Text:  Ephesians 3:2-12                                    W Epiphany transferred (First Sunday after Epiphany)

The Gentile’s Christmas

            In the name of Jesus, dear friends in Christ:  The traditional beginning of the season of Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the Magi from the east.  These sages showed a lot of faithful determination in traveling a great distance to present their worship and their costly gifts to the infant Jesus; but when all is said and done, they are really a rather mysterious bunch.  They show up, do their thing, and disappear again all within a very short section of Scripture, leaving us with a lot of questions.  For example, we don’t know exactly where they came from in the east, though we can make a pretty good guess with Babylon or Persia. We don’t know exactly when they came to Judea; we can only narrow it down to within two years of Jesus’ birth based on what we’re told.  We don’t even know exactly how many of them came:  the traditional number three comes from the three gifts that they brought; but for all we know, there might have been only two Magi, or maybe even ten or more.  Some of the early church fathers guessed that there were twelve.  But the truth is, we don’t know.  We just don’t know much about them.

            And even what we do know leaves us with something of an ironic mystery.  I mean, in Judea, scholars, priests, wisemen, nobles, common people … they’ve all been waiting for the coming of the Savior.  They’ve been longing for it ... watching out for it. They’ve studied God’s Word intently, pouring over prophecies and promises, and they’ve engaged in all kinds of speculation and date setting, trying to read the signs of the times and determine exactly when the Lord God would send the long promised Deliverer to his people – but none of them even comes close to figuring it out.  And then, all of a sudden, along come these mysterious, Gentile strangers, who, to the best of our knowledge, have had very little exposure to God’s Word – and they’re asking, “So, where’s this new king of yours we’ve heard about?”  Those with virtually none of God’s special revelation handed down through Moses and the prophets seem to know a whole lot more about what God is doing in the world than those who have been studying God’s work and words all their lives. Gentiles from a distance see clearly what God’s own people sitting right on top of miss entirely.

            And as strange as that is, however, it’s not an occurrence that is strange to the Scriptures.  Quite the contrary, it seems to be a consistent biblical theme that those who stand closest to the revealed Word of God are very often the ones who understand it the least.  Consider the earthly ministry of Jesus.  He sets out publicly and systematically fulfilling all the remarkable prophecies that told of what the Messiah would do when he came.  Yet, who was it that opposed him most?  It was the priests, Bible Scholars, scribes, and Pharisees – the very people who knew the prophecies the best.  And who is it that recognizes Jesus as the Messiah?  It’s common people; it’s sinners and outcasts. Jesus builds his following mostly with people who are thought of by the religious leaders as spiritually unenlightened and ignorant, not to mention unwashed and undesirable.

We see the same thing happening after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. On the day of Pentecost, some three thousand Jews in Jerusalem come to faith in Christ – fairly impressive; but remember, that’s out of a population of a quarter million or so Jews – so about a tenth of a percent.  And yes, the Christian Church there continues to grow at a steady rate; but it’s never any more than a small minority.  Where the Christian Church first experiences a real population explosion is in Syrian Antioch – a largely Gentile city; and most of the converts there are Gentiles. It’s from Antioch that the Gospel spreads across Asia Minor, into Greece, Italy, and beyond – and again, almost all of the converts are Gentiles – people who, for the most part, have never even heard of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, or the prophets.  Meanwhile, the people who have had God’s Word and have been looking forward to the fulfillment of God’s promises, for the most part, reject the truth of the Gospel when they finally hear it.

It all unfolds exactly as Jesus had foretold in the parable of the wedding banquet.  That’s the one in which Jesus describes a king who was planning an elaborate, weeklong marriage celebration and feast for his son.  When the happy day finally comes, the king sends his servants to notify all those who had been honored in advance with special invitations:  Come to the feast, for all is prepared and waiting for you.  But they all make excuses and stay away.  So the king sends his servants instead into the streets and allies – to those who had not been invited at first.  “Bring in everyone you can find – bring even the poor, the lame, the blind – fill my banquet hall with guests.”

And this is the strange situation as you come to the close of the first couple centuries of Christian history.  The Jews (most of them anyway), the people who had been honored with the invitation through the Law and the Prophets, stayed away from the party. Meanwhile the Church was filled with those who had been considered the outcasts:  those who had been far away from God and the light of his salvation. And it happened that those early Gentile Christians understood how blessed they were to have been called out of the darkness of their paganism and idolatry.  That’s why, back in those formative centuries when the church calendar we know was being solidified, that the Epiphany was made an annual celebration a good many years before Christmas was.  It makes sense:  the message of Epiphany was more important to most them – not just that the Savior was born; what they latched onto and held dear was that the King of the Jews was their Savior and King too.  And ever since Christmas was placed on the calendar, Epiphany has been known as “the Gentile’s Christmas”.

And since, to the best of my knowledge anyway, we are a congregation comprised entirely of Gentiles, we want to make sure that the message of Epiphany (our Christmas) is given its proper standing among us.  We need to remember that we aren’t the original heirs of the promise that God made to Abraham and his descendants forever.  Instead, the Scriptures describe us as being adopted into the household of faith.  They speak of us as unnatural branches that have been grafted into the living tree of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ.  We’re here – but it’s through God’s grace alone – and doubly so because we are Gentiles – and that should make us even more appreciative of the grace God has given us.

Unfortunately, we don’t often think in such terms.  Instead, most of us, because we’ve had faith in the Gospel since infancy, and because we’ve been heirs of the promise for as long as we can remember, we really don’t have the sense for just how blessed we are to be here holding the saving faith in Jesus that we do.  In many ways, we’ve become in our attitudes more like the first century Jews who always had all the privileges and took them for granted, than the Gentiles who were overwhelmed with gladness at discovering that they too would be welcomed by the Lord on equal footing together with his chosen people. And there’s a danger in losing that sense.

