Epiphany: What and Who is Our Guiding Light?

The following is a post from author Frederick Buechner about Epiphany. Epiphany, celebrated on January 6, is a huge feast day in the Orthodox world and many parts of Latin America. It is 3 Kings Day -- in Hartford where I last served with its large Latino population, school was cancelled so all could attend a festive parade.

The season that the Epiphany brings will last until Ash Wednesday. It is a time for opening, awareness, discovery, miracles and wonder. With many of us using the New Year to look at our lives as a checklist and asking what things we might like to improve or change, I hope that we might do so in the spirit of discovery for what God truly desires for us in our lives. The star that drew the Magi to the Christ child was their guiding light. What is ours? Who are we listening to?

Mark+

Epiphany

THE GIFTS THAT THE three Wise Men, or Kings, or Magi, brought to the manger in Bethlehem cost them plenty but seem hardly appropriate to the occasion. Maybe they were all they could think of for the child who had everything. In any case, they set them down on the straw — the gold, the frankincense, the myrrh — worshiped briefly, and then returned to the East where they had come from. It gives you pause to consider how, for all their great wisdom, they overlooked the one gift that the child would have been genuinely pleased to have someday, and that was the gift of themselves and their love.

The foolishness of the wise is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by the way the three Magi went to Herod the Great, King of the Jews, to find out the whereabouts of the holy child who had just been born King of the Jews to supplant him . It did not even strike them as suspicious when Herod asked them to be sure to let him know when they found him so he could hurry on down to pay his respects.

Luckily for the holy child, after the three Magi had followed their star to the manger and left him their presents, they were tipped off in a dream to avoid Herod like the plague on their way home.

Herod was fit to be tied when he realized he'd been had and ordered the murder of every male child two years old and under in the district. For all his enormous power, he knew there was somebody in diapers more powerful still. The wisdom of the foolish is perhaps nowhere better illustrated.

- Originally published in Peculiar Treasures by F. Buechner