Rise and Shine! Epiphany1C

“Rise & Shine” for Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010 (Epiphany 1C)
Scriptures: Matthew 2:1-12, Ephesians 3:1-12, Psalm 72:1+7, 10-11, Isaiah 60

Sing: “Rise and Shine and give God the glory, glory. Rise and Shine and give God the glory, glory. Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory. Children of the Lord.”

Such went the chorus of a song I used to sing for and with the children of a church camp I directed in Wisconsin in the mid-1980’s as we gathered for breakfast each day. I wanted the children and their leaders to truly give God the credit for everything that God had provided and blessed them with and to also see themselves as gifts from God living to bless each other.

Today we celebrate Epiphany. Oh, yeah, you might say to yourself, that’s the day the Magi came to worship the infant Jesus and to give their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Yes, that’s right, but it’s so much more than that. Epiphany means the appearance or revelation of something.

In literature, however, an epiphany is usually used to refer to the appearance of a divine being or the revelation of a basic truth about something. It is associated with light, as if a switch were tripped and the flood lights of realization suddenly came on about something or someone so that you immediately came to know the truth about the person or thing. And that truth may not be what we thought it would be. That truth might just twist our expectations.

Think about it. The Magi weren’t Kings, that’s a tradition that got started when someone read the Psalm today and decided that the Kings who would pay tribute to the Annointed One of God had to be the Magi that came to worship the infant Jesus. Matthew doesn’t write the story that way, but it didn’t stop us from creating many versions of the story of the Wise Men also known as the Three Kings.

There probably weren’t three of them, we get that from the number of gifts they bring. Some Christian traditions have as many as 12 coming to worship Christ. In fact Matthew’s word of these persons probably means priests or astrologists from the region of Iraq, most likely Zoriastrian priests or philosophers, if you will, those who study the stars and planets for religious or spiritual interpretations, a career that the Old Testament Law prohibited. Not only were these persons foreigners, they weren’t even believers in God, but they knew what the Jewish scriptures had to say and they realized that something had happened and they wanted to be in on it. They came to Jerusalem to find and pay homage to the new King of the Jews.

When they inquire at the palace in Jerusalem King Herod knows nothing about this new born king. Whoops. In fact, such a birth would be politically threatening to him and he would want to know who was claiming his throne even before he had even died. Herod was known to be a little angry whenever he suspected anyone of trying to take over his throne. He had killed many in his own family who he suspected rightly or wrongly of such behavior including a wife, a mother in law, and his own sons. Do you think he would spare a cute little baby?

Herod asks his religious advisers, the priests of the temple, to tell him where the baby would be born. Why, in Bethlehem of Judea, the city of King David, they tell him, every Jew knows that. So he sends the Magi off to Bethlehem to find this new king and, oh, by the way, bring back the good news to me before you go home, so I can go and worship him. Wink. Wink. Herod has no intention of worshipping this usurper of his throne.

I imagine the Magi have their own version of CSI to play out as they try to find the Christ child. By now Mary and Joe have moved into better living accommodations and Joe is working in the local carpentry trade. The Magi ask around about a baby born under unusual circumstances. Perhaps people think and then remember that a bunch of seemingly drunken shepherds were racing about town one night a couple of years ago crazily going on about angels and a new king being born in a barn. But nobody paid much attention to them then. Perhaps the Magi even went and interviewed the shepherds. Wouldn’t you like to see that on an episode of CSI! Eventually the Magi find Mary and Joe and Matthew tells us that they worship him. What you say? I don’t get it, unbelievers, non-Jews, worshipping God in Christ? Yes, that’s what the prophet predicted would happen. That’s what Matthew wrote down to prove to his Jewish readers that Jesus was the Christ, their expected Messiah.

Today we celebrate the Epiphany of Jesus who comes as the Light of the World and to whom the entire world will come and adore. The Magi were the first of the world’s people to realize this and to come to worship Christ, Immanuel, God with Us.

God wanted Israel, the children of Judah, to know that they were blessed because God had chosen them to be a blessing to the world. Through them, the prophet said, that the world would come to know God. Upon the arrival of God’s anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ, the new leader of Judah, upon them would come a great homecoming to which all the peoples of the world would stream into Jerusalem to worship God. This would be a great pouring out of God’s Love for all peoples no matter who they were. None were to be excluded from this great gathering in to God’s self all of God’s human creation.

