Bible Text: St Matthew 2:1–12 | Preacher: Rev. Pres. John Hill
Dear friends in Christ: Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray:
Almighty and Most Merciful God, who didst in the beginning create the light, and in the fullness of time didst give Thine only-begotten Son to be unto the end of the world the true Light of men, we beseech Thee, so to illumine our hearts with the beams of Thy grace that we may walk in Thy light as children of light and be made partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; through Thy dear Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen
The Word of God for the Epiphany of our Lord begins with this joyful call to the church:
Arise, shine, for your light has come,
And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. (Isaiah 60:1)
The creation of light is one of the wonderful mysteries of God: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” You may have observed in Genesis 1 that God created light three days before he created the sources of light—the sun, moon, and stars. This is to say that he filled his new creation with light and separated it from darkness and into Day and Night before he separated the waters into clouds above and waters below, before separating dry land and seas, before he created the plants, before he created the sun to rule by day and the moon to rule by night, and the stars also. The light we see from the stars and galaxies many thousands or millions of light years away was created long before those stars were created. Their light could potentially keep shining on us long after they have burned out or been extinguished. And we would never know it. For us, light always needs a physical, observable source. But not for God, who created light on that first day of creation.
We have been trained by the world to think as scientists, to find the causes for things. If there is light, there must be a source of light. And when we find the source, we reckon the source as the creator of that light. And so our idolatry begins. We regard the instruments God makes for the giving of his gifts as the very sources of those gifts.
It would be like worshipping the sun as a god because it gives us sunlight and heat by which all life and growth and fruit are given and sustained. We could worship medicine as the source of our health and healing. Or we could worship the earth, or the weather, or the trees, or any such gifts of God, as gods themselves, because they seem to be independent powers in themselves. And by worshiping the creature rather than the Creator we would give to the creatures of God the honor and glory which belong to God alone. For he is the true Source, the Father of lights—who is without variation or shadow of turning—from whom comes every good and perfect gift (James 1).
It has always been the downfall of every idolater that he substitutes all the wonderful and blessed gifts and instruments of God for the true God himself. And it works for evils as it does for goods. We get sick and we blame viruses and bacteria, eating habits, and poor health—you know, the intermediate things that we really do have to pay attention to. But then we forget to look for the more original causes of our ills—the just judgment of God upon sin, or in our case, His kind and fatherly discipline by which God puts to death in us the sinful desires and impulses of our flesh. In time we die, and our survivors blame cancer, or heart disease, or the accident, rather than the judgment of God which we inherited along with our sinful human nature.
It is in the nature of idolatry to worship all these intermediary things as gods, that is to fear, love, and trust in them rather than the God who gives us all things and makes the final judgments in this world. When we rejoice on this celebration of the Epiphany in the manifestation of the incarnate God to the Gentiles, we are not simply celebrating the ethnic expansion of the Gospel into all the nations of the earth. We are also celebrating and remembering with thanksgiving the end of our own native idolatry.
Luther reminds us that to fear something more than God himself or to love something or trust in something more than God is to have that thing, that person, that hope or wish, as your god. You can examine your fears, your loves, and your trusts to see how readily your own sinful heart makes little false gods. It is like making the sun into a god because it is such a wonderful creature of God, or making death into a god because it inspires such fear in us. But in the end there really is nothing that compares to God himself. So Isaiah records in the 46th chapter:
To whom will you liken me and make me equal,
And compare me, that we may be alike?
Those who lavish gold from the purse,
And weigh out silver in the scales,
Hire a goldsmith, and he makes it into a god;
Then they fall down and worship it!
They lift it to their shoulders, they carry it,
They set it in its place.
If one cries to it, it does not answer
Or save him from his trouble. (Isaiah 46:5–7)
Like a tender father or a loving husband, God pleads with his people and reasons with them.
Before me no god was formed
Nor shall there be any after me.
I, I am the LORD,
And besides me there is no savior….
I, I am he
Who blots out your transgressions for my own sake,
And I will not remember your sins. (Isaiah 43:10, 11, 25)
And in the next chapter:
Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel
And his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts:
“I am the first and I am the last;
Besides me there is no god.”(Isaiah 44:6)
And again in the following chapter:
I am the LORD, and there is no other,
Besides me there is no God;
I equip you, though you do not know me,
That people may know, from the rising of the sun
And from the west, that there is none besides me;
I am the LORD, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
I make well-being and create calamity,
I am the LORD, who does all these things. (Isaiah 45:5–7 )
This is the voice of the Child in the manger, the infant is who worshiped this day by the magi from the east. Our Lord pleads with his beloved church, and with each one of us: “Arise, shine, for your light has come.” “The people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.” (Isaiah 9:2)
On the first day of creation God created physical light, that great and wonderful mystery that is of such comfort to us, the divine gift which is so completely bound up with our earthly lives. And what comfort light gives us. The child who awakens in the night to nightmares is greatly comforted by light. Any parent who has sat up with a sick child through a long night knows what hope and comfort the breaking of day brings. Light is a great creature of God, a wonderful gift. The ancient pagans—the Gentiles—thought so much of light that they made gods of the sun, the moon, and the stars.
