Epiphany of Our Lord

Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

Arise, shine; for your light has come. And, why is the Bible talking about camels? No, not the camels that the Wise Men may or may not have ridden into town. The camels from Midian and Ephah and Sheba.

I’m thinking of our first reading, from the book of Isaiah, and what it might mean for us today — in a time and place that we don’t see a whole lot of camels.

The section of Isaiah that we read today begins with those wonderful words, “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”…and this whole section, had we read it after the preceding chapters in Isaiah, would have been somewhat surprising since all this light and shining comes right in the midst of great darkness.

To briefly catch you up on history, the Assyrians and Babylonians invade and conquer Israel. Not only do they win the military battle and the political battle, but they also completely destroy the temple in Jerusalem. For the people of Israel this would have been an indescribable trauma — it would have felt like the end of their religion.

At this point, the people of Israel get split up: those that are captured and taken away in exile…and those that remain…both under Babylonian control. The people of God are split up and demoralized but they don’t give up. Different camps come to differing opinions about what to do and how to respond to this traumatic shaking of their faith.

Some of God’s people thought that this terrible thing, the destruction of Israel, had happened because they weren’t following the rules closely enough. They had allowed too many outsiders in…they had become impure. Their solution was to circle the wagons and try harder. And that meant excluding anyone who didn’t seem to be a ‘pure’ child of Israel.

The folks responsible for this section of Isaiah, though, had a different response. They believed the way forward was not in what they could do, but in what God could do. Arise, your light has come. The glory of God will lift you up and restore you to greatness — even before you figure it all out — God will take action.

And for this group of believers, the light, the glory of God would expand so powerfully that rather than excluding people, more and more people would be included in the vision. Foreigners and other folks that had previously been excluded by the rules of the scriptures themselves will now be declared welcome to come worship in the temple. People from all over will stream to a rebuilt Jerusalem on camels — this is where the camels come in — a traffic jam of camels drawn out of the darkness into the light. That is Isaiah’s vision for God rescuing the people after a devastating loss.

In the midst of a great challenge, the people of Israel were being drawn to understand God in a new way. Out of darkness they were called to new light.

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Now flash forward 500 years to the time of Jesus’ birth…the people of God live in a different kind of darkness. They are technically free to worship God in the rebuilt temple, but Herod, their appointed leader, is much more of a politician than a person of faith. Faith in God is barely tolerated in the Empire, and only then if you play along nicely with King Herod. Yet, as we hear in today’s Gospel…when the news comes out that the Messiah — the real King — has been born, all the people of Jerusalem become afraid along with Herod. It makes a lot of sense why Herod would be afraid: he can’t remain in power if a true King is around. But why would the rest of the people share his fear?

Maybe they are afraid that any disruption to the current power system will result in the Roman authorities cracking down on their right to worship God. Or, maybe they’ve just grown comfortable. “The devil you know is better than the one you don’t,” right?

The Gospel writer wants us to see that God is ready to do a new thing, but many people just aren’t interested in a new thing, or — are even scared of a new thing. Matthew is telling his listeners that their understanding of God needs to expand again. But that can be a scary thing.

And so it happens that just about the only the people who do realize that God is doing something new are total outsiders who don’t live under Herod’s rule and who don’t even call themselves Jews. The Wise Men, the Magi, travel great distances to see what God’s own people couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize in their own backyard. The birth of Emmanuel — God with us.

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These epiphanies in Scripture, these moments when God’s people are given new understandings of God and God’s relationship with us, are so important because they remind us now that we, too, have only a limited understanding of what God is doing, that there is more for us to discover, that God is always greater than our “understanding of God.”

The Bible is much more than a rulebook for life. It’s an ongoing story of God constantly surprising the people that follow him…constantly stretching us to see a deeper and wider vision for just how much God cares for the world.

So, what devils do we put up with? In what ways have we grown too comfortable with the way that life is? How have we limited our vision for a love that God wants to expand? To whom have we limited this vision?

[“Crawling out of the woodwork” story]

Arise, shine, your light has come. God will continue to surprise us with Grace. Unexpected joy that we did not earn, did not create ourselves. We can’t earn it, but we can share it.

Arise, shine, because the light that God brings out of darkness reaches beyond us, beyond our understanding, beyond our comfort zones to draw us together with those we don’t expect. Those who have previously been left out, those called impure, those whom we hope might crawl out of the woodwork.

Arise, shine, because God’s light is bright enough to give us everything we need, to show us the way, even when when our own vision is narrow, and our understanding is limited.