Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

January 2, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Don’t Despair: Put Your Loves
and Your Longings into Action

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 72:1–7, 10–14
Matthew 2:1–12

January 6 is Epiphany. Every year, Epiphany falls on the sixth day of January. It is the day after the Twelfth Day of Christmas, if you count Christmas as day one, as many Christians do.

An epiphany, in general, is a sudden intuitive understanding of the meaning and import of something. When you have an epiphany, you suddenly see something in a new way. A clarity erupts. The lightbulb clicks on.

The Christian holiday of Epiphany is the day we celebrate the revealing of God, the revelation of God, through the incarnation of God in the infant Christ. Some Eastern Christian traditions call it the Theophany, the appearance of God.

Christ is born, and the magi, wise ones, the magic ones, come from different countries and cultures to encounter for the first time and to honor Emmanuel, the Incarnate God in Christ.

Traditionally these magi have been called kings, in part, probably because of Psalm 72, from which we just heard “May all kings fall down before him.”

The term magi probably comes from an Old Persian word for the astrologer priests of Persian Zoroastrianism. Our English word, magic, comes from this same linguistic root, meaning “to be able, to have power” (www.etymonline.com).

Tradition holds that these magi were from Persia and from the African country of Ethiopia and from India. Some traditions say that one of them was from China or that one was from Arabia. Since no number of magi are named in the biblical story, some Eastern Churches say that twelve magi came to honor Jesus. They came, as scripture does tell us, from the east or, more literally, from the rising, meaning the direction of the rising of the sun (the east).

Similarly, the star they saw and followed—they saw at its rising, or they saw it in the east. In translation we miss some of these beautiful patterns and parallels in the storytelling.

This story, like many stories, gives us a glimpse into human existence, human ways of being. Something momentous has happened. Something new has been seen. A new journey has been taken, and it’s an adventure of seeking and hoping.

Some people, the wise ones, the magi, celebrate when they follow the star to where it stops. Their joy is exuberant. The magi were overwhelmed with joy to find the infant Jesus at home with his mother.

But others, like King Herod, were less happy. He and “all Jerusalem with him” were shaken. I never noticed this in the story before. I remembered that Herod was frightened, and it seems clear that he was frightened about losing his own power, his own kingship. But all Jerusalem was frightened with him?

Perhaps they were afraid of the reaction of the Roman Empire to a king that it had not approved and had not appointed and did not control. Would the Romans come to Jerusalem to crush the new king? Perhaps the people of Jerusalem were afraid of potential conflict between competing claims of kingship between this new infant king and Herod. They might have been afraid of Herod himself and Herod’s reaction.

To be afraid in an unfamiliar situation is a normal thing. Healthy even. Fear can protect us. It can give us a warning and alert us to the need to respond. But how we process our fear and what we do with it is everything.

Do we examine our fears, questioning our motives, testing our reactions against our own moral commitments?

Or do we allow it to change us into oppressors ourselves, becoming violent, lashing out, blaming our fear as though we have no choice, no control of our own actions?

Fear is a healthy and natural thing if we examine it and understand it, if we stay in charge of our choices and actions. Fear becomes a problem when we let it drive us, when we let it control us.

Herod let his fear drive him. He allowed his fear to turn him into a tyrant. We know what happens next in the story, just a bit further on in the biblical telling.

Taking a cue from the Egyptian pharoah who tried to kill Moses by ordering all Hebrew infants killed, King Herod orders all the toddlers under two years old in Bethlehem to be killed. In this way, he thinks, he can kill this newborn king and maintain the status quo in which he, Herod, has power and dominance, to some degree.

But we also sense the reverberations of the Roman Empire encouraging King Herod’s fear, making him feel vulnerable to the Empire’s own crushing and controlling actions. I wonder if Herod felt free, or if he felt constrained. Did he feel that he had choices? And the people of Jerusalem, did they feel free? Did they even sense the possibilities of joy and hope that the magi felt?

In this Epiphany story about the appearance of a bright new star, the incarnation of God and the birth of new hope, about the visitation of the wise ones, we also hear of Herod’s fear. and we know what is coming.

We want Epiphany to be a day when we see the Christ child in all his glory, the Prince of Peace, born to save the world. We want it to be a day of great celebration; a day of gift-giving; a day of wisdom and community as wise ones gather from different countries and cultures and converge in recognition of Christ, in honor of God Incarnate, gathering with a spirit of generosity.

And we do see that in many places, in many traditions, in many of our own hearts. We celebrate the star, the hope, the revealing of God, the nearness and presence of God in human form.

