Epiphany -January 06, 2008

(Preached at Providence Lutheran Church, Holland, Ohio

by Pastor Dennis R. King)

"Epiphany Celebration – The Light Has Come!"

(Matthew 2:1-12)

May the gift of the Christ Child be a blessing to you this year and always!

Today is a very special day on the church calendar: Epiphany. I know some of you may be thinking: “So what?” How important can it be if the drug stores do not have a special display of Epiphany greeting cards?

However are you aware that Christians were celebrating Epiphany before they began celebrating Christmas. And one of the oldest Christian bodies, the Armenian Orthodox Church, still celebrates Epiphany rather than Christmas. Epiphany is the festival of the Incarnation: that is, of the coming of God to earth in human form in Jesus Christ. Perhaps we might say that Epiphany emphasizes the theology of Christ’s birth, while Christmas , as we now generally know it, emphasizes the mood of giving and perhaps also of sentiment. We might even say that Epiphany is the thinking side of the Christmas story, whereas Christmas as we now think of it is the feeling side of the story. But however we say it, at Epiphany, the church celebrates the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and his manifestation to the whole world. And we at Providence Lutheran Church even have more to celebrate this day because of this message to the world and through Epiphany Lutheran Church we came into being as a congregation some 50 years ago. So this morning we begin a year long celebration of our 50^th Anniversary. We don’t know what was in the mind or heart of the prophet Isaiah when he gave us these words hundreds of years before the birth of our Lord, but for centuries the church and its teachers have sensed that whether Isaiah knew it or not, he was revealing something about the Christ. “Arise, shine,” Isaiah shouts, “for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” We don’t know everything in the hearts and minds of the people of Epiphany Lutheran Church when they helped Providence come into existence 50 years ago but we do know they wanted to spread that Epiphany message to all that they could. “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” God provided for them, and for us, and for the world a Savior. A good telescope brings distant things into focus. In somewhat the same way, God provided the Bible to bring Jesus into focus, helping us to learn what he has to say to us. In other words, God’s Word provides us with an epiphany. On a clear night in November 1609, in Italy, a professor of mathematics at the local university hoisted a new instrument to his eye and pointed it toward the moon. His name was Galileo Galilei. He had looked skyward many times before, but those times it had only been with his own eyes. This time, with this new instrument which one historian has called “the tube of long seeing”, Galileo was able to view the moon under magnification, and what he saw differed from what he’d seen unaided. Seventy years earlier, Copernicus had proposed the idea of a solar system, with objects, including Earth, revolving around the sun, but there had been no proof. Now, however, Galileo began to see things in the sky to support that concept, such as the fact that Jupiter had moons. For Galileo, it was a kind of epiphany, one of those sudden realizations that what had been previously accepted was wrong, and that new possibilities now existed. Understanding “epiphany,” to mean a sudden new understanding, also helps us comprehend the church’s use of that word for this day. “Epiphany” derives from a Greek word meaning “manifestation” or “to come forth,” the way a sudden comprehension can. In the church, it also means the revealing of Christ to the Gentile world. And the first Gentiles to acknowledge Jesus as the “king of the Jews” were the Wise Men, who, like Galileo, were also stargazers. We call these first-century sky watchers Wise Men but the term in the original Greek is magi. In the ancient world, magi were people who studied the movement of the stars and from them tried to predict the course of future events on earth. Today, Christianity rightly considers astrology as incompatible with faith in God. But in the pre-scientific age, astrologers were viewed more as seekers after the mysteries of the universe, and over the centuries, the study of the stars led some magi to the serious science of astronomy. So we can view these magi as at least the pre-scientists of their day, and can even think of Galileo as a kind of successor to them. While the magi did not have the benefit of a spyglass, like Galileo, they were working on “long seeing” by gazing at the heavens and trying to make sense of it. Over the centuries, the relationship between science and religion has swung pendulum-fashion between acknowledging that the two fields have common ground to considering themselves as mutually exclusive. But eventually, science always comes back to the view that there is more to existence than can be explained using the scientific method. That’s happening today. Recently, Allan Sandage, who is one of the world’s leading astronomers, stated that the “big-bang” explanation of the universe “can be understood only as a ‘miracle.’” Charles Townes, a current physicist who has received the Nobel Prize and who helped to invent the laser, said that the discoveries in physics “seem to reflect intelligence at work in natural law.” And the director of one of the National Human Research Institutes, biologist Francis Collins, maintains that “a lot of scientists really don’t know what they are missing by not exploring their spiritual feelings.” The magi who came to see Jesus came only because they were looking and watching for something. Because they were watching, when this unusual star appeared in the sky, they sensed that they should pursue it.

This sign they observed in the physical world, the star, got them started in the right direction, but it didn’t get them directly to Jesus. The star brought them to Jerusalem, but then they weren’t sure where to go next. That’s why they started asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” God provide the answered in the scriptures. The priests pointed Herod to Micah 5:2, which identified Bethlehem as the birthplace. Herod then told the Wise Men, and they set off again, heading for Bethlehem. In other words, their scientific indicators brought them into the vicinity of Christ, but it took the scriptures to help them make the final part of the journey and to arrive where Jesus was. Like a good telescope, the Bible took what was at a distance and brought it close. That makes the magi good models for our spiritual journeys. Like them, many of us were launched into our search for God by a sense that there had to be more to this life of ours than just what the unaided eye saw. For Providence it was the people of Epiphany who started for us and those who went before us a life changing event that led to the creation of Providence. By their efforts it caused us and others to look for something more, and that led us into the vicinity of Christ. For many of us, what finally brought us to Jesus was the witness of scripture, the biblical stories of Jesus and those who encountered him. The scriptures became the tube of long seeing, taking that which seemed distant and bringing it close. The Bible is a kind of telescope that narrows and sharpens our focus, so that the reality of Christ begins to come into view. There is a German woman named Margaret Mehren. She grew up in the Nazi years, and as a teenager, she belonged to the Hitler Youth Movement. No one in her family was a Christian, and, as far as she could tell, none of them believed in God. She was still a teenager when World War II ended, and she finally realized that Hitler had not been the kind of hero they’d been told he was. She was completely disillusioned. The only values she had been taught had come to nothing .About that time, her brother, who worked for a publishing company, brought home a stack of books he’d been given, and one was a Bible. He didn’t believe in God either, and so he gave it to Margaret. She made a few half-hearted attempts to read it, but it didn’t connect for her.Then one evening, she happened to open the Bible again, and her eye fell on a passage that began, “And Jesus said to them ....” Margaret said that at that moment, she somehow knew that Jesus was alive. She writes, “I [suddenly] knew this was not just a 2,000-year-old book. I knew that whatever Jesus said, he said it to me, even in that small room where the walls were crumbling from bomb attacks.” In short, Margaret had an epiphany. The Bible can do that for us too. Epiphany refers to the revealing of Christ to the world, and the Bible can help that happen to us personally, providing an epiphany-type experience, in which we discover that what Jesus says, he says to us. So as we begin this journey in 2008, may God continues to provide Epiphany experiences that bring closer to Jesus—the true Light of the world--------a Light which the darkness cannot put out. Amen.