LESSONS FROM THE HOLIDAYS, PART 10 OF 10:
“Feast of Epiphany – Home by Another Way”
A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Sunday, January 13, 2008
This morning we close out our 10-part series of worship services on Lessons from the Holidays with a late look at Epiphany, also known as the Feast of the Three Kings. (For those of you who didn’t attend seminary, “epiphany” has come to mean a sudden insight, but originally meant a revelation of the divine.) Through this time, we’ve pondered Advent and Hanukkah, were lectured to by Charles Dickens (in the person of Rev. Roger Brewin), fought off the Holiday Blues, and learned from the darkness of Yule and the Winter Solstice. On Christmas Eve, we shared a Peace Communion, and we celebrated a fun family Christmas Tableau, that I believe ended up involving nearly every person present. Then we laid the old year to rest with a rousing jazz funeral, and last week, we learned some important spiritual lessons from evolution. Now, this morning, we end by comparing ourselves to “those magic men, the magi,” using the wonderful song by James Taylor as our text. In honor of the Three Kings, we’ll share some
For a long time, I’ve thought that we UUs are like modern-day magi. Like them, we follow a special light that guides us in our quest for whole-ness and meaning; theirs was a star, ours is the combined light of our reason and our experience. Like the Magi, we UUs also tend to have more formal education and/or read more books than the general population, making us “wise guys” too. Like the Magi, many UUs enjoy travel to distant places. We can assume that the Magi traveled with a whole caravan of baggage, borne by a pack of camels, and we UUs tend to tote with us all the religious baggage of our past experience, as well as the invisible knapsack of our hopes and fears. (However, we UUs seldom have camels to carry all that for us.)
As both scripture and the James Taylor song tell us, the Magi were warned in a dream of King Herod’s evil plans, and so they returned to their country by another route. They went home by another way. It is fitting that in this service we welcome New Members who have recently joined this congregation. Like the Magi, and like the rest of us, they too have “come home by another way” – arriving at a new religious understanding by a sometimes circuitous route that has brought us here, to this church and to Unitarian Universalism. Here in our liberal religious movement, we have come safe home to a place where what we remember and cherish from our childhood faiths can be joined with hard-won adult insights, and blended with the ideals and hopes that we dare to dream might be possible.
As modern-day magi, we UUs should heed James Taylor’s warning, and “Steer clear of royal welcomes/avoid a big to-do.” We should be wary of quick spiritual fixes, instant new-age cures, and religious insights that can be purchased for a fee. We should give a wide berth to New Thought spiritual counselors who claim we can attract a new life partner, or financial prosperity – or a hurricane – by the power of our thinking alone. It’s not that easy. You cannot buy an epiphany, no matter how much money you spend, and discovering what you believe, what you can give your soul to, and then striving to conform your life to those beliefs, is hard spiritual work indeed. In spirituality, as in everything else, there is no free lunch.
In the story in Matthew, the Magi at first trust King Herod, and promise to let him know where the child they seek might be found; later, they get clued in by an angel in a dream. In our world, too, evil is not always easily recognizable, like the villains twisting their mustaches in old-fashioned movie serials, and most us get precious few reliable dream warnings. Unfortunately, we live in a time replete with, veritably overrun with, Herods and his minions. Strains and conflicts do indeed fill our world, and it can be difficult to discern friend or foe. But the song reminds us not to let fear of evil or even fantasies of evil rule our days, no matter what, we “mustn’t let King Herod haunt” us. Though evil does truly exist, and “Herod’s always out there,” we must step forward with courage and do the best we can in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
By whatever routes, however complicated and circuitous, however long or short or delayed the journey, we have all come home by another way. Home to this church, home to this free religious movement. Home to place where, as the song says, “you can more or less assume that you’ll be welcome.” I know that is how I felt the first time I attended services at this church more than 20 years ago; I felt finally and wonderfully “at home,” my own personal epiphany – although no miraculous bright star was involved. (Although maybe a light bulb did go off in my head!) And for the nearly 15 years that I have been a UU minister, I wish I had a dollar for every time some new person exclaimed to me, “I can’t believe there’s a church where I can be at home!” It is a religious home not confined to one place or to one church – it is a wider home within the whole Unitarian Universalist movement. It is a home where you can be yourself, and be encouraged to be your best self. A home where disagreement can be honestly aired in an atmosphere of love and acceptance. A home where spiritual exploration is actively encouraged. A home where what we’ve shared and learned and gained can be brought outside to a broken and hurting world.
While it is difficult if not impossible to generalize about beliefs in a UU congregation or in our movement, there is one thing I think we can all agree on. With James Taylor, all Unitarian Universalists can say, “They tell me that life is a miracle, and I figure that they’re right.” Life is a daily, constant miracle that we can come together to honor and celebrate. There is something sacred, a holiness, in every day that is both within and without, and it is revealed to us every hour that we are awake and care to look. We can discuss or even argue intellectually about the meanings of words like miracle, sacred, and holy, but the truth is, each and every one of us, no matter our theology or philosophy, clings to a notion of the specialness of human life; no matter our theology or philosophy, we are all of us constantly amazed by life’s surprising beauty and renewal. That amazement, that surprise – that, too, is an epiphany.
So let’s “me and you be wise guys too and go home by another way.” Let us give thanks and rejoice in this liberal faith tradition which gives us shelter and makes us at home. Let us share with each other the revelations, the epiphanies, we have gained through our reason, our intuition, and our life experience. And let us strive to bring the message of Unitarian Universalism to others – for after all, the Magi didn’t stay home with their new-found knowledge, but brought it out into the world, dangerous though it was.
May this year bring more opportunities for sharing epiphanies with each other and with the world. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
