Thought for the week - 5 January 2025

Epiphany is here, and the last Hurrah of Christmas with it, although it carries on liturgically until next Sunday and in a slightly more folksy way until Candlemas, but for most people it ended eleven days ago, and a few chocolates wait on the sideboard for the moment when firm January convictions fail and we are back to business as usual. Tomorrow, all the routines resumed, emails, meetings, a new ‘to do’ list and we put Christmas back in its box. In January, things return to normal; it is familiar. Epiphany tames all that festival extravagance and marks the solemn end of the nut selection and the port decanter.

I could tell you a story of sophisticated London clergy going on a weeks walking holiday in the Lake District, packing, in their soft leather bags, essentials that they felt would be unavailable in the North of England, like gin, chocolate and books. Hiking in new and expensive boots which were built more for Chelsea Garden Show than Mitredale. Or a story of the day I took one hundred and twenty clergy from the Willesden Episcopal Area on coaches to Merville for a conference, and made them make their own beds and get up at six in the morning for Mass, and had bowls of pork scratchings on the bar which I built and stocked with excellent local beer, wine and unusual distillates. All you could hear was moaning for the first couple of days, until the beauty of the place and the simplicity of the liturgy took over and they assumed a theology of creation finally, and left their horror at instant coffee at the door and, as Scott once wrote; ‘Took longer still to learn to skip a stone across the lake.’

In a wonderful phrase, Scott suggests that as those wide-eyed priests struggle with all that natural grandeur they search for something more familiar, something safer ‘to narrow down the glory. To narrow down the glory. Is that what happens today? Do we really put Christmas back in a box and settle for something more manageable. Well no of course we don’t. We need to pay attention to what we are being told.

First, let’s tidy up the terminology. They were not kings. They followed a star remember they are astrologers, there is the hint of something just slightly fey here, a little bit alternative. It is Matthew’s gospel we are reading and we should remember, notice, that Matthew is keen on dreams. Something stirs here half-understood; there are hints and glimpses. The star only gets the wise men so far remember, they have to stop and ask directions. Where astrology fails, prophecy comes good. At this point Matthew sticks out his jaw and becomes rather more robust. There may be dreams to be dreamt, but there is also a divine providence to reckon with.

And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel - Matthew 2:6

It is Bethlehem the wise men must find. It was always going to be Bethlehem. When they arrive and finally present their gifts they may not know what they are doing, but Matthew does. They are fulfilling prophecy. It is a sophisticated thing we have before us here, Matthew is wearing together a story about three mildly new age travellers and the prophecies of God. We meet a tyrant (Herod) and we get drawn into the beginnings of a planned genocide. All the great purposes of God swing, like the stars, round Bethlehem.

So, no, this is not the night we put Christmas back in its box and get on with the business of life. Epiphany drags us outside under the stars and ask us if we have the capacity to imagine what has just begun in Bethlehem.

‘And this was the moment When a few farm workers and three Members of an obscure Persian sect Walked haphazard by starlight straight Into the kingdom of heaven.’

Jesus is unconfined, His divinity is tangible in a way that it will not be again until He stands in the Temple overturning tables. A hole has been blown in the chain of events and a baby is visible as a King. Today is a summons to the imagination. Epiphanies are only needed, and can only be accepted, by those of us who know that we must seek what we lack. The day we become certain, the day we become sure, the epiphanies end. Even here in St Stephen’s we are short of glory and looking to a Kingdom yet to come. Those astrologers, remember, went all that way and simply paid homage. They gave their gifts and they left. It is not at all what we expect of astrologers - no words, no horoscopes, no report, no memoir.

We do not tonight, put Christmas back in a box, nor must we turn again to our routines with a sense of a job well done but in this changing world, be ready to journey out as magi did seeking what we still have not grasped and finding words for what we still cannot entirely name. And go back to find those who have not yet seen what we have seen, but not with a list of rules and regulations, but like the Magi, with empty hands and full hearts. There are epiphanies yet to come, and we have to search for them in the darkness this year, I think.