The Star of Bethlehem by Edward Burne-Jones 1890

Christ the Mid-wife of New Life

A sermon for Epiphany 2012
St Peter’s Wellington, NZ
Bishop Richard Randerson
randersonjr@paradise.net.nz

You all know that lovely Christmas card which says: Three wise men? You must be joking! The journey of the wise men, or magi, belongs, of course, to Epiphany, not Christmas, but seeing we don’t send cards for Epiphany, their pilgrimage to the Christ child gets folded in with Christmas. As we did with our Christmas card this year. I imported from the internet the very moving painting “The Star of Bethlehem” by Edward Burne-Jones. The painting hangs in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and is dated 1890.

Astronomers speculate about the star. Was it Halley’s comet, that came by in 11 BC? Or a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in 7BC? We cannot tell, but Burne-Jones’ painting depicts an angel holding the star in his hands, while hovering at the manger a few inches above ground level. Whatever guidance the magi received, they had no doubt it was of God, and responded to the call to seek out the Christ.

Epiphany means manifestation, or revelation, and specifically the revelation of Christ to the gentiles – people of all races beyond Judaism. Christ’s primary mission on earth was amongst his own Jewish people, but always the ultimate purpose of Christ as the light to all peoples was there. This is symbolized at his birth with these three gentile sages coming to visit the babe, foreshadowing Christ’s universal mission to the whole world. Epiphany speaks of the light and the love of God revealed in Jesus for all.

Another perspective on Epiphany is in TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi (a copy can be found at the bottom of the screen)-

- an age when people were restless and dissatisfied with life, searching for a new and deeper truth, expectant that something would happen, like the coming of a Messiah.

Life didn’t lack comfort for the magi (‘summer palaces’), but they were driven by a thirst for something deeper, as our society is today. It drove them to undertake a difficult journey, not knowing the outcome.

The outcome was problematic : ‘were we led all that way for Birth or Death? …. With an alien people clutching their gods’. Here is the same tension of our age: we live in a society where people cling to alien gods, where value is measured in what we can count or own, or in where we stand on the success ladder compared with others. In the words of Isaiah 55: Why do spend you money on that which is not bread, and labour for that which does not satisfy? Return to the Lord, who is still to be found whose thoughts are higher than your thoughts, and whose ways are higher than yours.

Yet the call of Christ is to something deeper, to things of lasting worth, to compassion, to the feeding of the hungry, care for those at the margins, to reconciliation, to life in Christ and life with our neighbour - close to us or far off. Being born again to this new life requires a death to those meaner individual and societal aspirations that bind us.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has asked : “What difference would it make if I believed I am held in a wholly loving gaze which saw all my surface accidents and arrangements, all my inner habits and inheritances, all my anxieties and arrogances, all my history, and yet loved me wholly with an utterly free, utterly selfless love? And what difference would it make if I let myself believe that each person around me is loved and held in the same overwhelming, loving gaze, and that this love made no distinctions of race, religion, age, innocence, strength or beauty?”

That is the message of Epiphany, that God loves us utterly, warts and all, and that that same love holds everyone else with the same intensity so that we are driven out to love everyone with the same love with which God loves us.

So if like the Magi we feel no longer at ease in an old dispensation, and are searching for something new, Eliot reminds us that a new birth is not an easy experience. But Christ is the mid-wife of the new birth, and if like the magi we humbly offer ourselves and our gifts to him, we may be born anew as God’s love is released in us, and through us flows to all people.

Journey of the Magi - T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

A pdf of the above painting, sermon and poem can be found here.