One morning, in 1979, the phone rang in my father’s office at the University. Do you remember those rotary phones made of heavy black plastic? It was one of those.
“Please hold for a long distance call…”
The person on the other end of the line was in New York City. It was Don Shriver, the president of Union Theological Seminary. After a few pleasantries, Dr. Shriver got down to business. He offered my father a position as a tenured professor at the most prestigious seminary in the world. Without consulting anyone, Dad accepted the job on the spot.
This was like jumping from little league, to the starting line-up of the Red Sox, skipping all the farm teams and the minor leagues. Dad, who was a religion professor in a University in a forgotten corner of New Zealand had, with this one phone call, moved to the top of his field.
It goes without saying that, as far as my Da;s career was concerned, this was great development…
But for his son Mark… it was… less great.
Mark was twelve years old.
If you happen to be twelve years old, there was no better place in the world to be, than that forgotten corner of New Zealand.
My dog ran down the street and jumped on me when I came home from school.
There was a tall pine tree in the front yard – my roost, in the uppermost swaying branches, was an easy climb.
A brook ran through the fern darkened gully nearby – the glorious landscape of my childhood. I was a great one for rock hopping and snatching crayfish with my quick hands.
I got up before the sun to deliver papers in the neighborhood – a job that earned me three dollars a week.
And it was beautiful.
We lived on the side of a steep hill. A place where you could see the whole world. Down in the valley, the small orange neon sign for a chinese restaurant blinked on at dusk. The distant ocean was a line on the southwestern horizon. To the north, where the neighborhoods trailed off, the wide pastures that opened up were dotted with grazing sheep Eastward from the window of my parents room, the sun rose over sweeping hills that, to my child’s eye, looked like a giant lying down to rest.
When my father told us all the news, everyone else seemed to be excited to leave.
New Zealand was so far away from everything else in the world.
But I was unsure.
Since I was the youngest child, I kept quiet. They must all know something that I don’t know.
Right?
**
We are less than two weeks into the calendar year, but we are now into the third act of the church year. The liturgical year begins on the first Sunday of December with the beginning of Advent. The second season – short but momentous – is Christmas, our celebration of Christ’s birth.
The third season of the church year, which began last Monday, on January 6th, is named Epiphany after the classical Greek word epipháneia which means to “shine upon” or “appear.” The root verb phainein, was used by the ancient Greeks to describe the rising of the sun, which is a revealing metaphor I think, since, by coming up and “shining upon” the world, the sun makes things that are present, but not visible, “appear.”
I like to think that, like the rising sun, Christ shed a light on the world – a light that allowed certain truths, that had been obscured by the darkness of injustice, to “appear” with a new and particular clarity.
Or we could think of the metaphor in another way.
Rather than Christ himself shining like the sun, Christ could be the one who is being shone upon. In this reading of the metaphor the “shine” of epiphany is God’s light bathing Christ with blessing – making Christ, and Christ’s teaching, appear more clearly to us.
In either case – whether Christ is the source of light, or Christ is being lit up – the “shine” of Epiphany is surely intended to reveal the new thing – the good news – that “appears” as Jesus.
**
As anxious as I was about the massive change that was about to happen to me, my parents told another piece of news that made things even more frightening.
As it turned out, circumstances had conspired to make it necessary for me to travel from New Zealand to New York by myself.
My parents were distraught about this. They certainly didn’t want me to make the journey unaccompanied, but they had no choice. Why, you ask? To this day, I don’t know. I just know that it couldn’t be helped.
My father would take me to the gate in Auckland, and my mother would meet me at the gate at JFK – but I would have to do the rest of the journey alone.
My mind reeled.
Could I do it?
There were 6000 nautical miles of Pacific ocean that separated Auckland from Los Angeles!
6000 miles of open sea.
The world suddenly stretched before me, a terrible, fathomless unknown.
I also had to navigate a 4 hour layover at LAX – get to the right gate, and board another plane to cross the continental United States.
More than 24 hours in the air and a scary airport…
all by myself!
**
The Epiphany season is named for the “shining” metaphor that is at it’s core – the “appearance” of Christ.
