The Door

Matthew 2: 11, 12 (Excerpt from Gospel)

On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Here’s another beautiful tableau in our thoughts. When we bring to mind the story of the Magi finding Jesus, we may envision the crèche at the church or on the mantle or the Christmas cards received down through the years where the Magi on camels, trekking through a desert, are sharply silhouetted against a night sky while the star blazes brilliantly in the east. We may recollect that the gifts the Magi brought were representative of the character and mission of Christ, gold for kingship, frankincense for divinity and myrrh for his death. The wise men seeking out Jesus was another confirmation that the Light for all had indeed come into the world.

But it’s much more than that. We can appreciate and ponder Christ’s whole life and leave it on the level of a story of how God incarnated himself into the world and brought about our redemption. Or we can recognize that Jesus’ story is our own and find within it the pattern, flow and anointing of our own lives.

 It’s not so startling. We know we are baptized like Jesus was baptized and that we rise up out of the waters of baptism into our call and mission. We know that we go through the wildernesses of temptation where we are faced with the choice of either self-gratification or the recognition that God is God, not us. We struggle to allow ourselves to be made bread for the poor and to understand that the Spirit of the Lord is indeed upon us to set prisoners free and help the blind to see. And we too die and are resurrected, sometimes daily. Christ’s life is my life and your life.

So, each of us has also received gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  Each one of us is anointed and gifted as a daughter or son of the King, to find our place within the divine and to experience the death that leads to resurrected life. Each one of us is an epiphany to the world. If you are not a light set high on a hilltop, how can the world know that the Light it aches for is indeed here and is not just a Christmas story? If you are not a son or daughter of the divine King, who are you and why should the world care? If you are not anointed for holy death in a way that opens doors for the poor and lowly, of what use is your Christianity?

As Christians we can’t pick and choose who we really are but we tend to do just that. It’s hard for us to keep the whole panorama of our anointing before our eyes and what most often happens is we find the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to believe about ourselves is that we are simply ragged sinners. Yes, we are. But if God doesn’t stop there, we should be careful of doing so. We keep forgetting our anointing because it’s hard to believe that, like Christ, we are also dignified sons and daughters of the living God, that we are priests, prophets and gracious sovereigns, that we are the light of the world. When we celebrate Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection we are also celebrating our own. He came to share in our humanity and that means he became one of us and one with us. He gathered us all into the story and if we separate ourselves from the story, we are separating ourselves from everything we really are.  Christ’s history is our mystery. It’s the mystery of our full identity.

St. Paul says, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8: 14-17)  

Every event in Christ’s life that we celebrate is a door that he opened for us to follow through – not peek through.  

Walk through the door and receive your gold. You are a child of God and the King of Kings is your brother. This brother of yours walked in poverty on earth but he walked as one who was responsible for and responsive to all who came to him for healing, teaching and deliverance. His kingdom and his responsibilities as King are yours as well. How is this being manifested in your life?

Walk through the door and receive your frankincense. If you are a child of God then you have divine genetics. “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”  (The Liturgy of the Eucharist.) Christ walked humbly as one of us but was always aware of his divine nature. He offered forgiveness and reconciliation, called God his Father and invited us also to forgive, reconcile and call the Divine our Father. How is this blood relationship to the Divine being manifested in your life?

Walk through the door and receive your myrrh. If you are a child of God then you are familiar with the door to death but rather than fearing it, you know that Christ turned it from a door to the end of everything into a door to the everlasting Kingdom. Christ walked daily fully anointed for death. He experienced the small daily deaths we all experience and then took on the Death of all Deaths and made it the door of all doors. His anointing turned death into life. How is your anointing for death that leads to life being manifested in your daily existence?  

Walk through the door and become light, a light that shines for everyone, not just for the ones who please you or who agree with you or who are on your side. Do you know what will block your light? Walls. Jesus walked without walls surrounding him and he walked with no fear of those who were different, who had divergent creeds, who were socially unacceptable or who were lost. In fact the only ones who could not receive Christ’s light were those who surrounded themselves with the walls of religious righteousness. If we accept the light of Christ to be our own light, we are agreeing to walk without defensive walls. It’s the only way our light can be seen. How far does your light shine?

Walk through the door…

 …and be an Epiphany.