The light of dawn

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

In the seven summers before I got married I took long backpacking trips in the High Sierras of California.  John Muir called those mountains “the range of light,” and for me, as for him, that name evokes many images in the mind’s eye, memories of cloudscapes and waterfalls, of flowery meadows in the sun, and evening alpenglow on granite towers high above the trees.   And when I hear the words of Isaiah about the dawn, I think of a time my father and I camped amid the rocks above the shore of a small alpine lake.  It was the last night of a ten-day hike, and, as I usually did when the skies were clear, I did not pitch my tent but slept in the open. 

The first time I woke up it was deep night.  There was no moon and it was as if there was no world but the stars, and the light of stars, shimmering like snow on the ground.   When I woke up for good it was the early dawn, and though sunrise was still far off, I felt surprisingly refreshed.  I sat up in my sleeping bag and watched the pale light creep over the sky, slowly stealing away the stars.  In that light, the earth came into view again, a blackness at the jagged edge of the horizon.  On those stark heights a cold wind awakened and blew down through a world of dim shapes and deep shadows.  I sat like that for an hour or more, listening to the silence and seeing the color gradually come back to the earth.  At last, with surprising suddenness, the sun cleared the ridge, flooding the hollow of the mountains with warmth and light, unveiling the beauty of the world’s morning.   

Today the church comes from Christmas, the birth of Jesus under the stable lantern and the starry sky, and arrives at the Epiphany, the breaking out of the Christ-event into the world-at-large.  By the likely date of the composition of the gospel of Matthew, the news of Jesus Christ had broken out of its family of origin, so to speak.  It had spread from Palestine, by the efforts of apostles like Paul, throughout the synagogues of the Jewish diaspora, to Arabia and Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa, and on around the Mediterranean.  Strangely, Jesus’ own people, the Jews, largely rejected the proclamation.  In the main it was gentiles who greeted it with enthusiasm. 

In the synagogues of places like Damascus and Antioch, Ephesus and Corinth, there were a lot of non-Jews, religious seekers of pagan background, who came on the Sabbath to hear the scriptures and to pray to Israel’s God.  To these gentiles the knowledge of that God was like the rising of the sun.  It filled heaven with a light of clarity and peace, that they had never known before.  It revealed the world in its true colors, as a harmonious and unified creation, where every drop of water and every grain of sand came into being together and was sustained by the power of a single loving will. 

But before the sun rises, you’ll remember, there is the pale light of dawn, a light that sharpens the contrast between earth and heaven, and reveals a world of dim shapes and dark shadows.  The God of the Hebrew Scriptures was a god of justice and compassion, a god who hates evil and hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed.  This was not a remote ideal principle of Oneness, like the God of the philosophers.  This was a God who cared, deeply, achingly, for his people, and promised to deliver them from grip of suffering and death.

The Gentiles came to the synagogue and heard that this promise now included them.  They heard that God’s own Son, the anointed righteous king of the Jews, had come.   They heard that he’d been crucified, and every barrier to God’s inclusive love had died with him.   They heard he’d been raised from the dead, to reveal God’s hidden plan of salvation which held a central place for them.  And they embraced this message, and a new community began to form at the periphery of the synagogue, a community in which Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and free persons, sought the grace to live as equal citizens of a new people of God.

 In the eyes of these followers of Jesus, their community was itself a sign that he is the messiah, and that the promised deliverance had begun.   They heard anew the ancient prophecies of the dawning of a new age, when all nations would come and offer tribute and worship to the one true and living God.  In the light of that dawn, they began to hear the scriptures in a whole new way, to see things that weren’t visible before, and find new meaning in familiar stories.   They also told new stories, stories about Jesus.  They repeated things they’d heard about him, the things he did, and the things he said.  They told new converts and new generations about his life and death and as they spoke their imaginations were full of the light of the scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, which were the only scriptures that they had.

Today some of the spiritual descendants of these gentiles, here at St. John’s, along with about 700 other people around our diocese, are beginning a project to read the entire Bible by the end of the year.  Every day we will read three chapters and psalm from the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Old Testament, and one chapter from the New.   Reading in this way, we will restore a connection that has been too often and too cruelly broken, the connection between Israel’s God and the one that Christians worship as his Son.   Our reading will echo the experience of those first gentile believers who came to the synagogue to hear the glorious truth that God is one. 

This is a courageous undertaking.  Not just because the Bible is a long book and a year is a short time in which to read it all, nor just because it takes some effort to understand even a little part of it.   But because it is a book that is full of light.  It contains the light of stars, as when Abram stands outside his tent in the desert night and God says, “look up and count them—so many will your descendants be.”  It is full of the light of evening, and morning, and of that dark hour just before dawn, when the world is a place of dim forms and dark shadows, a light that reveals the darkness of history and the coldness of the human heart.  And it is a book that is full of the light of God, like the glory atop Mount Sinai, which no one can see and live.

But like those other gentiles, the wise men from the East, these adventurers will not set out empty-handed.  They bring something with them.  For one thing, they bring the understanding that not all the world’s light is contained in a book.  The wise men followed the leading of a star, and it is worth noting that it is when they took a detour to consult the experts in biblical interpretation, that they almost ruined everything. 

The wise men carry gifts, and we also bring rare treasures on this year of journeying.  The gift of life experience, of remembering what we have seen, of lessons learned and choices that cannot be undone.  We bring the gift of feeling deeply—hot anger, belly laughter, love, joy, envy, malice, gratitude, world-weariness that sinks into the bones, and every other emotion there can be.  We bring gifts of intellect, and imagination, and wonder—even the gift of doubting that it is true.  And none of us would be daring to take this "Bible Challenge" if we did not possess in some small measure the supreme gift, the gift that makes us shine, that makes us radiant with the glory that has risen over us like the dawn—the gift of the willingness to give ourselves, to offer what we have brought, to lay it down of our own free will, for nothing more nor less than love.