Intro
When you receive a gift, you normally say “Thank you” for the gift you just received. And it’s after that when you open the gift to see what it is. It’s then that you delight in what you received. If the gift is clothing, you wear it; if it’s a game, you play it; if it’s food, you eat it.
It’s the same way with God’s gifts to us, which is what Epiphany is all about. Epiphany is God unfolding and revealing His earlier Christmas gift to us. But His gift is different from any other you receive. For in His gift to us, the gift He gives us is Himself. God gives us His heart and mind, His goodwill and love, and His mercy and unflinching resolve to make us His special people forever. Now that’s a gift!
Main Body
Yes today, the day we celebrate Epiphany, we celebrate God giving us His Gift, and even unwrapping His Gift that we may see what It is. But even more, we celebrate how we are to delight in the Gift He gives us.
God says, “Arise! Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the LORD shines over you.” By the light of the star over 2,000 years ago, the Wise Men find the object of their search, Jesus Christ, the Light of the world. They gave to Him the worship they are to give only to God. They were led, no longer to walk in their own self-made gods, but to walk instead in the Light, the Light, Jesus Christ Himself.
And today, it’s the same for you. God leads you by the light of His written, revealed Word to bring you to the true Light, His Son, Jesus Christ. It is as Isaiah says, “Arise! Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the LORD shines over you.”
The Wise Men who came to see Jesus were intelligent and learned. They may have even known of God’s promised Messiah foretold in the Old Testament from the time of Israel’s exile in Babylon. And so it makes sense that these Wise Men looked for Jesus in Jerusalem. Why wouldn’t the King of the Jews be born in Jerusalem? That’s the epicenter of Judaism.
But Jerusalem wasn’t where God had chosen to unwrap His gift of salvation for the world. And so when God’s holy prophecies further captivated the Wise Men, they again followed the star, but this time to Bethlehem. The star, which the Holy Scriptures had made even brighter and clearer, led them to God’s Son!
It’s the same with us. From His grace, made real to us in Jesus, God shows us His heart and mind. This grace of God, which first drew the Wise Men to Jesus, also draws us to Jesus. For by God’s grace, He creates faith in us, the faith that worships Him by receiving His grace through His Son, Jesus.
But are we, today, merely spectators to these Gentiles who became worshipers of the living God? If that’s the case, that Epiphany is nothing but us remembering the Wise Men coming to see Jesus in Bethlehem, how sad it would be, indeed!
For Epiphany is not just some event in history, some 2,000 years old. Epiphany is also for right here and right now. Today, God still calls out to His fallen creatures, where His grace reaches out to our ears and eyes. The revealing of God’s glory, which the angels sung on Christmas night, is preached to you this day, here and now, in this place. For every Sunday is to be an Epiphany, a revealing of Jesus Christ.
God still calls His people to bend the knee in adoration and worship. In the revealing of His Son, God welcomes you, invites you, to come to His Son who was born in Bethlehem. In your ears, He sounds the words that knock at the eardrums of your heart, inviting you to see Him in His body, this Jesus who presents Himself to us. This altar is His manger, his feed box--not for cattle or sheep--but for pitiful sinners, lost, troubled in the darkness of a world that neither knows, nor fears, nor loves Him.
God openly shows His heart to us in His Son, Jesus, the Child born of Mary. Jesus is the promised descendant of David. Crucified in weakness and shame, He is raised in power and publicly preached to the whole world, for the whole world. Jesus was suspended on the cross, on the hill between heaven and earth, to join fallen humanity in Himself to God as one, holy, and newly created people.
This saving work was always on God’s mind, even when hidden under the Law, even when training Israel toward the fullness of time. And when the time was right, Jesus was born to fulfill what all the Israelites of old, and even ourselves, could not do. And Jesus is still here to bring Jew and Gentile, religious and nonreligious, into His body, into His Kingdom, into Himself!
Know this: God has not slacked off on sin. Sin is still sin, and His wrath against sin and sinners has not evaporated away. The key to understanding God and His favor toward us is in the body of His Son, Jesus. That’s because we see that in the body of Jesus, God has carried the sin of everyone into His death. That’s where Jesus, the One who knew no sin, became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God. And because Jesus became sin for us, that’s where God vented His just and righteous wrath--on Him, and not you and me.
That’s why, even today, God still gives eternal life in the blood of Jesus. God hurls our sins far from us and connects us to Christ. God lifts us from the darkness of death into the life of His Son. Because of Jesus, God shines on us, makes us new creatures in Him, and brings us into His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. And by faith, we believe and confess these truths.
What else is Epiphany about? It’s also about letting the secret of God out. In Epiphany, God showed in a real way that Jesus the Messiah wasn’t only for the Jews, but for all people. And so we, too, are to let that secret out.
Created by Jesus’ saving work, the Holy Spirit calls the Church into being, and gathers, enlightens, and keeps her in the one, true faith to carry the truth of Jesus into all the earth. Missions are nothing else than the one holy Church of God in motion, believing what we are given to believe, and confessing what we are given to confess. It’s living what we are given to live, and doing what we are given to do. That’s missions in a nutshell.
Missions are not hype and slogans to sell our church or denomination to others. If that’s what we think missions are, then we show by our deeds that God and His Church are just another commodity in a commodity-filled world. That would be showing by our deeds that God’s Church is just another entertainment package competing for a share of the market.
Yes, our deeds unmask our unbelieving hearts, for they show that we really don’t believe what we say we believe. They show that we really don’t believe that God the Holy Spirit creates faith when and where He wants to by the proclaiming of the Word and God’s giving out of His Sacraments. From this we must repent!
Missions in the Church always begin with Jesus. Jesus told His first disciples, at first, to wait in Jerusalem. But missions also mean that you are sent with your confession of Jesus to others, wherever you are in the world. Yes, we are sent to each other and we are sent into the world.
When we ignore others, others for whom Jesus died, we mistake who we are given to be as Church. When we want to exclude some from being hearers and believers, because they make us feel weird, because they take us out of our comfort zone, we mistake who we are given to be as Church. Even more, we mistake Jesus’ gracious wish to save sinners.
When you confess, when you tell others who Jesus is and what He does, you are doing missions. When you bring Jesus to another through your spoken Word, you are doing missions. For God wants to bring everyone, including you, into one Body, in Christ Jesus, with Christ Jesus as our head. What does that mean? It means that God wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
“Arise! Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the LORD shines over you.” If you don’t shine, it’s because you aren’t living in the Light of Christ. Even when you do good works, if you don’t let God’s light shine on your works, others cannot see them for what they are and glorify God because of them.
Conclusion
Arise! Shine! Get up, listen to that Word. Arise! Shine! Get up, speak that Word. Let that Word dispel the darkness of our self-made gods surrounding and seducing us.
Lift your eyes! See how God has brought the nations into His Church. In Christ’s Church, sinners lose their sin in the death of Jesus. And these same sinners trust Him to forgive their sins, to give life and salvation, to deliver from death and the devil, and to resurrect from death into eternal joy. Lift your eyes and rejoice! See your Savior in God’s gift to you in His Son, Jesus Christ! Amen.
