Matthew 2:1-12
Epiphany Sunday
My son recently asked me a provocative question. He wanted to know when I first really felt like I was a priest. I didn’t have a quick answer to that. There is a lot of pageantry and hoopla around ordination services, and I remember mine vividly: it was a wonderful event. And certainly celebrating the Eucharist for the first time felt momentous. But looking back, those were not the moments I first knew I was a priest. What comes to mind are other moments, like the time a person with terminal cancer asked me to pray for his healing, while his family gathered around him in tears. Or the time when a woman in her forties committed suicide. He sister just could not bear to tell their mother, and so I went to the mother’s home and delivered the awful news to that elderly woman and then sat with her in the horror of it. Or the time a 16-year-old was in a terrible car accident, and I was called to the hospital, and then called on to bury her a few days later. All of those happened early in my ministry, and I had no way to make any of those situations better. Years of advanced education, a shiny new collar, an ecclesiastical title: none of that mattered at all. All I could do was empty myself of all pretense and power and just love those people. I think those are the times I first learned what it means to be a priest.
It’s lesson I continue to learn and continue to resist, and I can’t help thinking about it as we hear this Gospel today. The story is familiar, but I will remind you this is Matthew’s version of the Nativity: there is no manger, no cute animals, no way to romanticize the story. It takes place in an insignificant town, a baby born to poor parents in a nondescript house. Matthew does not tell us that the wise men are kings — that tradition is extrapolated from Psalm 72 —but whether they are royalty or not, they are clearly men of status and means who come a long way to find this child, and when they do, they kneel before him. And in that familiar but strange scene, we see God. The Holy One empties himself of divine power to become a vulnerable human infant. Those wise men empty themselves of all the trappings of human power to kneel on the floor to kneel before this baby born in a backwater. If we want to know what God looks like, there it is: emptying oneself for the good of others; becoming weak in order to save; giving away power for the sake of love.
Matthew paints the scene brilliantly by contrasting the self-surrender that happens in that house with the self-aggrandizing actions of King Herod. Herod is a brutal ruler who has already murdered his wife and several of his own children in order to maintain power, and who will soon slaughter all the infants of Bethlehem to make sure no other king arises there. He is what people normally think of when they think of human power: he amasses wealth and weapons and everything he needs to secure himself and protect his power and privileges. He is the exact opposite of the God who empties himself of power to become a baby and the wise men who empty themselves of power to pay homage to that baby. The contrast just serves to make the message clear: if we want to find God, we will find her in self-giving, self-emptying acts of love — or not at all.
This shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus spends his whole life undefended and vulnerable, giving his power away by loving, healing, teaching, and building community among people. The cross is just the ultimate expression of that. But we imagine God in glorious terms, and we often think about going up to God: having peak experiences or mountain top moments. The Bible describes a few of those, and no doubt many of us have had such moments ourselves, when we have felt spiritually high and close to God. They’re great when they happen, but in both Scripture and life they are relatively rare. On a daily basis, the way to God does not involve ascending, but descending. We do not go up to God so much as we go down. Because that is what God does: God empties Godself, becomes the least of the least, so that all may know God’s love.
That very reality is embodied in our understanding of the Trinity: the Father pours out power, life, and love into the Son, who does not hold on to any of it but pours it all out on the world by sharing the Holy Spirit. I love that when we baptize people, we pour water on their heads, initiating them into the flow of divine love, the self-emptying nature of God. When we are baptized, we enter into the life of the Holy Trinity. And we experience Christ within us, we experience the Spirit moving through us, we experience God, when we go with that flow and give ourselves away in love.
So if we truly want to experience the power of God in our lives, then we don’t need to look at wealth and success: that is how the Herods of the world may understand power, but it is not how God manifests power. Nor should we just focus on peak experiences, which are few and fleeting. The one sure way to know God’s power is to surrender power and give ourselves away in love. In my early days of ordained life, I learned that is not only the nature of priestly ministry, but the nature of discipleship, the essence of following Jesus. And we all have power. We have power by virtue of being white, affluent Americans. We have education and money and skills. We can use our power to burnish our reputations and bolster our resumes and build up our retirement accounts, but the Lord of all, who gave himself away in the Christ child, calls us to experience the presence and power of Christ within us by giving ourselves away as well. This week, today, we will have opportunities to empty ourselves and give our power away for the sake of love. A catechist once told me that she never feels closer to God than when she is on the floor helping a child discover something new. All of us can find those moments of surrender and revelation. It’s not that we “should” do it: those wise men didn’t have to travel to Bethlehem. But if we really desire to experience the flow of God’s love and power in our lives, then, like them, we will want to do it — because it is the only way.
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