The Epiphany - January 6, 2010

"Bearers of the Light"

The Rev. Dr. William H. Joyner, Jr.

As we all know, December 21, when the winter solstice occurs, is the shortest day of the year. Since that day is our wedding anniversary, my wife and I received the predictable comments 41 years ago: “Yes, the shortest day, but the longest night!” What is less widely known is that the solstice is not the day when either the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset occurs. This has to do with something called the “equation of time” – this is too complicated to go into here (another way of saying that I don’t understand it either). Anyway, at the latitude of Chapel Hill, the sun doesn’t start to rise earlier until today: the Epiphany. So it is particularly appropriate that we sing “Brightest and best of the stars of the morning” and about Jesus being the true and only light. I have sometimes wondered about this northern-centric bias of Christian customs and how this affects those who live in the southern hemisphere, though I have been assured by a friend from Australia that there they do send Christmas cards with pictures of snowmen, and sing “In the bleak midwinter,” even though the average Christmas Day high temperature in Sydney is 80 degrees.

What this helps us understand, is that Christmas, and the Epiphany, and even Easter, are not seasonal celebrations, and the light they describe is not the light of the star, or the sun s-u-n, but the light of the son s-o-n. The Epiphany is about the light we proclaim at Christmas – the true light that was coming into the world. It is about that light shining upon all the people. Not just the Hebrew people, not just the people who came to the manger, not just the residents of a small town in an insignificant part of the Roman empire 2000 years ago, but all the people – all of us. Paul’s point to the Ephesians is that we are all members of the same body. The barriers are broken down at Epiphany, and the shines through every crack and crevice upon the whole world.

It is tempting to celebrate the Epiphany just as a chance to enjoy that light: its warmth, its brightness, its peace. But the gospel calls us, not to bask in that light, but to be bearers of the light. We are like the shepherds, who returned to their flocks praising God. We are like the wise men, who returned to their own country by another way and, we assume, did not keep quiet about their search. We are also like those present at the other marks of the Epiphany – the crowds at the baptism of Jesus and at the wedding at Cana. Don’t you think that the people there – the people who saw water turned to wine, the people who heard John the Baptist proclaim Jesus as Messiah – don’t you think that these witnesses told everybody what they had experienced?

Today, that task falls to us. Today, we need to be bearers of the light, not baskers in the light. We are all partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, as Paul says, but we are also ministers of the gospel; we are also bearers of the gospel light – all of us – not just bishops, priests, deacons, but – especially – all of us as the holy baptized people of God. It is our task to be bearers of the light and proclaimers of the gospel. As the often-quoted saying goes, the gospel is too important to be left only in the hands of the clergy.

Does this mean that we are to stand on the street corner, or in the Pit, yelling, with a Bible in our hands? Probably not – after all, we are Episcopalians! But the gospel we proclaim is not only a gospel that’s written in a book – it’s the word made flesh, made known to us, in a person – in Jesus, and that we make known not only through words but by our whole being. Remember later when John the Baptist in prison begins to doubt whether Jesus is the one to come? Jesus reports back to John, not what is in a book, but what is going on in the world: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the poor have good news preached to them. As Dom Hélder Câmara, the Brazilian archbishop, says: “Be careful of the way you live – it is the only gospel most people will ever read!”

Here at the beginning of the New Year, not far from the beginning of the church year, we focus on the gospel stories of Matthew and Luke. But there is one part of these gospels that we don’t read in the liturgy, but with which we are all familiar – the genealogy of Jesus. It’s too long to read with all those “begats” and names we cannot pronounce, tracing Jesus back to David, back to Abraham, even back to Adam. Today, on this Epiphany, we need to remember that this line stretches not only backward to Adam, but forward to us. The scholar Raymond Brown advocates the use of this lesson during Advent and Christmas because this family tree includes not only Abraham and Isaac and David and a bunch of kings, but idolaters, murderers, incompetents, and power-seekers, and generations of people we know nothing about – maybe people like us. As Brown says, it needs to be something like this, for us as bearers of the light, to remember as the sun rises a little bit earlier tomorrow morning: Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob . . . down to Joseph the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus – but not ending there. It continues, “Jesus called Peter and Paul . . . Paul called Timothy . . . someone called you . . . and you must call someone else.” You must bear the Epiphany light.