The reign of God is spread out upon the earth, but people do not perceive it.
Tomorrow is the actual twelfth Day of Christmas, which we call Epiphany – after a Greek word that means a “shining forth” or a revelation.
Some centuries before Christ’s birth, the Jewish people were oppressed by a Hellenistic tyrant who gave himself the title Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He insisted on having his statue placed in the middle of the Jerusalem temple in place of the Holy of Holies; adding to this blasphemy was the insistence that he himself was divine — an epiphany, a manifestation of the gods on this earth.
Modern rulers no longer have to assert in the Divine Right of Kings – even though sone might act as if they had God in their back pocket. And as a result, believers have retrieved the word “Epiphany” for our own purposes on the twelfth Day of Christmas.
The three kings that we celebrate on the Feast of Epiphany have responded to the shining forth of the traditional Christmas star. In the words of a pageant that was celebrated year ago here at St. Alban’s, the kings proclaim: We’ve followed the star. We’ve come from afar. And here we are.
Post-Christmas time is a parade of Epiphanies. The Gospels form concentric circles spreading out like ripples on the surface of a pond. After the sages return, Christ Jesus is baptized in the river Jordan. That’s what we’ll celebrate next Sunday.
Jesus then gathers followers who are attracted to his radiant words and deeds. The shining forth continues in Jesus’ first sermons and first healings, until it ends with the Transfiguration, Christ’s human form glowing outward with light. And three days after the last Sunday in Epiphany, we begin the 40 days of Lent.
The reign of God is spread out upon the earth, but people do not perceive it.
That is a verse from the “Gospel of Thomas” which didn’t make it into the Bible. Maybe Jesus proclaimed it, or maybe it comes from a few of Jesus’ disciples. But I’ve found it to be a helpful way of thinking about progress in Christian life: The reign of God is spread out upon the earth, but people do not perceive it.
Some time back I came across a book titled “The Ingredients”. It’s not a cookbook, but rather a series of stories of some of the elements on the periodic table: I want to share a story about number 79 on the periodic table: GOLD.
Just before the Second World War, two German physicists who had won Nobel prizes gave them to their Danish colleague Niels Bohr for safe keeping.
But after the Nazis occupied Denmark, Niels Bohr now had a big problem. Hoarding gold was a criminal offense, and these prize medals had names on them.
So Bohr and a colleague dissolved the gold medals in an acid, making a colloid (which is a liquid suspension of tiny solid particles — like milk). But these colloids of gold were so dark they were nearly black. So the two liquefied Nobel prizes sat in unmarked jars on a shelf in the laboratory until the end of the war, when they were reheated to recover the gold and recast into Nobel gold medals!
Now my question is this: when the Nobel prizes were in liquid form, were they an epiphany? All the gold was present, but there was no shining forth. These symbols of scientific insight were hidden in plain sight, known to a few. If you or I had seen these beakers, we would never know we were looking at gold.
And yet something in this story calls to me. I see it as a challenge to look deeper, to free myself (at least a little) from my own rash judgments about people and what they are really like underneath appearances.
The reign of God is spread out upon the earth, but people do not perceive it.
No one of us here has to think too long to admit some obscurity in your life: some cloudy mixture that you’re tempted to dismiss as irredeemable, or maybe some person whom you believe will never change, despite your efforts. Even if you can’t change their obscurity, can you believe that God can change them, heating up that dark personal colloid to reveal the suspended gold?
The season of Epiphany lasts for several weeks, and I invite you to watch out for the increasing intensity of revelations about who Jesus is, both in Sunday Gospels and in the rich spectrum of people God has placed into your lives.
But also be aware of the steady growth of God’s presence in your own inner life. It has started with us in a very small way, like infant Jesus, but it gets bigger, starting like a seed of a plant that then begins to grow into a huge tree.
During the season of Epiphany rippling out for us, be attentive to new and surprising ways that God might reach through to you in this New Year.
The reign of God is spread out upon the earth, but people do not perceive it.
