Thomas G. Long - "The Irony of the Epiphany" (January 6, 1991)

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Pastor	Today is the 6th of January.	0:18
	The Twelve Days of Christmas were over yesterday,	0:21
	and today is known, in the calender of the church,	0:28
	as Epiphany.	0:30
	Now, in the churches in the East,	0:32
	on Epiphany they commemorate	0:34
	the day that Jesus was baptized.	0:36
	But, in churches in the West,	0:39
	ironically,	0:42
	we commemorate visitors from the East.	0:43
	Let us hear the story of that	0:47
	as told by Matthew.	0:49
	"In the time of King Herod,	0:55
	after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea,	0:57
	wise men from the East came to Jerusalem,	1:01
	asking, "Where is the child	1:07
	"who has been born King of the Jews,	1:09
	for we observed his star at its rising,	1:12
	and we have come to pay him homage".	1:15
	Well, when King Herod heard this,	1:20
	he was frightened and all Jerusalem with him,	1:22
	and, calling together all the chief priests	1:25
	and scribes of the people,	1:28
	he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.	1:29
	They told him, "in Bethlehem of Judea,	1:35
	for so it has been written by the prophet,	1:39
	'And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,	1:42
	'are by no means least among the rulers of Judah.	1:45
	'For from you shall come a ruler	1:49
	'who is to shepherd my people Israel.'"	1:51
	Then Herod secretly called for the wise men	1:57
	and learned from them the exact time	2:00
	that the star had appeared.	2:03
	Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying,	2:05
	"Go and search diligently for this child,	2:07
	"and when you have found him, bring me word,	2:10
	"so that I may also go and pay him homage".	2:12
	When they had heard the king,	2:17
	they set out and there, ahead of them,	2:19
	went the star that they had seen at its rising	2:21
	until it stopped over the place where the child was.	2:24
	When they saw that the star had stopped,	2:30
	they were overwhelmed with joy.	2:32
	On entering the house,	2:35
	they saw the child with Mary, his mother,	2:36
	and they knelt down and worshiped him.	2:39
	Then, opening their treasure chest,	2:43
	they offered him gifts of gold,	2:45
	frankincense, and myrrh.	2:47
	And having been warned in a dream	2:49
	not to return to Herod,	2:52
	they left for their own country	2:54
	by another road.	2:57
	This is the Word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God)	3:00
	As you heard a few minutes ago,	3:09
	in Nancy's very gracious introduction,	3:11
	I am a Professor of Homiletics,	3:14
	which as some of you probably know	3:18
	is something of a fancy term	3:20
	for people who teach preaching in a seminary.	3:22
	That means I have a very unusual job.	3:27
	I and my colleagues have	3:32
	as a great part of our task	3:35
	walking into the classroom, sitting down,	3:36
	and listening to students' sermons.	3:39
	Lots of them.	3:43
	Four, five, six, sometimes as many as eight sermons	3:45
	in the course of a single day.	3:49
	My teenage children think	3:52
	I must have the worst job in all the world.	3:53
	The reason why we listen, we homileticians,	3:58
	to so many sermons is that	4:01
	we are trying to help men and women	4:02
	who are preparing for the ministry	4:04
	to get a little more comfortable	4:06
	with doing this awkward and intimidating thing	4:08
	that even now I am haltingly trying to do.	4:12
	To stand up here in a pulpit,	4:16
	and to look out at a congregation,	4:18
	and to proclaim the Gospel.	4:21
	Good ministers never feel completely at home here.	4:25
	A number of years ago,	4:33
	I was at the meeting of the Academy of Homiletics,	4:34
	that's the professional society of homileticians,	4:37
	people who teach preaching.	4:41
	We meet every year,	4:42
	just before Christmas, in December,	4:44
	and this particular year,	4:46
	one of the members of the academy	4:47
	had agreed to show some of his slides	4:50
	one evening to the academy members.	4:53
	His hobby is making photographs	4:55
	of religious art masterpieces.	4:58
	He's proud of his collection.	5:01
	He wanted to show us some,	5:02
	so we agreed to watch.	5:04
	Because it was near Christmas time,	5:06
	he had selected slides that dealt with	5:08
	the birth of Jesus.	5:11
	Seated directly in front of me	5:14
	was one of the senior members of the Academy,	5:16
	a homiletician near retirement age.	5:19
	God only knows how many sermons	5:23
	he had listened to in his career.	5:26
	And, to tell you the truth, it showed.	5:29
	(congregation laugh)	5:33
	His body sagged and drooped,	5:34
	he was near the end of a semester,	5:38
	near the end of a career,	5:40
	and he had the slightly jaded look	5:42
