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Foundry United Rev. |
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“The Irony of Epiphany” Sunday, January 4,
2009 |
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Ephesians 3: 1-12
Rev. |
One is the story by O.
Henry entitled “The Gift of the Magi.” Do you know it? A young couple is too
poor to buy each other Christmas gifts. The wife cuts off her treasured long,
beautiful hair to sell it to a wig-maker for money to buy her husband a chain
for his heirloom pocket watch. Meanwhile, he has pawned his watch to buy her
a set of combs for her long, beautiful hair. That’s ironic. A true Wikipedia example
of irony happened in 1974 near here. In 1974 the Consumer Product Safety
Commission distributed 80,000 lapel buttons promoting "toy safety,"
and then had to do a recall of their own pins because they’d been painted
with lead paint, had sharp edges, and had small clips that could be broken
off and swallowed. Ironic. Here’s another
Wikipedia example of irony: During the 1920s The New York Times
repeatedly heaped scorn on crossword puzzles. In 1924 it lamented "the
sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will
fit into a prearranged pattern;" in 1925 the New York Times said "the question of whether the puzzles are
beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. The craze evidently
is dying out fast;" and in 1929 it said that "The cross-word
puzzle, it seems, has gone the way of all fads." Today, of course, no newspaper
is more closely identified with the crossword puzzle than The New York
Times. Ironic. Wikipedia includes an example of ironic last words: “They couldn't hit an elephant
at this distance," were nearly the last words of American Civil War
General John Sedgwick before being shot through the eye by a Confederate
sniper. Irony. The Bible is full of
irony. Biblical history is consistently ironic. Joseph’s brothers sell him
into slavery. He becomes a senior public official in The basic story line of
the Bible is ironic: A group of powerless slaves become the spiritual leaders
of western civilization. The Jews are conquered
by the Babylonians in Jeremiah’s time. Epiphany is a season of
irony. The one whom his followers believed to be the Jewish messiah who would
restore The book of Ephesians
calls it a mystery. Ephesians was probably not written by Paul, but it is
written in his voice as though he were speaking…a literary device used often
in epistles. Paul is the apostle to whom the mystery has been revealed – the
mystery that Gentiles have become members of the same body and sharers in the
promise of Jesus Christ. (Eph. 3:6) This, he says, is “the plan of the
mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” (Eph. 3: 9) The Greek word
translated mystery is a derived from the word muo which literally means “to shut the mouth.” A mystery is
something that makes us shut our mouths. It is what a southerner means when
she says: “Well, shut my mouth.” The Greek word for
mystery and the word irony are very
similar, I think. The fact that the Jewish messiah includes the Gentiles, and
that this is the purpose of Jewish history from the very beginning is ironic.
It shuts everybody’s mouths. During Epiphany we
celebrate the coming of the magi to worship the Christ child, a story
included in the Gospel of Matthew to make the point that including Gentiles
was always God’s purpose, even before we came to understand it. During Epiphany we
celebrate the spread of Christianity throughout the known world of biblical
times, and then eventually into every corner of the globe, so that the church
has become a global body where every tribe is included and every language is
spoken. But we also celebrate
the irony of history…the irony of God…God is ironic. You might even say that
to believe in God means believing that life and history are ironic. When we
are weak then we are strong. When we think we are strong we are often really
weak. The best laid plans of mice and men.[ii]
To believe in God means
to recognize that we are not in control of history. We are not in control of
much of our own lives. I’ve been reading the
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr again. He is most popularly remembered because of
a prayer he wrote that has come to be called the Serenity prayer: “God, give
us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage
to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.” Reinhold Niebuhr’s daughter has written a wonderful
book entitled “The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Time of Peace and
War.”[iii] I’ve started rereading
Niebuhr after reading Andrew Bacevich’s very important book “The Limits of
Power.” Bacevich turns to Niebuhr to help understand One of Niebuhr’s books
that Bacevich quotes several times is the book: “The Irony of American History.”
One of the points Niebuhr makes is that the more we as Americans try to
control the world, the more uncontrollable it becomes. “If virtue becomes vice
through some hidden defect in the virtue;” Niebuhr writes, “if strength
becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the
mighty [person] or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because
too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does
not know its own limits – in all such cases, the situation is ironic.”[iv] Reinhold Niebuhr warned
that “our dreams of managing history,” meaning Andrew Bacevich says we
have slipped once again into the arrogance that Niebuhr warned against. This
is what Bacevich writes: “Americans ought to
give up on the presumptuous notion that [we] are called upon to tutor Muslims
in matters related to freedom and the proper relationship between politics
and religion. The principle informing policy should be this: Let Islam be
Islam. In the end, Muslims will have to discover for themselves the
shortcomings of political Islam, much as Russians discovered the defects of
Marxist-Leninism and Chinese came to appreciate the flaws of Maoism – perhaps
even as we ourselves will one day begin to recognize the snares embedded in
American exceptionalism.”[v] The more we try to
control history the more uncontrollable it will become. This is the irony of
God. I am amused by those
who talk about “defending the church.” We have these groups in our
denomination and others that have emerged who see it as their duty to defend
the church. What are they defending the church against? People? You and me?
Or are they defending the church against new ideas? You can not control the
church. You can not map the church’s future. Epiphany teaches us this. We can
go where God takes us either faithfully or kicking and screaming, but we end
up going where God takes us. You can’t defend the church. The same is true in our
personal lives. The more we push to get someone to love us, the less likely
it is to happen. The more we focus on success rather than the mission to
which we are called, the less likely we are to be successful. Jesus told lots of
ironic stories. One of the most ironic was about a farmer who was so
successful that he tore down all his barns and built big new ones to hold all
his crops, and he said to himself, “Now I can stop working and eat, drink,
and be merry because I have enough stored up for the rest of my life.” And
that very night his life was required of him. This is a very ironic story. The point is to live a
good rich meaningful life now, today, this very day, because we can’t control
our futures, none of us. This is what humility means.
Humility isn’t putting ourselves down. It is simply knowing that we are
finally not in charge. This is what prayer is – the acknowledgement that we
are finally not in charge. Faith is knowing that God
is finally in charge, not us. Faith is trusting the One who is really in
charge. Join me in a prayer:
You know, O God, how much difficulty we have trusting you. We want to be in
control. We want to be you. Help us to trust you so that we might live well
today and every day we are blessed with. Amen. www.foundryumc.org |
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