1.
Grace,
mercy and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ. The message from God’s
Word this morning we observe the Epiphany of our Lord is taken from Isaiah
60:1-6 and is entitled, “Arise &
Shine!” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
Epiphany,
is God showing us his Son, Jesus, baptized to be the Christ. Lent is this
Suffering Son, Jesus, showing us the Father.
Epiphany is the manifestation, the showing, the unfolding—or, if you
will, God unwrapping for us his Christmas gift to us. When you receive a gift,
you say “Thank you” to the giver. You open the gift and look at it. Then you
use the gift in accord with its purpose: if clothes, you wear them; if a toy,
you play with it; if food, you eat it. So
with God’s Christmas gift—a gift different from all others, for in this gift
God gives us himself, his heart and mind, his good will and love, his mercy and
determination to make us his special people forever!
3.
Our
thanks to God have filled our praises during these twelve days of Christmas. Today
we see the beginning of God’s unwrapping his gift and how we are to use that
gift in accord with the Gift and the Giver.
Arise and shine!
4.
God says
to you. “Your light has come, and the
glory of the Lord has risen upon
you” (see Is 60:1)! By the light of the star, the Wise Men were led to the
light, to walk no longer in the darkness of their house gods, their cultural
gods, their science gods, their self-contrived gods, but to walk in the
light—in Jesus Christ. By the light of God’s Gospel, you are led to the light,
to walk in the light. Arise! Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the
Lord is risen upon you.
5.
Intelligent
and learned, based on the general knowledge of the created world and maybe
knowledge of God’s promises carried to Babylon at the time of Israel’s exile,
the Wise Men looked for Jesus in Jerusalem. It was reasonable: the King of the
Jews had been born in Jerusalem, the capital city of the Jews. But Jerusalem
wasn’t the place God had chosen to unwrap his gift of salvation to all the
world.
6.
Instead,
when their great learning were brought into captivity to the Holy Scriptures,
the Wise Men were led to follow the star to Bethlehem, to the child in whom and
to the place in which God was pleased to give himself in the fullness of grace
and truth. The star, illuminated by the Holy Scriptures, led them to the star! The gift of intelligence and learning, of the
love of wisdom, of integrity and boldness in scholarship, are gifts of the good
God. But it is in his grace in Jesus that he gives himself in the real work of
his fatherly heart and mind. It is this grace of God that draws worshipers to
himself, for by his grace God creates faith in us, faith that worships him by
receiving his grace in Jesus. That was
Epiphany then. Gods of the human intelligence, gods of cultural, religious, and
human contrivance, died at the birth of the Child-God. Are we, today, merely
spectators to these Gentiles becoming worshipers of the living God? How sad if
that is the truth about us!
7.
Here is
Epiphany now. Today the call of God’s grace reaches out to your ears and
eyes—and to the ears and eyes of millions of believers around the world. The
Gospel of his glory, sung by the angels at Christmas, is preached to you this day,
in this place. His call is to come to worship him. In that Gospel he welcomes
you, invites you, to come to this One born in Bethlehem—the house of bread. In
your ears he sounds the words that knock at the eardrums of your heart,
inviting you to see him in his body, this Jesus who presents himself to us.
This altar is his manger—his feed box, not for cows or sheep or donkeys, but
for his poor sinners, lost, troubled in the darkness of a world that neither
knows nor fears nor loves him.
8.
With
boldness, St. Paul makes it clear that in this, the last time, God has revealed
to his apostles the mystery of our redemption, the secret of the kingdom of God. The heart of God is openly displayed in this
Jesus, born of Mary. He is the promised descendant of David. Crucified in
weakness and shame, he is raised in power and publicly preached to the whole
world, for the whole world. The secret—the mystery—is more even than an open
book. Jesus was suspended on the cross, on the hill, plainly between heaven and
earth, to join them in himself to God in one, holy, newly created people.
9.
This
work of God was always on his mind, even though it was hidden under the Law,
training Israel toward the fullness of time. God does not now find holy people
among the worshipers of manufactured gods, and now, by some whim of generosity,
includes them in what was before such a strict, straight-laced people. No; God
does not find such holy people, fit members of his newly relaxed rules for
getting into his Kingdom. No; now, here
is he born the King of the Jews, to bind Jew and Gentile, religious and
nonreligious, into his body, his Kingdom, that is, into himself!
10.
The
secret is not that God no longer considers sin to be sin, nor that he has no
wrath against sin and sinners. No; the secret is that in the body of Jesus, God
has carried the sin to death. In the blood of Jesus, God has given us eternal
life—for all, everywhere, who believe in this Son. In his Gospel, God is both
declaring and doing this work of the forgiveness of sin. He cuts us from our
sin and binds us to Christ by faith. By the Gospel, God lifts us from darkness
in death into life in his Son, for by the Gospel the light shines on us and in
us to create that new creature—the one, new humanity called Church.
The secret is out. The King of the kingdom judges us righteous by the
righteousness he is, gives, and brings to faith.
11.
Moreover,
the mystery continues to work. God not only creates the Holy Church by the
Spirit through the preached Gospel, but he also makes the Church herself part
of the revelation of his secret. Created
by the Gospel, the Church is called, gathered, enlightened, and preserved in
the faith to carry that Gospel to the whole earth. Missions are nothing else
than this one holy Church of God in motion (see Wilhelm Loehe, Three Books about the Church [Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1969]).
12.
To some
people, missions appear to be a burden placed on us by the Synod, a competitor
to drain away resources from our own needs. In this view, missions appear to be
something somebody does in some other place. Such is the misunderstanding of
missions and of the Church. Missions,
the “sentness” of the Church, what we say when we call her “apostolic,” always
begin with the Gospel and always begin where we are. Jesus told the disciples
to wait in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is, of course, a geographical location. But
missions also mean that you are sent with the Gospel to sinners, wherever you
are in the world and wherever they are. We are sent to each other, and we are
sent to the whole world.
13.
When we
want to ignore the other sinner as an object of the Gospel, or when we want to
exclude some from being hearers and believers, we misunderstand our own selves
as Church. We misunderstand the Gospel of God’s gracious will to save sinners. In speaking that Gospel of the forgiveness of
sins for Jesus’ sake and inviting people to trust him, God intends to make you
his display to the universe that he wills to bind you and all believers into
one Body in Christ Jesus, with Christ Jesus as our head.
14.
Arise!
Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you. If you
do not shine, it is because you are not living in the light. If you work and do
not let the light shine on your works, people cannot see them to glorify God.
15.
Arise!
Shine! That is, get up and listen to that Word. Get up and say that Word. Let
that Word dispel the darkness of the gods manufactured by the human spirit.
Live in the worship—that is, in trusting that God to be your life and good,
your righteousness and hope.
16.
It is a
sour spirit that thinks “missions” are something done by somebody else
somewhere else. Lift up your eyes, and see how men and women and children of
every race and tongue are drawn with you into this wondrous exchange: sinners
lose their sin in the death of Jesus, and these sinners trust him to give them
forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, deliverance from death and the devil,
and the lively hope of resurrection from the dead for eternal joy. Lift up your
eyes. See. Your heart will leap for gladness.
Amen.
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