Today is Epiphany. 

Today is the day that Christians celebrate the Wise Ones, foreign women or men, scholars and astrologers, who made their way from afar to worship a poor child living at the margins of a colonized world. 

A child who would grow up to model for us how to live – teaching, feeding, healing, and speaking truth to the power of empire. 

A child who would help us to understand that we would be known by our fruits – and that those fruits would be love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, even and especially in the face of a harsh and dehumanizing world. 

A human Incarnation of the Divine who embodied both the prophetic and the pastoral- and called upon us all to do the same. 

And yet today was a day when human hubris spectacularly centered itself for its own vainglorious ends – narcissistic, corrupt human power stirred up and applied for nothing more than its own self-promotion and self-enrichment.

And in its midst we witnessed those who would mistake something rotting for something divine. “Jesus Saves” – indeed, but to invoke Jesus alongside the current president is an act of substantive idolatry. 

Instead, today, we as Christians are reminded that we are called to keep following the Star and the radical Christ who rested beneath it.  

It’s a path that demands we reject all exploitation, all ways of using people or the planet for the abuse of self-gratification.

It is not wrapped in any flag. It owes allegiance to no political party, no national boundary, and no measure of money or profit. 

It’s composed of radical commitment, radical compassion, radical wisdom, and radical justice so that we might together participate in the creation of a world where all life flourishes.   

We’re called to recognize and exult the sacred made manifest in the world today, all around us. 

We ought not seek that in the corridors of power, for the mighty will be cast down.

We find it instead in solidarity with the poor child living at the margins of a colonized world, who has come to transform the world and to teach us what heaven really means. 

Amen