Epiphany is built around a narrative – a story that provides context and structure for this metaphor. The story tells of the Magi who make a pilgrimage to pay homage to the Christ child.
These Magi – also known in our tradition as the Three Kings, or the three wise men – come from distant lands.
They did not get on a plane.
This story is set in a time when there was no such thing motorized vehicles of any kind.
Tradition depicts them as riding on Camels. There were camels. But these camels were not equipped with a GPS… Were there even maps? If there were, they were few and far between, and probably terribly inaccurate.
So these Magi too were knowingly wandering into the unknown.
How did they know where to go?
The story tells us that they followed a bright star that had appeared in the heavens.
Another “shining.” Another “appearance.”
So…
The meaning of our metaphor deepens.
Epiphany is also a journey…
A journey that teeters in the unknown… but is rescued by the appearance of a light… a shining beacon, that leads us to the most important thing of all…
The divine.
**
Some memories remain clear regardless of how many years flow under the bridge.
Now, at 59 years of age I can still see my father waving goodbye to me as I sit down at the gate, waiting for the plane to board.
It is the day I left New Zealand forever. I am 12 years old.
47 years ago.
He waves goodbye to me.
I wave back.
He knows that I am a frightened little boy.
And I can see that he is a worried father.
Our lives are journeys. Sometimes we are afraid. Sometimes we are worried.
I watch him as he turns and walks away. After a few steps he turns and waves again.
I wave. I try to show a brave face.
We are at the beginning of a journey.
But I will go on alone.
Teetering into the unknown.
**
A few days ago, I spent some time following the news reports from Los Angeles.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Drone footage showed entire neighborhoods reduced to ashes.
A woman spoke on camera as she stood looking at the place where her home had been the day before.
“We just had our family over for Christmas dinner,” she said. “Now it’s all gone.”
She reached up and covered her chin and mouth with her hands.
“We’ve lived here for twenty-five years,” she said.
In another video, a young mother spoke.
“Our home is gone. Everything we own is gone. My kid’s school is gone. My children asked me ‘what are we going to do now?’ I wanted to tell them something, but I couldn’t tell them anything, because I don’t know. I don’t know what we are going to do.”
These people too…
They are teetering into the unknown.
If our lives are a journey, there are times when things go terribly wrong.
On this, the first Sunday of Epiphany, we ask…
Where is the light that will guide these people? These people who have lost everything?
**
The man next to me in the plane asked me if I was travelling alone. When I answered that I was, he offered to help me. When we arrived at Los Angeles International, he made sure that I made it to my connecting flight.
So, as it turned out, there was nothing to fear.
When I arrived at JFK, I quickly found my mother’s face in the crowd at the gate.
It was still dark as we were driven into Manhattan. My new home was on the eleventh floor of a building that looked east across Harlem, the East river and Queens.
Bleary from the flight, I looked out the window at my new world.
The sun rose, red through the haze above Queens.
The subway, that comes out of the ground at 123rd street, rattled by.
There were no sheep to be seen.
**
There is something that I have always wondered about the Epiphany story.
According to the story…
When they saw that the star had stopped, the Maji were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage.
The story is quite clear that it was the star that led them to the house where Jesus lay.
But when they came into the house, what did they see? They saw a mother with her child.
Isn’t this normal, everyday thing to see – a mother holding her baby?
The logic of the story led them to Mary and Jesus – but when they found the mother and son, there was nothing extraordinary about them.
What it comes down to, I suppose, is that they just knew.
They just knew. Even though what they were looking at was nothing all that special, they just knew that they were in the presence of the divine.
We cannot claim with any certainty, that all the people left homeless by the fires in Los Angeles will be given a light to guide them back to safety. We cannot be sure that a kind man will guide them to their connecting flights. We cannot be sure that, even if they are brought into the presence of the divine, that they will even recognize the grace that has been given to them.
We can only say that we believe there is something mysterious in the way that the world is made that allows such guiding lights – such kind strangers – such divine revelations – to occur.
And maybe we, with our small gifts of love, can help that Divine light appear.
and
Help it shine.
Amen