Epiphany Sunday 2012

The Journey of the Magi

A year ago I preached on Epiphany Sunday, or rather I told the story of the Fourth Wise Man who had missed the meeting with the other three, never caught up with them and spent his life trying to find the King whom he had come to worship.
That very afternoon,  I heard a programme in one of the,  “Adventures in Poetry”  series  on T.S.Eliot’s,  “Journey of the Magi” which gave me an insight into the journey of those  Magi, or Wise Men,  who DID get to Bethlehem and then returned to their own country. Roberta led a meditation on this in our Quiet Morning, which I am certainly not going to try to repeat here,  but I am offering a few ideas on the journey of the Magi for your own meditations. If you know the poem,  so much the better, but it will not be necessary. 
T.S.Eliot wrote the poem on an Epiphany Sunday between Matins and lunch ...just think what you may achieve by lunch time today;  apparently he consumed the best part of a bottle of gin whilst doing so. He had just returned to the Christian faith himself and to the Anglican Church, in particular, and the poem reflects both:-
A return TO faith and
the journey OF faith
Neither of which is easy.

In the poem one of the Magi, as an old man, is remembering  the journey he had under taken with his companions so many years before. It is the journey he remembers, not the arrival and not the gifts which are not mentioned. Neither is the star.

Sometimes, it seems to me that the journey of faith can be a bit like driving on a motor way on which you have not travelled before. You know where you have come from, you know where you want to get to, but you are far from sure where you actually ARE or when you should turn off. The Magi were on a road they had not been on before and this had three main effects.

They had left their comfort zone
In their own country they were wealthy, respected, learned men of high position. It is important to stress this because one of the things people look for in the Christian faith is comfort and it would be absurd to deny that they find it in matters of e.g. bereavement or other kinds of loss. But that is only half the story, only one side of the coin and faith brings challenge as well as comfort. To mix my metaphors, St Paul,  in his epistle to the Corinthians and St Peter in his epistle write of the need for us to be fed on solid food not milk.  In our spiritual growth we should be frequently weaned.
Epiphany today comes at the end of what has become our times of comfort has it not? This makes it also he beginning of the next challenge.The second point in the story of the Magi is that they take a wrong turning.

They take a wrong turn
They go to Jerusalem, the logical place to find a King of the Jews. This has disastrous results because they scare King Herod so much  that, in order to protect himself, he orders what we call the massacre of the Innocents, an event we tend to overlook  today;  I wonder how many of you could tell me, at the drop of a hat,  its date.  Yet, it poses the problem of innocent suffering a problem with which many Christians,  including some of you here today, are rightly concerned .

Things were never the same. 
The last point I want to make about the Magi, is that, when they had returned home, to their very privileged life style, things were never the same again. They didn’t quite fit in.....and this is the problem Christians have lived with from the beginning and with which we all live with today, or should do, for we are trying to be good citizens of an earthly kingdom, while owing a stronger loyalty to the heavenly kingdom to which we are all called. From time to time, these will conflict and they conflict for the privileged  whom we remember today as much as, if not more, than for the lowly. Indeed, one of the lessons of Epiphany may be that the rich, the learned and the powerful have further to come, a longer journey to make.
I want to close, as I am aware, I have closed before with description of the Epiphany service adapted from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, “Helena” .  The Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, as an old lady at the end of her own earthly journey, has gone to Bethlehem , is in what we now call the Church of the Nativity and clearly priests are playing the part of the Magi in the service.

The low vault was full of lamps and the air was close and still. Silver bells announced the coming of the three vested, bearded monks, who like the Kings of old prostrated themselves before the altar........Helena forgot even her quest and was dead to everything except the swaddled child and those three sages who had come from so far to adore him.
“This is my day”, she thought “and these are my kind”.
Perhaps she apprehended that their fame, like hers, would live in one historic act of devotion.
“Like me,” she said,” you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before you, even the cattle. How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, when the shepherds had run barefoot. How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts! What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. A deadly exchange of compliments!“Yet you came and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed but they were accepted because they came with love.
In that new order of charity which had only just come to life, there was room for you too.“You are my especial patrons and patrons of all latecomers who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused by knowledge and speculation, of all who, through politeness, make themselves partners in guilt.
“Dear cousins, pray for me”, said, Helena, ”and for my over-loaded  son.  May he, too,  before the end, find kneeling place in the straw.
Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly.
“For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate.
Let them not be quite forgotten before the throne of God when the simple come into the Kingdom”.