The Mystery Revealed

Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

Paul writes: “Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see the plan of the mystery hidden for all ages in God who created all things.”

Paul had been wanting for some time to visit the small Christian community at Ephesus. From what we know of it, the congregation at Ephesus was made up of some Jewish Christians but mostly non-Jewish Christians. In some early Christian communities there was significant division between Jewish Christians who believed in Jesus and also followed Jewish law and went to synagogue every Sabbath, and non-Jewish Christians who mostly thought that their faith in Jesus didn’t require them to adopt these Jewish practices. Some of Paul’s letters – Romans and Galatians in particular – are addressed to communities where this tension and division was serious. But in Ephesus, everyone seems to have gotten along reasonably well.

For Paul, this wasn’t just a matter of people being nice to each other or people learning how to get along with each other. Paul believed that the whole meaning of the birth and the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus was God enacting and revealing a plan that God has had from the very beginning of creation – a plan to draw all people together into the eternal life of God. And when God carries out that plan, people are not just drawn to Christ as individuals who get saved and so get to go to heaven and experience God’s presence. People are drawn together to each other in Christ.

Even, and perhaps especially, people who wouldn’t otherwise have anything to do with each other. People of different religious traditions who used to think of each other as godless, as totally unworthy of being part of the real people of God, who is us. When these people each start recognizing Jesus as the one who came into the world for me, because Jesus is the one who came into the world for everybody – well, then, how can we not see that we have much more in common that we thought, because Jesus came for both of us. For Paul, when bridges are being built and walls start falling down, and people start caring for each other and acting towards each other as people – this is how you can tell that the work of God is present.

Paul didn’t always think this way. Paul started out, as you know, as someone who thought that no faithful Jewish person could possibly be a follower of Jesus. Paul participated in executions of Christians, starting with Stephen, the first martyr whose story is told in the book of Acts. Paul was not someone who, by nature, had a lot of tolerance for people who had different opinions from his. He was a persecutor, an enforcer of the rules, someone who used the fear of God to keep people in line – until one day, on the road outside Damascus, he had an epiphany.

By the time Paul writes his letter to the church at Ephesus, almost two decades later, Paul the former grand inquisitor is now himself in prison. Because Paul is in jail, he is unable to visit Ephesus in person as he had hoped, so he sends them a letter instead. And in this letter Paul shares with the community of Ephesus his epiphany, his revelation, his insight into the mysterious plan of God revealed in Jesus … 

Paul is not the only one in today’s readings who has had an epiphany. Paul is not the only one who has discovered that God is doing something new in the world and that things that had been hidden are now coming into the light. This is, of course, the story of the Three Wise Men. These are pagans, outsiders, people who are unfamiliar with the Scriptures or with the law of the God revealed in the Scriptures. Their name – in Greek magi, from which we get our English word “magic” – signifies that they are not people of the tradition, not part of the people of God as it would have been understood at the time.

And yet these outsiders, these pagan magicians, they can see in the stars something that the learned scribes and powerful leaders in Jerusalem cannot see. The scholars know all about the prophecies concerning Bethlehem, but they don’t know anything about what God is doing in Bethlehem. The foreign visitors are far more in touch with the fact that something is up, something is happening, God is active and on the move. But they need to come to Jerusalem to learn from the Scriptures where to look, what to look for, how to recognize God’s presence. It’s only when both are put together that the wise men come to their epiphany.

The biblical scholars and the Wise Men. The Jewish and non-Jewish members of Paul’s earliest Christian communities. It’s when the two come together that epiphanies happen.

On this Epiphany Sunday, we always read these texts – the Old Testament prophecies of the coming king who will practice justice and give hope to the poor and the oppressed and all those in need, whose justice and peace will be world-famous, such that all the kings of the world will come bearing gifts, gifts like frankincense and gold. The gospel story of the Wise Men from the East who came to visit the Christ child, the culmination of the Christmas story – God in Christ present and recognized and worshipped by the whole world. And – most often overlooked – this passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, about the plan of God revealed both in the hope for a coming Messiah to do right by those who have been wronged and in the birth of the Messiah at Bethlehem, ignored and even opposed by the powerful and the learned but recognized and welcomed by the outsiders.

This plan of God, “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things,” Paul calls it, has now been revealed to all in Jesus – and Paul sees this plan of God at work in the community of Ephesus as Jew and Gentile, insider and outsider, strong and weak, are brought together in their common humanity shared with the God made flesh in Jesus and raised from the dead to inaugurate the longed-for kingdom of justice and peace. Once there was an Epiphany when three strangers followed the star to Bethlehem and found a child – once there was an epiphany that opened Paul’s eyes on another road. But now there is epiphany every day in the community of Christians at Ephesus who are living the gospel in the way that they treat each other despite their differences.

In this congregation called Epiphany, as we begin this year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two – this is the epiphany that we are invited to have, and the epiphany we are invited to share. I don’t need to tell you how rare it is these days for people who have different approaches to life, people who have different takes on the world, people who have different customs and ideas about the basic things of life – how hard it is right now to find common ground, to build community among people who have differences. That kind of community has always been hard to find, to tell the truth, no less in Paul’s day than in our own. Perhaps after the shared sacrifices of World War II, an older generation in this country was able to find the common ground to build some kind of unity, but even that unity had its important exceptions. And as the last of that generation passes on, from Bob Dole to Betty White, the impulse to retreat into our respective corners is stronger now than it has been in any of our lifetimes.

Paul’s epiphany was that when God took flesh at Christmas in the human being Jesus of Nazareth, God took on humanity – your humanity and mine. And that means for the eyes of faith we have something in common with each other – you and I are both sinners for whom Jesus died, you and I are both created in the image and likeness of God and you and I are both loved by this God more than either of us can understand. You and I are both called to share in the resurrected life of Jesus, and that’s more important than anything else that we may happen to have in common and way more important than any differences between us.  The community made possible by this insight, this revelation, this epiphany – this is what Christmas was aimed to produce. This is the plan that God has had from the beginning, to redeem all of humanity from our bickering and self-centered ways by giving us a new center in Jesus.

And this community, while rooted in our actual face-to-face life together in good times and in difficult times, can exist even when circumstances don’t allow us to be together. Paul was in prison when he wrote his letter to the Ephesians, yet he still saw in their life together an epiphany, a revelation, a manifestation of the love of God who destroys walls and builds bridges and connects us all in Jesus. May we in this coming year have many epiphanies as we come to see Christ present in one another, even in those who are so different from us. 

And may the eternal plan of God to bring creation to completion by bringing all people together in a community not of power but of service, not of scarcity but of plenty, not of hoarding resources but of bearing gifts, not of fear but of love, not of exclusion and condemnation but of inclusion where everyone has a place, even the pagan wise men visiting from the East – may this plan of God become ever more visible and concrete not just to us, but to all of our neighbors through us. May we have the courage to do the work of repentance and renewal and reconciliation that we need to do in order to be a brighter epiphany for our neighbors.