Matthew 2:1-12

It’s around this time of year, as the hectic pace of the holidays dissipates, the long, cold winter nights really start to get to me. Here in Ohio, the sun is setting around 4:30pm and its at about that time that the comfort of my warm bed starts calling my name. Somehow each day, I can convince myself that I’ll just escape the darkness by hibernating through it, dreaming it away until the light of spring comes again. 

Light is easier to figure out than darkness. It’s warmer. It’s more comfortable and more certain. Our western, masculine, and triumphalistic understanding of Christianity has for so long been popularly understood through this motif of light or what Barbara Brown Taylor calls our “full solar spirituality.” She says, “You can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the benefits of faith, which include a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer.”[1] Daylight is productive, it’s victorious and controllable and that is what I would like my faith to be. And, as we all know, only bad things happen in the dark. But during these short days and particularly long nights of winter, I long to find God in the darkness too. [2]

Our gospel narrative today is driven by people who, as magi, spent their lives fascinated with the gifts they might find in the darkness. And when they did indeed find something, it transformed them. In our Christmas readings, we often give these nutty, magi outsiders a break because they showed up with good gifts but on this Epiphany Sunday we get to sit with them and learn from them. We get to consider that perhaps what makes them so “wise” is their desire to explore the darkness and be transformed by the beauty they eventually find therein. What wisdom do they have to share with those of us who prefer to run from darkness or at least, sleep through it?

Here are a few things we can gather from these students of darkness:

1.) In the dark, paying careful attention and being present long enough to let our eyes adjust is essential. In doing so, the magi found a speck of beauty that changed them.

2.) In the dark, though it so clearly reminds us of our fragility and lack of control, the wisemen sought out the mystery of it, leaned into its uncertainty and cultivated a sense of awe that propelled them on a journey to discover the Incarnate Christ.

3.) In the dark, the wisemen embodied the importance of showing up in this mystery with our whole selves, trusting that though the outcome of their journey was unseen – their bodies needed to be there to experience it.

4.) In the dark, somehow Jesus is there. I have often wondered if that tiny, screaming, baby Jesus met the expectations that the magi had developed on their long journey to find “the child who has been born King of the Jews” (v.2). I know I often wish the vulnerability of Christ away in hopes of a more victorious warrior-type. But there, in the dark, the fragile Jesus, completely dependent on his parents and community to survive, became and remained present with us, though probably not as we expected.

5.) In the dark, it’s best to journey together. Though the classic nativity set depicts three wisemen, here in Matthew, there is no actual count. All we know is that they weren’t alone. They travelled together through the darkness reminding each other of who they were and where they were going.

Though it is often unpredictable, uncontrollable and sometimes even scary, the celebration of Epiphany Sunday reminds us every year to pay attention the other half of our life, the “lunar” side of our spirituality that its rooted in mystery, uncertainty, in the waxing and waining of felt Presence in the dark. May this story of wild magi prompt us linger just a little longer to see what we can find together in the darkness. Because as Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “When we run from darkness, how much do we know about what we are running from? We turn away from darkness on principle, doing everything we can to avoid it because there is simply no telling what it contains. But isn’t there a chance that what we are running from is God?”[3] [1] Taylor, Barbara Brown. “Learning to Walk in the Dark.” New York: Harper Collins Publishers, p.7 [2] This, she contends, is “the gift of lunar spirituality, in which the divine light available to me waxes and wanes with the season…[and] the moon never looks the same way twice.” Taylor, p.9 [3] Taylor, p.57