	of one experiencing sermonic battle fatigue.	5:44
	He had heard it all before,	5:50
	and once or twice too many, thank you.	5:53
	In fact, when I saw him there,	5:56
	he reminded me of Kierkegaard's remark	5:58
	about a certain religion professor,	6:00
	that his faith was so weak,	6:03
	it was like tea brewed from a piece of paper	6:06
	which had lain once in a drawer	6:09
	next to a teabag that had already been used	6:11
	three times.	6:14
	(congregation laughs)	6:15
	Well anyway, the lights were lowered	6:18
	and the slideshow began,	6:20
	and there, flashing on the screen,	6:22
	was one extravagant and lavish masterpiece	6:24
	after another.	6:28
	Click. There was the shepherd	6:30
	hovering over the terrified peasant girl, Mary,	6:32
	announcing the dreadful and wonderful news	6:35
	of her pregnancy.	6:38
	Click. There were Bruegal's dark and somber colors	6:40
	as the crowd jostled in Bethlehem.	6:44
	Click. There was Rembrandt's shepherd standing	6:47
	slack-jawed in amazement over the manger,	6:51
	his face illuminated	6:53
	not so much by the lantern he carried,	6:55
	but the face of the Christ child.	6:57
	Click. There was our story,	7:00
	the story I just read a few minutes ago from Matthew,	7:02
	the story of the visit of the Magi,	7:05
	and there they were on camels,	7:08
	dressed like oil sheikhs,	7:10
	Neiman Marcus gifts in their hand,	7:13
	following the blazing blue star in the cold night.	7:15
	As one picture flashed on the screen after another,	7:21
	the man in front of me became	7:25
	increasingly more animated and alert.	7:27
	His body tensed forward.	7:30
	And when the portrait of the wise men	7:34
	appeared on the screen he turned around,	7:37
	and in the white light of the projector,	7:40
	his face was the face of a child.	7:43
	And he said, to me, I suppose,	7:46
	I was the nearest one,	7:47
	but really to the room at large,	7:49
	"My God! What a fantastic story."	7:51
	I think old Matthew would have been pleased,	8:00
	don't you, that once again,	8:02
	the retelling of the story	8:06
	had broken through the crust	8:08
	and the religion weariness of one	8:11
	who had heard it all before	8:14
	to inflame his imagination and his heart	8:16
	once again with wonder.	8:20
	I think sometimes our deepest problem	8:24
	with growing in the faith	8:28
	is not the fact that	8:29
	we have not heard the Gospel,	8:30
	but precisely that we have heard it,	8:32
	and we have heard it, and we have heard it,	8:35
	and we are weary with its telling.	8:39
	It has worn its grooves on our ears.	8:42
	"God was, in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself."	8:48
	Yes, I know, we've heard that.	8:53
	Click, next slide, please.	8:56
	"Unto you is born this day, in the city of David,	9:00
	"a savior who is Christ the Lord."	9:04
	Yes, we know, we just put the decorations away,	9:08
	and we've only got 353 more shopping days	9:11
	until we hear that again.	9:15
	We have heard it, and heard it,	9:19
	and we are weary with its telling.	9:23
	A friend of mine tells the story of a man	9:29
	who walked home through a graveyard every day.	9:31
	One day, he happened to be	9:35
	walking through the graveyard	9:36
	when he saw an old man and a little boy,	9:38
	a grandfather and a grandson,	9:41
	standing at a fresh grave.	9:43
	As he walked by,	9:46
	he heard a little bit of a conversation,	9:48
	and realized that they were standing at the grave	9:51
	of the old man's son, the little boy's father.	9:53
	And, in stammering words,	9:58
	the old man was trying to tell the little boy	9:59
	how it is that they could trust God	10:03
	even in the face of such a loss.	10:05
	"I had heard everything	10:09
	he had said before," said the man.	10:11
	"But now that I overheard it,	10:16
	"it seemed to come to me from the outside.	10:20
	"And I heard it in a way I'd never heard it before.	10:26
	"My God! What a fantastic story."	10:32
	I am persuaded that that is precisely the reason	10:38
	that Matthew includes in his Gospel	10:41
	this exotic story of the visit	10:44
	of the wise men from the East.	10:46
	I am convinced that that is precisely	10:49
	the way he tells it the way he tells it,	10:51
	in order to disrupt our religious routine	10:54
	with a word from the outside.	10:57
	The point of this story,	11:01
	if you want to boil it down to a point,	11:03
	the point of the story is that	11:05
	even the Gentiles have come to worship the Messiah.	11:07
	That's the point.	11:10
	Next slide, please. Click.	11:12
	But, wait a minute.	11:16
	Like all works of religious art,	11:18
	it's not merely making a point,	11:21
	it's an expression of a way of being in the world.	11:24
	And when we experience the story	11:28
	the way Matthew tells it,	11:31
	it disrupts us,	11:32
