Feast of the Epiphany - Homily 5

 Homily 5 - 2018

I was lucky to study in Rome for six years immediately before and after my ordination – many long years ago. I stayed in two colleges, both of them international colleges. In the first one there were about fifty nationalities represented. The whole experience had a profound influence on my sense of belonging. Ever since then, I have felt myself to be not only a member of an extraordinarily universal Church but also a citizen of the world. For me, it served to put Australia in context.

Not surprisingly, at both colleges we claimed the Feast of Epiphany as our own special feast day. As Matthew shaped his infancy narrative, Epiphany was the day when representatives of the nations paid their homage to the infant Christ. While the political leader of Jesus’ own nation sought to kill him, men from foreign countries brought him gifts. Matthew’s Gospel went to considerable lengths to emphasise that there are no favorites with God. God’s love embraces the world.

Remember the photograph taken of the earth by the astronauts who first landed on the moon. We made a lot of it at the time to remind ourselves that, from space, it is blindingly obvious that we are one single globe, and that national boundaries are only human agreements. When God sees us, God sees us as the persons we are, unique but equal, different but interdependent. Nationality is irrelevant. We are citizens, as it were, of the one global village.

It is the mark of sin that so often we see others as threats, not as daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, in the one universal family of God. Instinctively [or is it?], we seem drawn to separateness rather than to unity. We have to work deliberately to love; but when we do, we recognise how right, how appropriate, how deeply fulfilling, how truly human, loving is.

Sadly, our present age seems to be moving more and more in the direction of nationalism and isolationism. National interests seem to override all other interests – Australia obsessively protecting our borders, the United States making America great again, Britain going it alone from the European Union, countries of the European Union closing their borders to refugees. And now we have the leaders of two nuclear-armed nations, the United States and North Korea, puffing out their chests like little boys and boasting how much of the world they can annihilate at the push of a button – just to show who is the greatest. Did we learn nothing lasting from the Second World War, and the succession of wars that have happened all around the globe since then?

Nor does what is happening nearer to home reassure me. Pressure groups proliferate, claiming more and more personal rights for themselves, which could be a good thing, except that rights make little sense other than within the context of the common good. Rights without responsibilities eventually self-destruct.

In the field of global politics, we feel powerless. In the realm of national politics, our power is limited. Yet, we are not helpless. Today’s Feast of Epiphany reminds us where the priorities of God lie. God’s love is universal, and that love has flowed out into God’s creation. The energies that drive the world are expressions in different guises of what the great Italian poet Dante, centuries ago, referred to as … “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars”.

To accept that, of course, is an act of faith. I might add, an act of adult faith, of practised adult faith. But we can allow that faith to develop as we school ourselves to seek the presence of God in every experience, in whatever is truly real. We synchronise with the world’s hidden energy as we seek to live with integrity and honesty, always open to the way of loving, and so of inclusivity.

Happy Epiphany!