First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, January 4, 2008
This morning we conclude a series of 5 worship services for the holiday season with this celebration the Feast of the Three Kings, known also as Epiphany or Twelfth Night, or as we used to call it in my New Orleans childhood, Little Christmas. For many Christians all over the world, January 6th marks the visit of the Three Magi, or the Three Wise Men, to Baby Jesus, bringing their strange and unexpected gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
The gifts of the Biblical Magi have inspired countless customs around the world, including, in many countries, the exchange of gifts among friends and family on the Feast of the Three Kings. (In fact, in the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions, January 6th is their Christmas.) When I was in elementary school, January 6th was the day the children exchanged Kris Kringle gifts with each other. Another custom is the New Orleans kingcake, served from Epiphany until Mardi Gras, which this year falls on February 24th. According to the tradition which came to the Crescent City by way of France, each kingcake contains a tiny baby doll. Whoever finds the doll hidden inside their piece of kingcake becomes king or queen until the next kingcake is served, which the erstwhile king or queen is expected to supply. This morning after the service, we kick off another First Church tradition by ending the Christmas season and beginning the Carnival season with kingcake at Coffeehour. We invite everyone to stay and share a small piece, and be sure to watch out for that baby doll!
The story of the Feast of Epiphany is all about strange and wonderful gifts, coming in unexpected places. (In fact, you might say that that is an informal definition of the word “epiphany.”) The poem about the Magi’s journey by T. S. Eliot details their hardships, and how their lives were utterly changed afterwards. What could possibly be stranger and more unexpected than rich and exotic strangers making an arduous trip to see a newborn baby, so poor and unconnected to the world of the powerful that his mother was forced to give birth in a cave turned cowshed, bringing expensive and symbolic gifts of frankincense, gold, and myrrh?
In the quote used on our Order of Service this morning, poet and author Jim Harrison ironically notes that we contemporary people would prefer a world with at least seven epiphanies a day and a lot more angels in it. But what if those epiphanies and angels are already here and we just don’t see them? How about those small epiphanies we receive every day, the insights that seem to come from nowhere or everywhere, those sudden flashes of connection and understanding that crash through our carefully built defenses of the everyday quotidian world, bringing us glimpses of the world as it should be? Aren’t those epiphanies? What about those individuals who show up in our lives at just the right moment, lending a helping hand, or a listening ear, or a gift of money, food, or friendship, that is exactly what we need at the time? Aren’t they angels?
It can happen any time, any place, when suddenly, some idea, some new way of seeing, breaks through to us, and life feels different, better. Maybe you had a healing encounter with a loved one from whom you had been estranged. Maybe you shared an insightful, unconflicted conversation with your teenager. Maybe you found the love just as you had decided to stop looking. Maybe you received a world of support and affirmation when you expected to be alone. Maybe someone dropped off a carload of groceries when money was tight. Maybe a bunch of friends showed up to help you move, at a time when you know your friends were already busy. Epiphanies? Certainly. Miracles? Maybe not by an orthodox definition, but surely the kind of miracles we religious liberals believe in.
If we care to take notice, to be open and pay attention, we can find everywhere around us evidence of a force greater than ourselves, something that draws human beings closer together, something that seems to fan the flames of the human spirit, something that encourages us to greater depths of feeling and commitment, something that lets us know that despite all our challenges, anything is possible when we open our hearts and work together in love.
Unexpected gifts in unexpected places. I love down-to-earth epiphany stories – not tales of God coming down in a blaze of glory, or the Goddess or Mary showing herself to adoring crowds – but everyday wonders, “kitchen table epiphanies” as my friend Ron Cuccia calls them. Religious liberals have – quite rightly, I think – abandoned the idea of divine revelation coming from outside or above the natural world of science and experience. What some of us have failed to do, however, is put in its place any concept of epiphany that comes from inside this world, that comes from the experiences of our lives as we live them, that arises from our relationships with one another. We religious liberals do wrong if we decide that ridding ourselves of the supernatural removed all possibility of epiphanies.
I use words like “miracle” and “epiphany” because to me, that’s what they are; that’s how I’ve experienced them and interpret them. You may use quite different words to describe your own comparable experiences. Are these stories of the deity interfering in human affairs? Are they stories of the divine revealing itself in an unexpected time and place? Are they stories of human potential and nobility? You be the judge; use the words that work for you. They’re all epiphanies to me.
A few years ago, before the Storm, this story appeared in the Times-Picayune:
On Christmas day, a group of about a dozen volunteers showed up at the Broadview Mission. They were supposed to serve a Christmas dinner to some 100 homeless people, but there was a problem: The cook had been in a car accident across the lake. Neither he nor the enormous load of food in his car would be coming – and all that was left in the mission kitchen was 2 hams, 3 pies, and 1 cake. And a busload of homeless folks would be arriving in about an hour.
“We thought we’d have to close the doors,” said Mary Prial, secretary at the mission. But instead the volunteers swung into action. Some began calling all the groceries in the city, finding the ones open on Christmas Day, explaining the predicament. Others rushed home to raid their own kitchens. Another New Orleans institution that serves street people, Covenant House, provided all the leftover ham, turkey, dressing, and vegetables left over from its own Christmas dinner the day before. When the hungry homeless people arrived at the Broadview Mission on Christmas afternoon, there was a spread of food the like of which had never been seen before.
The editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper – a man whose editorial work is not generally known for its sentimentality – concluded with these words:
Good will towards all is more than a an over-quoted biblical phrase made chic this time of year. It’s a calling. We all hear it. Some of us answer. The volunteers at the Broadview Mission heard the call and heeded it. Theirs is a lesson for us all. Volunteering is more than just showing up and giving yourself an emotional bow. It’s getting involved. “It was a miraculous day,” said Ms. Prial, “without the help of the volunteers, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything.”
“We all hear it – some of us answer.” A kind of miracle comparable to the loaves and fishes occurs in an inner-city mission to homeless people, and a dozen middle-class volunteers learn a lesson about Christmas.
The thing about epiphany gifts is their unsought, unexpected nature. Certainly Mary and Joseph never expected – or likely even wanted – the gifts of the Three Kings. But that’s what these unexpected gifts are like, popping up when you least expect it, bringing you something you didn’t know you needed til you got it, sometimes even inconveniencing you, but always surprising you with something wonderful.
Last year, at the end of December ’07, Office Administrator Mandisa jackson handed me an envelope with a Wells Fargo return address. It was addressed to the church and Mandisa was not sure where to route it, so I opened it – and thus became the first person in the church to learn that an anonymous friend of the church was making a $200.000.00 pledge to our rebuilding fund, and the first $100,000.00 was enclosed. To say I freaked out would be an understatement. Since I was expecting it, when the second $100,000.00 arrived early last week, I was still excited and happy, but at least I didn’t feel faint. This week, we got a check for $250.00 from a UU in Massachusetts who pledges to our church as well as to his own. Just knowing that out in the world, there are people aware of our situation and the challenges we face, who want to help us get back to normal, is enough to make me believe in angels.
My last epiphany story about a gift in an unexpected place is a personal one, but I hope it has resonance for you. After dinner one Christmas after our parents died, we went through 3 large boxes of “stuff” that had come from our parents’ house that we had put aside, meaning to get to “eventually.” We sorted through old photographs and slides and news clippings and documents, howling at ugly pictures of ourselves, trying to decide what to save and what to throw out; it literally took hours. Finally, we finished, hauling 2 giant garbage bags to the curb along with the Christmas trash, and ending up with 2 or 3 smaller bags or shoeboxes for each sibling.
I was put in charge of bringing my sister Lili’s share to her, as she had spent Christmas in Texas. A few days later. she and I sat in her dining room, going through what had been saved for her; Lili did not want most of it – too hard to store, no reason to save it, takes up too much space – so a lot of it was either going into my pile or into the trash. Then we came across a handwritten letter to our mother on yellow legal pad sheets in our father’s neat handwriting; it was dated only “Rock Hill, South Carolina, Thursday the 17th.” We could not figure out what year it had been written, so we began to read it for internal clues.
The tone of the letter was tender, with my father detailing his efforts to find a nice apartment for them to live in while he worked to organize dock and factory workers in South Carolina into unions. We decided that the letter was from the time right around their marriage, but before our mother joined him in his work. But then we got to page 3 – and our father’s words, “But I guess I haven’t really asked you the important question. So would you like to get married?” He warned her that of the 2 of them, he thought she was getting the worse deal; he also promised to do a better, more romantic job of the proposal the next time they were together. He told her that he had already written to his daughter, our half-sister, who was about 10 or 11 at the time. “I told Bonnie that if she was opposed we would get married anyway, but that we wanted her to know first.” Characteristically, he closed the letter with a question about some recent union negotiations at a Louisiana gas and chemical plant.
The letter in which my dad proposed to my mother, which she kept among her special things, found by chance on Christmas Day. A gift of love across nearly 50 years, a message of love from beyond death, that we almost threw away. Just goes to show you, you never know. If that’s not a gift in an unexpected place, I don’t know what is.
Inconvenient, weird, strange, unexpected – oh yes. But the gifts of epiphany are also wonderful, miraculous, beautiful, heart-touching, soul-awakening. And for those who are awake and alert and alive enough to notice, they happen every day. Not just to happy, well-off, fortunate people, but to all of us – the sad, the bereaved, the downtrodden, the lonely. Epiphanies happen to people with physical handicaps and to those blessed with health, to people with perfect families and to the rest of us with normal families. All you have to do is be there, be aware, be ready to look and listen and see the miracles of light and love and beauty that are all around you. And most important of all – you have to allow yourself to be changed by what you experience.
In this new year of 2009, I wish for all of us many miraculous epiphanies that shake us up, that take us out of the ordinary, and remind us of our commitment to our principles, our connection to one another, and our ability to bring about positive change. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE -- SHALOM -- SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
BENEDICTION
For this Feast of the Epiphany,
let us be as adventurous and wily as the Magi –
Follow a bright star
Take a long journey
Give unexpected gifts
See holiness in the ordinary
Don’t fall for the bribes of evil kings
Find our own way home.
May each and every day of this new year
Bring us gifts and blessings without number,
And may we receive them and return them
With grace and honor and humility.
So might this be!