	it invades us from the outside,	11:34
	and inflames our imagination	11:36
	so that we, too, fall to our knees	11:38
	and confess that most basic of all confessions,	11:41
	"my God, what a fantastic story".	11:44
	Let's try a little test to see if that's true.	11:50
	You know the story.	11:54
	How many wise men were there?	11:55
	Well, there were three, of course,	12:00
	everybody knows that.	12:01
	Uh, everybody knows that but Matthew.	12:03
	He doesn't tell us how many there are.	12:07
	We have supplied the number three	12:09
	from our imaginations.	12:11
	What did they look like?	12:14
	Well, when we try to depict them	12:16
	in our Christmas pageants,	12:17
	we dress up our sons in royal purple bathrobes,	12:19
	put Burger King crowns on their heads,	12:22
	give them jars of perfume	12:25
	and cigar boxes wrapped in aluminum foil,	12:27
	and send them down the aisle singing,	12:30
	"We Three Kings of Orient Are,"	12:32
	just as we sang a few minutes ago.	12:34
	Kings? Who said they're kings?	12:37
	Matthew didn't.	12:39
	We have supplied that with our imagination.	12:42
	What were their names, do you know?	12:46
	Well, there was Melchior, he brought the gold,	12:48
	and there was Caspar, he brought the frankincense,	12:51
	and there was Balthazar,	12:54
	he was black, you may remember,	12:56
	and he brought the myrrh.	12:58
	In our imagination,	13:01
	but not in Matthew.	13:04
	As one of the leading New Testament scholars	13:07
	on this text has said,	13:09
	"The pious imagination of the church	13:10
	"has been hyperactive on this story."	13:12
	But we should not be embarrassed about that.	13:14
	As a matter of fact, we should understand	13:17
	that the story invites it, demands it.	13:19
	It wishes to disrupt our religious routine	13:22
	by inflaming our imagination	13:26
	and bringing us to the place that we say,	13:28
	"My God,	13:32
	the Gospel is a fantastic story."	13:35
	In one of Woody Allen's movies,	13:43
	he plays the part that he usually plays,	13:46
	a slightly intellectual,	13:50
	somewhat neurotic New York Jew.	13:52
	In the movie, he falls in love	13:57
	with a Diane Keaton type woman,	13:59
	a woman who could not be more different	14:01
	from him, ethically or culturally.	14:03
	She is a Midwestern Protestant princess.	14:06
	As the relationship develops,	14:10
	it becomes time for him to meet her parents,	14:12
	and so at Thanksgiving	14:16
	he reluctantly follows her home	14:17
	to meet her mother and her father	14:21
	and her grandmama.	14:23
	And there he sits,	14:25
	at the Thanksgiving table,	14:27
	in a whitewashed WASPish home,	14:28
	being passed the Thanksgiving ham,	14:32
	as the table hums with conversation	14:35
	of the Republican Party and the Episcopal Church.	14:39
	In the middle of it,	14:44
	using a photographer's trick,	14:45
	the director Woody Allen allows us to see	14:48
	how this New York Jew is feeling inside.	14:51
	Suddenly he grows the beard	14:55
	of a rabbi and forelocks.	14:58
	Suddenly he is wearing a wide-brimmed	15:01
	rabbinical hat and a prayer shawl.	15:03
	There he sits,	15:06
	in the Republican heartland of the	15:08
	midwest, WASP, Episcopal country,	15:10
	the ultimate, ultimate Jew.	15:13
	Reverse that story,	15:19
	and that is precisely what Matthew is trying to say.	15:21
	Into the Jewish heartland,	15:27
	into the promise of Israel	15:30
	come Gentiles.	15:34
	Not just the Gentiles down the street	15:36
	that we all know in Jerusalem, mind you,	15:38
	but Gentiles from the East.	15:40
	Not just the familiar Gentiles	15:44
	that hang around the synagogue	15:46
	that are sort of half-Jewish anyway, you know.	15:47
	Oh my Gosh, no, astrologers!	15:50
	"Old Testament, we never heard of it.	15:54
	"What's your sign?"	15:55
	These are the ultimate goyim.	15:58
	And into the insiders' religious routine	16:04
	comes the disruptive experience	16:08
	of that which is new and strange and foreign,	16:12
	so that even those who thought they knew it all	16:17
	are re-infused with the wonder:	16:22
	"My God, what a fantastic story."	16:26
	God will not let us allow	16:33
	the sediment of our religious weariness	16:38
	finally to obscure our hearing of the Gospel.	16:43
	The Lutheran pastor Edmund Steimle	16:50
	was once the minister at a little church	16:52
	in the Lower East Side of New York.	16:55
	He had in his congregation a woman	16:58
	who had emigrated from Germany.	17:01
	She and her husband operated	17:02
	a little tailor shop in New York.	17:04
	They did not emigrate	17:08
	from Germany willingly, however.	17:09
	As a matter of fact,	17:12
	although she was Lutheran,	17:13
	he was Jewish,	17:14
	and he had been turned in to the SS	17:16
	and they had to flee Germany.	17:19
	Who turned him in?	17:20