But we also speak of light in terms of knowledge and understanding, of human reason. We indicate understanding by saying, I see. We call ignorance darkness. And human reason we call enlightenment. It was in the age of so-called Enlightenment that man regarded human reason as a goddess and worshipped her. But the goddess Reason turned out to be a bloodthirsty god, demanding thousands of human lives during the Reign of Terror. And in the past centuries we’ve seen how man by his reason has become ever more sophisticated and capable in the killing of his fellow man, till we came to the World Wars of the last century when millions died. Even now this so-called Enlightenment still demands the sacrifice of the unborn.
But our prophecies from Isaiah and their fulfillment in the Christ Child worshipped by the Gentile Wise Men this day speak of neither physical light nor of the enlightenment of human wisdom and reason. The Christmas gospel from John 1 teaches us the fulfillment of these ancient prophecies in the Person of the Word made flesh, the eternal Son of God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4–5). John calls him the True Light. He bears witness to the True Light: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
This is what the Prophet Isiaah teaches the Church:
The sun shall be no more your light by day
Nor for brightness shall the moon give you light;
But the LORD will be your everlasting light,
And your God will be your glory.
Your sun shall no more go down,
Nor your moon withdraw itself;
For the LORD will be your everlasting light,
And your days of mourning shall be ended. (Isaiah 60:19–20)
The child of Bethlehem, Mary’s Son, is the true and eternal Light. The wise men in today’s Gospel were experts in physical lights, watching the sun and the moon and the stars, and by the heavens reading the times. From the East they beheld the star which guided them to Jerusalem to ask about the newborn King of the Jews. And as we indicate by the term “wise men,” the magi were experts also in the intellectual lights, studying the ancient writings and searching for things past, present, and future. But none of these things, in the end, was their God, their true Light.
As we follow their progress from the East to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem, it is the Word of God which brings the magi to the Christ child. The one born in Bethlehem, born to be ruler of Israel, his “coming forth is from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2), as the prophet Micah had foretold. God’s Word, confirmed by the sign of the star, directed them to the lowly house of Mary and Joseph, where they would find not another intermediary creation like the sun, moon, and stars, but the Creator of all these things. That little Child was the Ancient of Days, the eternal God, the True Light which comes into the world to give light to every man.
At the end of Isaiah chapter 59, right before today’s Old Testament reading, God reveals exactly this promise to his beloved church:
And as for me, this is my covenant with them, says the LORD: “My Spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart from your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring, or out of the mouth of your children’s offspring,” says the Lord, “from this time forth and forevermore.” (Isaiah 59:21)
The Word and Spirit of God is our Epiphany, by which Christ is revealed to us as the true and only God come in our own flesh and blood. “Your light has come.” In the Child of Mary we worship not the creatures and instruments of God, but God Himself. It is as we sing in the Christmas hymn:
Of the Father’s love begotten
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see
Evermore and evermore. (LSB 384.1)
This Child is the beginning and source of our life. He created us in His own image, body and soul. He redeemed us from our sin and death. He gives to us his own life, over which death has no dominion. He speaks to us the Words of eternal life, for he is God.
It is no idol that we worship, with eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear, feet that cannot walk, and mouth that cannot speak. Here is the God who with his own eyes sees our suffering and sorrow and has come deliver us. Here is the God who hears with his own ears our cries for mercy, our prayers for help in every need, and our confession of sins. He answers us, comforts us, forgives us. Here is the God that walked the soil of our earth with his own feet and brought glad tidings of great joy to all the earth, to Jews first and also Gentiles, beginning with the wise men this day. Here is the God whose mouth teaches us wonderful things in his Word, bringing light to our darkened hearts and minds and filling us with himself, the true Light.
All idols forms shall perish
And Satan’s lying cease;
And Christ shall raise His scepter,
Decreeing endless peace.
Repeat the hymn again:
“To God on high be glory
And peace on earth to men.”
God grant you his peace in the forgiveness of your sins bought for you and given to you through the blood of this our dear God and Brother, our true and eternal Light.
In the name of Jesus. Amen.