I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,

I love Epiphany.

And I need it so much.

At least as much as I need Christmas, I need Epiphany each year, we all do.

For you see, after we have worked our way through the various stories, and all the legends and myths and wondrous songs and parables of Grinches and Scrooges and Baileys being redeemed and saved by Christmas; and after all of our efforts to recapture – in our individual families and traditions – the love of Mary and Joseph; after all of our yearnings to hear angel songs and believe again that Peace on Earth is God’s will and God’s plan and God’s inevitability; after all of that, at the end of the day, at the end of the season, at the start of a new year, we need the story of the Magi, the Wise Men.

Although, as I pointed out to the children, they were not so wise, there was, I often think, more of the Three Stooges about them then any clear signs of wisdom.

But their story, and this season of Epiphany which stretches all the way into March this year, is the one story, in the whole collection, which speaks most clearly to people like us. For it is the star of Epiphany that provides us with the promises that make life possible for us.

And the first promise is that we belong to God.

It’s easy to forget that in the pushing and shoving of life, at the end of one year and the beginning of the next, when we are so busy, but today, right now we can still look up and ahead and we can see what Isaiah called Israel to see, the promise of a God who says: “I will work with you, and others will watch you and they will realize how they are meant to live. You will be the gift that I give and as you follow me, so they will follow you.”

I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,

And in Epiphany we see that God now has stretched that promise to include some Persian astrologers – followers of a heathen religion that was an abomination to God’s people - gentiles, foreigners, those magi that we place in our little manger scenes, they were the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Hindu of today.

They were us in the story.

What are we going to make of that?

What are we going to do in a culture that is so anxious to fear and hate the ones who are not us, so eager to believe the worst of anyone who is different or unfamiliar, what are we to do when we find ourselves as the outsiders, the different ones?

And not even the first choice outsiders and different ones!

The story of the Magi always humbles me, because I realize that God had a choice on who, outside of the Jews, he was going to invite to the party.

And he didn’t choose my people.

And I think I know why: at the time of the great star that the Magi saw and followed, my ancestors were probably living in huts in Ireland where they grunted at each other, worshiped trees and painted their faces blue.

In fact I still have some relatives who . . . well, never mind.

You see God’s revelation is always directed at those who can appreciate it and share it with others. Hence, the Magi get the star, rather than the Cherrys, and my journey, our journey, to Bethlehem is taken vicariously in the caravan of those infidels.

There is no one else in the story for us to identify with, is there?

All of the others, Mary, Joseph, the Shepherds, even crazy King Herod, they were already a part of God’s people. You and I travel with the pagan Magi or we don’t make it into the story at all. And when we do, we come to the light that God has provided, first in his covenant with Israel and then in the person of Jesus.

I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations

Which brings us to the second promise God makes to us in Epiphany: we don’t just travel to God, we travel with God.

Look at the journey of the People of Israel.

Look at the journey of the Magi.

Look at the journey of Jesus.

What do they have in common?

God was right there with them and they were going somewhere.

I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.

And that same dynamic is there in your faith journey and that same dynamic is there in our faith journey together. God has taken us by the hand.

It is the time of the year when the Consistory is reformed and realigned, it is the time of the year when we speak of the journey we have been on in this place since 1834.

I find that my role is tell stories at this time of the year, to be sure that we all understand that we have come a great distance not only in time but in faith. I tell of saints who struggled and sacrificed so that we could have this place to come and worship together, so that we could have this place to come and sort out the complications and contradictions of life.

And I tell stories of the dreams that so many have shared with me, of where this is all going in the coming years and decades. This is Epiphany, this is the time for us to find and re-find the star and follow faithfully, called by God and accompanied by God, we make our plans as we do each year and look back and see that some came to pass, others didn’t, but, most importantly, other things came to pass that we never would have thought of, things that God surprised us with and blessed us with.

Next Sunday I will be calling the members of Consistory up here, men and women whom God has called to serve. And the nature of their service is this, they are called to get the stumbling blocks out of our way and to provide the opportunities for us to make our journey to be the person and the people that God has created and called us to be.

This is Epiphany, this is the time when God calls us to follow the promise of a star, the promise that we are his and the promise that he is with us.

I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,

And finally there is the promise that where he is taking us will be different, the promise that we don’t have to re-invent the wheel over and over again, that promise that we can build on the foundations that others have laid, and the promise that changes are coming.

See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.

And as we follow the star, there are always some changes looming out there that we can spot. Things that we have anticipated, some with joy, some with fear; and there are others that that will catch us unaware, some of them we are going to love, some of them are going to break our hearts; but there is this constant: as long as we journey, together and with God, we will find our way to the new things even as we fulfill the former things; we will continue to be the light that shines in our corner of God’s world.

For the Magi, who finally earned the title of Wise Men, the change was one of perspective as they heard Herod’s experts tell them where the child would be born:

O Bethlehem . . . from you shall come forth one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old . . .

This is a different kind of wisdom, the wisdom to distinguish Bethlehem, with its promise from Jerusalem with its pretense, the wisdom to worship the one who challenges both the arrogance of intellectuals and the arrogance of the powerful.

And when we leave Bethlehem we can either return to the life of Jerusalem or we can travel another road as we realize that we need to reorganize our wealth and our knowledge and our very lives around a baby, filled with innocence and hope.

Most of us, like the wise men of old or like country singer Johnnie Lee, have been looking for God’s love, in so many wrong places. But the star calls us to follow, to make our mistakes and to adjust and reorganize ourselves.

But understand this, clearly and bluntly, before you promise to follow: the way we go is not toward the security and prosperity of Jerusalam or Washington, it is toward the vulnerability, affection, generosity, and a modest future in a modest place, like Bethlehem or Clover Hill, where spears are turned into pruning hooks and swords into plowshares.

The ultimate promise of the star is that it will change you in ways you can’t imagine and you will never again find peace anywhere but in the presence of the child of Bethlehem.

I was reminded the other night of T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi and his imaging of how the Magi would have told their own story and I have always been struck by the poems final lines:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Births change us and change can hurt and if we are too attached to who we are and what we have, the hurt can run deep. If we follow the star, if we touch the cheek of the baby in Bethlehem, we will never be the same person and all the foolish things of this world will count for nothing, all of the old and worthless values and dreams will die within us, and new and precious promises and dreams will come to us, direct from God.

That’s Epiphany, that’s why I love it and that’s why we all need a season of Epiphany each year in our lives. As John Mellencamp might describe it, it is a love that “hurts so good.”

I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,