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At the beginning of January there were a few articles reminding the general population that the Christmas celebrations had not ended on 2nd or 3rd of January.  The writings actually sought to remind their readers incorrectly that Twelfth Night (the 6th January) when the Feast of the Epiphany is celebrated is the end of Christmas. Epiphany as you know is the day, that we in the Western Church, officially celebrate the arrival of the Magi to the temporary accommodation of the Holy Family. Actually, some months or years after the actual birth date of the Holy Child. Our scriptures are a bit vague on the actual timings.

Epiphany used to be the day that Christmas gifts were given, echoing the gifts of the Magi. In the Eastern or Orthodox Church this remains the tradition and Epiphany is the major Christmas celebration. It used to be that way for us and some people still call Epiphany; ‘Old Christmas Day’. In Spain the tradition of gift giving at Epiphany still survives and like the Orthodox, it is a big celebration day for the Spaniards with processions and Magi riding into town accompanied by Santa Claus as well! Liturgical and Calendar revisions in our Church are to blame for the shift from 6th January to the 25th December.

All this aside, according to the media, goes to prove that Epiphany is the end of Christmas and not New Year. The media, are however, wrong!

It is the Feast of Candle-mass that is actually the end of the Christmas season of celebration. It is the reason why our church remains in White or Gold until 2nd February rather than reverting to the Green of Epiphany Sundays. The 2nd February is the 40th day after Christmas Day and Christmastide like Eastertide is 40 days long. This is to emphasise the importance of the Feast of Christ’s Nativity - the birth of our Saviour, just as we keep the 40 days of Lent and Eastertide to emphasise the self-giving and resurrection of Christ as our Saviour.

There is evidence of it being a custom to keep up Christmas decorations until February 2. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) has a poem entitled Ceremony Upon Candlemas Eve which describes this tradition:

Down with the rosemary, and so

Down with the bays and misletoe;

Down with the holly, ivy, all

Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas hall;

That so the superstitious find

No one least branch there left behind;

For look, how many leaves there be

Neglected there, maids, trust to me,

So many goblins you shall see.

None of us will wish to see goblins so I hope that all your decorations will be down by the 2nd February. Mind you if your tree is still up you could be knee deep in pine needles by now and if you live in Palmerston Place there is flat person where the Christmas decorations remain up all year! I wonder if the flat is troubled by goblins?

40 days of Christmas-tide celebration seek to remind us of the importance of Jesus’ birth and that it should be something we rejoice in greatly. Without his birth there would be no Easter Day and proof of our redemption. Although Easter is the primary celebration of our faith, Christmas comes a close second.

Candlemass was once celebrated with much pomp and the candles for the coming year were blessed in the crib. We will later be blessing our candles but on the altar not in the crib as a sign of the light of Christ born into our world and ‘lightening the darkness’ as the Nunc Dimitis says.

Today as the readings remind us is all about recognising who Jesus is and seeing his light shining in the darkness. The first reading from the rarely read Prophet Malachi predicts the coming of the Messiah and the part to be played by John-the-Baptist. It comes, however, with a warning though that unless we meet the Messiah with an open heart and generosity of spirit towards others then we will be harshly judged by him.

St.Luke continues in this vein by relating the story of Jesus’ presentation in the temple and his Mother’s purification or ‘Churching’ after childbirth. It was the Jewish tradition to make sacrifice in thanksgiving for the birth of a son. the two elderly temple dwellers have been told by God that they will live to see their Messiah and when they clap eyes on the Holy Family, God alerts them to the fact that here is the Messiah. They rejoice and give thanks knowing that their waiting is over. They also predict that the child will have a turbulent life but that he will save those who believe who he is. These two pensioners see the light of Christ and it shines brightly for them in their darkness.

It is, perhaps, the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews who best sums today up when they say:

“14 Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. ¹⁶For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham. ¹⁷Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. ¹⁸Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”

Hebrews 2:14-18

Jesus the man, born human and divine so that by knowing who life is for us he can save us. Jesus is our light in the world and his light will shine for eternity. No wonder we call this feast Candlemass for although they are a poor substitute for the person of Jesus, they are still a powerful symbol of what he shows and offers to us his fellow but flawed human beings.

What a way to end Christmas acknowledging that Jesus is the light of the world and our Saviour.

 

How great is this place,

for it is the touching-place of God.

In Christ, we are gathered from the edges

and woven into the dream.

Here we feel the hint of heaven,

where justice, love and mercy meet.

