This sermon was preached for the Feast of the Epiphany, Sunday, January 9, 2022 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Wellesley. The texts for this Sunday were: Isaiah 60:1-6, Ephesians 3:1-12, Matthew 2:1-12 and Psalm 72:1-7,10-14.
Take a moment to picture the magi. What comes to mind for you? Perhaps it is the feel of the smooth, carved wood of your childhood nativity set. Or maybe you're remembering children in play crowns and fabric turbans, trooping up a church aisle. Or majestic silhouettes on Christmas cards.
Either way, my guess is that three figures come to mind. Though Matthew’s account doesn’t say how many magi there were exactly, the Christian tradition has coalesced around three kings simply because there were three gifts. Over the centuries, we’ve given the three names and stories, made them heroes for us to celebrate. In most contemporary depictions, the three journeying kings stride forth alone, perhaps with a couple of camels and a solitary star to guide them.
There’s another story we can tell, however, based in the same scriptural grounding. To make a long journey in that time, the magi would have needed caravans of attendants and camel wranglers and guards and scouts and various support personnel - especially if they were bearing valuable tribute. They were not kings acting of their own accord, but probably more like ambassadors of far-off cities, carrying the hopes of many others along with them. So literally and metaphorically, the magi would have been a whole crowd of folks, working as a team to get where they were going. Over time, this entourage has been erased, the whole group whittled down to just three.
We’ve done the same to Mary and Joseph, too. We speak of them as lonely, huddled figures struggling up a path. Banished to a stand-alone stable, Mary gives birth with only the ox and the ass to witness her labor.
But Mary and Joseph were not traveling to an unknown, foreign town, desperate for the ancient equivalent of a motel room on Mary’s due date. They would have been welcomed into Joseph’s family’s ancestral home for quite some time, perhaps most of Mary’s pregnancy. The 2011 New International Version translates the phrase we classically read as “no place at the inn” to the more precise “no guest room available." The family house was bursting at the seams! In that era, animals lived inside the family home, too, on the first level. So that’s where Jesus’ manger would have been, right downstairs. While all these are interesting details for us to ponder, what was most profound for me to learn, the thing that shifted something inside of me, was the realization that Mary would not have given birth alone.
In this most dangerous moment in a woman’s life, Mary would have been surrounded by relatives. There would have been older mothers holding her hand, sisters fetching her water, midwives coaching her through. These women would have breathed and panted with her, shared in her pain, and finally her joy. There are indeed tales of these midwives in older Christian legends, but they, too, have faded away.*
Telling the story as a tale of solitary protagonists is narratively easier, of course, for pageant casting and household decorations alike. But more than that - there is also power in telling the story this way. Sometimes it is important for us to tell the story of individuals. The named characters become courageous examples we can connect to on a personal level.
It's partially just how we tell stories. It's also that the particularities of the English language compound our focus on the individual.
Take, for example, the language of our passage from the Prophet Isaiah. "Arise, shine, for your light has come." Old Testament scholar Rolf Jacobson notes that a native English speaker intuitively hears the “you” as second person singular. However, the “you” in this passage - and this is clearer in the Hebrew grammar - refers not to an individual but to the whole city of Jerusalem. You, the people of God, your time has come to be the means through which God will heal the world.
Listen to the overwhelming populous abundance of the prophet’s words: nations and kings, sons and daughters, nurses and infants, multitudes. All gather together. Peoples drawn in. In Isaiah's vision, salvation is collective, not individual. Salvation through belonging, not personal choice.
Epiphany invites us to zoom out and see the community once again. This season we celebrate the first groups of non-Jews who dared to believe that God's story of salvation was about them, too. We marvel in the revelation that God chose a particular people, the House of Israel, to enlighten the rest of humanity.
In Epiphany, we celebrate that God’s vision is greater, more expansive than our own human assumptions. It's about more than individuals.
We fill the crowd back in.
There's a particular way we tend to look back on our history, as if we stand on the shoulders of giants. We credit the first, the few, the best with who we are today. We attribute the revelation of Epiphany to the three kings, Jesus' birth to the virgin Mary, gentile conversion to St. Paul and his letters. But taken from another angle, it is perhaps more accurate to say that we stand on top of a whole mountain range. We owe our elevation to centuries of vast and anonymous groups of people who strove together, rose together, lifted one another up. The women with the towels and warm water, midwives and messengers, the servants and slaves. That first early network of churches hashing out what Jesus' story could mean for us and them - of which Paul is just one voice.
In this particular moment in time, remembering the whole community matters. We live in a culture that encourages us to see ourselves as the main characters and places a premium on individual choice above all else.
Our society is actually designed to make certain people invisible. Waiters, servers, custodial staff, delivery people, all of these sorts of jobs are purposefully constructed to be as unobtrusive and behind-the-scenes as possible. That’s why it took such a concerted effort at the beginning of this pandemic for us to recognize and celebrate the essential workers that keep our whole way of life functioning. It’s why, in our fatigue and frustration two years into this, it’s been a struggle to keep that appreciation up.
More and more of these workers have been calling attention to how their sacrifice is being taken for granted. Through social media posts, interviews, or simply straight up quitting their jobs, these workers, including nurses and teachers, are declaring that too much has been asked of them for too long. They are refusing to disappear back into the periphery of our stories.
One retail worker recounted how a customer resisted wearing a mask in their store. "But there's nobody here!" the shopper complained, gesturing around at the lack of other customers. "I am here," the worker replied. I am human, too. My health and safety matter, too.
The experts keep telling us again and again that it is not through personal perseverance that this pandemic will end. To bring this health crisis to a close, we must act as if we are a community with a common fate. We must recall our own tradition’s roots in communal salvation. We already know how to exalt the giant, the king, the hero. It's time we celebrate the mountain range, the city, the caravan.
When you're stuck in day two of an epic snowstorm traffic jam, it is the most natural thing in the world to look out of your windshield and only see cars blocking your path. When Casey Holihan and her husband Joe looked out their car windows late last week, they saw more than that.** They saw a roadway full of scared and suffering people. They also spotted bread truck ahead, called the company on its side, ventured out into the snow to persuade its driver to hand out rolls to a temporary community of dozens of hungry, stranded motorists. They saw with Epiphany eyes a crowd of people sharing in a common fate, journeying this road together.
Arise, shine, for our light has come.
And when we shine, we shine as a people, together. We shine because we lift one another up. None of us left to labor or travel alone.
* Philip Kosloski, "The forgotten story of Mary's midwives." Aleteia, December 22, 2017. https://aleteia.org/2017/12/22/the-forgotten-story-of-marys-midwife/
** Sydney Page, "Drivers were stuck on I-95 when one saw a bakery truck. Soon, stranded motorists were breaking bread together." Washington Post, January 4, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/01/04/shutdown-virginia-i-95-schmidt-bread/
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