The sermon for January 6 was based on Matthew 2:1-12.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I like the season of Epiphany. I'm especially fond of the festival of the Epiphany. It's typical of the rich and beautiful and sometimes quite confusing Christian life. This festival has always been about both the arrival of the Magi and the Baptism of Jesus. It's a single feast with two separate, yet related, themes; the manifestation of Christ in the Jordan and the coming of the God's good will to the Gentiles.

As both a festival and a season, Epiphany seems to have bitten off more than it can chew. We Christians come to Epiphany the way neophytes come to Church, secretly hoping that everything will be made clear and that the hidden things of God will become obvious to one and all. We are annually disappointed, as are the secret longings of all who are new to the Faith. But God provides us with more and better blessings than those for which we know to long.

Almost 100 years ago cubist painters like Picasso and Braque started trying to depict objects from more than one perspective at the same time. They offered us paintings of people with multiple noses and any number of arms and legs. They were giving us different layers of information about a single subject within a single painting. Their paintings can be hard to look at but they have been very influential on subsequent painters. The cubists were scorned by many for abandoning the traditional tools of single perspective, foreshortening and shading. But they are also very greatly admired by just as many for their renewed interest in surmounting mere fact to reach for truth in art. I don't know how many of you are interested in painting or have ever even seen a painting by Picasso or Braque but here's something similar you will know about.

Most of us are familiar with the 3-D movies that require the audience to wear those glasses that have one red lens and one blue lens. If you have the glasses on the movie seems to have real visual depth. If you don't have the glasses the movie is a blurry mess that is unwatchable for any length of time. You can't appreciate a 3-D movie without the glasses because a movie like that is really 2 or 3 movies layered together and shown at the same time. A red colored movie from one perspective, a blue colored movie from another perspective and a regular movie from a central perspective. Like the cubists, the makers of 3-D movies are trying to give us multiple perspectives of the same object at the same time within a single picture. And like the cubist paintings, 3-D movies can be hard to look at. It's time to pick up our contemplation of Epiphany.

The very name of the season promises to make everything clear. Epiphany... we would expect a season or festival of that name to replace our humdrum and sometimes painful point of view with a better, nobler and more Godly view of the world. We expect the curtains to pull back, God to show Himself to us and the rest of the world to fade to insignificance if not outright invisibility. But it doesn't happen. Instead, we're presented with a series of miracles and lessons that, combined, add another layer to the view of the world we already have. The lessons of Epiphany don't replace what we see with our eyes. They rather help us see the same events from God's flawless and perfect point of view. Life for a Christian is like one long cubist exhibition or a seventy year showing of 3-D movie where there are no more special glasses. Here's what I mean.