There’s a problem with having privilege.  The Jews were God’s chosen people.  Why did he choose them?  For no reasons other than his super-abounding grace and love.  It had absolutely nothing to do with any wonderful qualities or inherent moral superiority the people possessed.  If anything, Scripture indicates the opposite:  that choosing to bring his Word and promises to fulfillment through a people known for being rather wayward and weak emphasized that salvation was God’s work for those who did not deserve it.  But that’s not the way the Jews came to think of it.

It’s a weakness in the fallen nature of man that causes him always to want to take credit for what goes well for him.  He wants to believe he deserves good things from God’s hand.  And you who have children know how quickly special privileges that are granted are transformed in the minds of the recipients into rights that should be demanded.  It doesn’t change when we get older.  And so the Jews came to think of themselves as better than the rest.  The Lord chose them because they were the best and logical choice.  They deserved everything he gave.  And the rest: the Gentiles?  Well, obviously they lacked any redeeming qualities—that’s why they were not chosen.  So the Jews took to calling them dogs because of their filthy habits, or stones because they were spiritually no more enlightened than dumb rocks.

And this was a big part of the reason first century Jews had so much trouble with Jesus and his Gospel.  Good people who deserve God’s favor don’t need a Savior from sin to die in their place. But faith in Jesus means recognizing first that you need a Savior – that you have no redeeming qualities – that’s why you need to be redeemed.  It means that you’re no better than a Gentile.  And most of the Jews refused to admit that.  They didn’t want to let go of their own pride and special status. Which is why, though they had the Scriptures and the privileges, they couldn’t see or understand what they were all about.

And we who now enjoy all the privileges and blessings are susceptible to the same sort of dangerous thinking.  Let me ask you, who are your “Gentiles”?  Who do you look down upon?  Who do you not think “worthy” of being a member of this church?

I know how easy it is.  I’ll confess some of my own sins here:  a couple of years ago a religious social agency (I’ll not mention which one) contacted me with a referral – that is, someone they thought could benefit from being incorporated into a church where they could receive some sound pastoral guidance and counseling (why they contacted me, I’ll never know).  Anyway, so I called the individual in question on the phone to see how I might be helpful – and was almost immediately sorry that I did.  I spent the better part of the next three hours trying to remain friendly, helpful, and pastoral and get off the phone.  But the truth was that I could hardly get a word in edgewise as I was subjected to a long litany of misery and woe such as I had never heard – and I wasn’t born yesterday.  It was clear to me that most of the problems described were self-inflicted; but it became equally clear that the individual would never even come close to admitting that. No, the person was a self-described victim.  Parents, family, neighbors, teachers, police, social workers, the legal system, and more … they were all part of a massive conspiracy to make this person’s life miserable – and miserable it was.  I’ll not go into all the details, but just to give you an idea, the person told me that they had a soft spot for stray animals, and so had a collection of some dozen cats and four or five dogs in the small apartment in which they lived. But the person was also morbidly obese and disabled, and so, was unable to take the animals out to take care of their business on a regular basis … so most of that all went on inside of the small apartment.  And well, due to the filthy conditions, many of the animals had caught some kind of horrible skin disease that is fatal to animals … and then the vet had said that they needed to clean the place up, sanitizing it by scrubbing it down with some liquid bleach … but hey, bleach is expensive and then there would be no money to buy cigarettes … and, can you believe it?  Now the landlord was threatening eviction … 

And now I think you get the idea.  Trust me:  that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Now, the person wasn’t so sure about dealing with me, so did not give me an address so that I could make a personal call.  I confess that I was grateful for that – I really didn’t want to go there. So I gave the person contact information should they wish to get hold of me – but when I hung up phone, I found myself really hoping that it would never happen. 

I had judged the person a “Gentile”, as it were – someone who was beyond the scope of God’s grace and love.  Why?  Because the person’s standards were a lot lower than mine.  Because of the inconvenience and discomfort it would have brought to me – and maybe to the rest of you too had this person become a part of our family of faith.  Because this person wasn’t good enough to be one of us.  You see, we can talk about the love of Jesus and how he died for all of us unworthy sinners – but we can’t help thinking that some folks are more unworthy than others.  And so I’ll ask again, who are your Gentiles?  Can you put faces on them?  Maybe you know their names?

The Apostle Paul was a self-described Pharisee’s Pharisee.  As far as the Jews went, he was the best of the best and the proudest of the proud.  He was also a great Bible scholar.  And he knew why God had chosen to bless him:  because he was such good and holy person.  That’s why he hated the Gospel of Jesus Christ so much – and that’s why he set out to destroy it.  And you know what happened:  how the Lord Jesus appeared to him in a brilliant light, knocking him from his proud perch on a horse and laying him flat on his face in the dust.  He also left Paul blind; so that his physical condition would match his spiritual understanding of the Scriptures he knew so well but understood so little.  And then, the ultimate irony, having humbled Paul so low, the Lord Jesus raised him up again and made him, of all things, his chosen Apostle to preach the Gospel to Gentiles.

In today’s Epistle, Paul writes of this as his greatest honor.  He calls himself the very least of God’s people, not worthy of anything good from the hand of God.  What a change, huh?  And he counts it as God’s great gift to him that he was given the grace and privilege of declaring to those who were far away from God the unsearchable riches of Christ.  It’s my Epiphany prayer for all of us that we too may be humbled by the mighty hand of God, and stripped of all our dearly cherished pride and imagined merit that we may discover again for ourselves these unsearchable riches in Christ that have been freely given to us.  And then, like Paul, we will count it our greatest joy to share the gift and grace we have been given.  It’s the Gentile’s Christmas.  Let’s tell them about it, in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!