Reflection on the Epiphany
By the Rev’d. Allison K. Dean
(Read/listen to last week’s reflection here.)
Listen to this week’s reflection here.
The collect for the Epiphany reads,
O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
As I sat down to write this reflection a memory was stirred up. I remember watching an old tape of my pre-school nativity production. I was the star the wise men were supposed to be following. But one little wise man tried to do his own thing. In the video I can be seen putting out my hand to stop him and giving him a bit of a dirty look. I was the star! What didn’t he understand about his one job, which was to follow me?
I’m sorry that video has been lost, because it was funny to watch, and funny to remember now. But I thought about how all of us sometimes act like that little wise man. We see the star, we see signs from God, we read the message of Holy Scripture, we hear his voice in prayer and meditation, but we ignore all of that in order to do our own thing. We only want to follow the star, we only want to go where God wants to take us, if that’s already part of our plan.
The problem is, we don’t really know where we should be going. As we read in Matthew 2, the wise men first went to King Herod’s palace in Jerusalem looking for the king who had been born. This is understandable; we expect kings to be in palaces. But relying on human perspective, acting on human expectations, led the wise men to the wrong place. Just as we end up in wrong places, in wrong situations, because we follow the wrong impulse/belief. Fortunately, God is faithful, and despite the many wrong turns humanity makes, he still leads us on. The wise men left Herod and set out again to find this infant king, “and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising” (Matthew 2:9). The star which was a sign from God.
They followed the star until it stopped where the child was. That is, they kept on moving, kept on following, until they arrived where they were supposed to be. And then, having found Jesus, they were “overwhelmed with joy” (2:10). That’s what happens when we are where God has called us to be and doing what God has called us do. The journey may not always be easy, but the end is worth it all: seeing Jesus face to face. That’s the end we pray for in this week’s collect: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face.
As I close this series of reflections, I pray that we will be like those wise men of old, journeying to see Jesus, determined to encounter him, bringing him our hearts as a gift, committed to serving him all our days, in this life and the next.
I leave you with some words my mother and I wrote as an additional verse to the well-known hymn “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem”,
O Beautiful Star a gift of grace
Helping us all to see God’s face
Just like the wisemen did so long ago
We’ll follow your beam through all our days
Giving to God unending praise
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem shine on.