	His wife's brother.	17:23
	His own brother-in-law.	17:26
	One day Steimle	17:29
	was visiting them in the tailor shop,	17:30
	went to see her.	17:32
	She was not in, but he was in,	17:33
	so Steimle had a conversation with him.	17:34
	And he'd started to go	17:37
	when the old man said, "Wait, just a minute,	17:38
	"Pastor Steimle, I have a question.	17:40
	"We have just received a letter from my brother-in-law.	17:42
	"He is now old and sick	17:48
	"and he is asking for money.	17:52
	"My wife, she says no.	17:56
	"Me? I say yes.	18:02
	"What do you say, Pastor Steimle?"	18:08
	Steimle said, "I couldn't say anything.	18:13
	"We Lutheran are supposed to be	18:17
	"the specialists on grace and forgiveness,	18:18
	"and here, this one from the outside	18:23
	"was teaching me what forgiveness is all about."	18:28
	My God, what a fantastic story.	18:34
	So look,	18:41
	I know what the religious self-help manuals say.	18:44
	They say that in those inevitable dry periods	18:46
	in our spiritual life,	18:50
	in those inevitable times when the routine	18:51
	and the weariness of our faith has set in,	18:54
	we ought to be about doing spiritual aerobics.	18:57
	More prayer, more Bible-reading,	19:01
	more worship, more, more.	19:04
	Maybe so.	19:10
	But I think this story tells us	19:13
	that we ought also to keep watch	19:16
	for those wise men and women	19:20
	who come from the East,	19:25
	from the outside,	19:28
	from the unexpected,	19:30
	from the surprising,	19:32
	to remind us of what the Gospel is all about,	19:35
	and to bring us to the place	19:39
	that we even can say,	19:40
	"my God, what a fantastic story".	19:42
	When Doctor Elizabeth Kübler-Ross	19:49
	was doing her research on terminal patients,	19:51
	she assembled a crack medical team.	19:54
	Nurses and physicians,	19:57
	they combed through the hospital	19:59
	interviewing terminal patients,	20:01
	recording every blip on the electrocardiogram,	20:03
	every feeling, every mood.	20:06
	It was going into a study of scientific precision.	20:08
	One day, however, Dr Ross began	20:13
	(sound cuts out)	20:15
	had just cleaned up their hospital room.	20:27
	On a hunch,	20:32
	she stopped the maid in the hall that day,	20:33
	and said "what are you doing with my patients?"	20:35
	The maid was frightened, defensive.	20:39
	"I'm not doing anything with them," she said.	20:42
	"No, no," said Dr Ross.	20:44
	"I'm not here to scold, I'm here to learn.	20:46
	"Sometimes when you're with the patients	20:48
	"they become very peaceful.	20:50
	"What are you saying to them?"	20:52
	The maid turned and said,	20:56
	"the people in those rooms are dying.	20:59
	"You know, I've lost two babies on my lap,	21:03
	"and I have needed Jesus in my grief,	21:08
	"and I have found that he is always there.	21:13
	"I tell them that.	21:18
	"You know, I ain't afraid of death.	21:21
	"And I think, when I tell 'em that,	21:24
	"they aren't so much afraid of it either."	21:27
	And then, taking her mop and her bucket,	21:31
	this wise woman from the East	21:36
	turned and walked down the hospital hall.	21:40
	She, from the outside,	21:47
	having brought into rooms of despair and death.	21:50
	the word of a Jesus who bears our pain	21:55
	and carries our sorrows.	22:00
	That's the Gospel.	22:04
	My God, what a fantastic story.	22:09
	(organ music)	22:22

Item Info

Title:

Thomas G. Long - "The Irony of the Epiphany" (January 6, 1991)

Description:

Sermon start time: (Part 1) 00:18. Sermon end time: (Part 1) 22:17.
The deepest problem with growing in our faith is not that we have not heard the Gospel but we have heard it and have become weary of it. But the gospel has a way of coming to us from the outside, from without, from strangers, and disrupting our religious routine. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: "But we should not be embarrassed by [overactive imagination in response to the gospel]. As a matter of fact, we should understand that the story invites it, demands it. It wishes to disrupt our religious routine by inflaming our imagination and bringing us to the place that we say, "My God, what a fantatsic story!""

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4m61c49s

Date:

January 6, 1991

Speaker:

Long, Thomas G., 1946-

Liturgical Calendar:

Epiphany

Biblical Book:

Matthew

Chapter and Verse:

Matthew 2:1-12

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-0521
ref8890_4d3
uachapelsermaud
duke:320802
dcrau001388
ark:/87924/r4m61c49s
0390d3ea-1946-4f6e-a13d-ae1349c20538

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

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This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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