them. “I once was lost,” wrote slave trader turned Anglican clergyman John Newton, “but now am found. T’was blind but now I see”. “T’was grace that brought me safe thus far. And grace will lead me home”.
The Apostle Paul was himself the recipient of a radically reorienting grace while on a journey to Damascus. In his letter to the church in Ephesus, he wrote that “grace was given to me.” But Paul understood that the blinding flash of light knocked him to the ground was not a gift for its own sake. Grace was “given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things,” testified Paul. “So that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”
God made the light; Genesis assures us of that. And not just the light of the heavenly places or the star over Bethlehem, but all of the inner and outer light there is. And God made us to be seekers of the light. But the Christian tradition teaches that light-seeking is not about enlightenment for our own sake, but for the sake of others. We seek out the light so that we may become bearers of light, and make it known to others. Whether we had planned to or not. That too is a gift of grace; the certainty that what we have been given is too good not to share, and the courage and generosity to share it.
Perhaps you’ve found the light of Christ here at Trinity, in the practices we call uncommon warmth, holy compassion, intellectual curiosity and deep beauty. Perhaps grace has shown you the way to embody these practices yourself, through ministries of hospitality or service or learning and worship. If so, leave your gifts and go out any door that you want to today. But whatever route you may take home, tell about the light you’ve seen along the way. Tell it to your family, to your friends, even to the rulers and authorities. Because you may be the one—the only one—who can bear the light, and be the light, that another person needs for their own homeward journey.
