Epiphany

Today is the feast of the Epiphany. Epiphany is a Greek word meaning
"appearance." Epiphany as appearance is startling usually because it is
unexpected, it is beautiful, it is the Holy Spirit shining through to us
at just the right time.

Epiphanies can come in grand blossoms of fireworks, or in something as
small as noticing how the breeze ripples over the placid waters on a lake.
Or it can and usually does come with a child

Epiphanies! Life is filled with them. It's evening. We're at the airport,
waiting for a plane. We sit there watching people. We're people-watching.
People coming and people going. People arriving and people departing.
Life.

An epiphany. We spot what looks like a mom, a dad, and three teenage
daughters. The girls and their mom are each holding a bouquet of roses. We
're wondering what the story is. Whom are they expecting? What's
happening? The dad keeps looking at his watch. The mom keeps turning her
head to make sure she hears each airport announcement. After one garbled
announcement, the mom bursts into a big smile. She tugs at her husband's
sleeve and says something. They start holding hands--his right side melting
into her left side. The plane they are expecting must have just landed.

We keep watching, wondering who's arriving. They move--along with at least
sixty other people--closer to the big, closed arrival door. Anticipation.
Tiptoeing. Waiting. Looking. Finally the door opens. First come the
"rushers"--men and women in suits with briefcases and bags over their
shoulders, rushing towards phones, bathrooms, and their cars or rent-a-cars.
Then come those looking for those who are looking for them. Embraces.
Hugs. Waves of hands and waves of joy.

We're still wondering and watching who this family we've been studying are
there to meet. Then out comes a young Marine, his wife, and obviously their
brand new baby. The three girls run to the couple and the baby. Then Mom.
Dad. Hugs. Kisses. Embraces. "OOPS! The flowers!" But the baby is the
center of attention. Each member of the family gets closer and closer to
the mother and each opens the bundle in pink to have their first peek at
this new life on the planet.
We're seeing it from a distance. It's better than the evening news.

Then we notice several other smiling people also watching the same scene.
There are many other hugging scenes, people meeting people, but this is the
big one.

We're smiling too. A tear of joy. What wonderful moment we are
photographing into our memory. We're thinking, "Family! Children!
Grandchildren!" This is what life is all about.
We're experiencing an epiphany. Life is filled with them. Praise God! 1

The three Wise Men, also called Magi, saw a star in the East. That was
their epiphany. An astronomer, Max Kepler, witnessed the conjunction of the
planets Jupiter and Saturn and Mars in October of 1604. He calculated that
it occurred every 805 years, and realized that the conjunction occurring in
7-6 B.C.E. correctly coincided with the birth of Jesus. This was some
conjunction for the Wise Men to have seen.

But the greater epiphany the Wise Men saw was when they looked down on an
infant in a crib and realized that this was the Christ Child. They laid
down their gifts: gold for a king, frankincense for a God, and myrrh for the
burial of this King-God.

The Magi took a great risk in following their star. They were important
men in the land from which they came. They weren't sure of what dangers lay
on the road if they followed this star. But they followed it. They risked
in not returning to tell Herod about the child. And of course, the Holy
Family risked most of all when mad Herod sent his soldiers to slaughter the
innocents.
Risk, then, is a prominent element in this Gospel.

It grieves me so often [says one minister] that Christian faith is
associated with playing it safe. We are the respectable people,
middle-class, neat lawns and carefully polished cars. And there is nothing
wrong with that. We are responsible, trustworthy, somewhat conservative.
Elevator music. Vanilla ice cream. Careful not to offend. Then we read
about the Apostle Paul, ship-wrecked, beaten, thrown into a god-forsaken
Roman prison for following Jesus and we wonder, "Have we somehow missed the
guts and the glory of Christian living? Have we focused more on the
security of our portfolio than on the power within our souls?"

Wallace Wilkins, writing in The Futurist magazine, also bemoans the fact
that we are such a security conscious people. "Many of us," he says, "have
grown up with prompts and reminders to be careful. When people part
company, for example, they often say, 'Take care.' That utterance can be
subtly disempowering. Taking care is one of the reasons why individuals and
organizations take so long to change. Imagine how differently you might
have developed if your friends and family said to you, 'Take risks' [rather
than ' take care'].

"Pause to consider how different you might be," Wilkins says. "Do you
imagine that if you take more risks in the future you will be fabulously
successful? Or does the thought cross your mind that you might become
physically injured or otherwise harmed? When dealing with risks, many
people automatically presume that risk entails danger. This is because our
language confuses danger with the possibilities of embarrassment or
disapproval that risk entails. When considering a risky initiative, some
people will automatically imagine: 'If I tried that, she'd rip my head of!'
'If I'm not careful, he'll tear me limb from limb!' 'I would just die!' 'I'
d fall to pieces!' 'He'll explode!'
"If you color your anticipation of the future with alarming thoughts, you
will automatically inhibit your action." 2

We must take the risk, for that is what God calls us to.
I want to tell a thirty-year-old story about a sermon that went way out of
control [says another minister]. A friend was delivering the sermon to his
parish in downtown Macon, Gerorgia, on a Sunday in the late sixties. As you
know, the whole country was in an uproar with Vietnam and civil rights
marches and women were waking up and young people finding spectacular ways
to be outrageous.

