Epiphany: Notice God's Light, Find Your Belonging

And the very first thing that we see before Jesus shows up with a sermon, before he does any miracles, he heals anybody, before he calls a single disciple to follow him, the very first thing that happens is we meet a crew of people who are not Jewish. They're outsiders. They don't belong in the story. They're Gentiles. They're foreigners. They're people from outside God's covenant. People who have religious practices that would raise the eyebrows of most of Matthew's core readers. And that these are the very first people that Matthew identifies who intentionally come seeking Jesus, and they come to worship him. Our translator says pay him homage. The language there is they have come to worship. And so Matthew is making a theological statement. [00:29:54] (63 seconds)  #SeekersAreFirst

I often say to people that the very first spiritual practice, the most important spiritual practice that we can engage in, the foundational spiritual practice. In other words, before we can read the scripture, before we can pray, before we can fast, before we can do before we do any other spiritual practice, the most important spiritual practice is paying attention. That's where it begins. [00:33:25] (28 seconds)  #PayAttentionFirst

Learning to pay attention, learning to notice what's happening around me, learning to notice God's spirit speaking inside of me. And these magi notice. They notice that something has shifted. They notice that something has changed. They see an alignment. They see an opportunity. Their curiosity is sparked, and they begin to move, and they travel over distance at their peril to explore that curiosity because they have a sense that something has happened, and they act upon it. [00:33:53] (41 seconds)  #CuriosityLeads

Proximity doesn't guarantee faithfulness. Sometimes, Matthew says, the insiders, the ones who should know, the ones who have been given every advantage are the ones who miss it entirely. Epiphany invites us to examine ourselves. Are we paying attention to God's light? Are we paying attention to what God is doing around us? Are we noticing what God is doing within us? Or are we too busy protecting our own self control and our own our own self interest? So we learn the importance of noticing. We learn the importance of paying attention. [00:36:09] (54 seconds)  #AttentionOverProximity

Matthew's story tells us that the gospel of God's grace is always moving from the inside to the outside, from insiders to outsiders, from included to excluded, from the center to the marginalized. The apostle Paul reflects on this very mystery in Romans 11, and he uses a image similar to the one that we've had in front of us all season. It's the image of a living tree. [00:37:51] (30 seconds)  #GraceFromInsideOut

Not because we've earned it, not because we've replaced anybody, but because God's mercy is expansive. We draw nourishment from a root that we did not plant. We receive life from a story that began long before us. And so Epiphany is a celebration of that astonishing truth. We belong not as outsiders who are just barely tolerated at the edges, but as branches that have been grafted in and are now sustained by the same life giving root. [00:38:45] (41 seconds)  #GraftedInGrace

The movement from an experience of saying you don't belong, you're outside, you're other, to your part of the family. You're in. The Magi didn't belong in Bethlehem. They were Gentiles. They were outsiders. They were of the wrong religion. They had the wrong beliefs. They had the wrong motivations. They had a different language. They had a different culture. They had different dress. They had different cuisine. Everything about them was different. They were not born there. They didn't belong there. And God is saying, yes, you do. You belong to me and you're part of my family. [00:41:59] (46 seconds)  #YouBelongHere

``Whose presence makes us feel uneasy? Who disturbs us? If Christ came so that all may belong, then the church must be a place where belonging is embodied and not just proclaimed. This means going out of our way as the church to ensure that the vulnerable, the marginalized, the overlooked know that they are seen and valued and welcomed. Not as projects, never as a project, not as guests who are on probation somehow, a period of evaluation, but as beloved children of God. [00:45:06] (52 seconds)  #BelongingEmbodied