Beloved St. John’s community,
Tuesday was the Feast of the Epiphany—one of the seven great feasts of the Christian liturgical year, celebrating magi from the East who followed a star to find the baby Jesus. The Epiphany celebrates the many ways God can be revealed to people, and the many kinds of people to whom God is revealed: nature (the star), prophecy, scripture, wisdom from religious hierarchy and dreams all come into play in guiding the magi to Jesus. And the magi were not Jewish nor from Israel / Palestine at all – they were likely Zoroastrians from Persia. Yet, God granted them a series of “epiphanies”—revelations, manifestations—of the divine that led them to Jesus, where they were “overwhelmed with joy” and paid him deep devotion. So no one tradition “owns” revelations of God.
In the Epiphany story, our lectionary reading typically ends at Matthew 2 verse 12, where the magi return home by another road. But the verses that follow describe a story of horror: that King Herod orders the slaughter of all baby boys under the age of two in Bethlehem, as he sees them as a threat to his power—just as Pharoah had ordered the drowning of all Israelite baby boys millennia before him. This slaughter is commemorated as the Feast of the Holy Innocents every December 28. These two things show up side by side in our scriptures: the magi’s joy and the slaughter of innocents.
Tuesday, the Epiphany, was also the fifth anniversary of the riot at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., when Trump-supporting people violently sought to prevent the lawful transfer of power to President Joe Biden. That President Trump pardoned them as soon as he returned to office in 2025 is a chilling reminder that the Herods of the world—and all the violence, falsehood and injustice they wield—sometimes have the upper hand.
Yesterday, ICE agents surrounded Roosevelt High school where some of our youth attend school, terrifying them and preventing them from leaving. And then they murdered Renee Nicole Good. We are horrified, outraged, and heartbroken.
The appearance of God in innocence and vulnerability happens side by side with shameful and extreme abuse of power in our scriptures. These two things also happen side by side in our world. The awfulness of yesterday’s events, alongside the seizure of Venezuelan oil “indefinitely” and the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol building, and so much else in the news, could make us focus entirely on what is so wrong in today’s world, and forget the epiphany of Jesus and all that he embodied then and embodies still, in us.
My friends: the way to have stamina to resist evil without becoming evil ourselves is precisely to stay deeply nourished, connected with and inspired by epiphanies of the presence of God everywhere. How will we have the strength, wisdom and courage to stand alongside our immigrant neighbors for the long term, and not just while the emotion of yesterday is running high? On Tuesday, our noon Eucharist group was discussing the Epiphany story and we noticed that the magi from the east were guided not only by intellectual wisdom but by their dreams. Pastor Alika Galloway, who was present with us, noticed this and mentioned that there are many sources of wisdom, and only one of them is intellectual; we also receive wisdom from intuition, from dreams, from our bodies.
And in difficult times like these, we need all those sources of wisdom we can get to stay grounded in what is actually true: that love is stronger than hatred and violence in the end; and that no one can take our shining souls or our character from us. We get to choose, each day, each moment, how we want to live, what we want to stand for.
So by all means: ask God for epiphanies of God’s presence. Receive them from the clouds and the snow, the deer and pine trees, scripture and liturgy and your neighbors. Receive them from the truth-cord that each one of us possesses in our bodies, that vibrates strongly when we recognize someone telling an important truth. Re-wild your experience of the sacred. Receive epiphanies of God from your own body, and your dreams, and your wordless intuition. Do not discount how important this is. Let these strengthen you to live Jesus’ Way in this world with courage, resisting evil and embodying love.
Arise, shine, for your light has come… for God has caused God’s light to shine within us, to give the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Amen.
In Christ’s love,
Lisa
