Decentering and Recentering Our Lives

Epiphany of the Lord, Year C
6 January 2025 (moved to 5 January)

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

Now that we stand at the beginning of the Season of the Epiphany of our Lord I may tell you a secret. The secret is that I am not a big fan of Christmas. My family has been wonderful putting up with me all these years, and I try not to be a fun suck, but I don’t always succeed.
My childhood memories of Christmas are wrapped up with pretending we were a happy family, and pretending just made what was so obvious more painful.
Now, I am not alone in finding Christmas a difficult time. Many of us who have lost people we love experience the pain of loss, even while we experience joy. We just can’t separate one from the other. And there are people who suffer from the lack of daylight hours.

The thing with pretending is that it offers no avenue for change. Pretending everything is alright, whether that be at home, at church, at work, or in society, robs you of the opportunity for change because we pretend so we would not have to admit that something is wrong, that something needs addressing. And so, in a way, pretending is more paralyzing than the dysfunction.
I understand why my family had to pretend. Anything else may have unleashed chaos. It’s the thing about the devil we know. Which works in a lot of places, including the way we address the ecological challenges before us. We acknowledge the problem and then pretty much go back to what we know, which is to carry on as usual.

Now the thing with the Gospel is that is is precisely not about going on as usual, though at times it seems that the only people saying this are the preachers at street corners, and they seem concerned only about the salvation of the soul while they are indifferent to body or world. For the rest of us religion is mostly comforting and reassuring.

In our reading from Matthew we see change. We see scholars from a distant land travel away from what they know to a foreign land, to kneel before a child and pay him homage.
We see Herod rattled by the news of a newborn king for any new king would mean a challenge to his power. And we see the centre of power shift from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.

I love the reading from Isaiah. It is poetic, beautiful, and full of promise. It also contains the verse I was given at my baptism.
The reading from Isaiah was appointed for today because it is the text that informed the travel of the Magi. The magi had seen a star, they had travelled to Jerusalem, and they came bringing gold and frankincense.
Matthew tells us about them because in their arrival we see that the birth of Jesus was indeed reason for great joy for all people, including those from far away and those different from us.

But Matthew tells us that they didn’t get the address right. They knocked on the palace door when Jesus was born in a stable. Jesus was not born in Jerusalem, the centre of power, but born in Bethlehem, a small village about 10 kilometres away.
The magi did make their way there but not without first scaring Herod.
They found their way to Bethlehem because Herod, startled by their visit, consulted the theological experts who told him that an obscure peasant prophet had prophesied that it was from Bethlehem (not Jerusalem) that the future of God’s people would come. Matthew quotes the text in today’s reading. We also heard the text on Christmas Eve.
² But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,
who are one of the little clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to rule in Israel,
whose origin is from of old,
from ancient days.
³ Therefore he shall give them up until the time
when she who is in labour has brought forth;
then the rest of his kindred shall return
to the people of Israel.
⁴ And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great
to the ends of the earth;
⁵ and he shall be the one of peace. (Micah 5)

And so we find not only that the reign of this newborn king is a threat to those in power but also that a decentering is taking place. Walter Brueggemann writes, “That text, from the lips of the rural peasant Micah, is the voice of a peasant hope for the future. It is not impressed with high towers and great arenas, banks and great urban achievements. The little ones think rather about a different future, as yet unaccomplished, in a peasant land that will be organized for well-being in resistance to the great imperial threat. It anticipates a common leader who will bring well-being to his people, not by great political ambition, but by attentiveness to the facts of folk on the ground.”¹

The decentering is away from the places of power, and away from the powerful to the people, which is why Micah can say, “… he shall stand and feed his flock … and he shall be the one of peace.”
And that brings us back to the beginning. Do we allow Christmas to decenter us? Do we allow God to decenter us? In the Christmases of my childhood there was no decentering. We worshipped the Prince of Peace yet we did not allow that peace to enter our lives.

This, it seems, is a risk especially where Christmas has become an expression of culture. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas once said that the greatest threat to our faith is sentimentality.²
Reducing faith to sentimentality robs the Gospel of its power. The tragedy of the church is that nine times out of ten for the last 1600 years the church has sided with the Herods and Augustuses of the world.
The Magi, however, save us from sentimentality, for they allow God to uproot their lives, they stop at the places of power only to worship in a barn, they defy hegemons and rulers to protect the vulnerable, in short, they show us a different way.
I believe that the church has always been aware of the danger of sentimentalizing Christmas, which is why we remember Stephen the first martyr on the second day of Christmas, remember the Holy Innocents three days after Christmas, and remember that an angel warned the Holy Family of the violence of Herod which made them refugees in the very land in which their ancestors had been enslaved. And we remember Basil the Great of the 4^th century on the 1^st of January. Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, are known as the Cappadocian Fathers. Basil is remembered for the care of the poor. In a sermon Basil had preached, “When someone steals a person’s clothes, we call him a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry. The coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to those who need it. The shoes rotting in your closet [belong] to the one who has no shoes. The money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”

And so the Magi remind us that in Jesus God has decentered the world and brought change, especially to the church. We can no longer proclaim peace while we do not seek it, nor fail to understand that the peace Christ gives is not the way the world gives peace. (John 14)
The magi remind us that Christmas is not about sentimentality but about change, it is about the meek inheriting the earth, it is about our own decentering. It is about letting Christ rule our lives and rule the Church.

And so we give thanks for the Christmas season, for all the good it brought us, for each other, for light in the darkness, and most of all that God send Jesus to establish God’s reign, with all that that entails.

Amen.