By the Rev’d Andrew Coyle

Season: Epiphany

Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:1-12 | Matthew 2:1-12

• Here’s a scene:
  • We are in a hall.
    • All the seats have been pulled back around the edges, up against the wall.
    • The hall has been decorated with streamers and flashing lights, but it’s dark around the edges – the seats are in shadow.
• All the light is focused on the empty space in the middle beneath the mirror ball – because that’s the dance floor!
  • Yes, you’ve guessed it!
• It’s my 1983 school social at Berkely Intermediate School!
• But that scene – it could be any time and any hall, perhaps a school hall, church hall, country hall from your own memory.
• And maybe the dynamics are the same as well…
• Everybody’s clustered around the edges.
• Maybe, depending on the age, it’s guys on one side, girls on the other.
• Maybe it’s clumps, cliques, the popular and the not so popular (whatever that means),
  • bunches of people all huddled together,
    • talking, laughing, eyes darting,
    • looking surreptitiously at everyone, at someone…
      • checking out the scene, noticing and being noticed.
  • Or maybe there’s the guys (in particular) leaning back with a studied nonchalance, cool and distant,
    • apart from all that nervous excitement, but there all the same,
      there all the same…
• That space in the middle under the mirror ball is still empty,
  • still empty until some brave soul steps up, steps out, steps over that empty space.
• May I have this dance?
  • Do you want to dance? Dance with me…?
• And then there are two, four, six, eight, twenty, forty, a hundred, two hundred people – all moving together beneath the brilliant light dancing off that shining mirror ball.
• And here’s the thing.
• It’s the same for everyone there – the nervous, the giddy, the reserved and the confident.
• That space in the middle?
  • That’s where everybody wants to be – dancing in the light…
  • That’s where everyone wants to be – dancing together in the light…
    • Free from all the “shoulds” and “oughts” and “don’t” and “cant’s”, all those doubts and worries and fears that separate us from each other, which separate us from ourselves…
    • Free from all those artificial barriers we erect between each other,
• barriers that define a place for you and a place for me, forgetting that in God all are loved and free…
• That’s the promise proclaimed in this vision of the prophet Isaiah when he speaks to the city, Jerusalem:
  • “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you… Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. Lift your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you – your sons and your daughters from far away.”
• It is a vision of celebration and joy, a vision of homecoming:
• Humanity in all its far-flung diversity dances together in the light, in the glory of God, radiant with the knowledge that they are known and loved and that this is their place – in the love of God.
• And in this coming together, in this celebration, there is such an abundance of gift and goodness, God’s commonwealth of peace and freedom, where there is healing and wholeness:
  • “the wealth of the nations shall come to you”, the prophet says, “..
    They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the
    praise of the LORD.”
• The prophet has this vision of people being brought together in joy and celebration, sharing their gifts in praise of God and in celebration with one another.
• And, of course, the gold and frankincense of which the prophet speaks has us turning to this morning’s gospel reading, in which wise ones from the east come to Bethlehem in Judea, drawn by the light to the Light.
• And here we see an echo of the promise proclaimed by Isaiah,
  o here we see perhaps the first fulfilment of that promise:
• Magi coming from the east.
  • These are not Jews.
    • They are foreigners,
      • outsiders.
• And yet they are drawn by the light in the sky to the light of the world,
  • Jesus, the human face of God.
• They come bringing gifts,
  • responding to the abundance of God’s gifts by laying before God
    their own possessions,
    • laying before God their lives.
• Because in Jesus, they find their destination.
• In Jesus they find what they are looking for.
• In Jesus they find a place, their place, their home.
• Whether it is beneath the light of that ancient star, or the light of that not so ancient mirror ball at my school social, the purpose of God is to draw us together from all our diverse and distant places to celebrate our essential unity as beloved children of God.
• Today we celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, or, to give it it’s full name, The Epiphany of our Lord Jesus Christ.
• And on this day we celebrate our understanding, our awareness, our own epiphany that God’s love knows no bounds.
• There is no one beyond the pale,
  • no one who must remain in the shadows,
  • no one who has not been invited,
  • no one who is not welcome in that space beneath the mirror ball, beneath the star,
    • dancing in the light.
• All of us get to dance in that light.
• All of us get to know that we are loved by God, treasured by God, called by God to extend that invitation to others and to be agents of God’s love in the world.