Epiphany, the church season we are walking into this morning, means revelation. So this is the Sunday in the church’s year when we reflect on this particular gift.
Revelation comes from outside you, it’s something you don’t seek, but it becomes the template for all future experience.
H R Niebuhr said that Revelation is an interpretive framework through which you understand the world. That’s the human side of revelation. As people, we never understand experience from the standpoint of experience itself. We need a framework or context on which we can map what we are feeling and thinking to make sense of it. But what about the divine side? The process I’ve described could apply to any formative experience, like seeing the Grand Canyon. It could even apply to growing up in a household and afterward regarding that household’s way of eating dinner or washing clothes as normal.
To call something revelation is not enough for it to become a story through which you see and understand all future experience. I think it also means some kind of encounter with God, or Holiness.
There are more or less four kinds of divine revelation. The first is so common we tend almost to discount it. It’s what you might call the sunset version. I remember looking out at a streaky blood-red sky over Lake Huron in Canada at eventide and being told, ‘They say that’s the third-best sunset in the world.’ You couldn’t get a more Canadian sentence than that.
Americans used to settle for nothing less than the best, but never knew that most folks outside of America were never counting.
But the sunset was certainly beautiful, and the technical name for experiencing the glory of creation such that it feels like an insight into the ways of God is general revelation. You look at beauty and say, ‘There must be a God somewhere.’
The second kind of divine revelation is the opposite. It’s intense and personal and unforgettable. You hear a voice, have a dream or feel your heart strangely warmed. God is with you, and you should be overwhelmed, but mysteriously you don’t feel afraid.
Many people have told me about an experience like that. It takes your life to another level, gives you a benchmark that feels as true as anything you’ve known.
It takes religion from someone else’s hand-me-down to the centre of your soul.
Even if there were no church, these two kinds of experiences, the general and the personal, would still be alive and well.
The problem with the sunset kind is that it tends to have little or no crossover into the way people live. It has no connection as to how we relate more justly to other people or more sustainably to the planet. The problem with the heart-strangely-warmed second kind is that it often becomes a celebration of the self.
Our culture so prizes amazing experiences, from bungee jumping to massage to narcotics to exotic holidays, that it’s hard to explain how a moment of revelation is different in kind. We’re so used to the figure of the half-crazed religious fanatic that we have strong resistances to believing anyone that says ‘God is speaking to me.’
Which is why the other two forms of divine revelation are so important. The first is the story of a people and the ways of God, a collection we call the Bible. Most of what’s in the Bible is a mixture of the first two kinds of revelation. The difference is that it’s been distilled over generations, and the parts that remain are largely the encounters and discoveries and reflections that are true to the God made known to people through the ages.
The reason Jesus became recognized as the Christ is not just that he did extraordinary things, but that he so clearly embodied the character of the God already made known to Israel. He revealed God. The canon closed at 66 books not because that’s everything there is to say about God, but because anything new to say about God is going to coincide with the character of the God revealed in those 66 books. God continues to surprise us; but God doesn’t shock us.
And the fourth kind of divine revelation develops out of the third. It’s about what happens when that scripture is turned into live conversation and action – or word and sacrament, as the church calls it becomes ministry.
If we want to meet God, it’s best to hang around where God most frequently shows up. Scripture, sacrament and service are those places.
They’re not the only places for revelation – but they are the places where we can reliably encounter the God of Jesus Christ.
Natural science can assess the wonders of creation and social science can measure the breadth and depth of personal experience. But neither can describe the community formed by the story and the encounter discovered in sacrament and service.
There’s no reason whatsoever to belittle general revelation or personal experience. In fact without them it’s hard to say Christianity is joyful and outward-looking. But they’re not substitutes for the faith of the church.
And that brings us finally to the wise men. The story of the wise men is the definitive revelation story because it brings together all four kinds I’ve just described. It starts in the East, with the first kind, the general revelation of the stars. In Jerusalem the wise men experience the third kind – they hear, from the chief priests and scribes of the people, the story, about the babe being born in Bethlehem. In Bethlehem the wise men find the fourth kind of revelation – they encounter Jesus through service – the giving of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
And before returning they have the second kind, the personal discovery – the dream that tells them to go home another way. To receive any one of these kinds of revelation is a wonderful thing. To receive all four is very special. So special, we have a word for it. We call it Epiphany.