Lost in the Pageantry

As a child growing up in South Carolina, I knew well the story of Wise Men following a star to visit the child who was born king of the Jews. I knew next to nothing about Epiphany, however. For me the Wise Men were just one more facet of the Christmas story, one more layer to the pageantry that went with that celebration.

I know better now, although I'm not sure I know quite what to do with Epiphany. Perhaps it's still too connected to seasonal pageantry in my subconscious mind. It's still too much about elaborately attired gentlemen presenting gifts to the Christ child while the congregation sings "We Three Kings of Orient Are."

I suppose the Christmas itself has something of the same problem. The story is so bound to the pageantry that the meaning gets lost sometimes. And as Christmas has become a bigger and bigger event on both Christian and secular calendars, the pageantry has gotten bigger and bigger to match.

I wonder what we would make of the birth narrative in Luke or the Wise Men story in Matthew if we had never seen a crèche or a Christmas pageant or a nativity display on a church front lawn. If we had never heard any Christmas carols or gone to a Christmas Eve candlelight service, would the stories strike us differently?

Neither Mark nor John see the need to tell of Jesus' birth in their gospels. And I doubt that Luke or Matthew anticipated the impact of their brief narratives connected to Jesus' birth. I suspect that they saw these stories as ways of turning our attention in a particular direction. In both gospels, Jesus is connected from the outset with people we might not have expected.

In Luke the shepherds connect Jesus with the bottom tier of society. In Matthew the Magi connect Jesus with religious outsiders. In the Epiphany story, all the religious folks have somehow missed the heavenly announcement of a king. Only these foreigners, these members of the wrong religion, seek the king of the Jews. And when we read the rest of Luke and Matthew, we discover that Jesus has come for the bottom tier and for outsiders. It's the insiders and the rich and the good religious folks who can't make sense of Jesus, who don't like Jesus, who ultimately kill Jesus.

Religions of all stripes is prone to pomp and pageantry. Our pomp and pageantry are often inspired by the stories of our faith, but they can also obscure the stories themselves. Pomp and pageantry are not all that well suited to messages of subversion and revolution, and the stories the gospel writers tell are very much about subversion and revolution. Jesus comes to proclaim a way very much at odds with the ways of the world. That's no less true for our world than for the world Jesus was born into.

I do enjoy the pomp and pageantry of Christmas/Epiphany. But what I really long for is a deeper connection to the subversive, revolutionary Jesus, and to the subversive, revolutionary ways he calls us to embody.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.