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Getting Ready for Epiphany

Getting Ready for Epiphany

Last updated on: December 26, 2024 at 1:29 pm by Vance Morgan

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Getting Ready for Epiphany 2024-12-26T13:29:52-04:00 Vance Morgan

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The Feast of the Epiphany is tomorrow, January 6. Let’s get a 24-hour headstart by considering the heart of this unique liturgical season that marks the “coming out party” of Jesus. Here’s what I wrote for the day of Epiphany in my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy.

The gospel reading in all three years for Epiphany is the familiar story from Matthew 2 where wise men from the East, following a star, end up at the house where Jesus, Mary, and Joseph live. For a number of reasons, Epiphany has come to be very meaningful to me over the years, beginning with an unexpected epiphany on a Sunday morning bus trip to church that began with overhearing a public conversation.

It’s the cold mornings that are the hardest. You want nothing more than to wake up in your own place, look out the window, make some coffee, and not have to go anywhere.

They’ve given me ten days. Who the hell can find a place to live in ten days? The only place you can find in the winter in ten days is an abandoned building.

But I’ll sleep anywhere instead of going to a shelter. Some of the people in shelters are nasty. No matter how hard you try to mind your own business, somebody just has to get in your face and then it’s on.

You’re telling me. A lot of those people never take showers, not that I blame them because the shelter bathrooms are disgusting. Animals wouldn’t want to use them.

I sat too close to someone’s backpack one time, and he kicked me.

Not the sort of conversation I usually hear on a Sunday morning. But then I don’t usually ride the bus to church. “It’ll be fun,” I thought to myself. “It will be an adventure.” Jeanne had the car in New Jersey for a work commitment, and I felt like going to church. I spent a half hour on the public transportation website the night before, eventually calculating that it actually was possible to get there from here, but just barely.

As I waited for my bus downtown, I looked inside the terminal. It was crowded with at least one hundred people of various sizes, shapes, ages, and races. Most were dressed in some sort of winter garb, designer or makeshift; I guessed that half of them weren’t even waiting for a bus. A few minutes later as I boarded the bus that would take me ten miles south to church, two gentlemen—a thirty-something and a guy ten years or so older—got on and sat across the aisle.

Before long they started talking about how difficult they found it to preserve a shred of dignity while being homeless. As I eavesdropped on their conversation, I was grateful for my good fortune and blessings and silently asked God to bless them. Please help our elected officials to figure something out. You are a God of love and justice, and these men need a lot of both. Amen—and they got off the bus, leaving me to travel the remaining ten minutes to church in silence.

Since the Feast of the Epiphany happened to fall on Sunday that year, the day’s texts from the Jewish Scriptures were from Epiphany 1, Year A. Psalm 29 says that “the voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire . . . the voice of the LORD causes the oaks to whirl and strips the forest bare; and in his temple all say, ‘Glory!’” Now that’s what I’m talking about! That’s a God who can straighten things out and bring on justice like a flood. Enough with our puny human attempts! But says something very different about the one who is to come, the one who “will bring forth justice to the nations.”

He will not cry or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.

How is someone so gentle that he won’t break a bruised reed or snuff out an almost spent candle going to bring about justice?

Then it dawns on me—a little epiphany, I suppose—that I encountered the bruised reeds and dimly burning wicks of our day and age sitting across from me on the way to church. These were the people I read about in the paper and hear the talking heads screech about on 24/7 news channels, but with real faces and living real histories. These guys actually existed, not as specimens from the social category labeled “homeless,” but as men, exactly like me, who were one day stamped with a special mark by affliction and misfortune.

How to respond? I might begin just by paying attention. Simone Weil writes that

[t]hose who are unhappy have no need for anything but people capable of giving them their attention . . . The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.

In other words, before I try to solve your problem, tell me your story. Justice for bruised reeds and almost-extinguished wicks must begin in peace, gentleness, and silent attentiveness. Various sorts of force have just about finished them off. Any more might be the end.

But who on earth could do this? Isaiah’s answer is disturbingly direct:

I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness . . . I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness . . . See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.

Epiphany basks in the glorious light of the Incarnation, of the divine made flesh. And nowadays that’s me. That’s you. That’s us. Only from that very unpromising source will justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

For reflection: Where are the “bruised reeds” in your life? What would it be like to listen to and hear their stories before trying to “fix” them or “solve” their problems?

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