Epiphany

Some words for this weekend . . .

Every year has its significant anniversaries - for example, one of the many special ones this year will be the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, signed at Runnymede in 1215. It’s also 200 years since Waterloo, 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the United States, and 25 years since the release of Nelson Mandela from prison on Robben Island. All these anniversaries seem to me to connect to the theme of human freedom: Magna Carta began the slow process towards suffrage and democracy in this country, Waterloo brought to an end the imperialist aspirations of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, well, I hardly need to comment on the ending of slavery. The slave trade had in fact ended more than fifty years earlier, and at least by 1865 it was no longer true that thousands of people (in fact, millions in total) were being taken across the ocean from one continent to another, and from freedom into complete ownership, to be bought and sold like any other possession. But those who were slaves, and their children and grandchildren, remained slaves, until the Civil War, and Lincoln, and Gettysburg.

Some years ago I spent time researching the slave trade, and one of the things that surprised and disturbed me was that to begin with, the Church saw no reason to oppose the trade. Of course, there are slaves in the Bible.  The mission Society I used to work for had at one time itself owned slaves, in Barbados, having inherited them with an estate there.  It did understand that bringing education and Christian faith to slaves was something it should be doing, but it didn’t see that that should mean they ceased to be slaves. Indeed, it was argued that they would become better and more obedient slaves if they became Christians. Doesn’t Paul tell slaves that they should in all things obey their masters? But in fact educating slaves and teaching them the faith would begin the process that would in time be bound to lead to their liberation.

I thought to mention that this morning because I think it's relevant to the theme of Epiphany. Throughout the ages of Christian history, and particularly in the great mission campaigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people did what they did because the Gospel message must be shared across every kind of human boundary: national, cultural, linguistic - even the boundary between freedom and slavery.

And yet Jesus was born and raised a Jew, and for his disciples he called fellow Jews;  he taught in Jewish places, in the synagogues and the temple.  And though he was critical of some of his fellow Jews, the Pharisees for example, he never spoke against the faith itself, only the ways in which the faith was being distorted or misused. The prophecy which states that the Messiah should be born in Bethlehem also says that he is to 'rule over Israel', and when wise men came from the east following their reading of the stars, the question they asked was 'Where is he who has been born King of the Jews?'

So we know where Jesus belongs, in time and place and culture.  Why then didn’t he stay there?  It’s not the birth of Jesus but his death that brought his disciples to say 'What this man has done is good news for all the world.' But still, we read in the Gospel of Matthew that soon after the birth of Jesus men came from the east - sometimes we call them kings, or else magi, wise men. But anyway, they were not Jews. When he is first born Jesus is revealed to shepherds on the hills, maybe not the expected audience for angels, but Jews of a kind at least. Jewish scribes at Herod’s court knew that something was going to happen in Bethlehem, even if they didn’t know quite what or when. But the Messiah is revealed also to strangers  outside the faith and away to the east, and in this we’re given a sign that the new thing God is doing will change not just the history of the Jews but the destiny of the world.

And this is confirmed in the symbols the strangers present: gold, frankincense and myrrh.  Gold is obvious enough - the child is a king, and gold is a king's coinage. He has kingly authority and power, and the right to rule the nations, even though his route to a throne is very different from the one Herod might have expected him to take.  Frankincense is also fair enough, for there’s something priestly about kingship, which is why monarchs are anointed when they’re crowned. Kings like priests stand between the people and God, and between God and the people, and their role is to be a bridge.  One word for priest is pontifex, literally bridge builder or bridge maker.  Jesus will rebuild the bridges we’ve broken, as the greatest of all high priests.

But for me a chill falls across the proceedings when the myrrh is unwrapped. In my home church choir long ago we used to sing the verses of ‘We Three Kings’ as solos, and this was always my verse, and never an easy thing, because myrrh is costly and special, but it’s the stuff of death.  'He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,' wrote St Paul. For Jesus, this was the only true way to be a king and a priest. He would not grab at status or power, but would let it go.  The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that this man is both the perfect priest, and the perfect sacrifice.  He is the only one worthy to make the offering, and he is the only one worthy to be offered, for the sins of the people: the Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep - who dies that we might live.

These symbols have power and resonance in every culture;  but myrrh especially expresses what crosses human boundaries: a self-giving love to break into every heart;  and the God who places no limits on love, and who loves even the most wayward of his children.

And wherever it may be, and whatever it may look like I believe the Church that bears this child's name should be presenting gold, frankincense and myrrh.  The gold of our own kingship: Jesus shares his royal authority with us, the secret of his throne.  'Let the one who would be greatest among you become the servant of all.'  Wherever the Church is a servant Church it is claiming and expressing the kingship of Christ.

The frankincense of our shared priesthood:  every Christian is called to speak of God to the world, and to speak for the world to God: in other words, to preach and to pray.  And this is the work of the priest;  Peter says we are a kingdom of priests.

And myrrh? Myrrh tells of the way we are joined to the death of Christ in our baptism, dying with him so that we may also rise with him, so that we may share in his risen life and in the new wine of his Holy Spirit.  There has to be a dying, a laying down of the old things, for the rebirth to happen that is Christ in us.  'Lord, you only will I serve;  you are Lord of all my life.'  We never do manage this, always keeping something back, but where the Church is really striving to be filled with the Spirit of Christ, where it’s trying to empty away its own desire for status or standing, then it offers a witness to the death of Christ, and to his risen life.

And the wonderful thing is that the Church is doing all these things in all kinds of places, in African places and Asian places and South American places.  In Sierra Leone, as the Church plays its part in combating ebola. On the streets of Calcutta or Manila, where Christian workers provide shelter and support for the homeless. In the shanty towns of Peru and Brazil where base Christian communities of the very poorest are opposing drugs and crime and supporting families.

Another special anniversary this year is that it’s 150 years since the foundation of the Salvation Army, which brought onto the streets of our land and indeed the streets of much of the world a new Christian force for good, reaching out in Christ’s name to those whose plight was and is most desperate, those who are often overlooked, those whom other people just walk past. Why? Because these are people Jesus cares for, people he wouldn’t have walked past; these are people for whom he died.

The wise men were right to identify the birth of this new king as a very special birth, and to make the journey they made to lay gifts before the child. For the love of this child can transform every human heart, he is God's gift in love to the world he never can stop loving. There is much in our world today that is unfair and nasty and spoilt; it would be easy to give up on hope and to expect very little from life. But we know as Christians that God loves us, and loves our world, even as we are, even as it is, in all its ugliness; we know too that he loves it too much to leave it that way. The love born in Bethlehem still shines, even in the very darkest places, and thank God it does, and thank God for the lives his Son continues to inspire and transform.  May our hearts too receive the love of the Christ child, and may our lives too transmit it and proclaim it in the world.