In the visit of the Magi our eyes present us with one picture and faith presents us with something else. With our eyes we see scholars arriving from the East. We all know what a questionable lot scholars are. I've rarely met a scholar with any special strength in keeping the 8th Commandment and a journey across the desert of two or more such men is almost certain to have degenerated into a quarrelsome and somewhat testy mess. When these oriental bookworms arrive in Jerusalem, asking for directions, they do so in a way that upsets the people, again, typical of guys who consider themselves wise. Then these shabby scholars (have you ever met a scholar that wasn't at least a little shabby?) are sent by King Herod to Bethlehem with the understanding that they will return and tell him the exact location of the Child. The wise men show up in Bethlehem and find the child, a child who seems in no way extraordinary, a child born in barn and being brought up by a carpenter whose marriage was and is shrouded in suspicion. They leave gifts that to the casual observer seem inappropriately costly and then leave. They don't return to Herod as expected but go off by some other way giving the impression that they are either disrespectful, unreliable or simply insane. Shortly after their visit Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus make a run for the border. This baby, whom every one in Bethlehem has been calling a God for some time now gets up and runs to hide in, of all places, Egypt, leaving all the other little boys to be slaughtered by an offended and frightened king Herod. On the face of things, there isn't much in this entire escapade of which to be particularly proud. But eyes of faith see another layer, superimposed on the one seen by everyone. Faith sees in the persons of the wise men the gift of reason and intellect being used the way God intends it, in the quest for truth and in the service of faith. Unlike the so called scholars of our day, these men were examining God's creation, the earth and the firmament and the heavens, for information about the Creator, not for ways to disprove His existence. Whether or not they quarreled as the crossed, they came all the way across the desert just to be near Jesus. As for upsetting the people of Jerusalem, every true Christian knows that there is no tactful way to proclaim Christ. He is an offense to all who lack faith and even those who love Him are often troubled about Him. Those of us who still believe that the wise men really were directed by an angel not to return to Herod will sympathize with them and the damage done to their reputation. No one who is faithful to the Word and will of God will be thought well of or be understood by those who are not similarly faithful. The Pastor who practices closed communion, the layman who insists that his congregation remain true to the Book of Concord, the Church that rejects unionism and renounces syncretism of every description will seem always to be lacking in the good will required of God's servants. They will seem to have broken faith even as the wise men broke their implied promise to return to Jerusalem. And what of God running off to Egypt hiding behind His mother's skirts while all the little boys in his village are put to death? Christ goes to fulfill a prophecy, to keep the Law and redeem the world from itself. He doesn't abandon those boys. He summons them. Those boys are called out of the tyrannical kingdom of Herod and into the Kingdom of God's light and glory. Who here would not like to have gone to heaven before having ever disappointed his parents or embarrassed himself publicly or shamed his family in some way? With my eyes I still see the shoddy tableau of Jesus and the wise men but layered over that the Word of God shows me a bright and hopeful and comforting meaning. All these romantic paintings of the wise men, all these ornate carvings that go with our little nativity sets are efforts to depict what they eyes of faith see. I'm almost sure that the real visit of the magi looked nothing like the front of our bulletin covers with all that rich fabric and royal drama, but we chose those covers because they convey the meaning of the visit.

I admit, or maybe I should say confess, that looking at both layers gives me a headache. I want that first layer to go away. I don't want to think of the nasty gossip that must have surrounded Jesus' flight into Egypt of the lusterless image of some crabby astronomers crossing the desert. I only want to see one layer and I only want to see the pretty one. But even when the pretty one eclipses the one we always see, it doesn't bring the kind of comfort we crave. In the 12th Chapter of John, as Our Lord is entering the city of Jerusalem to be sacrificed for the forgiveness of our sins, He is talking to His disciples about what is to come. Then a voice came from heaven, saying, "I have both glorified it and will glorify it again." 29Therefore the people who stood by and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, "An angel has spoken to Him." Even when, God in His grace, shines forth and makes brilliant that second and all important layer, such as on the mount of Transfiguration or in the Baptism of our Lord or as Jesus enters the city to die, it is difficult for even those who are aware of it to express it properly or agree about what it means. The kind of single vision clarity that we all so desperately want will come only at the end of time and then only because the world and all of its stimuli will melt away.

Until then we are given faith and the creeds to guide us through the confusion of life in a fallen world. In the Nicene Creed we confess that we believe that God the Father Almighty is the maker of all things visible and invisible and that the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of life, which is to say, giver of faith. Those who have no faith see the world in marvelous simplicity. They do not have to go through the agony of doubt that is part of every faithful life. They don't have to reconcile the majesty of Christ and His Bride with the scandal of the poor militant Church.

They have, indeed, only one perspective but that perspective is unrelentingly harsh. That first layer of perception, the one we all share, is limited to finite things and is utterly without hope. There is nothing to he hoped for beyond what is seen and sensed. It is a perspective limited to Law and wrath and death and to sporadic carnal satisfactions. It is no wonder that the unbelievers tend toward escapism, gravitating toward their TVs and drugs mindless activities. They want to replace their reality. They want something they can't identify and cannot see.

