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A Sermon for DaySpring
By Eric Howell
“Epiphany Sunday”
Matthew 2; Ephesians 3
January 10, 2016
The visit of the wise men to the child Jesus was told in the gospel of Matthew, and
from there found a home in our hearts. Who can resist the idea of these majestic
travellers following a mysterious guiding star to Bethlehem? As their billowing
robes flow, they one by one kneel at the side of the baby, as servants before their
king. They present to him evocative gifts, suggestive of glory and possibly of death.
Then they depart with an act of subversion against the sitting king.
It’s such an intriguing story. Another intriguing story I think I’ve mentioned before
is the one in which Fred Craddock preaches about the wise men. It was his first time
preaching. Let me say this: the first time preaching is absolutely terrifying. You feel
the weight of what you are about to do. It’s audacious that you would hold the Bible
in your hand and proclaim the Word of God with your own words. It’s exhilarating
and petrifying. I still remember my first sermon years ago and it still brings a cold
sweat to my forehead. Those poor people. (I’ll leave it to you to determine how
much solidarity you feel with them.)
Preaching is never for the faint of heart and a preacher never gets over the sense of
awe standing at a pulpit when it is time to preach God’s word to God’s people. You
hope the gift you bring is worthy of the king of kings, but as you set it down at his
feet, you see how flimsy your offering really is. That he accepts it at all is terrific
grace. That’s true no matter how long you preach.
That first time though . . .Fred Craddock’s pastor gave him the opportunity to preach
at a mid-week service just after Christmas. He reflects, “I was frightened to death. I
prepared what I could, and I said what I could. It wasn’t long, it wasn’t eloquent, and
it wasn’t full of substance, but I got through it. Almost. Near the end of my
presentation, whatever the subject was, I said something about the visit of the three
wise men. No sooner had I said that, than a man in the back of the room, an elderly
man, stood up and said, “What gave you the idea that there were three?”
Indeed. The Bible doesn’t say three. So where does that idea come from?
Where do many of our widely held ideas come from? Well, that’s a bigger question.
For poor Fred, preaching his first sermon, cut him some slack. Matthew’s story does
tell about three gifts—gold, frankincense and myrrh. That seems like a clue, though
the Eastern Church often pictures twelve wise men. And the tradition of the church
builds on that by giving them names: Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. We even sing
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about them. The song taught from children’s Sunday School onward is not, “We the
kings of indiscriminate number.” No no. It’s “We three kings of Orient are, bearing
gifts we travelled afar. Field and fountain, moor and mountain following yonder
star.”
More broadly we might appreciate how the threeness of scripture is interwoven into
so very much from Genesis to Revelation. In Genesis three visitors come to
Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, bearing the gift of a prophetic birth announcement
for Sarah.
Three disciples are taken with Jesus up the Mount of Transfiguration. Jonah spends
three nights in the belly of the fish. Jesus spends three days in the belly of the earth.
In Revelation, “holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was, and is and is to
come” sing the angels in threefold doxology. And, of course, we know our God as
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God, in three persons, blessed Trinity.
None of those manifestations of threeness have anything directly to do with the
Bible trivia question of how many wise men came to Bethlehem, yet they do suggest
how a Bible reader, shaped by the church’s traditional stories and song, inferring
from what little we’re told in the story, hearing the ever present drumbeat in the
biblical background -- three, three, three -- would in all likelihood, and quite
reasonably repeat the unquestioned assumption: there were three wise men.
Until someone stands up and asks, “Are you sure that’s what the Bible really says?”
Craddock says, “Well, I was absolutely dumbfounded and silenced and frightened. I
was glad to get out of there and glad to get home. I had serious doubts about going
into the ministry. What a painful thing it was, his stopping me in the middle of my
sermon and questioning the three wise men.
“I looked it up in the text again, and sure enough, I couldn’t find any indication that
there were three. I know tradition says three based on the fact that there were
three gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But in my wiser years I now understand
that if there had only been three, they weren’t very wise, crossing that desert with
all the bandits and marauders behind every sand dune and at every oasis. Not wise
men, if only three.” (Craddock Stories, Kindle loc 948)
It’s so interesting to me how in that story the preacher made an assumption based
on what he thought the Bible said and discovered on closer reading that it didn’t say
what he thought it said. Was the church wrong about the interpretation? Quite
possibly not, but that old man in the back of the sanctuary that day had some
wisdom too: read closely, question your assumptions sometimes, and speak softly
and humbly about things about which you are not assured. Then, it’s interesting
that Craddock, as he himself became an old man, perhaps after seeing the Middle
East with his own eyes, read the story with new insight and shifted perspective.
