Rector's Sermon
2 January 2011

First Reading	Psalm	Epistle	Gospel
Jeremiah 31:7–17	Psalm 84:1–8	Ephesians 1:3–6, 15–19a	Matthew 2:13–15, 19–23

      The date of December 25 developed as a widespread festival honoring the annual rebirth of the sun god in the western part of the Roman Empire.  In the first two centuries of the early church it had become a wild and unruly festival of indulgent behavior. As no one knew the actual birth date of Jesus, the celebration and date of Christmas was deliberately intended to supplant the celebration of the sun, s-u-n god with the honoring the S-o-n of God. In the Eastern part of the Empire, however, a holiday with the date of January 6 was identified with the wine god Dionysus. The church in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt began to celebrate on this date what they called Epiphany, a word meaning “disclosure.” It was a holiday that originally centered around the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan and the public confirmation that Jesus was the true messiah and ready to begin his active ministry. As each region of the church in the Roman Empire began to adopt each other’s customs, Epiphany in the West became associated primarily with the visit of the magi, and the disclosure of the birth of Jesus to the larger world. Later, as the feast of Epiphany grew into a season, succeeding Sundays honored Jesus’ baptism, as well as Jesus’ first miracle, the changing of water into wine at a wedding in Galilee. It was the first of seven great signs of disclosure in John’s Gospel showing that the Good News was ready to change people's lives.  Christmas has remained the dominant holiday in the West, and Epiphany is often given scant lip service save for singing the carol of “We Three Kings.” I'm happy that this year the church calendar allows this Sunday and the succeeding two Sundays to address in order these three great disclosures in their own right.  While the twelve days of Christmas seem to rush past us like the plethora of Bowl Games, the season of Epiphany gives us more time to unpack the important meanings and reflect a bit more on the implications of God's disclosures to us.

       The birth account from the Gospel of Luke centers around the angels announcing to the shepherds living on the hills around Bethlehem and is what is commonly read on Christmas Eve, but Matthew's account centers around the visit of the magi, and hence is the Gospel emphasized for the feast of Epiphany.  The foreign magi were seen as the representatives of wisdom for the greater, non-Jewish world. It was the magi's visit that fulfilled the promise that the messiah would also be a light to the gentile world. Matthew is no romantic Pollyanna. He wants us to remember that while wise people will rejoice and welcome the Gospel, there always will be powerful people who feel very threatened by the Good News and will seek to exterminate it. The magi picked up on the fear of Herod. They sensed that their knowledge about Jesus might put them in danger, too. The magi knew that God's revelation had changed them and they would always take a different route through life.

       We infer that there were three magi because of the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, but of course each of the magi could have given more than one gift. Gold was the symbol of the most worldly precious gift one could give; frankincense was a type of incense, made from a tree resin and used to enhance holy occasions (When we use incense here at St. John's, we use frankincense, so it was frankincense you smelled at the late Christmas Eve service.); and myrrh was a spice used to preserve bodies for burial, and presumably was to foretell of Jesus' suffering and death.

       In the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph's great journey began before Jesus was known to be born. In Matthew, the Holy Family began its great journey after Jesus was born and revealed to the world. Matthew believed it quite important to emphasize that Jesus was legitimately honored as the messiah and savior, and that Jesus fulfilled what the scriptures and tradition had said. God had first called Moses out of Egypt to free some hapless immigrant tribes from slavery and lead them to Mount Sinai where God formed these twelve tribes into a nation with a history and purpose. Egypt symbolized nothingness and death. Through Moses, God created life and a new future for twelve nomadic tribes. In Jesus, God was calling the whole world out of nothingness and death and offering to all humanity a new life.

       Unfortunately the reference of Jesus being called a Nazarene is, at best, obscure to us. Undoubtedly to Matthew and the original readers of his Gospel it was clear, but as yet we've yet to discover what it really meant. Nonetheless, it was important to Matthew to get Jesus back to Nazareth.            

       Today we will baptize William. His parents and family know well that life is a journey.  Sarah and Stuart are originally from Australia, and have lived here in the States coming to Ithaca from Wisconsin and in a few weeks the three of them will move to California. By March they will have earned more frequent flyer miles than all the magi combined. Nonetheless, William joins the wide family of faith, and Sarah, Stuart, and William will leave here knowing that there will be a community of faith waiting for them to support and nurture then in California. People of faith learn that God has no boundaries. Wherever life takes us, we will likely find God at work on the ground, awaiting us to join in fellowship.  Moreover, as life unfolds, we discover that we have all been traveling in some matter ever since we were baptized. People of faith are always going to be growing, taking different routes like the magi, and never traveling the roads in quite the same way. We are happy to baptize young children because we are all reminded of the gift of grace God gives us and the potential of grace that always lies ahead. The world our children are born into and the world in which they will live as adults will likely be as different as for the last generation. Most college age people find it hard to imagine that when they were born there was no Internet, no email, not even facebook, not to mention ipods,  kindles and cell phones. In one sense we are being brought together much closer and very quicklyt and leaning to live together and respect the human dignity of every human being is no longer just an academic enterprise.

       Next Sunday, The first Sunday of Epiphany is about Jesus' baptism and the inauguration of his active ministry. Jesus goes from a child to an adult in a week's time. The following Sunday, Jesus has gathered disciples and is at a wedding. He changes some tasteless, stale water into fresh, invigorating wine as a sign of how the Gospel promises to invigorate our lives also.   William will grow up fast, too. It may not seem it at the time, but young parents should savor these moments. This is a time of great potential and great promise. In one sense we see today something of what the magi saw after their long journey to Bethlehem and before they began the equally long journey back to their respective homes. Hence it is good to be here, to give thanks for God's revelation, for this child and for the gift of our fellowship together.

       And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.