Another Way Home

Sermon-Year C-2 Christmas January 3, 2010
The Cloud of Unknowing, "O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours, that we may be faithful interpreters of Life to each other, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
If it had been three wise women instead of three wise men?
They would have asked for directions.* Arrived on Time* Helped Deliver the Baby* Cleaned the Stable* Brought Practical Gifts* And made a CasseroleAnd as they were leaving they would have said:
“Did you see the sandals Mary was wearing with that dress?" "That baby doesn't look anything like Joseph!" "That donkey has seen better days” "I heard that Joseph isn't even working right now!" "Want to bet on how long it will take until you get your casserole dish back?"
We’re celebrating Epiphany 3 days early. The official day of Epiphany is January 6th Christmas season is how long? 12 days, ending January 5th. And that means that January 6th is the first day of Epiphany. In the Eastern church Epiphany was much more important than Christmas, and they didn’t focus on the visit of the magi. For Eastern Orthodox Christians most of their attention was on the Baptism of Jesus. We will celebrate that next week. But in the early days, this season, Epiphany, in the Eastern church was the important celebration-not Christmas.
Even today, Pastor Katerina K Whitley writes: “In this season of Epiphany we enter the realm of light. In fact the Greek church, in the language of the people, has called this season, Ta Phota: “the lights.” In the Eastern church, this season of light is celebrated as fully as the season of Christmas. ….The presence of water in Epiphany is as meaningful as that of light, perhaps reminding us that this was the preferred time for baptism in the early church. On Epiphany Day in every port city in Greece, the Orthodox bishop throws a cross into the waters of the sea and brave young men jump into the cold January Aegean to retrieve it.
We are in the darkest time of the year and yet in the eastern church they call it, “the lights”, Ta Phota. Epiphany season continues this year for 6 weeks.
T.S. Eliot, wrote a poem called, The Journey of the Magi. It is short and written from the perspective of one of wise men.
I have put a copy of this wonderful poem in each of the Chalking the door bags.
This is a short story, the story of the wise ones traveling from the east to find a newborn baby who would be king. 12 verses. But it is packed with a lot of drama. Foreigners on a long journey, an evil kill who is plotting to kill a baby, pilgrims following a star, arriving with expensive gifts, and then the same travelers leaving without telling the king-keeping the holy secret. A great story told in a few short verses. But here is the part that always grabs me, the last phrase, “they went home by another way.” I love that phrase “they went home by another way.” After all those miles, after all those days of travel, after meeting with the evil King Herod, after all that fear, and all those sacrifices-they finally arrive. When these travelers finally arrive at their goal-there’s no celebration, no fireworks. Suddenly their whole journey is changed, and they start new lives. Does it not seem odd? You would think after all this there would be a wonderful scene, great drama. These were men who listened to dreams and followed stars. These were men who met with kings and traveled long miles because they had heard prophecies. Any of you do this? Of course not. They weren’t like us! But we were similar in one way, after they found Jesus, they went home by a different way. The old road home no longer worked for them. They were changed people, different. They couldn’t walk the same path or be the same people. They had to go home a different way. This season of Epiphany begins every year with this same story-the wise men following a star. And it ends every year with the same story-Jesus on the mountaintop with his 3 closest friends-the Transfiguration. The people who set up the lectionary want us to be grabbed by this. The story of Epiphany begins with a star and ends with a dazzling light on a mountaintop-and each time the focus is on those who are witnesses-what happens to them. What happens to us. After the epiphany. The 3 disciples come down from the mountaintop and are told to keep what they’ve seen to themselves. The magi, quietly, secretly, go home by a different way. Why?
Anne Lamont tells in Traveling Mercies about her moment of Epiphany following a health scare. She writes, “The afternoon the doctor called to tell me that my mole was benign, [my son] asked me if I had been brave during the stitching. I said I was very brave. We were sitting outside looking at things. And it was as if the lighting director had turned the lights up full force, because all these small things were showing up more brightly—a yellow house finch, the tiny pink buds of the scraggly wild rose, a patch of ivy on our dirty-blonde hill” (pp. 182–183).
After you’ve had your epiphany, the colors look different, the world is different. After we’ve seen the light, we are different. After an epiphany, a manifestation, a revelation, the road home is always different, we are changed.
The magi were never the same after meeting the Christ child. They couldn’t travel the same roads, they could go home, but now it would be by a different way. And that is true for us, also. Once we meet Christ, once we have our epiphany, we are on a different path. Have you seen your life change as you live your faith? Do you take a different road because of your beliefs? Have you had your revelation? One dictionary defined an epiphany as “a sudden intuitive leap of understanding, especially through an ordinary but striking occurrence.” It’s the day you graduate and suddenly realize that you a no longer a student. It’s the day your child is born and someone calls you mom or dad.
In 2008 we walked the Camino in Spain, an old pilgrimage road for 200 miles, 14 days. The whole way we, and everyone else, carried a simple seashell on our backpacks. It meant that we were pilgrims on the way. Whenever you saw someone else with a seashell, you knew right away that they, too, were a pilgrim. They, too, were on the way. And every walker greeted every other pilgrim with the same words, “Buen Camino” Good way, good walk, God be with you. On the day that we finally reached Santiago do Compostela the end of the road, we took off our packs, and our shells and left them in our hotel rooms. And no one said to us “Buen Camino” any more. We were no longer pilgrims. We had arrived. And at that moment I thought, “we’re walking a different road now. We’ve finished this journey.”
Today we celebrate Epiphany, the feast of the first strangers finding the Christ child. Foreigners who walked a long way to simply see a newborn babe. And after they saw him, they were never the same. I bet it felt weird for them on the way home. It felt weird for us in Spain. When you’ve been on a long journey and suddenly you arrive, you wonder what life will be like now. What we believe, what we teach, is that we go home by a different way. We are always different after we’ve seen our light. We are altered after our epiphany. Even if we take the same way, we are changed. That is not just the story of these wise men. This is the story of the first people who saw Jesus-and were different. They didn’t just follow a star, they no longer carried their shells, no one said “buen camino” to them any more. They were changed now after their sudden intuitive leap of understanding. They had to take a different road home after meeting Jesus. And so do we.