Changed by the Journey

The Rev. Amy Morehous
Festival Eucharist
Feast of the Epiphany
January 6, 2013
 


When I was young, my mother, sister and I only had one nativity scene, and we loved it. It had many, many figures, and each one had been poured, fired, hand-painted and hand-glazed by my grandmother, my father’s mother, who died the month before I was born. On the bottom of each piece, they were even individually signed. We always set it up in the living room, on the hearth of the fireplace. My sister and I would very carefully act out scenes with them every year. That nativity set had many adventures.

One Christmas, when my sister and I were older - I think I was 10 or 11- my sister and decided it would be a good idea to roll a basketball around in the living room. (What could possibly go wrong with that?) Of course, someone missed a pass - I really don’t remember who. It would be convenient to blame my sister, since she’s in South Carolina, but it was probably me. The basketball rolled into the nativity scene with a crash. My mother was in the basement, but was alert to such things, as all mothers are. She called upstairs, “What was that noise?”  My sister and I were sure that Christmas would be spoiled if we were dead, so we said, in unison, “Nothing, Mom!”

My mother went back downstairs, and we crawled over to inspect the nativity scene, and sure enough, Joseph had taken a direct hit, and had fallen into several pieces. With instincts born of terror, we propped him back together with great care, so that from a distance, he still looked pretty normal. Then, we lived in the abject state of anticipation known only to children who know they’re going to get caught - eventually.

Several days later, my mother walked through the living room, and as she walked by the nativity, Joseph fell apart before her very eyes. Knowing there were only three people living there, she didn’t have a hard time putting the events together, and finding the very sorry, very miserable, and very terrified culprits, and bringing them to swift justice.

We never were able to repair Joseph. For years after, my sister and I continued to insist that we put the manger scene up, and we would make up stories about where Joseph had gone. (Since we had a single-parent family, my sister and I reasoned there wasn’t anything wrong with Jesus having one, too.)

I still have that nativity scene, carefully packed into its boxes. I haven't brought it out in years - I think as I became an adult, I became more worried that there was something incomplete and broken about that set, and it bothered me, even though it’s such a part of my family history. I don’t know if it's my sense of guilt, or if it’s my perfectionist tendency to want everything to be ‘just right’.

We each do that, in our own way. As we move into Epiphany, and we pack up Christmas, and put it all away until the next year, we forget pretty quickly. We have a tendency to look at what isn’t perfect - at what got chipped and broken. Instead of looking at what was done with love, we look with critical eyes at what is not exactly the way we want it to be. We become worried about appearances, and how things appear and heavens, how WE might appear, and we can fall into the habit of propping the pieces back together very cautiously, and hoping that no one looks too carefully. Of course, in the process, we make ourselves even more broken.

Even as a Christmas people, we can have a hard time remembering that God sent Christ to live with us, in all the broken places, and love us all the more. At Epiphany, we celebrate that we, most of us Gentiles, searching for Christ in improbable places, are part of that Christmas story - even as imperfect as we are. We travel long distances to arrive at Christ, some of us, and we are marked by that journey. We ourselves might be a little chipped, a little uncertain, a little broken, but even so, we are recipients of the ‘boundless riches of Christ’. Those riches have nothing to do with gold, and everything to do with love.

So, as Epiphany people, how will you return home tonight? Will you return the same way you came? Or will we all, just as the wise men did, return by another road? If you find yourself unexpectedly in a relationship with Christ, can you look at your life, at the lives of others, with eyes of love? With a sense of ‘rightness’ even in the midst of imperfection? Will you leave and return home tonight, accepting that you are loved, even in the midst of all your flaws? Because God does love us mightily, even when we have broken something irreplaceable, even when we have been unable to mend the unmendable.

God knows us and loves us, and sends us out into the world this Epiphany night, to return home by another road, different than the way we came. Broken, but loved, dented and scratched but fully renewed, changed by the journey we have taken. God sends us out tonight to take that love to others, especially to those who don’t yet know how much they are loved.

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among (God's) people,**
And to shine the light of Christ's love to all the world.

Amen

** from The Work of Christmas
by Howard Thurman