Epiphany: Open to the Light

Isaiah 60:1-6

January 6, 2013

There were two short videos circulating around the social network right before Christmas. You may have seen them. One, published by the New York Times, was a series of still photographs set to haunting piano music. The pictures were taken from an third-story window overlooking a New York City sidewalk where someone had set a piano out to be picked up by trash haulers. The photos, screened without comment, showed a random series of folks stopping to check out the old piano. Some plunked its keys. Others tried to push it along. One young couple clearly wanted to take it. They played it. Pushed it. Walked around it trying to figure out how they could get it home. Then they left it. In the wee hours of the next morning, a group of men came at the piano with crowbars and sledge hammers and smashed it to bits. Later on, the young couple returned. This time with a piano dolly, only to find the instrument scattered in pieces all over the sidewalk. The video ends with them walking away sadly, leaving the otherwise empty sidewalk.

I’ll tell you about the second video a bit later.

But first, as we begin a new year together, I want to reflect briefly on the one just past.

A little less than one year ago, session gathered for our annual planning retreat day and we adopted an ambitious agenda for the season we’ve just lived through together. We said that we wanted to create together a more vibrant congregation.

Now a few of you may be more than a bit tired of the word “vibrant.” I’ll grant you that!

But we said back then that we wanted, in the year that lay ahead of us, to clarify our congregational mission, to discern a model of ministry appropriate to that mission, and to redeploy our staffing resources accordingly.

It’s tempting to stand up here this morning and go all George W. Bush on you and proclaim, “mission accomplished!”

Well, we all know how that worked out so I think I’ll avoid the temptation.

Indeed, we are Christians and today is the day of Epiphany. Taken together, those two facts ought well to remind us that the mission is never fully accomplished, and that the vision always shines brightly before us calling us on toward an unfolding future of God’s imagining.

In the meanwhile, we do the work that is before us, trusting that the present moment and the unfolding future belong to God, and trusting that we have been given the gifts that we need for the moment that we have.

I began pondering this morning’s sermon last month, on a particularly foggy morning when I couldn’t see a block in front of me much less see a future unfolding over months and years to come. I was walking past the construction site out there on Irving St. and it struck me that the workers scurrying around the site probably did not have, at that – or any given moment, a perfectly clear vision of precisely how their present task would work into the finished building.

Indeed, at that point in the project most of them were either still clearing earth from the bottom of the pit or building the framing into which the foundation would be poured. Moreover, the way construction works, a lot of the guys working on this part of the project won’t even be around to see the finishing touches. They all remain a long, long way from finished.

That’s where we are this morning: a long, long way from finished, but beginning, step by step, to see some fog lifting, some near-terms plans unfolding, some hopes beginning to be realized.

Joseph and Mary weren’t even at that stage when the magi came calling with their strange tale of following a star and their intriguing gifts. It’s easy, and fairly common, to mock those gifts – gold, frankincense and myrrh. We’ve heard the joke – if it had been wise women they would have asked for directions and brought practical gifts.

But Martin Smith, an Episcopal priest, suggested a while back in Sojourners that the gifts of the magi are more down-to-earth practical than we might imagine. Smith writes, “The Son of God appears as a poor child at risk in just those ways that millions of children are today. The Magi’s gifts are not exotic luxuries, but practical relief aid. Mary and Joseph need financial help. A cramped peasant’s house, with animals crowded on the other side of the manger that divides the single room, stinks of their excrement. The baby has a rash because the manger is crawling with fleas. The wise men are wise enough to offer money, fumigation, and medication.”

With simple gifts, the magi help to transform a marginal and tenuous existence into something just a bit more sustainable, and with the vision to see danger just ahead they help to ensure that this child will grow up to share his gifts with the whole world.

It’s probably not too far from accurate to say that the existence of any small, mainline Protestant congregation in North America is marginal and tenuous these days, but we have been given incredible gifts – among them the imagination to cast a vision for a future otherwise that we can share with the whole world: imagine a world where everyone is welcome at the table, where everyone has enough to eat and to prosper, where everyone lives in shalom.

That future otherwise is the light that shines before us. We can live in it and live into it, if we but have the vision to use well what we find right before us – as available as a cast-off piano on the sidewalk. If we do what we can with what we have where we are in this very moment, that future otherwise is not only possible, it is assured because God is calling it forth and God will not be mocked.

Of course, we can, if we choose, ignore the gifts or abuse them. We can smash the piano to smithereens. Or … or we can do something beautiful with very, very little.

So, I told you that I’d seen two videos. The second video, which I happened to see the day after I’d seen the first, is a very short documentary – less than four minutes. It tells the story of the landfillharmonic symphony – a group of young musicians from a slum in Paraguay. Their homes are built in, on and around a landfill. Their instruments are made from trash. Among the first musicians shown is a 19-year-old named Juan who plays a cello constructed from an oil barrel, a meat tenderizer and what looks like a 2x4. He plays a piece from Mozart with such beauty that it brings tears to your eyes.

If the life of Christian faith is about anything at all, it is about this: finding new life where only death seems to reign. We are a resurrection people. We trust that a light shines in the darkness that the darkness shall never overcome. Epiphany celebrates the light, and the moment when our eyes are opened to see the gifts we have been given again for the first time.

Arise, shine, for your light is come! Live into that light. Amen.