Epiphany, which simply means the manifestation, is one of the oldest Feasts in the Christian year. This is evident because of the nature of the Feast as these early Jesus-Jews believed that the destiny of Judaism had been fulfilled through the life of Jesus. This means, that through the Jews, God's mercy was going to be extended to everybody. This universality of God's mercy was supposed to be achieved specifically through this Jewish man, Jesus. Thus, they celebrated the manifestation of this to the world and, of course, the text that best exemplifies this is this famous passage from Matthew.

I think that teaching Scripture has all kinds of advantages and one of them is that it helps me and the people I work with to look closer at what the Scripture is all about. This holds especially true for this passage from Matthew in which, for example, the star and the Magi are found. Today, most Scripture scholars believe that there was no star or Magi. (However, sure enough, efforts to locate this star took place on television today as all of the astromomers of the world stood on top of Mount Palomar trying to figure out when, 2007 years ago, there would have been this great astral communion in which all of these stars would come together and glow brightly.) If there was no star then we have to ask ourselves why they made up this story with the star. The answer is fairly easy to grasp: in the ancient world, whenever they wanted to talk about the birth of somebody who subsequently became extraordinarily important in world history they would say that his birth was marked by all of these portents. For example, when Julius Caesar was born there was a description of a great sign in the heavens. When Alexander the Great was born there also was this great sign in the heavens. In other words, they were trying to express their own belief in the significance of this person. Thus, when the author of the Gospel of Matthew created this episode about all of these Gentiles, these non-Jews coming, to see this child who was the King of the Jews, he was trying to show precisely what I have said Epiphany is all about: Everybody, through Jesus, as having access to the mercy of God. And so, they created these stories to express their faith in this occurrence as being the most crucial event in the history of the world. Because now the world, this terribly dishevelled, disconnected and fragmented reality, is going to be unified by the action of God in this man Jesus. As I said, it is useful to think about this because if there was a large star in the sky and if all these weird strangers did show up in Jerusalem, then this would, wrongly, simplify life and the significance of Jesus' birth. But, it would also complicate the matter religiously because then it would make the religious significance of the birth of Jesus less accessible for these people who believed in him: namely, that in this man we detect the presence of God, and God for me and for everybody else.

We all know how readily we float to the surface of our lives and want some kind of spectacle, or some kind of trivial sort of certification, or legitimization of ourselves or what we think is real in the world. It is much more difficult to pay attention, to look attentively for what is real, good, valuable and true. This does not announce itself with all the fanfare and bravura as does, for example, the launching of the Titanic, whether it be the historical ship or this $200,000,000 film.

So, this presents the issue very squarely to us in the form of this question: Where do I find the presence of God in my life? One of the things that comes out of the Scripture is that it is not going to be a particularly notable presence. For example, while thinking about this text from Matthew I was driven back to that famous passage in I Kings, and the whole business of Elijah standing on the top of a mountain. And there is an earthquake, thunder and lightning and he expected God to appear in all of those things. Then suddenly, there was dead stillness. It was in this dead stillness that Elijah perceived the presence of God and I think that this holds true for us also. If you think about, for example, the holidays, who is the person that you have run into who seemed to best embody the patience and the generosity of God? For me, it was a seventy-seven-year-old Scottish Presbyterian lady who walks around with a little black bag with an oxygen container and plastic tubes going up her nose as she sits and talks to you and makes these little honking sounds. This woman radiated this kind of generosity, sensitivity and capacity to listen and respond. Yet, when I saw her walking down the street she looked kind of grotesque as she was slightly overweight and dressed in an unattractive, baggy, black-pant suit. However, there she was, utterly splendid, but in no way remarkable by the normal canons of notoriety in our minds. This leads to one of the last things that we can derive from the Feast of the Epiphany: namely, to question our own sensitivities as to what is important, real and true and our own responses to this.

I think it is true to say that we live in a world where we are battered by impressions that are too loud too, highly coloured and gargantuan in scale. The reason these impressions continue to grow is because we need to have more car crashes and bigger volcano explosions as we are precisely being desensitized. Therefore, the threshold has to be altered because we are so deadened and coarsened by all of this excess. Now, if this is the case, then Epiphany shows us that we are going to have to re-examine our whole sensory apparatus in order to detect what is real, important, good and godly. And this will almost certainly be inconspicuous by every normal standard of assessment. In other words, Epiphany is a chance for us to check our hearing and seeing apparatus, a chance to help us arrive again at what is really true, enduring and godly in ourselves and in our world.