Text:  Ephesians 3:2-12, Matthew 2:1-12                                                                 W Epiphany (transferred)

Celestial Secrets

            In the name of him whose light shines in the darkness, dear friends in Christ:  We’ve been hearing a lot in the news lately about state secrets.  The biggest flap at the moment concerns the recent revelation that certain security agencies of our federal government have been covertly wiretapping a select number of international phone conversations, and doing so without the sort of legal authorization that’s normally required to supersede the rights to privacy of our citizens.  The whole thing has got a lot of people in a stir.  Imagine:  poor, unsuspecting American citizens, people who love their freedoms and who just happen to have casual telephone contact with folks in al Qaeda like Osama bin Laden and other major terrorist leaders, may have had their conversations secretly recorded while they merely … uh … chitchatted about such mundane things as world politics, religion, and the next major terrorist target; or while they innocently exchanged recipes for things like lamb kebobs and homemade explosives for suicide bombers.  I guess we can be proud of the patriots who revealed this secret government plot to invade our privacy, and that we can somehow feel better knowing that the terrorists have been tipped off to what has been up to now a vital source of information for keeping tabs on them and their activities.  Or then again … maybe some secrets should remain secret.

            The fact is that every nation keeps secrets. A certain amount of secrecy is essential to their national security.  And to deal with the secrets and keep them secure, each nation has its secret agents.  These are the people who are entrusted to operate on behalf of their country with full knowledge of the confidential information that is deprived to others, or that is revealed to others only in part on a “need-to-know” basis.

And if all the kingdoms on earth keep secrets, it should not surprise us to discover that the kingdom of heaven has its secrets too. Yes, even God keeps secrets.  Some of these are what might be classified as top secret.   Take, for example, the precise date of the Last Day, when the dead will be raised and our Lord Jesus Christ will return in glory to judge all mankind.  That’s a secret that the Lord is holding real close. No one will know the day or hour until it’s actually upon us.  The Lord has other top secrets, of course; but there are many more divine secrets that he has revealed to people over time – particularly to us who are members and heirs of his kingdom.  For the most part, these secrets have not been revealed to the world at large.  And it’s kind of funny.  To keep their secrets, the kingdoms of this world employ any number of security measures.  They lock up their classified documents in safes and in special vaults; but God tends to hide his secrets in plain sight.

The birth of his Son, which we just celebrated, is a good example of this.  No one who just happened to be walking by and saw Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus in the manger would have had any idea what they were seeing or what kind of miracle had taken place.  Think about it:  God had been born in the flesh.  The Creator and King of the universe was there sleeping peacefully on a few handfuls of hay.  But this amazing secret was known only to his mother, his stepfather, and a few poor shepherds who happened to be out working late that night.

Today, as we observe the Epiphany, we remember how the wise men from the east were let in on the secret.  They were astrologers, people who studied positions of the stars and who made predictions about what was going to happen in the future based upon years and years of accumulated data about what had happened in the past when the stars were in similar positions.  It’s really a lot of baloney – the whole concept; but they had developed it into a real science.  And they believed in it.  But here’s the thing:  in order to reveal his secret to these wise men, the Lord wrote the message he wanted them to have in a language they could decipher.  He aligned the stars to communicate to them and tell them that a great King had been born in Judea.  No one else just staring up at the stars could have figured it out.  All they’d see is what any of the rest of us sees: a lot of pretty, twinkly lights. They’re nice to look at; but if there’s a message up there it might as well be written in Chinese for all I can get out of it.  But what these wise men had done over the centuries was essentially to build a decoder ring. 

When I was in the Army stationed in Europe, sometimes I’d have to be the duty officer, which is the guy who’s left in charge when everyone else in authority has gone home for the evening.  The duty officer stays up all night, makes periodic checks and inspections of the guard posts and what not, responds to emergencies if they arise, and maintains contact with higher headquarters.  This last duty involved receiving and decoding classified messages.  Every couple hours the Teletype machine in the duty office would spit out another message from above.  It was always just a series of paired letters that made no sense at all.  Whenever it happened, you’d have to go to the safe, pull out the codebook, find the appropriate day, and then decode the message. Now, 99.99% of these messages were absolutely bogus.  They didn’t mean a thing at all.  Headquarters sent them down only to keep people on their toes and give them practice decoding messages.  It was all to ensure that the system worked if it were ever necessary to send a real secret message, like “Wake up.  Take your battle positions.  The Russians are coming.”

That’s pretty much what happened to the wise men. Their whole system of stargazing and decoding gave them nothing but bogus messages.  But on this particular occasion, the Lord sent them a real message, a celestial secret written in the stars.  And however it appeared, it must have made a real impact because normally the birth of a king in a miserable little conquered country like Judea would hardly have registered on their scale of events to take note of.  This one was different.  Somehow, though it couldn’t have made a lot of sense, the wise men knew that this Jewish King was going to be their king too; and the message was emphatic enough to get them to step out in faith, travel the 800 miles or so necessary to get there, and cause them to pay homage to the baby Jesus with their physical acts of worship and their costly gifts.  The coming of these Gentile wise men demonstrated a tremendous amount of faith in the secret message God sent them through the stars.