They get divorced and addicted and indicted for just a glimpse, the merest impression of a hint, of what we struggle to understand all day every day. And yet those of us who see the world, by grace, both from our own perspective and that which our Lord has revealed to us, are similarly tempted. We too want that first layer of perception to go away. We don't want to have to accept what God says by faith we want it to be plain to everyone, including and especially ourselves. We want to be proven right and demonstrated to be correct. We don't want people thinking we're flighty like the wise men or dupes like St. Joseph or liars like St. Mary or insane like Jesus. We want vindication and assurance and we don't want to wait for the end of the world to get it.

The pietists among us try to prove the Word of God with their behavior. They think that by behaving the way God wants us to they will prove their worth to the rest of the world. The dogmatists try to manifest Christ in their thinking. If they think the right way, they will be thought of the right way, or at least will come to think of themselves in the right way. Both of these groups wind up living in little ghettoes that are less and less like the view of the world they set out to demonstrate. The same thing happens to those who try to prove the rightness of the faith by assembling huge numbers of believers. The Church Growthers, in their attempt to prove with numbers and members that God is real and that His Word is true, wind up with organizations that bear very little resemblance to the communities created by the Holy Ghost through the Means of Grace.

We individual Christians are tempted to do the same kinds of things. We see our lives as they are, full of sin and ugliness and shame and sickness and all the other facets of the curse and we want it all to go away. We want our lives to be exclusively the way Christ describes them; righteous and shining and endless and joyful and gracious. We want an Epiphany wrapped in an apocalypse and then made permanent. But that isn't what Jesus gives us in this world. What He gives us instead are the means of Grace.

The Word of God and His Holy Sacraments are like four fixed points where both layers of reality are identical. Of course, this means that they are only of comfort to believers, those who can perceive both layers. In the Lord's Supper what we see and taste and smell and feel even hear lines up with what the Word of God reveals to us. When we come to the altar we find things the way they should be. Here what we see and we believe converge and we are as close to God as we can be in this world. At the altar He forgives our sins and renews a right Spirit within us. Holy Baptism is another place where the two perspectives come into alignment. The Water and Word combine according to the good and gracious will of God to make a washing of regeneration and a renewing of the Holy Spirit. Here too our sins are forgiven and our faith is established by grace. The right proclamation of the Word and the pronouncement of Holy Absolution also provide comfort to Christians made dizzy by the split vision of life on earth. In the hearing of God's Word that second and beautiful layer is brightened and polished and we become increasingly aware of it's rightness and meaning. In Pastoral Absolution we feel on heads the hands of the man whom God has sent to console us with the assurance that our sins are forgiven by the work of Christ on the cross. We hear in our ears both the voice of God and the voice of the Pastor but in all these means of Grace God has promised to strengthen and sustain faith and to forgive sins. There are other moments in the life of the Christian where the twin perspectives of Truth and reality align but God has not promised to work through them and we are not directed to them for comfort.

So if your feeling bleary and blurry and frustrated that God requires us to take so much on faith, I invite you contemplate that it is the most unbelievable parts of the Christian life, the Means of Grace, that our universal experiences are drawn into alignment with the Word of God.

But more than your contemplation I invite your participation. Don't just watch Holy Communion, come and eat, come and drink, come and participate in the mystery of God made Man and of that Man given and shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins. Come and be forgiven and assured. Don't just remember your baptism, rely on it. Trust in the God who came to you in it call on the Spirit who filled you at the font. Come be absolved, let God lay His hands on you and speak in your ears to assure you that you are forgiven and that what has been revealed to you is true. I invite not only you but your friends and neighbors. Bring them with you, bring with you those who see only their sin and shame and need. Let them come hear the word so that they can receive from the Holy Ghost through the Means of Grace the somewhat wonky double vision that makes all the difference between despair and hope. I want everyone to have the headaches we have, to feel the excitement we have, to look at the world and see more than the world would have us see. I want everyone to see joy where the world sees only gloom, life where the world sees only death, strength where only weakness is visible and God where only man can be seen. I want everyone to bite off more than they can chew and I want for them the Epiphany that we celebrate, the revelation of a God who redeems the world without destroying it, who is born of a virgin without violating her virginity and who opens our eyes to the Gospel without closing them to the Law. Amen.

The Peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Last Updated: 7/15/2008