Isaiah 60:1–6

¹Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. ²For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. ³And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising. ⁴Lift up your eyes all around, and see; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from far, and your daughters shall be carried on the hip. ⁵Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and exult, because the abundance of the sea shall be turned to you, the wealth of the nations shall come to you. ⁶A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall bring good news, the praises of the LORD.

If Christmas is God giving us the gift of his Son, Epiphany is God unwrapping the gift. Epiphany is God showing us his Son, Jesus. Epiphany means the "manifestation," "the showing," When you receive a gift, you say "Thank you" to the giver. Then you open the gift and look at it, that is Epiphany. Then you use the gift in accord with its purpose: if clothes, you wear them; if a toy, you play with it; if food, you eat it.

So it is with God's Christmas gift—a gift different from all others, for in this gift God gives us himself, his heart and mind, his good will and love, his mercy and unflinching determination to make us his special people forever!

Our thanks to God fill our adoration during these twelve days of Christmas. In Epiphany we see the beginning of God's unwrapping his gift and how we are to use that gift in accord with the Gift and the Giver. Epiphany is God's liturgy: God's work to redeem and save us and the world. In the liturgy God tells us the story of the world; how God comes to us in the conception, birth, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to save the world from sin and death. In worship He reveals his incarnation; his presence with us. The liturgy is Epiphany: God telling us that he is here with us bodily, in word and sacrament.

Arise! Shine!

God says to you. "Your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you" (see Is 60:1)! By the light of the star, the Wise Men were led to the light, they no longer walked in the darkness of their house gods, their cultural gods, their science gods, their self-contrived gods, but they walked in the light—in Jesus Christ. By the light of God's Gospel, you are led to the light, to walk in the light. Arise! Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.

The Wise men were intelligent and learned men. They had received the gift of learning and had received the general knowledge of the created world. They knew the sciences, the astronomy, and the mathematics of the Babylonians. They also knew the gods manufactured by the people of the East; the gods of darkness. But they had received another wisdom as well; as gift from God. They had the knowledge of God's promises carried to Babylon by the Israelites in exile. These educated and learned Wise Men looked for Jesus in Jerusalem. That was reasonable: the King of the Jews would be born in Jerusalem, the capital city of the Jews. But Jerusalem was not the place God had chosen to unwrap his gift of salvation to all the world.

Instead, when their intelligence and learning were brought into captivity to the Holy Scriptures, the Wise Men were led to follow the star to Bethlehem, to the child and to the place in which God had chosen to give himself in the fullness of grace and truth. The star, illuminated by the Holy Scriptures, led them to the Star!

The gift of intelligence and learning, the gift of the love of wisdom, of integrity and boldness in scholarship, are gifts of God. But it is only in his grace in Jesus that he gives us himself. This is the real work of his fatherly heart and mind. It is this grace of God that draws worshipers to himself, for by his grace God creates faith in us, faith that worships him by receiving his grace in Jesus.

That was Epiphany back then. The gods of the human intelligence, gods of cultural, religious, and human contrivance, died at the birth of the Child-God. Are we, today, merely spectators to these Gentiles becoming worshipers of the living God? How sad if that is all we are!

Here is Epiphany now. Today the call of God's grace reaches out to your ears and eyes—and to the ears and eyes of millions of believers around the globe. The Gospel of his glory, sung by the angels at Christmas, is proclaimed to you today, in this place; in the liturgy which leads us from the font of baptism through the word read and preached to the altar of his very body and blood where we are joined to the eternal wedding feast. His call is to come to worship him. In that Gospel he welcomes you, he invites you, to come to this One born in Bethlehem—the house of bread. In your ears he sounds the words that knock at the eardrums of your heart, inviting you to see him in his body, this Jesus who presents himself to us. This altar in church is his manger—his feed box, not for cows or sheep or donkeys, but for us, poor sinners, lost, troubled in the darkness of a world that neither knows nor fears nor loves him.

With boldness, St. Paul makes it clear that in these last times, God has revealed to his apostles the mystery of our redemption, the secret of the kingdom of God.

