A Letter from Fr Andy
So it’s all gone; all packed
away. Four months of build-up and whoosh
– two weeks after the event and Christmas has gone. Shops already have Valentine’s Day cards and
Easter Eggs out. It’s such a shame that
a season that brings/offers so much in its messages of love and peace is done
away with so speedily. It’s a shame too
that the Epiphany gets passed by so quickly that it barely happens. In fact, there are some churches that don’t
celebrate Epiphany at al. They may
display the three wise men (Some even do that before Christmas) and sing We
Three Kings but never think about the feast itself or its importance.
We know from the Gospel that wise
men came ‘from the East’. There may have
been three, they may have been kings as well, they may have travelled on camels
and their names might be Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. On the other hand, that could all be a load
of tosh. It’s pretty certain that Jesus
was older than when the shepherds visited (possibly nearly two years old) and
living in a house, not a stable. The
shepherds would certainly have gone back to their flock and Jesus wouldn’t have
been lying in a manger but still we peddle and display a muddled version of the
Christmas story.
However, I would like to suggest
that none of that is important. What
matters is the message of Epiphany. This
feast has been celebrated in the Western Church since the fourth century so
must be one of the most enduring feasts of the Church’s calendar. The word, “Epiphany” is derived from Greek
and means manifestation. This is how the redeeming of mankind, born
out of God’s love for us, was to be manifest or made known. God became man and did so for the whole
world. The point of the wise men is that
they were not Jewish, nor were they Bethlehem locals, they were gentiles from
far away. They were shown Jesus (God
made man), the fulfilment of a promise made centuries before and repeated
throughout history and they were to go and tell everyone about it so that he
may be known far and wide.
The same message was given to
Mary Magdalene on Easter morning – “Go and tell…….” and, again, at the end of
the gospels “Go and make disciples…..”
Well, the wise men have gone, so has Mary Magdalene, and so too have the
apostles. We now stand in their place;
we are now called to “Go and tell.”
Unfortunately, we seem to have lost our way on that and our focus, all
too easily, becomes about our buildings and how we protect and maintain what we
have in our patterns and places of worship, but we are wrong.
Jesus did not say “Go and build
somewhere that you can feel safe in; somewhere you can grow old together and
protect what you have from falling into other people’s hands.” We are called to do just the opposite. We are called to go and tell and to share
what we have because what we have is the good news of the love of God and how
that is available to all and we can’t do that sitting in church, on a Sunday
morning, with people who’ve already heard the same message. I’m not saying we shouldn’t go to church or
do away with churches. It is perfectly
right for us to meet to praise God and hear his word but that is meant to
sustain and feed us for the work we are called to do: “Go and tell”.
So, I call on everyone to reflect
on how they do that – in what you say, what you do, how you live. Go on, take the risk, in God’s name and in
God’s interests and all will be well in God’s time and in God’s kingdom and
remember “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Phillipians 4:13)
God bless
Fr Andy