Epiphany journey for today

We are in that post Christmas and early New Year period which some people really struggle with. Decorations are taken down at home and for a few days it looks really bare, and January opens up before us and perhaps it doesn’t look inviting. The weather is horrendous with wind and driving rain, people are struggling in many places with flooding and thousands of pounds of damage. Others are struggling in other ways – commuters having to pay more for their daily journey into work when the service continues to be poor, in their view; people down with a cough and flu virus which gets worse if you try to carry on doing with it; and England cricketers, well, let’s not talk about them. What a miserable series – although I have loved the venom of Geoffrey Boycott about them on the radio – “me granny could have caught that in her pinny!”

And yet, theologically,we are invited not to be downcast or pessimistic, nor to dread the year opening up before us. We are invited to remember the God who is always before us, ahead of us, surprising us, encouraging us, calming our fears, and showing us new things. We journey not in dread and anxiety, even if we don’t know all the answers to the things that might lie on the path ahead, we journey in anticipation and confidence. Well, we start like that anyway. 

January 6th is the feast of Epiphany – the day we remember the journey of Magi from the East to seek the Christ child. They like us didn’t know what they might find as they set out, but they followed a star with excitement, because they knew where it led would be exciting – they would be surprised where it led and they would return from the experience different. 

Three pieces of literature I came across between Christmas and New Year while I was doing some reading and having some quiet time which help me work out what meeting the Christ might mean this year.

First, I think we need to follow in faith. We need to want to move forward. We need something to attract our attention and get us motivated to be God’s people again, rather than keep worrying about everything. So, I turn to my favourite very powerful Old Testament theologian, Walter Bruggemann. He has written this prayer called “Epiphany” 

       On Epiphany day,
     we are still the people walking.
     We are still people in the dark,
          and the darkness looms large around us,
          beset as we are by fear,
                                        anxiety,
                                        brutality,
                                        violence,
                                        loss —
          a dozen alienations that we cannot manage.

We are — we could be — people of your light.
     So we pray for the light of your glorious presence
          as we wait for your appearing;
     we pray for the light of your wondrous grace
          as we exhaust our coping capacity;
     we pray for your gift of newness that
          will override our weariness;
     we pray that we may see and know and hear and trust
          in your good rule.

That we may have energy, courage, and freedom to enact
         your rule through the demands of this day.
         We submit our day to you and to your rule, with deep joy and high hope.

The Magi, however many there were of them, astrologers, men who studied the stars, saw a bright star in the sky and were attracted to it, and simply had to follow it. Light has that quality, we notice it and are led to it. In the war I gather, if your black out curtains let a bit of light through, the warden would come and tell you off. The other night, I was driving home from Bexhill up Harley Shute Road, when suddenly flashing blue lights got closer and closer to me, and I had to pull over. I couldn’t avoid them. Why is it you always feel guilty when this happens to you? I wasn’t speeding. They were checking my car belonged to me, that’s all, but it was a heart stopping moment. I’d had an alcoholic mince pie, after all, before getting behind the wheel! Whoever these men were, they couldn’t ignore this star, this light in their lives, the star led them not to where they expected, but to a house in Bethlehem, where they found a new king. They offered him their gifts and they bowed down and worshipped. Are we at the beginning of 2014 here brave enough to follow, what is the light in our lives we cannot avoid, and will God in Christ be at the end of our journey, our motivation and our energy? Bruggemann suggests if we come to God, if we find Jesus, we will find deep joy and high hope – not despair and worry and misery.

