Feast of the Epiphany                     Professor Dale B. Martin,

Isaiah 60:1-6, 9                              Yale University

Psalm 72:1-2, 10-17                       Procession & Solemn High Mass

Ephesians 3:1-12                           January 6, 2008

Matthew 2:1-12

 

Children in some Latin American countries, on the night before January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, put their shoes outside their doors so that when the wise men, the kings, the magi, come during the night they will have someplace to put the children's anticipated gifts, perhaps trinkets or small toys or candies or sweet cakes. Just to make sure the wise men are in a good mood, the children sometimes put straw in their shoes. After all, the wise men have to keep their camels fed during their long night travels. In other countries, children put boxes of straw for the camels under their beds. All these camels! Maybe this is what Isaiah was prophesying when he said, in the words of our reading this morning, “A multitude of camels shall cover you”—a prophecy whose fulfillment I for one am not particularly looking forward to.

 

Christians in some cultures celebrate Epiphany by baking cakes and hiding something in the cakes, such as a tiny plastic baby Jesus, or a bean, or a trinket. Whoever gets the prize in his or her piece of cake gets to claim to be “king” for the rest of the year. For Cajuns in Louisiana , Epiphany marks the beginning of the Mardi Gras season, or as it is also known, “kings' cake season.” My Jewish architect used to live in New Orleans and only converted to Judaism later in life, but he and his wife still celebrate Mardi Gras with something like a big hurricane party, attended also by the members of their synagogue. It is an odd but cheerful sight, let me tell you, to watch a rabbi eagerly search his piece of cake for the plastic baby Jesus.

 

January 6 has been celebrated with a special feast by at least some Christians from the second century onward. For eastern orthodox Christians, it marked the baptism of Jesus by John, sometimes along with celebrating the visit of the magi. In the English church, it marked the first day after the end of the twelve days of Christmas. It has always been marked by images of light. In fact, light appearing in the midst of darkness, the darkness of a winter night.

 

The Greek word epiphaneia means “appearing” or “manifestation.” In the ancient Greek speaking world, the word often referred to the sudden appearance of a god. In fact, rulers would sometimes tack on the title Epiphanes to their names to designate their own status as a god. The emperor of Greek Syria—who set up the “abomination of desolation” in the Temple in Jerusalem and faced a rebellion led by the Maccabees—was known as Antiochus IV Epiphanes, all of which is narrated in the books of Daniel and the Maccabees. By claiming that title, Antiochus was saying that he was “god manifest.”

 

So when we Christians celebrate Epiphany, we celebrate not just the worship of the wise men, but the very manifestation of God among human beings­­—in this case in the tiny, helpless body of a twelve-day-old baby. And we celebrate it in the middle of dark, cold, sometimes depressing winter.

 

It is no accident that holy days emphasizing light occur in the dark of winter: Christmas, then Epiphany, and then Candlemas on February 2. For many of us, we need some encouragement of light to get through the winter. I just returned from a vacation in Puerto Rico . Being a boy from Texas , I have discovered that I can get quite depressed during New Haven winters unless I take a break here and there and get someplace warm and sunny. When I moved back to New Haven , after 12 years in the south, the one thing that worried me was whether the long, dark winters would depress me, as they sometimes had when I was a student here in the 1980's. The first two years I was back here, I was rather depressed, partly because it was a difficult move for me. But partly, I think, the winters just got me down, because of the cold, or the darkness, or just their length. I've learned to handle all that by using school holidays to get somewhere sunny and warm and store up some good cheer for myself to help me survive until spring. Like recharging my batteries with vitamin D. Similarly, I think Epiphany, the “shining,” comes in winter as a sign of God's grace in the darkness. And it is an intervention we need, just at this time.

I was talking with a friend recently about depression. He was worried about his wife's life-long chronic depression. She does take medication, which helps, but it is still a struggle. His wife was both fascinated and disturbed by the recent revelations that Mother Teresa had suffered the “dark night of the soul” her entire life. She prayed and meditated, and she certainly had faith, but she could never escape her feelings of emptiness. She prayed for the experience of the presence of God, but all she felt was God's absence. My friend asked me, was her “dark night of the soul” just clinical depression? Or was his wife's depression really a divinely allowed, or mandated, “dark night of the soul”? Was the depression itself something God was using to try to break through and tell her something? Was she wrong to take drugs in an attempt to rid herself of the depression? Maybe depression was God's way of trying to tell her something, or get her attention, or break through her stubbornness. And if someone like Mother Teresa had gotten no relief from God for her “dark night of the soul,” what chance did lesser mortals like us have?

