A Sermon for the Second Sunday After Christmas: Epiphany Observance

And entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother,

and the knelt down and worshipped him.

When I got back from Liberia in November, I went on-line to Google Earth, that website that shows satellite photographs of the whole of the globe. With a few clicks of my mouse, I was able to locate the places I had visited; follow some of the rough roads I had traveled, and then zoom out to see their relationship to one another – something that hadn’t always been clear to me when I was on the ground.

How easy it was for me to travel those distances electronically. How much more difficult and time-consuming was the journey of the Magi from “the East” to Bethlehem! Instead of sitting comfortably in a warm house traveling hundreds of miles in seconds on a computer screen, they traveled across the desert on a dangerous journey that must have lasted weeks, at least. What drew them on this pilgrimage, following a star to a little Palestinian village hundreds of miles from their homes? The answer is found in their words to Herod: they have come to worship the newborn King of the Jews. They undertake take this journey because they want to worship.

That the Magi go to these lengths to worship the one whose star they have seen suggests that offering worship is a profound human desire, a deep human need. Only something of great importance will move people to make the efforts and take the risks the Magi do. They go on this arduous journey because offering worship is something that human beings need to do in order to be whole.

Though the journeys we make to get here to worship on Sunday morning are certainly shorter and less risky than the Magi’s, something draws us on. Some desire leads us to get out of bed, get our family organized and moving, even though we might rather sleep in or relax with the paper. The reasons we make our journeys here to worship are many and complex. Habit, tradition , and a sense of duty play their role, as do the desire to see friends and enjoy fellowship.

But somewhere at work in us is also that profound human need to worship, the recognition that in some way worship nourishes the soul and offers us glimpses of wholeness we can find no other way. People talk about this reality by saying that worship gives a sense of peace or comfort, that they feel better for having gone to church, or their week just doesn’t seem right without having been here; that they “get something out of” participating in the service or simply that worship feeds them. All these are attempts at describing the mysterious yet real experience that worship does something to us and for us, something that we need and want. Like the Magi, we journey to worship because worship meets one of the deep desires of the human heart.

Yet if that is true, it is true only because we and our needs are not at the heart of worship -- God is. For all that worship may move or feed us, give us a feeling of peace, wholeness, or comfort, the center of worship is not ourselves or whatever we may receive from it. The center of worship is God. Moreover, it is only because God is the center of worship that worship does something for us and to us.

The paradox of worship is that it feeds and moves us and leads us to wholeness precisely by calling us away from focusing solely on ourselves and our needs and desires. Worship meets our needs by calling us to focus towards an Other, and to see ourselves and our needs in relationship to that Other; that Other, who is at once majestic and intimate, demanding and tender, comforting and challenging, with us, yet utterly beyond us as well.

Worship orients us towards this Other, drawing us out of ourselves, in awed recognition of the One who is the center. Last week, I said that the Christmas story has the salutary purpose of reminding us that God is the center of the universe, not us. Today’s Epiphany story confirms that healing truth. The Magi kneel before the infant Jesus and worship him because they recognize in him the center of all of creation. So also, our worship is the response to and recognition of the presence of the One who is the center of all that is in a way we never can be. And, paradoxically, it is by placing us in our proper relationship to this center, where the focus is towards God and not ourselves, that worship meets our own deep needs and desires, giving us that peace of wholeness or renewed direction that we cannot find on our own.

For as we look towards God in worship, we are drawn away from self-preoccupation, self-justification, self-punishment and all those other self-hyphenated words -- from self-centeredness in its many forms. By drawing us towards God, worship frees us from the great lie, a lie which is also a great burden, that we have to live as if we were the center. Worship reminds us that we are creatures, who don’t have to be perfect or powerful, who can be needy and sinful, because the weight of creation does not rest on our shoulders, because we are not the center of the universe. In worship, we can experience in our guts the truth of a sign a wise friend gave me many years ago: “Do not feel totally, personally, irrevocably responsible for everything. That’s my job. Love, God.” That, of course, is another way of saying that God is the center.

In worship we can discover that passionately as we care about our own struggles and desires, there is an Other, a Center, towards whom we can look, on whom we can lean, who cares more passionately about us than we can ourselves and who gives peace passing human understanding -- when we look beyond ourselves to that Center. We may also discover that what matters so much to us, important as it may seem, is not quite as central to the life of the whole creation as we are tempted to believe. In these ways, by focusing us towards God, worship gives us a changed perspective on our place in the universe: a reminder of the good news that we are not the center, and that the One who is the center loves us beyond our power to imagine. In worship, we find wholeness, in being the creatures we really are, as we look to God who is the center.

Since worship draws us out of ourselves, towards God the center, the central, repeated action of all worship is that of offering gifts to the One whom we worship. It is absurd that we whose whole existence is a gift from God, we who have nothing to give except what has first been given us by God, should try to give anything to God, yet we do so because we must, because only that action tells the truth about who is the center of all that is. The offering of our gifts to God in worship is the outward, visible, sacramental sign of our turning towards God the center. And so the Magi, after they have fallen down in worship before Jesus, open their treasure chests and offer him gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

So, too, in our worship, we offer to God anything we can lay our hands on: the beauty of music, eloquent prayers, words of praise; candles, flowers, vestments, and, like the Magi, incense; we offer, also, our struggles and desires, our delight and our pain, our weakness and our sin. Like the Magi, too, we offer gold, and bread and wine as well -- which are brought from the back of the church towards the altar, the visible center of our worship -- a physical movement that marks our movement toward God the center in worship.

Placed on God’s table, our gifts of money, bread and wine, signs and symbols of ourselves, our souls and bodies, are offered to God in prayer. And then, in a gift beyond our imagining, the bread and wine are returned to us as Christ’s Body and blood, that the One who is the Center may enters into and dwell in us as our center. So we experience again the astounding paradox that in worship our needs are met and our hungers fed -- when we turn towards God the center.

In the Epiphany Gospel, Matthew tells of the Magi’s long journey to find the newborn king, of their joy in worship as they kneel before him, of the fulfillment of their purpose in offering their gifts. However, he doesn’t tell us what happened to these worshippers afterward, whether or how they were changed, fed, or fulfilled by their experience, unless the fact that they went home by another road is a hint that they did not leave Bethlehem unchanged. Matthew doesn’t tell us what happened to the Magi, because, in the end, his focus, like theirs, is not on themselves, but on the one whom they came to worship the center of all that is. That child in the manger is the center towards whom we, too, are called to journey, that we may kneel before him in worship, and to offer him our gifts. Even so, come, let us adore him.

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

January 4, 2009