Here's a sermon I preached back in January of 2007 when I was working at Marquand Chapel, the ecumenical chapel at Yale Divinity School. A little something I came across preparing for the sermon I'll preach tomorrow.
A few days ago, my boyfriend JC said to me,
Emily, I think it’s time to take down the Christmas tree.
I looked at our tree, standing so innocently in the corner,
lights twinkling valiantly, proudly displaying her ornaments.
I pretended I hadn’t heard him.
Emily? he said,
Did you hear me?
It’s time to take down the Christmas tree.
But, I started, I don’t want to.
I like it.
It’s pretty.
This year, for the first time, I got really caught up in the holiday season.
Perhaps it’s because I was the one planning so many of the celebrations this year.
It started way back in November, with a big Thanksgiving with friends at my house. And hardly before we had cleared the dishes, I was on to Christmas. I was busy filling the place with pinecones and candles, building big fires in my fire place to chase away the mid-winter dreariness.
And, for the first time, I got a real Christmas tree.
A big one.
You see, I was very excited because my parents and my sister were coming to my house for Christmas this year, and by the time they arrived the house was practically bursting with Christmas spirit. We spent our time decorating cookies and wrapping up packages. We sang carols on the way to the Christmas Eve service, we curled up with warm drinks and watched our old favorite Christmas movies.
They had hardly left before JC arrived from Chicago, and it was time for New Years, and I was back in the kitchen again preparing for the party, bedazzling the place with streamers and party hats.
It was an extraordinary season, filled with friends and laughter.
So perhaps you’ll understand why I was reluctant to take down my Christmas tree.
With that tree’s departure would come JC’s departure back to Chicago,
the return of my regular, day-to-day routine,
and the understanding that I would not see my family again for at least 6 months…
Everything would just go back to normal.
And I wasn’t really looking forward to it.
This is terrible! I cried as JC and I stripped the tree of her ornaments.
All the fun is over!
And what do I have to look forward to?
Lent!
And terrible weather!
It’s not Lent yet, JC said absentmindedly.
He had become entangled in Christmas lights as he took them off the tree.
It’s Epiphany.
Epiphany, I grumbled.
By this time I was in a very foul mood.
No Christmas Trees in Epiphany.
No Epiphany parties, no hot cider or cinnamon sticks.
No Epiphany carols.
Nothing.
Epiphany, I decided. The season of Nothing.
The Season of Normal.
As it turns out, I was wrong.
These days, it may feel as if Epiphany is a huge let down after the celebrations of Advent and Christmas. But in fact, the celebration of Epiphany pre-dates Christmas. It means: “to show,” “to make known,” “to reveal.” Epiphany is the season of Christ’s presence among us.
James Kasperson and Marina Lacheki, authors of the book These Twleve Days, write,
The stories have now been told. We enter an ordinary time of the church year, a time where the story of God and God’s creating Word need now become present in our day-to-day lives. But things never will be ordinary, because God has now entered the world. We are called to live in an ordinary world with this extraordinary news.
Ah-ha, I thought when I read this.
Epiphany is not the season of Nothing.
Epiphany is a season of challenge.
Of finding God in our lives:
without the Christmas tree
without the glow of the fireplace
without the warm surround of friends and family.
In the Church, Epiphany is about signs.
Signs that God is in our midst.
The season revolves around three primary stories, which we may have heard these past weeks in church, and which we heard fragments of this morning:
The sages coming from the East – God made manifest through a star.
The baptism of Jesus by John – God made manifest through a dove.
And the turning of water into wine – God made manifest through the miracles of God’s son.
These are our biblical examples of Epiphany – a seemingly ordinary moment when God suddenly shines through.
In his work Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, James Joyce writes of his protagonist, Steven Dedalus,
His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, by lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed.
It was Joyce who “secularized” and popularized the epiphany, claiming it not as a Christian season, but as a sudden mystical experience.
For Joyce, an epiphany was a moment like that of Stephen’s:
A moment of significance in ordinary experience.
An ah-ha.
A breaking-in.
Joyce held his epiphanies in deep regard, documenting his own, and even building his literary master pieces from them.
Epiphany – the season of nothing?
The season of God among us.
Suddenly.
In a moment.
A burst of understanding
A glimpse of the face that made us.
A inexplicable knowledge of her love.
I suddenly feel a little less attached to my Christmas tree.
In Ulysses, Joyce writes:
Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent, if you died to all the great libraries of the world…
We can’t capture these brilliant moments of knowing,
but we can remember them – make a record of their happening.
And we should, for they are the moments our faith is built on.
And so, I give you the Epiphany Tree.
It is a little less reliable, a little less obvious than the Christmas tree we are used to.
Just some bare branches in a pot.
And it is our job to make it green – to adorn it with leaves that say simply, “God is here.” “I’ve seen.”
Our epiphanies will hang, small but sure, reminding us of the of the season.
And so, in a moment, please come to the table.
You’ll find these little green leaves, with a hole in one end, and a ribbon.
They’re not ovals, unfortunately, but Joyce had no idea how difficult it is to get paper cut into ovals. So rectangles will have to do.
What we’re going to do, is make little books – for recording our epiphanies throughout the season of Epiphany.
So take as many leaves as you think you might need, and a ribbon, then go back to your seat, and tie them together.
Then, take your epiphany book with you, keep it in your backpack or your purse, and record your epiphanies.
So that we might record this community’s witness, bring your green leaves back to this chapel, to hang them from this tree, which will become greener and greener as the season continues.
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