 

I certainly don't have the answers about depression, or “dark nights of the soul,” or whatever they are. I have experienced depression, but not at all like some people I know. I think I was chronically depressed as a child, but that seemed to lift after I reached puberty. And when I experience depression now, it is usually caused by something I can name, such as a personal relationship turned sour, or a string of bad weather—or the long, cold, darkness of a New England winter.

 

One thing I think I do know: when faced with the depression of others around us, we must resist the temptation to “blame the victim.” So when my friend wondered whether his wife's depression might be due to the fact that she was not listening to God carefully enough, I cautioned him against thinking that way, and certainly against making such a suggestion to his wife. When we are confronted with suffering in our world, whether of homeless people, the poor, or the depressed, it is tempting to blame the victim. We make ourselves feel better about the apparent unfairness, the injustices of our world by assuming that persons could improve their state if they only tried hard enough—that the homeless man could get a job, any job; that the poor woman could do better if she saved her dollars rather than playing the lottery; that the depressed person should be able to climb out of it—or listen to God more carefully.

 

Of course, if I myself am depressed and I'm also drinking too much or abusing drugs, I rightly should face up to my own agency. Perhaps my depression is due precisely to alcoholism or drug abuse. But it is very dangerous to turn the same sort of thinking onto other people, whose inner states we simply cannot know. Blaming depressed persons for their own depression slides too quickly into the judgmentalism Jesus condemned. We must not attempt to make ourselves feel better about the suffering we encounter in the world by blaming those who suffer for their own suffering. Nor, I believe, should we blame God.

 

This entire line of thought takes us into the theological or philosophical “problem of suffering or evil.” Why do people suffer, many times due to no fault of their own? Why does God allow such suffering, if it is not indeed the fault of other human beings?

 

A few weeks ago, I was asked to “blurb” a book soon to be published by my friend Bart Ehrman. You know what I mean by “blurb”: giving the publisher a few comments praising the book that could be printed on the back cover. Ehrman recently published a book called Misquoting Jesus , on the problems posed to faith by the fact that we cannot be certain about the original text or words of the Bible. That book was on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks, partly because Ehrman explained, in a rather gripping first chapter, how his scholarship as a text critic of the New Testament eventually caused him to lose faith in scripture. This new book goes further. Ehrman explains how he lost his faith entirely, not because of doubts about the original wording of the Bible, but because he couldn't accept any of the traditional Christian answers for suffering. His faith foundered on the classic question, “If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why does God allow the incredible amount of suffering and evil we see around us?” Ehrman's book goes through different attempts in the Bible to address these questions and finds none of them adequate. For Ehrman, the result was not just a shaking of faith in scripture, but the demolition of his faith in God entirely.

 

I told the publisher that I did not want to blurb the book. I had no problem with Ehrman's objection that none of the traditional Christian answers to the problem of suffering was adequate. I agree that they are inadequate. What I don't agree with is Ehrman's assumption, which he shares with most everyone in the modern world, that Christianity is a philosophy that should explain everything in the world, that the gospel is supposed to provide philosophical answers to philosophical questions. I don't believe the gospel has “answers” in the “philosophical” sense. We must stop thinking that Christianity exists to answer all our questions with propositional answers. Christianity, in my opinion, was not “made” to provide those kinds of answers to those kinds of questions. Christianity is not a philosophy. The gospel was not intended to provide a philosophy. It provides a story .

 

Which is not to say that the gospel doesn't provide any kind of answer. The gospel answers the problem of suffering by saying, “God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world.” “God so loved the world.” “The Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you” (Isa. 60:2). When you suffer, know that God is not the cause of your suffering, but the one who suffers with you. Emmanuel. God is the glimmer of hope that may see you through suffering. God is the glimmer of light in the darkness—in your darkness. The gospel does not tell us why . It helps us live .

The liturgy offers us the appearance of light in the darkness. Just as I need to go south once in a while to get some light, so I need to come here, to this beautiful and holy place, to see the candles, to smell the incense, to gaze on the bright lights and shining vestments, to close my eyes and be transported by the music. I need to come to the church for light, especially in the wintry days of darkness. Christianity is an eschatological religion, which is to say that its best answers lie in the future, and that faith is not “seeing” but believing and hoping in things unseen. The light of Epiphany is the sign of that hope, faith, and light in the midst of darkness. Now come with me to the light.