Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, one of the most ancient Christian holidays. These days, we mostly associate it with the arrival of the Magi, the wise ones from the east who see the star shining and follow it where it leads, bringing royal gifts to the newborn Jesus: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But in its more ancient form, it actually wrapped together several different stories into a kind of mega-feast: beginning with Jesus’ birth, including the arrival of the Magi, but stretching forward to his baptism in the River Jordan and his first miracle at the wedding in Cana. It celebrated all the manifestations of Christ, all the ways in which Christ appeared or was revealed to all the nations of the world, which is what the word “Epiphany” means.

It’s a holiday of glory and splendor, of light and power, and yet it’s a holiday of paradoxes. Because while that star shone so brightly in the sky for everyone to see, there were only a few who understood and followed. While we celebrate and remember Jesus’ earliest miracles, we live in a world in which miracles often seem like far-off memories. And while our church calendar lists Epiphany as one of the six principal feasts of the church year, it often passes by unnoticed, less than culmination of the Twelve Days of Christmas than an afterthought, an echo, a day in which the City of Boston has already collected Christmas trees from the streets.

In a way, though, this paradox of revelation and obscurity is fitting, because this is exactly how Christ appears in our world and in our lives today. We do not see light shining in the sky pointing out to us where to find Jesus, but we’re told in whom we can find Jesus and how. We don’t receive miracles of water turned into wine, we receive stories and are called to walk by faith, and not by sight. We don’t always set aside time for another party or celebration—sometimes we don’t even have a service in church—but always, everywhere, all around us, Christ is being made manifest in the world.

So I pray, in this new year of 2022, that you may find the ways in which Jesus is being revealed in your life; that you may see the star shining in the lives of the people around you, and see the miracle of each everyday act of human love.

And as the Collect for the Epiphany prays:

O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

I sometimes joke that I’ve held nearly every job in a church that doesn’t involve playing the organ. In roughly reverse chronological order, I’ve been something like: rector, assistant rector, curate; Godly Play teacher, seminarian, wedding coordinator; administrative assistant, campus minister, summer assistant sexton/floor-waxer, and (this one was unpaid) Christmas pageant spotlight operator.

This was one of the highlights of my (in retrospect, extremely churchy) youth. For a few years during high school, my friend Tom and I would sit up in the church balcony and act as a very minimal crew. One of us would handle sound effects: rhythm sticks for Mary and Joseph’s knocks on the hotel doors, jingle bells for the appearance of the angels, and so on. The other, trying not to burn himself as our decades-old spotlight overheated, would point the spotlight here and there and flip the switches for a variety of tinted and opaque shutters, trying and inevitably failing to highlight Gabriel’s radiant splendor at precisely the right moment.

It was a significantly less-polished production than some (I could name more than one parish pageant that involves live-animal rentals and/or competitive auditions!), but still more involved than most.

Whatever the nature of the Christmas pageant, though—whether the costumes are simple or ornate, whether the words are a memorized script or a read narrative, whether there’s a menagerie of live animals or simply a bunch of kids making animal noises—every Christmas pageant does the same exact thing. It reenacts the story first told by an angel to the shepherds long ago: “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)

It’s a story so familiar and yet so strange that the differences between our many pageants and retellings barely matter. However cute or serious the actors, however shoddy or precise the lighting, however real or imaginary the animals, the story remains the same: a Savior wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger; a God made flesh in a child’s vulnerable form; a holy family exhausted at the end of a long journey, only just beginning their season of exhaustion.

It’s a story that’s simple but enigmatic, familiar but bizarre, unnoticed but world-transforming; a story that reaches us in very different ways in very different circumstances and at very different times of our lives. It’s a story, in other words, that’s better suited to a pageant than to a sermon, to an enactment rather than an exegesis!

So “let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.” Let us return, as we do every year, to the scene of Jesus’ birth, to a family who are poor, and tired, and looking for a place to stay. And let us prepare ourselves to greet him, whenever and wherever we find him in our world.

This year’s Christmas Pageant will be held on Sunday, December 19, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, during the 10am service.

I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to use this space this week to offer a few comments on our Gospel reading that may be helpful to hear in advance, for two reasons: 1) my sermon will be focusing on the epistle this week, and 2) John the Baptist’s words in the Gospel are quite harsh and (at least in my opinion) often misunderstood.

(Here’s a link to the whole Gospel reading, if you want the full context before reading on.)

You may have heard of the “praise sandwich” sometimes taught to aspiring managers or teachers; when offering feedback, they’re told, begin and end with the positive and stick the “constructive criticism” in the middle. In this week’s gospel, John offers more of a “hellfire sandwich.”

The passage is split into three paragraphs. In the first, John shouts at the crowds of people coming out to be baptized by him in the Jordan: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? … Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” In the third, John returns to his fiery theme: “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand… to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

And then, strangely, the text ends: “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”

It’s easy to hear these words and think that John is declaring that humanity will be divided into two parts: the good and the bad, the saved and the damned; the branches that bear good fruit and the branches that are pruned and burned; the wheat gathered into the granary and the chaff burned with unquenchable fire. Not many of us in the year 2021 in a pluralistic-and-mostly-irreligious city like Boston are very comfortable with this. In the abstract, it’s troubling: how could a good God burn people with unquenchable fire? But when we make it concrete, it’s even worse: why would John say this about my friend, my neighbor, my family member who doesn’t believe the same things I do? This isn’t “good news” at all!