And part of us wants to dwell in that dreamy world of hopefulness, with no conflict and no fear and no anger and no hate. But that is not the fullness of the life that we have. We have a life in which violence plays a role. We have a life in which the fears of some create death and havoc. We have a life in which our very mortality creates pain and sorrow and loss.

A fearful king, embedded in a system of domination, may do great damage. And sometimes we cannot prevent that damage. There are things we cannot control, but there are things that we can control. First, we can resist despair. We can repel it from our hearts and minds and souls and choose love instead. We can choose to love God and neighbor and self with all our hearts, minds, and soul.

That is what Joseph and Mary did when they whisked Jesus away to keep him safe. That is what the magi did when the followed the star to the source of their joy. They did not despair; they did not let fear control them.

First they chose love and possibility. And second, they put that love into action. Their connections, their relationships became the source of their power, and they used that power to achieve their goals. Mary and Joseph had goals of survival and protection rooted in compassion and love for their son. And the magi had goals of giving honor and giving generously, rooted in gratitude and respect.

Their strength to persevere came through their emotional ties, through their loves and their longings. They listened to their intuitions and to their own dreams. They would not give up. They were committed, even devoted to each other. And they made their love tangible in the physical world. Their feelings powered their actions.

Social emotions are the emotions that bind us to each other. They can give us strength, perseverance, and creativity. They can be a doorway to inspiration and insight when we listen to them. Our social emotions, our connections and our care for each other can help us overcome our fears and walk away from despair.

In this extended season of pandemic, we all have many griefs, each of us with our own unique configuration of losses, not all from the pandemic. Some are just from being human. Some among us have lost loved ones. Some have lost our health. Some have lost some of our youthfulness. It happens to all of us. We have lost homes and jobs. Someday we will lose our lives.

Humans lose things. This is the fragility of human existence. This is the vulnerability inherent in mortality. Loss changes us. Grief changes us. The very disorientation of perpetual change around us changes us.

This perpetual change also has within it a perpetual power of creativity. As things change, we are recreated. The shape of our lives changes. The map of our social connections is redrawn. The tenor of our emotional experience shifts.

Our life today is different from our life yesterday, and it will be different tomorrow. And yet at the deepest center of our existence is an exquisite invulnerability of the Soul.

Here we all are, embodied Souls. And what an amazing gift we have received. This day. This life. The capacity to love. The capacity, perhaps, to experience color, sound, scent, taste, touch. We have the gift of feeling the breeze caress our faces; to feel the prickle of cold, winter air; to feel the warmth of sun on the tops of our heads. We can experience the satiation of drinking a tall glass of water when we are thirsty or the relief of being wrapped in a warm blanket when we are cold.

These are all gifts. These are just a few of the gifts we have. You each can make your own list. Without life we would not have any of these beautiful human things.

Jesus entered into this amazingly vulnerable existence, this experience of perpetual change and perpetual creativity, in order to teach us how to live, how to be human. He teaches us how to overcome our fears and how to walk toward love, not toward hate.

Through his life and his ministry he teaches us how to be connected by compassion, how to be generous based on gratitude, and how to be strong, rooted in love. And through his death and resurrection he teaches us of the exquisite invulnerability of the soul. Death is not the end, but only the next re-creation of our life with God.

We are learning how not to despair. We have to practice and practice and practice this. It’s sometimes called resilience. We are learning how to receive the gifts of life, the gifts from God and the gifts from all the wise ones in our lives.

January 6 is the Day of Epiphany, but every day can be a day of epiphany. Every day we can listen to our dreams and see the dangers around us. Every day we can look for the things we can control, and we can make choices based on our social emotions, our commitments and connections to each other.

Every day we can choose to go home by a different route. We don’t have to return to the treacherous king. We don’t have to give the king what the king wants. We don’t have to maintain the status quo or return to the way things used to be. We can try a new thing.

Jesus is our hope. Jesus entered human vulnerability to show us a way through it. Not around it, but through it. Through poverty, through sorrow, through illness, through death. We can find our compassion, we can affirm our generosity, we can remember our gratitude, and through all these things strength will come to us.

Finding Jesus under a star, we can follow him and serve as he served and love as he loved. We can go with him even to the cross and the tomb and still resurrection grabs us and pushes us into new life. When we go home that way, we get to a home where we really want to live.

So don’t despair. Put your loves and your longings into action. Listen to your dreams. Follow that star. And may you be filled with overwhelming joy, exuberant joy. May it be so. Amen.