(Isaiah 6-:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12) By Rev. Rick King—Last night, we celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany, which always happens on January 6, with a bonfire and hopes for the year ahead. Oh, and eating chili, too. Today is Epiphany Sunday, and the readings from Isaiah and Matthew are the same Epiphany readings every year—Isaiah’s promise that new hope is dawning after a long, dark time in Israel’s history, and the story of the Magi, the three kings, who ostensibly follow a star to worship the baby Jesus—but who end up foiling King Herod’s plot to find and eliminate him, and the threat he poses.

Empires like Herod’s are always threatened by hope. Despair, cynicism, and “settling” are what Empire needs to survive, and hope makes it hard for those to exist. As long as there was no hope of Israel returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding the temple, people would settle for a captive but comfortable life in Babylon, where there were beautiful Hanging Gardens (think “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”), and they could make a tranquil, domestic life for themselves and their families, and not have to think about what they were missing without God, the Land, and lovingkindness.

Captivity—to whatever—always dulls us, and makes it easy, eventually, to settle for mediocrity. But hope is subversive; it eventually finds a way.

And the Magi? We love the story of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” The lore that’s grown up around them reinforces their mysterious, exotic origins and their background as star-gazers, soothsayers, and diviners of wisdom, who nevertheless seek out a baby boy, born King of the Jews, illuminated by “What Star is This, that Burns So Bright?” as we heard the choir sing in the Introit.

The “light” imagery this morning is unmistakable, from the opening hymn, a riff off of Isaiah’s “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you,” to our final hymn, “We are Marching in the Light of God,” and from the lighting of the Christ Candle and switching our liturgical colors to white, to the fact that in the northern hemisphere, we’ve passed the winter solstice and the days are lengthening, the nights growing shorter. Signs of hope are all around us!

And the light imagery is there in the readings, as well, along with references to abundance, and joy, and symbolically significant gifts that the Magi bring. I know I called them “useless and priceless” on Christmas Eve, but the gifts are actually most appropriate for a boy-king who will become a dying-and-rising Savior later on in his life. Gold for a king, frankincense to burn as prayers are offered to a God, and myrrh which comes back to importance at the Crucifixion.

Epiphany answers the question, “What do you do after Christmas?” by shouting at the top of its lungs, “Make Jesus real!!” Because, as we heard in the gospel lesson last week, Jesus doesn’t stay a baby—he grows up! And Epiphany gives our faith a chance to grow up, too. It’s no mistake that the rest of Matthew’s story to accompany the Three Kings is the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous plans, and Herod’s rage at having those plans foiled. That rage gives rise to the horrific Slaughter of the Innocents, which is nothing less than mass infanticide by a paranoid ruler with absolute power to order it. The Magi are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, who wants them to tell him where Jesus is, NOT so Herod can “pay him homage,” as he says, but so he can tell his contract killers where to find the baby, and eliminate him.

There is much in the world around us that does NOT want the HOPE that was promised in Advent, fulfilled in the Christmas birth, and made real in Epiphany. In fact, the stronger our witness to hope, the harder evil tries to thwart hope. Whether it’s religion that anesthetizes people to accept injustice as “their lot in life,” or government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich—Epiphany Hope subverts the plans of the powerful who would build empires on the backs of the poor, enslave and incarcerate black and brown people, and substitute personalistic salvation for the Reign of God.

Against the prevailing despair that makes us settle for less than justice, peace, and compassion for Jesus’ brothers and sisters, HOPE gives us the vision and the power to ask, and ACT, for MORE for the weak and voiceless.

That’s what it means to be Epiphany People. That is Subversive Hope. Amen.

(Luke 1:26-38, 47-55) By Rev. Rick King—It’s a tough time to be optimistic, with great uncertainty in the world and a feeling that something is deeply amiss in our nation. Christians and religious people generally, are not speaking with anybody except those with whom they agree, because it doesn’t feel safe to do so. Not exactly a favorable climate for a sunny outlook!

Into this morass comes the promise of the birth of a Savior, as it does every year—of God doing a new thing in our midst.

But how is this to happen, with all that’s going on? We may feel out of energy, powerless to change certain things. And we tend, sometimes, to get “stuck” on the things we’re powerless over, and begin to feel like we’re “being acted upon by reality.”

