Epiphany! Aha! Eureka! I See!

Isaiah 60:1-6
Matthew 2:1-12


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

January 6, 2008

I ended my Christmas Eve homily sharing the wonderful poem about stars by Ann Weems and how only God can give the gift of a star and, she urges, perhaps God will give us, you and me, a star if we only ask, ask God to give us a star. Now most of us would just settle for a balanced budget, and to lose a few pounds. We’re a little maxed-out on the celestial imagination thing.

However, our religious calendar gives us Epiphany—the appearance of the star in the east. Perhaps as the greens come down and the tree star is packed away, Epiphany is one last glimpse at the potential of a star-gift to guide our lives as we settle down to business, the coming Super Bowl, congregational budget meeting, and ‘what about the Redskins?’ So, while tumbling towards the terrestrial, taking our eye off the celestial, Epiphany, a new star, shows up to guide the wise to the holy infant of all creation.

Now philosophical types, and some artistic dreamers, love this religious day. It’s as if it’s a religious day for thinking types. Not everyone loves the dirty sheep, the manger hay, and the swaddled gynecological mystery of God’s childbirth. More cerebral types like God in astronomy and, also, it’s always good to imagine a time when there might have existed a least three wise men, men who could also all agree to travel in the same direction at the same time!

Stars are beautiful and clean and have light, but newborn baby saviors tax the earthy practical. And, as Goethe says, stars are beautiful because they are so far away and unattainable. I can’t say it in the German, but even the romantic German poet and thinker Goethe knew enough to know that a star in the heavens is a lot more beautiful and desirable than a meteor sitting in your own back yard.

But thinkers, and I’m suggesting Epiphany is a thinker’s religious holiday, thinkers like to think long thoughts, high thoughts.

And you can look at a new star and ask what does this mean? Looking at a baby in a manger more raises the question: “What am I supposed to do now? I’ll figure out what it means later!”

The unattainability, the mystery of stars, leads us to what our Christmas Eve poet said about stars as gifts, gifts from God. When we go from stars as abstract beauty to contemplate, to stars as gifts, a lot of thinkers, philosophers, wise men, drop out of the journey, because thinkers use reason. But a gift is a revelation.

So thinkers easily lose interest in celestial things, especially as January comes and February can’t be far behind. Only the tenacious philosopher keeps on thinking star-thoughts. And when stars are seen as gifts given, not conclusions reached, then we weak-hearted, prone-to-hopelessness people tend to give up on star-gazing, star-hoping, star-praying.

And it is here—at this point—when we give up on hoping for starry things that philosophy turns to religion, that thinking turns to feeling, that looking at a star becomes hoping for a star.

Yet how many of us can keep on feeling hope, especially, as Paul says, hope for things unseen, much less conclude-able, deductible?

Well, my friends, we have in our religion something stronger than that wistful Walt Disney line, “when you wish upon a star your dreams come true.” At the center of our religion the line is “when you love a star you come to know a star; and when you know a star you will love a star: it will become a gift to you.”

Here is how this religious thing works. The artist Van Gogh, who was a preaching pastor to the poor before he became the painter of sunflowers and starry nights, Van Gogh wrote his brother Theo these wise words: “The best way to know life is to love many things. I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, of inward moral, spiritual, and sublime beauty…comes from God…But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend…something, whatever you like…and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith.” ¹

For you philosophers this is knowledge from the particular to the universal. But, philosophers: it is knowledge through love, not knowledge through thinking.

An example. There is a woman who has written a lot about how to be a writer. She talks a lot to English teachers in high schools, especially in urban, challenged schools, about how do you get kids to write? She follows the advice that I first found, I believe, in the novelist Robert Persig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). Pick one thing. Look at it. Study it. Learn everything you can about it and you will have a lot to say, a lot to write about. The example I remember is the kid who said, “O.K., I’ll look at a brick” and the more she looked into bricks the more she learned, and soon she was loving what she learned. She picked up the brick and there were ants on the ground, and chapter two was born!

You see, in the religious life, love and knowledge are not separate things. Van Gogh knew this. Of course Jesus knew it. The great American eighteenth century theologian Jonathan Edwards knew it. To love something or someone, wrote Edwards, is to know it. You cannot know it, religiously, without loving it and coming to love it. Nor can you know more and more about something, some one, about life, without increasing in love for it.

Aristotle said that to look at something is an act of love. That perception is a form of affection. And in fact the root cause of our life problem, our psychological pain, our social violence, is our modern mistake of separating love and knowledge.

What we do here in our religious life, in our worship and prayer, in our ministry and mission, is to renew the star-gazing wisdom of the marriage, the union, of love and knowledge. In the words of the Celtic thinker John O’Donohue, “Most fundamentalism, greed, violence, and oppression can be traced back to the separation of idea and affection. For too long we have been blind to the cognitive riches of feeling and affective depth of ideas.” ²

In our quest and journey, let us love to know stars. Let us know love stars, and in the faith that includes love and knowledge, let us stay still open to God’s starry, starry gifts.

Amen.