The Feast of the Epiphany (January 6, 2023)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Part of the disaster that is the Fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 is that it has ongoing universal ramifications for humanity. Their sin, insofar as it spreads original sin, affects not just a single people group or a region or a particular family. It impacts each and every one of us. Because of what happened in the Garden, each and every human person is infected with original sin that prevents us from being who we are supposed to be. Coming out the chaos caused by the primordial sin which resulted in the Flood and the hubris of human rebellion that manifested itself in the Tower of Babel, God calls one man, Abraham, to become the forefather of the nation Israel, the chosen people of God who are the beginning, a beach head, in God’s offensive against the forces of chaos: Satan, sin, and death. But we shouldn’t let the particularity of this call confuse us: God’s intentions have always been universal, a fact evident in the call of Abraham: “In you all the shall all families of the earth be blessed.” This theme is picked up throughout the Old Testament as the prophets constantly tell of a coming day when all the nations would flock to Jerusalem to worship the Lord. So to redeem all, God selects a few who are given the special vocation of being God’s representatives to the world.

The story of Epiphany brings into view the next stage of salvation-history via contrast. Herod, the king of Israel, acts not like one called with the vocation of telling the nations the good news about God; he acts like Pharaoh in Exodus who massacres the Hebrew children. Except in Pharaoh’s case, he was a godless pagan killing the children of a foreign peoples…here, Herod slaughters the defenseless children of his own people. Meanwhile, the Wise Men were gentile pagans, probably Zoroastrians from Persia, who find the Christ Child probably through the use of astrology. And rather than seeing the Child as a threat to eliminate, they see him as God who needs to be worshipped, bringing him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. This phenomenon of gentiles acting on faith while Jewish characters act faithlessly becomes a major theme of St. Matthew’s Gospel: Gentiles are the ones who recognize Jesus as the Christ even though the Jewish characters should recognize him. It is what St. John says in his prologue: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.”

In today’s Epistle, St. Paul fleshes out what this means for the Church. He claims that he is a steward of grace as an Apostle and Bishop and that his mission is to the Gentiles. He played a significant role in the unfolding plan of God: “That the Gentiles should be fellow heirs of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ.” And so the objective of his ministry is “to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God.” St. Paul, then, could be called the “Apostle of the Epiphany” because he so accurately carries out that mission in his ministry.

Those of us Christians celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany today are called to participate in the same unfolding mission in which St. Paul was such a mover and shaker. I think this goes double for those of us who attend a parish called St. Paul’s Anglican Church. Our goal, then, is to be a missional people. No matter where we are, we are called to proclaim Christ crucified for the forgiveness of all sins. And as we go about this mission, it’s important to remember the context in which St. Paul wrote: in the Jewish mind, the gentiles were hopelessly unclean; what could God want with them was the implicit prejudice or sometimes explicitly stated objection to including gentiles in the family of God. Sadly, we can fall into the same logic and apply it to those groups we deem “too far gone” or “not good enough.” But Epiphany, Jesus as the light of the world, challenges our assumptions and our prejudices because it so ardently reminds us that the Gospel is for all people because the Light has come into the world and the darkness has not overcome it.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.