Sermon preached on the First Evensong of the Epiphany of Our Lord 2024

This afternoon, we begin our celebrations of the Epiphany. In our imagination, we join the Magi on the final leg of their long journey towards the Christchild. These strange unnamed and unnumbered figures were probably from Persia or Arabia, and the traditions which surround them are myriad, diverse and exotic. They represent the pilgrimage of the gentile, pagan world to the revealed Anointed One, the Messiah promised by the Hebrew prophets, the Incarnate Son of God, whose flesh was nurtured at Bethlehem by his blessed Mother, and by those who cared for them both. One tradition surrounding the magi is that these men were astronomers, another is that they were pagan priests; surely these were mystical folk who knew how to look at the night sky, and who believed that the eternal purposes which wrapped and stabilised the universe were in some way discernible or mediated through the natural world. They were striding towards Bethlehem, yet hadn’t been given any address or coordinates. They sensed that this child – the ‘newborn king’ – could be the water which quenches all thirst, the one who must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. When the star which they had followed since its rising stopped over the place where the child Jesus lay, they were overwhelmed with joy and fell to their knees. They had been drawn by forces beyond them, their curiosity magnetised by that star; no wonder that two millennia later, TS Eliot imagined one of the Magi reminiscing back home years later in his very old age, ‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation…’ Many great spiritual teachers tell us that one of the greatest challenges in life is that of integration: the integration of different kinds of knowledge and wisdom, the integration of our history, our biology, and our experience, the integration of our imagination, our deductive powers and our observable reality, the integration of our memory and our hope. What can we truly trust on that journey we call life? How might we discipline or interrogate our insight and imagination, alert to the eternally new future to which God is calling not just us, but us-in-creation; our whole selves and our cosmic community? This is heady stuff, fizzing with possibility. And tonight, the Magi wrestle with all of that, in those final plodding miles through the night towards Bethlehem. They do what they know. They allow their hopes to be interrogated. They follow the star.

Here, we should perhaps note something so important we could easily miss it. The pilgrimage of the Magi is essentially rooted in some kind of trusting hunch. There is no revelation given before they set off. No Burning Bush to notice like Moses, no angelic visitation from Gabriel or another of the heavenly host. We are not told precisely what prompts their journey beyond a desire to come and worship. They set out, and they follow a star, in part because that is just what they do. They look into the skies. The seventeenth century Anglican theologian Bishop Jeremy Taylor comments on this, ‘For God called the Gentiles by such means, which their customs and learning had made prompt and easy. For these magi were great philosophers and astronomers, and therefore God sent a miraculous star to invite and lead them to a new and more glorious light… And God so blessed them in following the star, to which their innocent curiosity and national customs were apt to lead them, that their custom was changed to grace, and their learning heightened with inspiration…’

‘Their custom was changed to grace.’ In short, God used their natural inclinations – their customs, their beliefs – to lead them to Christ. This is a strategy which gives dignity, through grace (God’s free gift), to customs and insights outside the covenant with the Jewish people – working, if you like, with the grain, not against it. There is something very profound going on here: God not imposing or demanding, certainly not threatening or intimidating, but clothing honest searching and curiosity – hunches – with grace.

So might it be with our own Christian discipleship, as we work with our own curiosity, imagination and hunches to notice what God has done in Christ, and what God is doing among us in the power of the Holy Spirit. So might it be with an honest, open search for God in a culture where our formal language to talk about God is so often unintelligible. On that final long night before they arrived at the manger of Bethlehem, the Magi can’t have known exactly where it was going to stop. They trusted their best instincts, and allowed their hope to be fuelled by that which was beyond them, and in a certain way, foreign to them. Those instincts and insights – their method – was made holy by God’s grace, and their longing was fulfilled with great joy even as they knelt in the poor earth of a Palestinian town – the City of David – a place trading on its past glory.

So tonight, with the Magi on this last leg of the journey, we might ask, what draws us to Christ? What is it that fascinates us by his claims? What hunch can we not quite get away from? How is it that love seems stronger than death, and why can we not let go of the hope that this vulnerable and bruised world is shot-through with the promise of final, ravishing glory? For all its ills and complexities, our contemporary western culture places much value on characteristics such as authenticity, integrity, vulnerability, truth-telling. Often we realise these are valued precisely when they are trampled upon or disregarded. But they are perhaps some of the better angels of a complex, compromised and profoundly contradictory age.

If we can notice these, and allow ourselves to work with the grain of these elements of our culture, we might be surprised to see that they can be shot through with grace, utilised to translate the Gospel for our age. The contemporary cult of personality is certainly a corrupted one, but just perhaps it might challenge us to focus on the person of Jesus and the unique value of every human life. The constant mantra of authenticity and the triumph of ‘my truth’ can be a self-obsessed marketplace of relativism and self-righteousness, but just perhaps we can step back and ask what is really authentic in a human life, and why it might matter that truth is something which owns us, rather than the other way around. The advent of AI may seem scary and confusing, in need of monitoring, interrogation and regulation. But such advances can also remind us that humans are firstly creatures in an infinitely dazzling creation which is not always simply or straightforwardly controllable. In other words, unknown futures might have a lot to teach our senses about God and God’s ways with the world.

The mechanisms and priorities of our culture need careful interrogation. The habits of our hearts and minds need to be read in the light of the Gospel. They need to be judged against the eternal values we see in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and by the wisdom given to the Church in the power of the Holy Spirit. But tonight, with the Magi, perhaps we can ask what our hunches – individual and cultural - might teach us, as we let go of our obsessive need to control the journey, and realise that God’s grace is at work within and around us. The thirst we each have for the water of life, is the same graced desire which drew the Magi to the manger. We will often need to shed our self-sufficiency to quench that thirst, and to let go of cultural and personal habits which seek to annihilate the love of Christ rather than participate in it. In the Epiphany story, King Herod seeks the Christ child only to control and use him; that results in a devastating bloodbath, the slaughter of the innocents. Let us recommit tonight to the curiosity of the Magi, and to humbly laying all our insights and skills at the feet of the Christ-child, as we seek a life which recognises him, and which worships him in spirit and in truth.