And that in itself, the faith of these wise men, was another celestial secret that God revealed to his people – another secret he laid out in plain sight before them; but they didn’t get it.  They were unable to decode it.  Last week when we met for worship, we heard how the promise of God to send a Savior into the world to deliver people from sin was given to a man named Abraham and his descendents after him.  The promise was passed down from generation to generation always in the same family – the family of Abraham’s line.  You didn’t get to be part of it except by having the good fortune to be born into the right family.

But the whole thing about the promise to Abraham and his descendants was an extended parable of sorts.  You remember what a parable is:  it’s an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.  Or to say it another way, a parable is another way that God hides his secrets in plain sight.  The earthly story in this parable is about a physical family.  It’s about the bloodline of Abraham and being inheritors of a gift by right of birth.  The heavenly meaning is about God’s grace.  The Lord wanted to emphasize that the promise comes to people by his grace alone and not by any action or merit of theirs.  The covenant of the Gospel is a covenant entered into by faith in the promises of God in Christ Jesus – and even this faith is a gift:  something that God works in the heart of people, and that people cannot by their own power and will produce on their own.  You don’t come into the covenant by choosing to believe in Jesus; rather you are born into the covenant when God works in you faith in Jesus by his Word and Spirit. So, the true children of Abraham who are heirs of God’s promise are not those who share his blood whatever they may believe; they are those who share his faith regardless of whatever blood flows in their veins.

Now it happened that the Jewish people got stuck on the earthly part of the parable.  They thought, “We are God’s chosen people because we are physically descendants of Abraham.”  And the first Christians, the disciples of Jesus, who all happened to be Jews, thought the same thing.  Even after the resurrection and Jesus giving them the great commission to go into all the world spreading the Gospel, they just couldn’t get it into their heads that that meant sharing the Gospel with people who were not Jews by birth.  The Bible’s book of Acts is mostly about how the early Christian Church came by degrees to understand the secret that God had been hiding in plain sight all along:  that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is meant for everyone.

That the church came (at length) to finally understand this simple truth is largely due to God’s work through St. Paul.  In the decades following our Lord’s Ascension, he became God’s primary secret agent – not to keep the Lord’s celestial secrets, but to decode them and make them known to the entire world.  And Paul is probably the last one any one of us would have picked for the job.  There was nothing of the suave, self-confident James Bond about him.  No, Paul was a little twerp of a guy, with a weak, trembling voice and a physical ailment of some kind.  As you recall, he was also one of the chief opponents of the early Christian Church.  He set out to try to destroy it and all who believed in the name of the Lord Jesus.

But by God’s grace he was chosen to be the agent of God’s grace.  That’s exactly what he’s saying in the Epistle lesson we heard this morning: that God chose him, the least of all of God’s people, to be the one to declare the secrets that God had long held hidden under a shroud of mystery.  And these secrets were twofold.  First, and most of a shock to the Jewish believers, was that Gentiles too were by faith heirs together with Israel and sharers with them in the promises of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And if that seems obvious to us, it’s only because Paul did the job God gave him to do as well as he did.  The fact is that if you believe in Jesus today, you can almost certainly trace your spiritual lineage back to St. Paul.  There really is a sense in which it can be said that he is the father of the faithful today.

But, as important as it is, Paul did more than just reveal the secret that Jesus is the Savior of all people; to him was also given the grace to reveal precisely how the Gospel was to be administered. Paul’s the one who, by divine inspiration, wrote the book on how the Christian Church was to function and operate. This is vital.  You know, the wise men came and worshipped Jesus, but then they left and no one ever heard from them again.  Did they share the good news of the Savior’s birth with others in their own land?  Did they even remain faithful themselves?  There’s no way to tell.  We don’t know what happened to them.  One thing’s for sure:  when the apostles of Jesus went to eastern lands after the Lord’s Ascension to spread the Gospel, they didn’t find any Christian Churches already in operation.

It was given to Paul to share God’s secrets concerning the Holy Christian Church.  He didn’t just go around making Christians by preaching Jesus; he planted the first Churches so that Christians would have a body in which to grow.  There’s no such thing as an autonomous, individual Christian floating around out there.  There are only Christians united together in the body of Christ through the ministry of the Church.  So to Paul was revealed what we know and practice even today about dividing the Word of truth into Law and Gospel, the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the pastoral ministry:  who’s qualified to do it and what’s he supposed to do; also the church’s organization, the means for maintaining discipline, what’s required for everyone to do and practice, what’s up to the individual to decide for himself, and so much more. These are celestial secrets the Lord revealed to his Church through Paul.

And having been made heirs of the promise by faith in Jesus through the ministry of the Church, these secrets have now been entrusted to us.  We are now God’s agents, just like Paul was.  Like him, we are by grace the keepers of the mysteries of his kingdom and the revealed secrets of God; and like him, to us have been given the honor and privilege of sharing these secrets with those whom God continues to call from darkness into the glorious light of his kingdom.

Some secrets are meant for keeping; others, as we’ve seen, are meant to tell.  This Epiphany season, may God who shared his most precious secret with us, the Good News that he sent his Son to die for our sins and give us new and holy life – may he give us his grace to go forth from here sharing this saving celestial secret that everyone needs to know.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!