The Prophet says, “Arise, Shine, for your light has come, and the glory of God rises upon you.” The prophet is describing a picture of a dark and hopeless night that has finally come to an end with the flashing brilliance of the dazzling hope of God’s Presence and Power dawning brightly upon God’s people who had given up all hope of ever being freed from their oppression and slavery in Babylonian exile. Written hundreds of years before the birth of Christ these passages and similar ones were claimed by the infant church in the first century after Christ’s resurrection to represent the realization of the hope of the ages: God has stepped in human form into the world and brought God’s peace, love, and justice to all people, but especially to those who previously had been rejected by society and cast off as unimportant and useless.

With the advent of Jesus Christ God says to each one of us: “The world is wrong about you. You are important because you are loved by me. You are blessed because I love you. You are good and worthy because I care about you. I created you just as you are. I love you exactly the way I created you.”

There is a tension in the Old Testament scriptures that cannot be denied. On one hand the children of God are told that they are to be a blessing to the world, that through them the entire world will come to know the love of God and will experience in to a fabulous party of celebration and joy to which the world has been invited to attend.

However, the Children of God, Israel, came to see themselves as the blessed ones but forgot that they were suppose to be a blessing to others, ushering in a new world order in which all peoples would exist peacefully with each other, a world in which no one would be excluded and no one would suffer injustice or harm. But, instead, they came to see themselves as especially blessed by God above all others and therefore they believed themselves to be better than anyone else and because of that they decided they should keep themselves pure and separate from everyone else, including even their own family members who might be born differently a-bled or injured or ill. Anything that kept you from being perceived as a perfect human specimen was to them evidence that you were not acceptable to God, someone who deserved to be excluded from God’s presence and therefore from their presence, too.

Shannon shared with us a wonderful passage from Isaiah two weeks ago from Isaiah 56:3-5: “Let no foreigner who has bound himself to God say, "God will surely exclude me from God’s people." And let not any eunuch complain, "I am only a dry tree." For this is what God says: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant, to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.” This passage full of hope for you and me who were created to be differently oriented sexually and differently gendered, is in direct conflict with other passages that told the people of Israel to exclude the eunuch, anyone who was sexually different than they thought everyone should be, those who were outside of the acceptable boundaries of behavior and existence from their midst, and especially from the worship of God.

Some of us have experience the modern day equivalent of this kind of misinterpretation of the scriptures and have found ourselves excluded from the religious communities of our formative faith when we came out as Queer, as differently oriented sexually or differently gendered. We found out that the ancient exclusion of those who were not acceptable to the religious leaders of Israel had become the modern day exclusion of those who were unacceptable to the Fundamentalist Religious Right who claim that they must exclude us and others in order to keep their faith pure and themselves holy.

We often wonder how the Spanish conquistadors in the new world, who were suppose to be Christian, could so brutally murder so many Native Americans. Because their religion told them that the Native Americans weren’t even human and had no souls. Killing a Native American, according to their religious leaders at the time, was of no more concern than killing a bothersome animal or insect.

One conquistador wrote in his diary after shooting a Native American and watching him die these words: “He suffered just like a Christian would suffer.” He realized that the man he had just killed was a person just like himself regardless of what he had been told by his faith leaders.

Those who would exclude you and me and others from their faith and from their God fail to see us as being Christian or even human at times. Mostly they fail to see that it is they themselves who are failing God, God who rejects no one and includes everyone even those who are different from ourselves. Like Martin Luther King, who shaped much of my thought and theology, before and after he died a martyr to our faith in God, I came to see that we cannot exclude anyone in the name of God, because in Christ Jesus God has chosen to include everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, politics, or even religious faith.

Nor was the new Christian church above this kind of exclusionary thinking using such logic to even exclude their own fellow members. Paul writes to the Ephesians, just like he had to do with the Corinthians for the same reason, because they are letting strife and bad attitudes destroy that new congregation as people begin to tell each other: “I’m better than you are. God loves me more than God loves you.”

They were literally fighting over who had the most important spiritual gifts for ministry. Who was God blessing better and bigger than anyone else was being blessed? Who was a real Christian? “I am,” one claims, “because I have the gift of speaking in tongues.” “No,” another would cry, “I am the best Christian because I have the gift of interpreting tongues.” “Not so fast,” another would cry, “it’s me, I’m the best Christian because I can heal with my touch.”

Paul tells them that they are all members of the body of Christ and that God pours out God’s blessings upon the Body of Christ, the Church, because God wants all the members of Christ’s body to work together in harmony. No one is better than anyone else. All are needed, whether Gentile or Jew, male or female, no matter what your economic status or political beliefs, you are all a part of the Body of Christ, so start acting like it, by letting the Spirit of God unite you into a peaceful, harmonious, reconciling community where no one Lords it over anyone else.

