Homily,
Epiphany, 1/3/21
 
Sirach 24: 1-4, 12-20
Ps. 72
Ephesians 3: 2-6
Matthew 2: 1-12
 


            An epiphany, or sudden insight, can happen in a split second. As when a few months ago at 465 and 70 on the east side of Indianapolis, a tanker hauling jet fuel turned over on an exit ramp, started spilling fuel, and caught everything on fire. The driver managed to escape the truck and started running down the ramp. Not one, but three people got out of their cars and ran toward him to help, including a woman who had just had a baby 4 days before. They saw a human being on fire and realized he needed them.

            Or an epiphany can develop over time. Since the start of the pandemic, the number of people applying to and enrolling in Public Health degree programs has increased from 20-75%, depending on the school. The students involved say they want to be able to help solve complex biological, social, political, and economic problems, and help their own communities.

            Over the past year, I have learned two concepts that brought me epiphanies. The first was about the communication systems of trees. I learned that trees share messages about predators, food supply, and weather patterns, by fungi that connect their root tips. Trees in a forest are actually communities of organisms that work together to provide for the greater good of all their members. This reinforced for me the mind-boggling interrelatedness of all the elements in our cosmos-- plants, animals, water, air,-- everything, which we understand more and more, were created to work in harmony to support one another. The second was the idea of human intersectionality. This is the concept that we all have interconnected social categorizations such as race, class, gender, size, and physical ability that apply to us, individually and as members of groups, to create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. So every person has a combination of factors making up their social location as more or less privileged. The tragedies of the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor and others in the past year have brought into focus the fact that some people have layers of disadvantage that multiply to actually put their lives in danger every day. By reading more, I have come to understand that these are layers of disadvantage manufactured by design over generations to empower some people by dehumanizing others.

            So I believe epiphanies are about welcoming the wisdom and love of God. Like many people, I no longer believe in God as a distant figure who occasionally, for reasons of his own, intervenes in our lives. Instead, I understand God as the Creative Spirit who made the cosmos, is alive in every atom of every being in it, loves all of creation without reserve, and wills that all should thrive in interdependent harmony. I think this God sometimes inspires us, nudges us, lures us, with ideas of how we can embody God’s unconditional love. To welcome God’s wisdom, I think it helps to have a regular spiritual practice that keeps us open and receptive to how God loves and how we can participate. The more open we are, the more we grow in unity with God’s purposes.

            Our readings today are about several epiphanies. They combine to remind us of the vital importance of welcoming others, and of recognizing the sacredness of all beings in the universe, as members of God’s body, no matter their faith or ethnicity or other categorization. Sirach tells us of Wisdom, an image of the promised Messiah, taking root in a people honored by God, but with a history of slavery and exile. Paul tells of the strength of his conviction of the equality of all in the sight of God’s love, Jews and Gentiles, calling all people co-heirs, members of the same body, and co-partners in the promise of Jesus’ human personification of God. Matthew wrote this birth narrative of Jesus to include magi who were not Jewish, but who recognized the sacredness of a child sent by God as a new kind of religious leader. And Matthew represented Mary, Joseph, and Jesus as refugees, after their visit from the magi, from an Emperor who felt his power was threatened by such a child.

            So these are all epiphanies, realizations, before our eyes and in our hands, of what Jesus was talking about when he taught the Reign of God’s love. They are crystalized moments of the heart of Jesus’ teaching—the in-breaking of God’s love here on earth. And they help us realize our own God-given capacity to convert our behavior toward generosity and kindness.

            To me, this is the meaning of the Incarnation, that God became human in Christ, to draw attention to the reality that, all along, since the beginning of creation, we as members of God’s body, have possessed the potential for the same love for God, and one another, and all of Creation, that God has for us.

            Reflexive moments of kindness for someone in need, or reflective processes of realization of how we can help the human community and the earth in general—we thank God today for messages of inspiration, clarity, and generosity that come to us and strengthen us as Christ’s hands, feet, eyes, and ears. We pray for openness and the courage to respond, when they dawn on us, like stars in the sky.