Yesterday was Epiphany and with it Christmas officially ended with all the lights, decorations and gifts packed away and the festivities over for another year. A New Year has started, Congress is back in session with a new party in control, my favorite basketball team lost its opening ACC game; and yet the world continues on its course with good things and bad things happening, human nature hasn’t changed, and neither has the nature of God. That is both the good news and the bad news.

Did anything change because we celebrated Christmas again this year? In many ways probably not, but there is the possibility, possibility which is embodied in this child we are baptizing today, possibility embedded in our created nature that we might grasp something we need to understand and while our nature won’t change our nature has the capacity to mature, to deepen in awareness of who we are and who we are capable of being of having light shed on it in the reminder that God has and will come to us.

The early tradition of Epiphany was that it was the feast of light, as it means “ showing forth.” It was a feast of having light shed, not just in the story of the Magi, those who were wise but outside the fold, following a star, coming to visit the infant Jesus, to recognize this mysterious unveiling of God. It was also a time of announcing the whole Gospel Story and declaring the whole church year, from the birth, to the ministry, to the passion, death and resurrection of this Jesus. Epiphany sheds light on all of it so we can foresee what is coming. Epiphany is about shedding the light of God on life, our life and the life of the world, so we can see things as they really are and as God wants us to see.

Today is the first Sunday after the Epiphany and oddly they are back to back. In some ways this is revealing also. While the theme of yesterday was the light of Christ being manifest to the world, represented by the Magi, it is also a bidding to recognize God in the midst of life, in the small things, the vulnerable experiences such as the life of an infant; today represents another glimpse of this unveiling of God’s way – in the baptism of Jesus, his submission to experience the world, to accept the reality of this life, and in his living to unveil God.

Both days are about recognizing God in our midst, both are about discerning and discovering the way of God and the nature of God. Both have to do with experiencing the reality of God in our life and in the life of the world here and now. One bids us like the Magi to trust and follow even when we don’t have a Triple A map, or mapquest ( though I don’t find that to be always reliable ), to be willing to kneel before the mystery of God “with us” even when life has many Herod like threats looming over us.

From this trusting journey we may discover that we can’t return the same way, or we can’t continue in the same way, there must be a new way. The other reveals that following the path of God, far from preserving us from struggles may mean that we have to walk into the water, the metaphor for dying and rising again, and head into the wilderness of uncertainty and temptation, but we need to hear the voice saying to us, you are my beloved daughters and sons.

A former member of the National Church’s staff, John Ratti, wrote,

We must, each of us, open the window into the Infinite that allows us to understand the miracle of this season. Whatever Christian tradition we embrace, whatever window we chose to open, the result is illumination; the result is light. The imagery of the Epiphany is full of light.

I can’t help but think about this as I think about all that faces our nation, our world and each of us, as we begin this new year. It seems to me that we often know that change doesn’t come without a willingness to take a new path, and the new path often does not become apparent without some kind of Epiphany, something that reveals to us another way. It may be a difficult way, but the only way that offers hope. The way of the Cross is such a way which is why Epiphany bids us to see the whole story, the whole journey that begins in light shining on a possibility, an infant born to be King, and that life which must submit to the realities of the world while standing apart, a life lived fully revealing the clarity of God’s way and the power of God’s love, that revealed that evil can be overcome by love, death by trusting in the power of the only one who gives life.

Jim Prevatt shared an article by Fr. Richard Rohr titled Epiphany: You can’t go home again. It is a great article and in it Rohr writes:

If God can be manifest in a baby in a poor stable for the unwanted, then we better be ready for God just about anywhere and in anybody. The letting-go of any attempt to compartmentalize God will always feel dangerous and maybe even like dying. However, as TS Elliot said, “ I should be glad of another death. “ What looks like birth is also and always death in this mystery of faith. And what looks like death, thanks to God, is promised birth.

What Rohr describes as death that is also birth is the great burst of light which we celebrate on Easter. Today we have a vision of Easter, the new birth, but we must now be willing to follow the star, to walk into the water of our own baptism, the wilderness of our own uncertainties knowing that God will bring us the food we need to sustain us on the way and will bring us home though by another way; the way of the Cross and the way of his resurrection of us. When we take this other way then we live into the words of Isaiah which we heard this morning and we look for those Epiphanies to bring them to reality: “ I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind… Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.

In this vein today we can join in the words of Simeon: (also called, in Latin, Nun dimittis):

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy word;

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
which thou has prepared before the face of all people,
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles,
and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

As we begin this New Year may we see the salvation of God for us, around us and through us to the world to which we are given.

Amen