We, too, like the ancient Children of Israel, or the Christians of first Century Ephesus, can let ourselves get sidetracked and spend our time arguing about how you believe I’m not being the kind of Christian leader I should be, while I spend my time telling you your faults as a Christian. We won’t accomplish much in the way of building a church or reaching Seattle with the Light and Love of God.

It happens to churches all the time. Good growing churches that are truly connecting to the greater community around them often let themselves get sidetracked by internal issues and personalities. They forget to keep their eye on God and let their focus wander to less important things.

MCC Seattle has come through an exciting year of beginning again, of starting over. I’ve been with you as your residential pastor now for some ten months and we have seen our ministry extend into the community touching lives in ways we are only now beginning to realize. Whenever we make contact with one person we explode the possibilities of making contact with others through them.

I read some interesting posts on the internet this week talking about MCC as a denomination and how, in one person’s opinion, it is our liturgy, how we worship that makes and breaks us as a church. Well, I’ve got some news for that preacher, “Building a church is all about building relationships.” People don’t really come to church to worship God because of the liturgy; so much as they come to church to build meaningful friendships with God’s people. Researchers have known this to be true for many years even though churches and church people want to think otherwise.

Most people come to church because they are lonely and they want to fill the void in their lives with new friends with whom they can share something in common. Hopefully, they think, they will be able to find that kind of friendship much easier in church than anywhere else. I pray they are right about MCC Seattle.

Sometimes, however, we church folk tend to concentrate on the wrong things. I remember the first church I served full-time after completing seminary. On one particular morning I had spent the hour and a half before worship visiting adult and youth and children Bible Study classrooms. I greeted visitors and members building relationships and saying hello to folks I’d only spoken to on the phone or sent invitations to in the mail, or met while visiting them in their home and now they were coming to church.

Over a six month period of time we had added over 100 to the Bible study membership, increased attendance in Bible study and worship significantly, and added more than 50 new members to the church, because we had realized that we needed to build friendships and community with persons in uniquely different ways than that church had been doing. And the changes were producing growth. A twenty year decline in attendance and membership had been reversed in six short months.

But when I walked into the worship service that morning having just welcomed some first time families to worship and helping them take their infant children to the nursery and then ushering them to seats and introducing them to several people, I sat down next to the guest speaker who leaned over to me and said as the organ prelude began, “Just where is your Bible, young man?”

Mind you, there were Bibles available in the pews for anyone to use, but this guest minister decided to make an example of me because I didn’t have a Bible with me that he could see. I had laid my Bible down accidentally in the nursery when I had helped a young mother get her child comfortable before she left for worship. I tried to explain, but he wouldn’t accept my explanation and he proceed to get up to speak, pointed directly at me said, “I just can’t believe that a minister of the Word of God would come into a worship service without bringing the Word of God with him. I hope, Ray, this is the last time we see you without the Sword of the Lord in your hands.”

I wasn’t humiliated by the fact that I did not have my Bible with me. I was humiliated by the fact that this man thought that simply by carrying a Bible with me where others could see it that I would somehow be more able to carry out the work God had called me to do. I truly do think it is more important to ‘carry’ the Word in my mind and in my heart than to have a book in my hands. In fact, I usually need my hands to actually do the Word…kind acts of mercy and encouragement to others.

We all come to church with our own ideas of what it means to serve God, to be God’s servant. But let us remember that just because someone does things differently from us does not mean that he or she is not serving God. They are simply serving God differently than we serve God. Let us look to the results that are evident in the other person’s life and in the lives of others to whom that person shares his or her understanding of God by what he or she does and says to truly build the new community of God.

It is so easy for us to criticize others, to fail to see beyond the issue that has captured our attention for the moment, be it the fact that someone isn’t carrying a Bible, or the fact that he or she isn’t acting exactly like we believe a Christian should act and speak. Thank God that God created a world full of variety and diversity. Let’s try to allow God to bless MCC Seattle with as much human variety and diversity as God wants to give us. Then, let’s remember to celebrate God’s presence in ourselves and in others together in joyful praise and worship!

But most importantly on this Epiphany Sunday, let us remember that God blessed us so that we can become a blessing to others by sharing with them the light and love of God in Jesus Christ. Rise and shine this week and turn on the light switch in someone else’s life this week by being Christ to them.