Here we celebrate

the blessedness of unity in God.

We, who were once far off,

are brought near.

And so we pray,

God, creator of all,

in your love, you have made each one of us

in your grace, you gather us together in your image

in your mercy, you make us restless until we find our rest in you.

Disturb us in our contentment,

distract us from our comforts

deter us from our conflicts

until your kingdom comes and your will is done.

Amen.

Today we celebrate the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and for the reconciliation of all that gets between us and stops us seeing each other as brothers and sisters. 

God of all,

because of your great love

our sins have been washed away

and we are part of the beloved community.

We come before you, a holy family,

a rainbow people, united in the beautiful diversity of your creation.

We celebrate the rich tapestry of the human family.

We commit ourselves to overcome prejudice and disunity wherever we find it and to walk humbly in your presence.

Amen

May God bless you with discomfort

at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,

so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger

at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,

so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears

to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,

so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them

and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness

to believe that you can make a difference in the world,

so that you can do what others claim cannot be done

to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

Amen

“Come” he replied to two of John-the-Baptist’s followers; ‘and you will see.”    John 1:39

Do you remember those times, when you were a child, when you were so excited  about some discovery that you had made that you just had to get someone else to share in your excitement as well? Even if like Nathaniel, they took some persuading.

In John’s Gospel account of Jesus’ calling of his disciples you can still sense the excitement of those first disciples. I have this sense of Andrew almost dragging his brother Simon to meet Jesus; and then Simon, who had initially been reluctant to meet the wandering preacher being bowled over when he realised who the preacher actually was - and then he is totally shocked when Jesus calls him ‘petros’ - the rock! His rock!

Andrew had seen who Jesus was and led Simon to see him too. Can you imagine their excitement in coming face to face with the promised Messiah? We get the sense of this excitement in John’s writing but what would it have been like to meet Jesus in real life? And, what was it that these men saw in him?

John uses a strange phrase to describe Jesus; ‘The Lamb of God’ (1:36), a phrase that today we hardly notice and if we do, our thoughts are most likely of fluffy wee white or occasionally black or brown creatures happily gambolling in Springtime fields. A pretty but hardly powerful image. The image John is trying to convey is certainly not fluffy, his is of sacrificial offering.

Ritual slaughter or sacrifice was a big part of the Hebrew religious practice. Lambs without ‘spot or stain’ were used as offerings to God. When the Jews sacrificed and animal they would first place their hands on the animals head, then take them away as they slit its throat. They believed that as they placed their hands on the animals’s head their sins passed into the creature and thus when it was sacrificed it carried or took away their sins. Hence the meaning of the Angus Dei in the Eucharist:

“Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”

Ritual sacrifice was big business in Jesus’ day and when John-the-Baptist refers to him as the ‘Lamb of God’ ordinary folk would have instantly recognised what he meant. However, they would not have expected the phrase to be associated with a human being, least of all the long promised Messiah. John’s picture of Jesus is a harsh one. The salvation he comes to offer us comes at a great price, his life in atonement for OUR sins.

The Russian author Dostoyevsky encapsulates what this means in his novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov’:

“The righteous man departs, but his light remains. People are always saved after the death of him who came to save them. Men do not accept those whom they have tortured to death.”

Quite what those called to be disciples expected to see when they were challenged to ‘turn and see the Lamb of God’  we do not know but what we do know is that they saw in Jesus something that them follow him. They saw enough to desire to be taught by him, to give up everything for him, to bring others to listen to him and to be (eventually) prepared to die for him, as well.

Andrew tells Simon to ‘see the Messiah’  and like the phrase ‘the Lamb of God’  both phrases would have been mind blowing to first century Jews. In the 21st century these words have lost much of their power, perhaps we need to recapture something of what we have lost and give back to Jesus the amazingness of who He actually is and what He came to do.

This morning’s Gospel reading is one full of hope, full of potential. It speaks of new life, fresh starts, new beginnings and it also challenges us to take its message seriously; to proclaim again who Jesus is and what He means for us and for our salvation. If we can only encourage the world to take Jesus seriously we might actually be able to live in a better world.

 

These days I often turn for entertainment to podcasts and to crime series on television. The relevance of these leisure habits to the Feast of the Epiphany will be made clear in a moment.

