Eve of Epiphany, January 5, 2014;  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of light and love, grant us the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

Happy Epiphany Eve, everyone! Technically, this is the Second Sunday after Christmas Day and tonight is Twelfth Night – when the Lord of Misrule reigns and kings become peasants and vice versa! So it’s not quite Epiphany, and I generally don’t like to celebrate holidays before they arrive, but there is an exception to almost every rule. You probably know by now that pragmatism nearly always trumps idealism for me, and I didn’t think so many of you would be able to come to church tomorrow to celebrate the Feast of Epiphany! So whether you are still savoring the last day of Christmas or you’ve already packed up the decorations for another year, we are all on the cusp of moving from the season when we are called to rejoice in the light, to the season when we are called to show that light or reflect that light in our wider worlds.

Now, because I chose the lessons from Epiphany for this Sunday, we have the odd circumstance of hearing the beginning of Matthew, Chapter 2 a week after we heard the end of Chapter 2. Last week we heard about what happened when Herod figured out that he’d been duped by the travelers from the East. This week we hear the back story – it’s like a prequel in a movie series! “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men – magi – from the East came to Jerusalem.” Astrologers – they were probably Zoroastrians from Persia who were known to study astrology and interpret dreams. The text doesn’t tell us how many of them there were – early church tradition numbered them at a dozen or more. The text doesn’t tell us their gender (just saying). Over the centuries, the magi became known as kings and they became known as only three. However many they were, it’s fascinating that it’s a group of religious outsiders or foreigners who are alerting the insiders to the birth of the great shepherd of the people Israel.

Perhaps this Gospel story is a reminder that church insiders (that’s we who are inside the church right now) benefit by listening for wisdom from outsiders, from foreigners. Episcopalians generally don’t think much of wisdom from outsiders – especially wisdom like astrology. It reminds me that, although there are prohibitions in the bible against practice of astrology, there is a ruin of an early synagogue in the Galilee with a large and elaborate zodiac mosaic in the middle of the floor of the sanctuary. Clearly the prohibition is listed because religious people WERE practicing astrology, and this must have been an area of conflict among religious leaders. In the Celtic wisdom tradition there is a practice of reading from the two books of God – the big book is the universe and the little book is the Bible.¹ When heaven and nature sing, they are singing parts of the same song, don’t you think?²

In case this makes you think that I’m getting too romantic or soft, I will tell you that I have been feeling strangely drawn to Herod the Great, having reflected on him for the better part of two weeks. This Herod was a Jew who was assigned the title of King of the Jews by the Roman Senate in the year 40 or 39 BCE. But he was never a “good Jew.” Upon his arrival in Jerusalem in 37 BCE, King Herod had the whole city council or assembly of leaders (the Sanhedrin) slaughtered so that he could appoint his own people. His decadent and violent life style earned the scorn of devout Jews, and he was widely opposed by Pharisees and Sadducees. His huge ambition resulted in massive building projects, such as the fortresses at Masada and Herodium, the Caesarea Maritima port, and, perhaps his most ambitious project, the great expansion of the Temple in Jerusalem, of which only the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) remains. But he funded his magnificent programs on the backs of those who were poor and was willing to commit all kinds of crimes – even mass murder – as means to ends. Herod’s first move when he felt afraid seems always to have been to annihilate whatever or whomever he perceived to be the threat, even if the threat was an infant born to peasants. Herod seems to have been overwhelmed with fear on a regular basis.

Whether or not this particular Gospel story from Matthew happened, it certainly is true. Herod’s function in this lesson is as the quintessential villain. Whenever his name is mentioned, we should all hiss and rattle our noisemakers.³ Perhaps there are good reasons to dismiss this tyrant, and to distance ourselves from the kinds of evil he represents. The moral of this story might be that skillful and even sly evasive maneuvers are called for in the service of protecting the holy. And yet, I don’t want us to be completely satisfied with that moral. Biblical scholar Douglas Hare wrote something that caught my eye this past week that essentially says, “not so fast.” He wrote, “scoff not at Herod until you have acknowledged the Herod in yourself!”⁴ So that leads me to wonder, what in us gets overwhelmed with fears of loss of power or authority, or respect or control? Is it possible to call out of us an empathic response to Herod? Is trying that good integration or completely foolish and dangerous?

I was pondering this out loud with a friend who was raised Jewish and is now a practicing Buddhist. He does not have much exposure to the teachings of Jesus. And so he asked me in all candor and curiosity, “well, does Jesus have any teachings about how to respond to someone like Herod?” I thought for a moment. “Oh, I said. Yes he does. He teaches, ‘Love your enemies….Love those who seek to do you harm.’” Herod the Great, and then his son, Herod Antipas, were certainly enemies of Jesus. This teaching was not theoretical theology for Jesus. This teaching was lived, embodied, practical theology for Jesus. Two generations of Herod wanted him dead and had the power to execute. I wonder how Jesus loved them.

Maybe you know the short poem, “Outwitted,” by Edwin Markham.⁵

He drew a circle that shut me out –
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

For Jesus, in Jesus, the circle that Love draws can take in even Herod. One of the truths of Epiphany is that even Herod is loved, even the Herodian parts of ourselves are inside of the circle drawn by Love. One antidote to overwhelming fear is empathy. I managed to feel a little glimmer of empathy when I read that one of the really sad stories of Herod the Great is that as he was dying, an apparently painful death, he was very afraid that no-one would mourn his death. (He was right.) His final wishes, which were not granted, were to kill men in the town so that there would be mourners around. There’s hardly anything sadder to me than a death that no-one mourns. We know those kinds of deaths in our own time, don’t we?

We don’t know what happened to the wise ones after they went home by another road. Maybe they were haunted with fear that Herod would hunt them down, but I like to imagine that, having been overwhelmed with joy, rather than overwhelmed with fear, those wise ones would have seen everything more brightly because of the light they carried and reflected.

Robert Fulgham tells a story in his book, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on it, that I’m going to share with you to close this reflection:

When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.

I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light in to dark places where the sun would never shine – in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child’s game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light – truth, understanding, knowledge – is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.

I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world…[and into the hearts of others] and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of [my] life.

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