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He saw the familiar with new eyes. Those changes in our understanding are
sometimes called conversions or light bulb moments, or lightning strike moments if
they are big ones: that experience of knowing one thing, and then, click, knowing
another. Seeing the world one way and then, splat of lightning, seeing the world a
different way. Light bulbs, lightning . . . epiphanies. That’s the word the church has
for new revelation. Epiphany.
Into the darkness, light shines.
I saw in a mirror dimly; now I see face to face.
I was lost but now I’m found; I was blind but now I see.
Faith meets deeper understanding. I now know the truth and I am set free.
God’s love for you washes over you in a time of pain and need.
The most important way the word is used is the salvation coming for all humanity,
Jews and Gentiles. The arrival of the foreign wise men (however many, let us say),
signal and symbolize that the gospel incarnated into this world in Jesus Christ is for
Jews like his momma and daddy, Mary and Joseph, and for the whole world,
Melchior, Balthazar, Caspar, and you and me.
“This is the awesome reality of the incarnation. God became man; the two natures
were neither confused nor divided; and the revelation prepared the way for another
unity, for the Gentiles to be joined with God’s people Israel.” (Amy Peeler,
Commentary on Eph. 3:1-12)
“I understand that God shows no partiality,” St. Peter says much later. The favor of
the Lord is for all people in every nation who fear him. “The same Lord is Lord of
all,” writes Paul in Romans 10, “bestowing his riches on all who call on him, for
everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
In Galatians, St. Paul declares, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have
put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, there is no
male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This revelation shouldn’t be
taken for granted.
It was a dramatic opening of insight into God’s will and heart. It was for Peter on the
rooftop praying. It was for Paul on the road to Damascus. The Jews knew they
were God’s chosen people; what is now revealed is that God’s chosen people are
chosen not from the world but for the world.
St. Paul, in Ephesians, calls it the mystery. The great mystery of the gospel is that
the church is for everyone. Ephesians is about that, how the church is the
embodiment of the Epiphany, how the church is the carrier of the light, the
torchbearers of the good news.
The reading today from Ephesians is one part of a glorious, sweeping call to the
church as the surprising bearers of light of the world. It’s been called a rhapsody on
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Christian salvation (NICNT 229). FF Bruce writes that Ephesians considers the
implications of Christ as Lord over the cosmos for the church as the body of Christ.
(231).
In Ephesians 3, St Paul dramatically unveils the mystery made known to him. He
says, by nothing less than revelation, “when you read this you can perceive my
insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to our ancestors as it
has now been made clear through God’s Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets.”
“This is the mystery: that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body,
and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”
What we take for granted as obvious (after all we are the very same Gentiles),
wasn’t obvious then. Brought into being by Christ was a profoundly new body, an
ecclesia, a church that could bring together all humanity, though all their
differences, into one community under God by the incarnation, death, and
resurrection of Christ.
Delighting in this gift, sharing this gift, St. Paul is changed by the gift. About himself,
he now says in Ephesians: I am a prisoner, a servant, and the least qualified of all the
saints. That’s how he sees himself now, in these three ways. (Of course it is three!)
Preachers, from their first sermon to their last, relate to these identities:
I am a prisoner for Christ. Paul literally was behind bars, suffering for his belief in
the power of the world-altering mystery that had been revealed to him. Many
believers around the world are suffering for Christ in the same way today. Even if
we are not in jail, we are likewise prisoners in our work, in our preaching . . . we all
are willing captives for Christ.
I am a servant. The word is the same as minister. When we preach, from our first to
our last, we are servants of Christ and of the congregation we serve. On our best
days we serve faithfully to both.
I am the least of all the saints. The word there actually means the least of the least of
the saints. The bottom rung, the lowest peg. You often tell me how nervous you are
about doing the welcome or saying a prayer. Let me tell you: most preachers feel
that way when they step behind the pulpit. We honor the moment the same way.
We feel unworthy to unwrap the mysteries of God before God’s people.