I want to make one observation, though, about the image of the wheat and the chaff, the granary and the unquenchable fire, that leads me, at least, into quite a different understanding of this passage. (NB: As a city kid I sometimes get myself into trouble with agrarian metaphors; send me an email if I get this one wrong!)

“Wheat” and “chaff” are not two different kinds of plants that grow in a field together, which the farmer must sort out, one from another, destroying those of one kind and saving the others. Instead, they’re two pieces of the same thing. The “chaff” is the light husk that protects the “kernel” of the grain, the “wheat” proper. Even “whole wheat” flour is simply using that whole kernel; the chaff has to go. (And before the invention of modern threshing machines, this was done using a “winnowing fork”: the farmer could use what was essentially a large shovel to break the chaff apart from the wheat and then throw the harvested grain up into the air, causing the lighter chaff to fly away and the heavier kernels to fall to the ground.)

So I invite you to consider: What would it mean if the dividing line between the wheat and the chaff ran not between people, but within people? What would it mean if John’s point was not “Alice is wheat and Greg is chaff, Alice will be saved and Greg will be burned” but that each of us is like a grain of wheat covered with chaff, that each of us needs to be husked, that each of us has things that need to be broken apart and sifted out? (and, yes, maybe burned like the yard waste they are!)

In fact this reading then makes sense of the middle of John’s “fire sandwich,” in which he gives practical advice to individuals on how to repent, how to reform their lives. If you’re a tax collector, don’t take a little more than you’re owed to pad your salary. If you’re a soldier, don’t plunder from the locals. If you have two coats, share one; if you have extra food, share some. John doesn’t condemn a single one of those who come to him to fiery damnation: he identifies the chaff in their lives, and invites them to burn it.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, this image transforms a gospel of condemnation and destruction into a gospel that is really gospel, really “good news.” Because I know that I have chaff that needs to be thrown away; and now John tells me that one whose sandals he’s not even worthy to untie is coming with his winnowing fork in his hand, to burn the chaffiest bits of me up, and to gather my best wheat into his granary. Oh, Lord, you can’t come soon enough!

Greg

“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” (Philippians 1:9-11)

On Wednesday, we wrapped up our second online, multi-week iteration of the Harvest Fair. On Sunday, we’ll hear St. Paul’s prayer for the Philippians that they may “produce the harvest of righteousness.” Last Thursday, of course, most of us sat down to eat meals that originate in a day of thanksgiving for the fall harvest. For a modern, urban, post-industrial, way-too-online society to spend so much energy celebrating the harvest is about as ironic as the New York Times headline I read last week: “The Best Pumpkin Pie: Skip the Actual Pumpkin.”

But there’s something beautiful in this tradition of harvest celebrations as well. However far our fingers may be from the dirt, however different our desks or cash registers or brooms may be from a plough or a tractor or a scythe, we’re all harvesting something in our lives. “Harvest” comes from an Old English cognate with the ancient Greek word karpos, which means “harvest” in Paul’s “harvest of thanksgiving” but usually means something more like “fruit.” Paul’s writing to a church in Philippi that’s almost as urban as ours in Charlestown. Few of the Philippians were working in the fields, but the image of the harvest was as poignant for them as it is for us, because they, too, were praying to bear good fruit in their lives; not the “fruit” of a field of wheat, but the “fruit” of a life powered by love.

It’s worth saying that this is not an individual prayer. It’s not an exhortation to each of you to “produce the harvest of righteousness” in your own life, to bear good fruit in your own life. The quality of the harvest never falls on a single worker; it’s a communal event. In the days before the combine harvester, the harvest took every hand in the village, and the people’s fortunes rose or fell together.

So let’s celebrate the harvest we’ve produced this past year, the fruit that God has brought forth in our community and in our lives in the midst of difficult times. Let’s give thanks for the seven children we’ve baptized and the many loved ones we’ve lost. Let’s give thanks for the hundreds of people we’ve fed, near and far, through St. Stephen’s and through our own Harvest Fair. Let’s give thanks for the new friends who’ve joined us and for the old friends whose faith has long carried this church. And let’s give thanks to God for the fruit that’s growing in our lives even now, however brown our garden plots may seem to be.

A few weeks ago, I met with one of the organizers of the Charlestown Resident Alliance, the non-profit community organization and public housing volunteer tenant group that represents residents of the Bunker Hill Development. We talked about some of the struggles our communities are facing, and some of the hopes we have for them, and when I wondered how St. John’s might support his work, he had a pretty clear answer. “You know what would really help? Toys.”

Supply chain issues and inflation are scrambling Christmas plans once again, making it even harder for all families—but especially lower-income families—to celebrate the holidays. Even massive operations like Toys for Tots are limiting the number of toys they’re able to distribute, which in turns limits the supply of gifts community organizations like the CRA can share with residents.

Enter the Charlestown Resident Alliance toy drive!

St. John’s will be partnering with the CRA to collect new, unwrapped toys for local kids. You can drop toys off at St. John’s during church office hours (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9-3) or on Sunday mornings; we’ll have clearly-labeled boxes for donations in the Parish House and in the Sanctuary. We’ll be accepting donations through Friday, December 17.

One of the things I love about being a Christian in the city is that it makes certain things really easy to do. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is one of them. This December, I’ll be buying my child a few toys; why not love my neighbor as myself, why not love my neighbor’s children as my own? If you’re shopping for kids or grandkids, nieces, nephews, or family friends, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to buy one or two extra toys to share.