All of this was swirling around his congregation, which included city
fathers, who made it clear to their young rector that on Sunday they wanted
to rest from the unrest. They wanted to come to church and slip peacefully
into the rhythms of the prayerbook and then hear an uplifting,
well-thought-out sermon about love or something, sing a few rousing hymns,
say the old familiar prayers, including, "bewailing their manifold sins,"
and then they wanted to be done with it and go home.

Newcomers were showing up in church, some in jeans and long hair, even rock
musicians. The newcomers got involved in outreach ministries serving the
poor, which was sort of okay with the church leaders. But the newcomers
also wanted the poor and anybody else to come to church--which was not okay.
They even put an advertisement in the paper with the Sunday service schedule
and a picture of a black sheep and the words "Come As You Are."

Inviting even more strange people to flock to the church through the
newspapers, with the connotation that some of the sheep might be black, was
the last straw for the traditionalists. One woman mailed a letter to the
entire parish in which she stated that the reach of the outreach people had
exceeded the grasp of any sensible person by a long shot.

Thus, lack of appreciation pervaded the atmosphere on that Sunday. The
lections included an encounter between Jesus and some Pharisees when Jesus
reminds them of Isaiah. "...as it is written, 'this people honors me with
their lips but their hearts are far from me'... You abandon the commandment
of God and hold to human tradition" (Mark7: 6b-8).

Well, what more solid scriptural platform could you want? The priest quoted
the text and launched, subtly of course, into repenting the traditionalists'
sins. He spoke with assurance, deftly weaving the stories of Isaiah's
community and Jesus' crowd and the world of Macon, Georgia. He described
the parallels in a gently ironic tone, and he looked out over the
congregation who seemed transfixed. If the truth were to be told he was
pleased with himself. Then as he paused for breath, the unthinkable
happened.

A lady stood up. Not one of the new casual types who might be standing to
applaud and say "right on." Oh no, the lady who stood was an old-timer; in
fact she was the one who had written the letter denouncing the newspaper
advertisement. It flashed through his mind that she definitely not standing
to applaud or say "right. on."

Instead she talked back. Instead she said, "Do you mean to say we are wrong?
Do you mean to say that for all these years we have been wrong?"

Then the young rector opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out. And
he stood in the pulpit. For a moment, all was silence. And then another
voice in the congregation spoke up and then another and then another. And
people talked of trying to become part of church and being frozen out. And
others mourned the loss of respect for traditions held dear. And some
yelled in anger and some said they were afraid of what the church and the
whole world were coming to. And many people cried.

The congregation argued with itself for about twenty minutes. And the young
rector stood in the pulpit. And listened. Then for a moment all was
silence again. And he said, "I don't know what to do. What do we do now?"
And someone said, "well, we might as well do Eucharist."

And they made Eucharist, and the young rector said that by the time he got
home, he was a changed preacher. Because he never got into the pulpit
again without remembering the possibility of somebody talking back. And he
never spoke from the pulpit again without remembering that perhaps the
gospel would not be heard in his well-chosen words. Perhaps the gospel
would be heard instead, by him and everybody else, through the interruption.

And of course you know the rest of the story. Like Paul and the Gentiles or
Nixon and the Chinese, the enraged traditional woman became the instrument
of reconciliation between the old-timers and the new people. She was the
first woman ever on the vestry, and largely through her sponsorship, the
first female priest in Georgia came to that congregation. And through the
grace of God in her and some others, the doors of the church opened wider to
invite strangers in and to send people out to love and serve. 3

Epiphany is the feast of risk. How are we risking in our spiritual life?


1) Andrew Costello, "Epiphanies: Life is filled with them," Markings,
Readings--20, Epiphany, (The Thomas More Association, 205 West Monroe
St.--Sixth Floor, Chicago IL 60606-5097), Jan 1999.

2) Future View, May 1999, p. 60, as quoted in "A magnificent adventure,"
Dynamic Preaching 15 (1): 18 (Seven Worlds, 310F Simmons Road, Knoxville TN
37922) Jan. Feb. March 2000.

3) Martha Sterne, All Saints'Church, Atlanta, GA, "Can Pentecost be
private?," Journal for Preachers, Pentecost, 1997, pp 40-41, as quoted in
"Relating the text," Pulpit Resource, 28 (1): 9-10 (Logos Productions Inc.,
6160 Carmen Ave. E., Inver Grove Heights MN 55076-4422) Jan 2000.

Jerry
Fr. Gerard Fuller, o.m.i.
St. William Parish
P.O. Box 367
Gainesville MO 65655
Tel.: 1-417-679-4804