One of my favourite podcasts is The Rest is History and it is presented by two distinguished historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Just before Christmas they did a two-part presentation about Jesus. Tom Holland demolished the absurd but now surprisingly widespread view that Jesus didn’t even exist, and they both attempted to assess which bits of the Gospels are historically reliable and which are what might be called pious embroidery. It was at this point that I took issue with them, for today’s Gospel was dismissed as pious embroidery. That may be what most New Testament scholars think, but there’s a case for its authenticity. I thought Tom Holland was going to make it when he explained “the criterion of embarrassment” – the idea that anything in the Gospels which would have been embarrassing to the early Christian church is almost certainly authentic.

The Magi are an excellent example of “the criterion of embarrassment”. The Greek word that Matthew uses – Magoi – can mean “Astrologers” or “Sorcerers” or “Magicians.”  There are two other Magoi in the New Testament, both in The Acts of the Apostles. One of them, called Simon, is baptized but only after he has repented of his evil ways. The other, Elymas, is roundly condemned by St Paul as a “son of the devil”, “an enemy of all righteousness, full of deceit and villainy” and is then struck blind. So those who doubt whether Wise Men really did visit Jesus, need to remember that Magoi were generally regarded by the early Christian community as disreputable and unreliable characters and that a visit by Magoi to the Christ child is not something that early Christians would have been inclined to make up. In early Mediaeval times there was indeed embarrassment about the Wise Men, and they were transformed into Kings in an attempt to give them greater status and an air of reliability.

So much for the podcasts, what about the crime series? Epiphany is all about the revealing of mystery – that’s why we heard those verses from Ephesians Chapter 3 which speak of “the mystery of Christ”, a mystery not made known to former generations. Just now we are catching up with the TV series Endeavour and grateful to Ian Lawson for recommending it. Like all good detective stories, it sustains the mystery until the climax while scattering clues so that the revelation as to whodunnit is surprising yet doesn’t seem contrived; offering the sort of surprise which makes you say both “Yes, of course…!” and “Why didn’t I see that coming?”

It’s easy to imagine the surprise of the Wise Men when it turned out that the new king was not the son of a current monarch but a baby born to an apparently obscure mother in a small provincial town. Yet it was a satisfying surprise – when they got to Bethlehem, they had no doubt that they were encountering the special baby whose birth had been marked by the rising and moving of the star, and they had no hesitation in acknowledging the kingship of Jesus by presenting the costly gifts which they had brought with them. The baby was not where they had expected him to be, not whom they had expected him to be, and yet they recognized him for who he really was. They experienced that special moment of thinking “Yes, of course…!”

Their Epiphany surprise was made possible by their study of the heavens, their willingness to undertake an arduous journey and their encounters with Herod and with the chief priests and scribes who knew the answer to the question “Where will the Messiah be born?” but who were expecting a different kind of Messiah – a liberator who would free them from the rule of the Romans and usher in the golden age of which the prophets, including Isaiah in today’s reading, had spoken. Most of them did not, either then or later, see in Jesus the fulfillment of those prophecies – and the adult Jesus, the challenging travelling preacher and healer whose earthly life ended on a cross – did not fit the picture they had of the way in which God would put everything right.

It’s easy to understand why, then and now, most people don’t get Jesus. Darkness still covers the earth, and we have moved forward into a new year in times of violence and uncertainty. Matthew’s Gospel acknowledges that. It is the most grown-up, the least sentimental of the Christmas stories, for it goes on to tell how Herod ordered the massacre of the Innocents and Mary, Joseph and Jesus became refugees.

Yet reading it in faith we are able to say “Oh yes, of course! This is how God comes to us and seeks us out…” Not as a tyrant demanding absolute obedience, but open to the best and the worst of human responses. The Epiphany mystery is not just a whodunnit, though the recognition that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, is central to it. The Epiphany mystery is also a Whatareyougoingtodoaboutit?”

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians explains that the whole point of the church is to be an Epiphany Church:

“…to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things”

There’s a technical theological term for that – it is “participatory eschatology” – in plain English, that means how we as the church play our part in God’s healing and redeeming work.  St Augustine of Hippo summed that up splendidly in one of his best one-liners:

“God without us will not; we without God cannot.”

“God without us will not” - because God is not the authoritarian tyrant some folk believe in and other folk reject. Rather God wants us to respond freely and lovingly.

“…we without God cannot” - because we’re human and broken, because our vision is clouded and our searching, like the searching of the Wise Men, doesn’t often take us straight to the right place – and that’s the whole point of Christmas and Epiphany, God becoming visible to short-sighted humanity, and showing us a better way.

 

May God bless you and yours this coming year.