So we’ve reached the feast of Epiphany. The magi from the east have found the Christ child. They’ve presented their gifts. They’ve worshipped. And they travel home by a different road. They ignore the wails of a threatened tyrant and return from the child different people having been surprised where they found him and what he looked like.
Epiphany is a making clear what God intends for us all along: to seek him, to find him and to enjoy him. We don’t do a lot of enjoying in the church! We worry a lot how to keep it going. BUT! To have a future we need to do far more celebrating of what God is up to. For that to happen we need to make our own journey spiritually. And every day get our focus right.
Tonight the church in my patch that has perhaps had the largest numbers out from the village, our LEP in Grewelthorpe had an Epiphany party. 85 of us enjoyed a concert of village talents, copious amounts of wine (not for me driving home on an icy night) and a huge supper. We ended the concert with while shepherds watched which ends that the work of God has begun - and will never cease. Thanks be to God!
Thank you for reading these daily reflections since Advent Sunday. I’m glad to know people have been reading them! I’ll be back in Lent with a mixture of written and by request some recorded talks will be back! Two of my school friends wrote lovely things about my wittering for last Sunday recorded on Christmas Eve.
Let me finish these seasonal ramblings with the wise Jan Richardson. She hits the nail on the head what the journey we’ve been on and need to make again and again means…
HOW THE STARS GET IN YOUR BONES
Sapphire, diamond, emerald, quartz: think of every hard thing that carries its own brilliance, shining with the luster that comes only from uncountable ages in the earth, in the dark, buried beneath unimaginable weight, bearing what seemed impossible, bearing it still.
And you, shouldering the grief you had thought so solid, so impermeable, the terrible anguish you carried as a burden now become— who can say what day it happened?— a beginning.
See how the sorrow in you slowly makes its own light, how it conjures its own fire.
See how radiant even your despair has become in the grace of that sun.
Did you think this would happen by holding the weight of the world, by giving in to the press of sadness and time?
I tell you, this blazing in you— it does not come by choosing the most difficult way, the most daunting; it does not come by the sheer force of your will.
It comes from the helpless place in you that, despite all, cannot help but hope, the part of you that does not know how not to keep turning toward this world, to keep turning your face toward this sky, to keep turning your heart toward this unendurable earth, knowing your heart will break but turning it still.
I tell you, this is how the stars get in your bones.
This is how the brightness makes a home in you, as you open to the hope that burnishes every fractured thing it finds and sets it shimmering, a generous light that will not cease, no matter how deep the darkness grows, no matter how long the night becomes.
Still, still, still the secret of secrets keeps turning in you, becoming beautiful, becoming blessed, kindling the luminous way by which you will emerge, carrying your shattered heart like a constellation within you, singing to the day that will not fail to come.
—Jan Richardson
from How the Stars Get in Your Bones: A Book of Blessings
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