The heart of God is openly displayed in this Jesus, born of Mary. He is the promised descendant of David. Crucified in weakness and shame, he is raised in power and publicly preached to the whole world, for the whole world. The secret—the mystery—is more even than an open book. Jesus was suspended on the cross, on the hill, plainly between heaven and earth, to join us in himself to God in one, holy, newly created people. In Jesus heaven and earth meet. In the liturgy of our worship the here and now meets and joins the future in the eternal kingdom.

Jesus came from the house of Israel to draw the entire world into God. This work of God was always on Jesus' mind. But how is it that what began with Israel now includes the entire world as signified by the Wise Men coming from the East? God does not now find holy people among the worshipers of manufactured gods, and, by some whim of generosity, include them in his kingdom along with the Jews. No; God does not find such holy people, nor does he merely relax the rules for getting into his Kingdom.

No; now, here is he born the King of the Jews, to bind Jew and Gentile, religious and nonreligious, into his body, his Kingdom, that is, into himself!

The secret is not that God no longer considers sin to be sin, nor that he has no wrath against sin and sinners. No; the secret is that in the body of Jesus, God has carried the sin to death. In the blood of Jesus, God has given us eternal life—for all, everywhere, who believe in this Son. In his Gospel, God is both declaring and doing this work of the forgiveness of sin. He cuts us from our sin and binds us to Christ by faith. By the Gospel, God lifts us from darkness in death into life in his Son, for by the Gospel the light shines on us and in us to create that new creature—the one, new humanity called Church.

The secret is out. God loves us into loveliness. The King of the kingdom judges us righteous by the righteousness that he is, that he gives, and that he brings through faith.

The liturgy in our worship is nothing other than God's work, gathering us together in the community of believers and making himself present with us; drawing us unto himself first in baptism, then through his word read and preached and finally draws us to the altar where we partake of the wedding banquet together with the saints who have gone before us into eternity. This is a mystery which God plays out every week in the liturgy of the Divine Service.

Moreover, the mystery continues to work. God not only creates the Holy Church by the Spirit through the preached Gospel, but he also makes the Church herself part of the revelation of his secret. Created by the Gospel, the Church is called, gathered, enlightened, and preserved in the faith to carry that Gospel to the whole earth. He not only unwraps his gift for us, he not only offers himself to us in his liturgy, but through the church he unwraps the gift of himself for the world to see and take hold of; this is Epiphany; this is Mission and evangelism which are nothing else than this one holy Church of God in motion.

To some people, missions appear to be a burden placed on us by the Synod, a competitor to drain away resources from our own needs. In this view, missions appear to be something somebody does in some other place. Such is the misunderstanding of missions and of the Church.

Missions, the "sentness" of the Church, always begin with the Gospel and always begin where we are. Jesus told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is, of course, a geographical location. But missions also mean that you are sent with the Gospel to sinners, wherever you are in the world and wherever they are. We are sent to each other, and we are sent to the whole world.

When we want to ignore the other sinner as an object of the Gospel, or when we want to exclude some from being hearers and believers, we misunderstand our own selves as Church. We misunderstand the Gospel of God's gracious will to save sinners.

In speaking that Gospel of the forgiveness of sins for Jesus' sake and inviting people to trust him, God makes you his display to the universe that he wills to bind you and all believers into one Body in Christ Jesus, with Christ Jesus as our head.

Arise! Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you. If you do not shine, it is because you are not living in the light. If you work and do not let the light shine on your works, people cannot see them to glorify God.

Arise! Shine! That is, get up and listen to that Word. Get up and say that Word. Let that Word dispel the darkness of the gods manufactured by the human spirit. Live in the worship—that is, in trusting that God is your life and good, your righteousness and hope.

It is a sour spirit that thinks "missions" are something done by somebody else somewhere else. Lift up your eyes, and see how men and women and children of every race and tongue are drawn with you into this wondrous exchange: sinners lose their sin in the death of Jesus, and these very sinners trust him to give them forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, deliverance from death and the devil, and the lively hope of resurrection from the dead for eternal joy. Lift up your eyes. See. Your heart will leap for gladness.

Amen.