Secondly, I think we need to look for new things this year. My new diary came through the post yesterday and it is empty. I wish! I haven’t yet copied out the back of my old into this one. But the turn of the year for people can, if we are not being miserable about it, it can be an opportunity for renewal. The Archbishop of Canterbury suggested in his New Year message that we might all be more neighbourly, that we all might try and make a difference to just a few people round us this year, that way the world might be changed. Let me turn to Tennyson.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,   The flying cloud, the frosty light:    The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,    Ring, happy bells, across the snow:  The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind    For those that here we see no more;    Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause,    And ancient forms of party strife;  Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin,    The faithless coldness of the times;    Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite;    Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease;    Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;    Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free,    The larger heart, the kindlier hand;    Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

I don’t know if you “saw it in” – the New Year. I am an old sad individual so I watched Gary Barlow live from Methodist Central Hall, Westminster and living on my own was able to sing old Take That songs out loud and I enjoyed it – but others stood out in the cold to herald midnight and others partied in it. In my last appointment, the Rector and I would do a New Year bells service and at 11.55 we would stand round his church outside and wait and at midnight the bells would chime. It was a very powerful time and I miss doing that now at New Year. Tennyson’s poem is part of a longer piece called “In Memoriam AHH” – he had a friend called Arthur Hallam who died aged 23. He was to have married Tennyson’s sister, and the poem largely is about coming to terms with with untimely death and grief, or something no longer part of our experience. It is said Queen Victoria found great comfort in these words after the death of her husband, Albert. Tennyson was of course, poet laureate.

I just wonder whether to be able to move forward we have to let go of the past. A lot of people did not have an easy 2013. We have to be able to be move on, but we cannot if we are paralysed by what the past has done to us. But there can be a freedom in realising the old ways are just that, old, and the new way need not be frightening but can be liberating. The Magi went first remember to Jerusalem, where they encountered Herod. Herod was the old way, power, domination, threat. The new way was not to be found there – but in poverty, simplicity, in the ordinary, in new life. We need to trust. Tennyson hopes for the bells ringing in not just a New Year but “a thousand years of peace” – and the coming of Christ “yet to be” not simply a child in a manger, that all will be well in him. Are we going to step out with God and to God this year, or will we cling onto the past even where it is unhealthy? 

Lastly, I think we need to think about expecting more from God. The Magi we are told at the end of this account “went back to their own country by another road.” Not only was this to avoid Herod, who along with his advisors in Jerusalem felt threatened and would indeed lash out violently, but it was a spiritual new road, surely a message for us on Covenant Sunday. We will say “I am no longer my own, but yours.” And that can be a scary thing to say. Let me turn thirdly to my spiritual hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was killed by the Nazis towards the end of the war for not being able to renounce his faith in Jesus, when faith in Jesus was dangerous to have. Towards the end of last year, a little book of letters he wrote to a teenage boy called Ernst in London, giving him instruction by letters about the Christian faith. He wrote in in early 1936:

  

Life here will this year probably change considerably. What is crucial is to find and acquire the powers and the energy that you will need, to hold fast to the truth and not to let anything else influence you. Everyone here faces, again and again, moments of being hard pressed to give in, thinking, I can’t bear any more of this standing all alone. Then it is very liberating to think that in his life and death, Christ became the Lord, who has overcome falsehood and that we can share in his victory. Godspeed, good health in this New Year, and above all, don’t forget the few things in life which make life worth living.”             

People are not persecuted for being Christians in Britain in 2014 but there might be times when we are wondering whether it is worth carrying on, when the material pressures are spoken about by some far more than the spiritual opportunities. The Magi saw the journey as a risk worth taking, and they found because they kept going and returned full of the Spirit, a new quality of life for them. We seek and then have for ever a God who is worth finding, following and being committed to. He calls us to another road, the road of faith and trust.

Perhaps a fourth piece of writing, well, a speech, touched me in this season, one sentence really, from the Pope. During his New Year message, he suddenly got exasperated  with the state of things on Earth. Putting aside his prepared remarks, he said, "What is happening in the heart of man? What is happening in the heart of humanity? It's time to stop." 

The God in Jesus who makes all things new invites us to journey. We have responsibilities. May the star, the light, the house, the road bless us, and more that, through us this year bless others so that Jesus is known, here and everywhere.