The Second Sunday After Christmas – Year C
January 3, 2010
The Reverend Monna Mayhall
Matthew 2:1-12
Here it is, only the 3rd day of the New Year…A little more than a week after Christmas, and not quite Epiphany. And yet when you look around, it seems as if the Christmas season has already come and gone. All the gifts have been unwrapped and all the decorations are almost all put away. At the grocery store, holiday goodies are being replaced with King Cakes and boxes of valentine chocolates. You might be able to find some traces of Christmas, but you have to search diligently to discover them.
To some degree, this proved to be true at my mother’s house this past week.
For the past several years – rather than spend Christmas in her own home, my mother has rotated spending Christmas with her children. And even though she usually isn’t home during the week leading up to Christmas or on Christmas Day, and even though all her decorations are stored in her “hard to get to” attic…Every year she insists on trying to get down some of her favorite decorations.
Every year…except for this year, that is. And I guess there are a few reasons why she didn’t try to get down any decorations.
For one, there had been a leak in the roof earlier in the year. Some storage boxes had gotten wet, and so, the things in those boxes were transferred to other boxes in the attic that were dry. This resulted in pumpkins thrown in with Easter eggs…Fall leaves getting mixed in with 4th of July flags…and Christmas decorations being divvied up in any boxes that had empty space left in them.
Another reason was, that with the leak, some of the attic flooring had gotten a little too soft with all the moisture. And as the roofer found out, you could easily step right through the flooring to the ceiling below you, if you weren’t careful.
And I guess another reason why my mother didn’t get any decorations down this year was that, in trying to clean out and move things around in the house this past summer, she ended up putting lots of things into one closet…that closet being the one you have to go through, to get to the attic.
So, needless to say, just getting into the closet to get to the attic, was difficult because of all the, shall I say, “obstacles in the way.”
When all of my brothers and sisters gathered at my mother’s house for a few days this past week, my mother decided that it was time for her to pass along one of our favorite family Christmas treasures - a beautiful German-made Nativity complete with a crèche. We drew numbers to determine the new owner of the coveted nativity, and my older sister was the lucky sibling. All that was left to do was to get it out of the attic.
I offered to attempt to find it, and I enlisted one of my nieces to help me. My mother suggested that it would be pitch dark up there, and she wasn’t sure the light worked. One of my brothers went to find a flashlight, but it didn’t work so well. Earlier in the day, my mother had handed out flashlights to all her grandchildren…but most were still in the packages and without batteries. We eventually found one tiny flashlight…that worked!
As we moved boxes, and mattresses, and blankets, and more boxes out of the closet to go up to the attic, I kept wondering what obstacles the magi encountered as they searched diligently for the Christ child. One thing was for certain though…their guiding light was much brighter than the pinky size flashlight I had.
The Gospel we heard today is Matthew’s version of the Epiphany – with King Herod and the Wise Men and their journey. And even though the actual date of Epiphany is January 6th , when I looked at today’s choices of gospel readings , it seemed to me that if I didn’t select the one with the wise men, we would end up skipping right over Jesus being showered with gifts.
The prophet Isaiah describes the message of Epiphany beautifully. “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”
We celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany as the time when 3 wise men, astrologers or sages, traveling from far across the land following a brilliant light, arrive in Bethlehem, offering their gifts and paying homage to Jesus – the baby, born king of the Jews.
And we should celebrate Epiphany, not only as the journey TO Bethlehem, but also, the journey FROM Bethlehem, for that journey truly signifies the manifestation of Christ, and the Light to the whole world.
As one theologian says, “…We are like the 3 Wise Men who [journey] to Jesus. [Now, after Christmas] like those Wise Men, we return to the world from which we came, to the everyday life where we will witness to what we have seen...”
…Witness to God’s greatest gift to the world.
In a sense, “the Wise Men were the first missionaries, and their encounter with Christ did not keep them in Bethlehem, but made them set out on the paths of the world,” back to their country to bear witness to what they had experienced and seen.
Like them, we, with the light of Christ radiating in our lives, and the hope for the world burning in our hearts, we must be “compelled” to be witnesses, to be proclaimers and heralds of Christ, offering gifts of his love to others…
Gifts like a comforting word to a hurting soul…a warm smile to the disheartened…a feeling of compassion for the neglected…a sense of peace to a spirit in turmoil…a respect for the dignity of others. All those and so many more are gifts that we can offer.
I’ll share with you that after some diligent searching, amid the mess in my mother’s attic, we did find the Nativity…Even though there was no star shining above it or no flashing lights, it was in its original box, so that one could not mistake it for anything other than the treasure it contained.
When we gather here each week, after the peace and the announcements, we hear an offeratory sentence that the wise men could have heard as they offered their gifts and then departed from Bethlehem. And it’s particularly helpful for us, as we strive to be the light of the Christ…
“Let your light shine before all people so that they may see your good works and glorify God in heaven.”