But we are a people of HOPE, not just optimism, as our Advent theme reminds us. That’s one of the big reasons we’re a church, after all, and not something else—we’re looking for hope. In the “Biblical Grounding” time on our agenda at the dinner meeting we had at Executive Board Tuesday night, I shared this text from Luke’s gospel that we heard just now—about how CELEBRATION can be an act of RESISTANCE against despair and the feeling of powerlessness; we celebrate not just when we have obvious reasons to do so; we celebrate no matter what is happening in our lives. It’s one of the ways we practice our faith.

But still, if you’re like me, you struggle with staying focused on the “half-empty” part of the proverbial glass. There are lots of inner messages, old tapes that play, powerful, inherited myths that shape our ability to receive hope, and hold onto it, when it’s so much easier to let it slip through our grasp like a fleeting thing, rather than the bedrock that it’s meant to be.

That’s why, on this Fourth Sunday in Advent, coinciding with Christmas Eve Day and three days after the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, the story of the Annunciation to Mary that she’s pregnant with Jesus comes at just the right time, illuminating hope and promise in the midst of despair and need. And Mary’s dialogue with the angel, and the process she goes through in receiving this news can show us a way to receive the hope that is hope, not just optimism and Christmas cheer.

First of all, Mary is perplexed. She’s confused when the angel comes to her and greets her with, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Now, Mary was about sixteen years old. How do the teenage girls you know (or teenage boys, too), react when somebody notices them? If I let my imagination go for a bit, the dialogue might go something like, “As if! Why are you coming to me? You and I both know I’m not favored….What do you want from me?”

Obviously, I’m paraphrasing freely! But the important thing is, Mary doesn’t run away, or push the angel away. She holds the door open, and engages. When Mary “ponders what sort of greeting this might be,” she’s taking it seriously, not dismissing it. So, perplexity is a positive because she engages with this holy messenger. We don’t know why, but she does.

And she receives reassurance: “Don’t be afraid, Mary…” and also a promise: “You will conceive in your womb…and you will name him Jesus…and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David.” Something is about to happen, and it involves this teenage girl. She’s about to become an agent, instead of someone acted upon by her circumstances.

The second thing that happens is that in response to the promise of what is to come, she doubts, as in, doubts her own abilities. How often have you and I had opportunities present themselves and immediately focused on ourselves rather than the opportunity? Focusing on all the reasons why we could never do this, not in a million years. “I’ve never done that before. I don’t know anything about how to do this. I feel overwhelmed. Shocked and dismayed that I would even be considered. Almost like the reassurance disappeared before it could make a difference. “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” is Mary’s retort. Essentially, “God, are you crazy? These things don’t happen.”

But there’s even a good side to this: It shows us about ourselves that, when the confusion clears some, and we begin to see what’s being laid on us, we are apt to feel our falling-short. In these kinds of situations, nobody has to tell us to “get real!” We’re already there. And so is Mary. Pollyanna is gone. We have replaced our rose-colored glasses with some “hard-reality” ones, emptied of all pretense.

And yet, this self-emptying, of all our pride in our own accomplishments and powers and capacities, presents the perfect opening for what comes next, to Mary and to us, in these situations: Realizing We’re Not Alone.

This comes in two ways: Number One, community—“Your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren, unable to conceive.” And Number Two, seeing that it’s not about us! Some Higher Power, some unseen force, Something or Someone much bigger than us, is already at work, doing what we cannot do by ourselves.

So, Mary might have thought to herself, “This is happening to somebody else, too? And somebody even less likely than I am?”

Community—finding others in a similar situation, no matter how implausible it seems at the time—can help us realize that the Power beyond ourselves is at work, as the angel says, “For nothing is impossible with God.”

Mary is now in a position for the next step in receiving hope—Saying Yes. A radical yes! She’s realized that she and Elizabeth are partners, not just with each other, but with God—partners in the “new thing” God is doing. And Mary says, “Here am I…let it be with me as you have said.”

And then, Mary goes to Elizabeth, and they have this meeting of minds and hearts and wombs (because Elizabeth’s child, John the Baptist, leaps inside of her at the news of Mary’s pregnancy). And then Mary, the demure teenager, a Nobody of unimportant lineage, previously believing herself to be insignificant—Goes Public with what has happened, in praise and exultation. And the Magnificat is her song of celebration. Her words have echoed for centuries among the downtrodden and advocates alike, “for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is God’s name.”

We receive hope by being real and open to God, open to life on life’s terms, in all its grit and splendor, and by engaging with God—no matter what. If holy men and women have struggled toward blessing, then struggle we will! We can’t go around our own barriers to hope; we have to go through and over them.

This season, no matter what, you and I are invited to engage with the God of Hope, who promises to be with us. Amen.