Three names we all share with the Apostle: I am prisoner for Christ Jesus. I am
servant by the gift of God’s grace. I am the least of all the saints. With our three
shared gospel-shaped identities given at Epiphany, I’m thinking about this short
ordinary time season ahead of us before Lent begins this year. Through the next
three weeks, our scripture readings take us with Jesus to a wedding where he turns
water to wine, to Corinth where the one body of the church is taught to find strength
in its many diverse members, to Jerusalem where Israelites returning from exile
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heard scripture read and taught, and they wept. And we’re taken to the heart of the
Gospel, the love of God by which all our sermons and lives are tested, “If I speak in
the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a
clanging cymbal.”
Over the next few weeks, through these readings, beginning from the wedding Jesus
attended and where he performed his first miracle, it seems timely to try to say a
few words about weddings and marriage. And church. And love. And sexuality.
And creation and grace. And welcome, and discipline, and community. Together
these are the sources of great joy for many people, of terrible pain for others, and at
the intersection of some of the most vexing issues for the church today, for
Christians: tender-hearted, Bible-formed, careful-thinking, spirit-led, sinners-savedby-grace kind of folks. So we’ll do some of that in this year’s short season between
Christmas and Lent.
I appreciate how Burt, our first pastor, described the role of the sermon at
DaySpring as a voice in the ongoing conversation in the church’s life. And so it
seems totally natural to affirm that these words will not be the first spoken on these
matters here, and will not be the last words spoken on them here. Through them, I
pray they are a place where God’s word to you . . .to us . . . may be heard through
them or in spite of them if necessary. As always, nothing any of us says in worship is
bigger than what the Spirit does here among us as we worship. However else we
might be described, preachers and all of us come to worship as prisoners of Christ,
as servants of the gospel of grace, and with the humility of those unworthy of the gift
we have been given. Those all seem especially important in all of this.
Years after his three kings sermon, Fred Craddock was named one of the twelve
most effective preachers in the English language. Yet all the while he never got over
the sense that he was unworthy to be a preacher who wasn’t like those who
thundered with prophetic authority. He always said his voice sounded more like
“wind whistling through a splinter on a post.”
God can use all kinds though, right? God can use the thundering prophetic bold
proclaimers of truth. God can use the protestors always pushing and questioning
from the margins. God can use quieter voices too, even silence as words fall short.
It was possibly Craddock’s silence rather than his words that spoke most to a man
named Frank, the patron saint of the group of men who met Sunday mornings at the
café in Custer City, Oklahoma. That’s another great Craddock story. Frank had an
epiphany. He was 77 years old, a good, strong man, a pioneer, a rancher and farmer,
and a prosperous cattle man too. He was born in a sod house. He had his
credentials, and all the men there at the café considered him their patron saint, “Ha!”
they said, “Ol Frank will never go to church.”
Craddock says, “I met Frank on the street one time. He knew I was a preacher, but it
has never been my custom to accost people in the name of Jesus, so I just was
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shaking hands and visiting with him, but he took the offensive. He was not
offensive, but he took the offensive. He said, ‘I work hard, I take care of my family,
and I mind my own business. Far as I’m concerned everything else is fluff.’ You see
what he told me? ‘Leave me alone, I’m not a prospect.’ I didn’t bother Frank.
“That’s why the entire church, the whole town and I were surprised, and the men at
the café were absolutely bumfuzzled when old Frank, 77 years old, presented
himself before me one Sunday morning for baptism. I baptized Frank.
“Some of the talk in the community was ‘Frank may be sick. Guess he’s scared to
meet his Maker.’ All kinds of stories.
“But this is the way Frank told it to me. We were talking the next day after his
baptism, and I said, ‘Uh, Frank, you remember that little saying you used to give me
so much: I work hard, I take care of my family, and I mind my own business?’
“He said: ‘Yeah, I remember I said that a lot.’
“I said: ‘You still say that?’
“He said: ‘Yeah’
“I said: ‘Then what’s the difference?’
“He said: ‘I didn’t know then what my business was.’
“He discovered what his business was—to serve human need.” And so Craddock
baptized Frank. “I raised my hand and I said, ‘In the presence of those who gather,
upon your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, and in obedience to his command, I
baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.’”
(Craddock Stories, KL 960).
Copyright by Eric Howell, 2016