Epiphany Sunday
/by Rev. Eric Folkerth
This Sunday we’ll celebrate the “Epiphany,” or the coming of the Magi to the birth place of Jesus. The Christian Church has always located Epiphany twelve days after Jesus’ birth, accounting for the idea that the Wise Men/Magi would be traveling from a foreign land to see Jesus. The technical day of the church’s observation then doesn’t ever float.
It’s always January 6th.
We don’t know who these three mysterious travelers were.
We don’t know what happens to them after they leave the site of Jesus’ birth.
The actual Greek word for what/who they are is “Magos” or “Magi.” This is a root word of our common word “Magician.” And so, they might have been Middle Eastern followers, soothsayers of some kind. Maybe followers of the god Zoroaster.
Maybe.
I mean, we just don’t know.
These are all just conjectures and guesses.
All we really know about them is that they follow a star, and that they show great wisdom in not going back to see King Herod. Matthew makes Herod out to be a horrible tyrant. And the little historical evidence we have about him seems to bear this out.
Herod was caught between a rock and a hard place.
Specifically, caught between his own Judaism and the Roman Empire.
His entire authority to rule as “King” was subject to the ascent of the Roman Empire, and he understood this. As such, we are told that he could be incredibly ruthless and cruel to his own people, and that he was incredibly paranoid that even his closest family might be plotting against him.
Some of this paranoia comes out in the way Matthew tells this story. Matthew says that when the Magi informs King Herod that the Christ Child has been born, that he…and “all of Jerusalem” was stirred up.
This is a telling line and it gets me back to my Christmas meditation of a few weeks ago. I reminded you of what social commentator Naomi Klein has said about our age. That in a time of great distress:
“Calm is a form of resistance.”
But Herod is NOT calm.
Herod is “stirred up.”
And his own anxiety and fear stir up everyone else.
Friends, for the last three years we Christians —those of us who actually read these stories carefully— have been struck by the paradox that “January 6th” now has an entirely new cultural meaning.
January 6th is now, in our nation, seen as the day of the insurrection against the United States. Now three years later, 1,200 hundred people have been charged with crimes associated with that insurrection. Hundreds are already convicted and hundreds more have pled guilty.
All these rioters were exactly as Matthew describes, “stirred up” by a cesspool of pundits and social media sources…even our President at the time…convinced that the election had been stolen. They were so “stirred up” that they tried to take over our government.
This leads me to think of my own father and a story he told of his life as a young man.
Dad was a Goldwater Republican. He was —in college and in his twenties— a staunch “anti-communist.”
As such, he fell in with some folks who were protesting left-leaning politicians and celebrities. And one night he found himself signing up to picketing President Kennedy at an event in Los Angeles (where my Father was living at the time…).
The night of the protest he and the anti-communist group showed up at an LA theater where JFK was holding a political fundraiser. They no doubt had angry signs and anti-communist slogans.
Dad tells of how the protestors were shunted off to a side of the building, away from the main entrance. But, lo and behold, that meant they had been pushed over to a side door where a very famous guest had unwisely decided to try and slip out undetected.
It was Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra had been at the fundraiser and had mistakenly assumed the protestors were still near the front of the building. Instead, the side door he chose as an exit put him right in front of a bunch of young, angry anti-communist protestors…all of whom immediately recognized him and all of whom immediately started yelling at him and heckling him.
Dad says that this moment ended up changing his life. Because he got close enough to Sinatra to look at him, person-to-person.
“I saw the fear in Frank Sinatra’s eyes,” Dad told me decades later.
And as he saw the fear in Frank Sinatra’s eyes, it was as if my father’s eyes had also been opened, too.
While Sinatra’s eyes were opened in FEAR, my dad’s eyes were opened to the fact that he was CAUSING that fear.
My Father vowed, then and there, never to be a part of another mass protest. In fact, over the years he gradually retreated from any kind of social or political activism.
Dad would say that this encounter helped him realize just how close to the line things can sometimes get when everyone in a crowd is “stirred up.”
I think about that story a lot these days. I myself have certainly been part of a LOT of protests. I seriously doubt I have attended my last.
But it’s also crystal clear to me that crowds can get “stirred up” to a point where all control can get lost.
Thanks be to God that my father, on that night in Los Angeles, somehow saw the *humanity* in Frank Sinatra. He saw the fear HE was causing. He no longer saw Sinatra as a “celebrity,” or a “liberal,” or a “political enemy.”
My father saw a scared human being with fear in his eyes who just happened to be all those other things, too.
My *own* fear is that we are losing that ability: The ability to see each other as human beings.
Those January 6th protestors were stirred into such a frenzy that it’s very clear they no longer saw the Capitol Police, the members of Congress, even the sitting Vice-President…as human.
You cannot mount that kind of armed insurrection without seeing your “enemy” as less than human.
Christ’s incarnation is all about seeing each human being as a child of God. It’s about seeing the inherent humanity in every person. It’s about understanding that every human person has a bit of God’s Spirit within them, co-combined with our human flesh.
But stirred-up King Herod, the story tells us, slaughters innocent children instead.
I don’t have all the answers to everything we struggle with in our world today. But I do know that the way out of our current horrors must include seeing each person as a human being.
Like my Father decades ago, we have to get back to some sense of civil normalcy where we realize the fear *we* can cause in others.
Bad leaders, like Herod, “stir people up”
Good leaders, like the Magi, wisely go “home by another way.”
And God calls us all to acknowledge and love all of our fellow humans as Children of God.
See you Sunday.
