January 30, 2004
Epiphany season
Epiphany doesn’t offer much of a shopping season.
So its symbols [whatever they are besides kings riding camels back home and wondering how they could ever explain where they’d been and what they’d seen] don’t attract shoppers any more than they annoy the ACLU. The irony of God is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in creating us human beings in the first place and then choosing us as an icon, a window, through which can be seen not only God and ourselves, but through which, as well, the whole universe gets a shot at expressing and understanding itself. Epiphany.
Epiphany maybe lasts too long. On the other hand, we’re already half way through, and Christmas, with all its sweetness and light, is out of sight and out of mind for most of us. Now we can get back to nitpicking our great Scriptures and arguing about our tradition and the usual unreasonable foolishness about our reason.
The Nazarenes took their hometown boy about as seriously. But when he stopped preaching and went to meddling, their neighborly tolerance was out of the question. There he was, in the synagogue of all places, reminding them of something they should have learned in kindergarten. They probably never called it Christmas and Epiphany, of course, but it was “show and tell time,” nevertheless.