Celestial

 

Propers: Epiphany, AD 2023 A

 

Homily:

 

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

 

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

There’s something divine about the stars.

 

In ancient times they represented the eternal, the unchanging. No matter what might occur down here upon this earth, no matter how mutable were all things beneath the sun, up there in the firmament the celestial spheres kept turning, unperturbed, unimpeachable, showing us the way, guiding us in the night.

 

You could trust the stars. They always show true north. They always herald the seasons. Steadfastly they point the way for us to get back home. And this included planets, mind you, which literally meant “wandering” stars, following their own paths yet regular as clockwork. That sort of permanence, that reliability in an unreliable world, seems little less than divine. The planets were like gods, the stars like angels.

 

It’s hard to draw the line between literalism and symbolism here. Did the ancients believe that the stars were intelligent, that they had minds of their own, that they were in fact purer spirits looking down on us—or did they just represent all of that? One thing’s for certain: on the rare occasion when a star burnt out, or a new one appeared, or a comet brashly slashed across the sky, people got upset. The heavens were not supposed to change; it did not bode well here below.

 

Even today, knowing what we know of the solar system, of our galaxy, the stars still captivate us. They follow the same physical laws, are made up of the same elements, proceed from the same processes with which we are familiar. But the scale of them! The vast spans of time and space, so Brobdingnagian that we cannot fit our minds about them, even as we codify them in equations! The sky is still a source of wonder, the face of the infinite.

 

I question how many of us still pay attention: to the constellations, to meteor showers, even to the phases of the moon. It’s right up there for all to see if only we’d look up. I confess that I never paid it much mind until my first Farmer’s Almanac. Now I see them all the time, the turning of the heavens, the music of the spheres. And they are wondrous to behold—all the more so not in spite of my background in the sciences but because of it. Science and spirituality do go hand-in-hand.

 

In the Eastern Orthodox Church there remains a tradition of viewing the heavens, and indeed the whole of Creation, as an icon; that is, as a holy image, a sacred picture that points beyond itself into the deeper reality. If I were to show you the Mona Lisa or the Birth of Venus or the Last Supper, and ask of you, “What is this picture?”—and you then were to respond by describing the chemical components of the canvas and the paints—you wouldn’t be wrong.

 

But you’d have missed the point. You’d have missed the goodness and the beauty and the truth of what’s portrayed. You’d have missed its meaning and its purpose and its value. Science finds facts, not truth. For that you need philosophy. You need religion. And yes, I am now paraphrasing Indiana Jones.

 

One of the best parts of Epiphany, and the festival’s central story for those of us in the West, is the tale of the Magi: wise men from the East, following a miraculous Star to celebrate the birth of our Savior. Now, as for who and what the Magi were, I’ve already written at some length on that in this month’s Pastor’s Epistle. I needn’t repeat myself here.

 

But the reason they so captivate us, methinks, is because they are open to wonder. The Magi are stargazers, spiritual scientists, who observe the motions of the heavens and interpret within them a deeper, truer meaning.  We tend to dismiss our horoscopes today—most of us, anyway—yet the Magi were correct. Their guiding Star proved true, for indeed it was an angel, or so the dominant tradition maintains. It’s funny where we find God once we start to look.

 

Christians used to be like this. We used to be like the Magi. We weren’t afraid of science or philosophy or other faiths. They weren’t a threat to us. All truth is God’s truth, after all, all beauty God’s beauty, all goodness His goodness. We used to be polymaths. We used to know languages, history, philosophy, mythology, the whole nine yards. We used to be the very best scientists, the very best stargazers, for the head is not separate from the heart nor from the hand.

 

We think. We love. We give. In all of this, we conform ourselves to Christ, who is Himself the Wisdom of God, the Word of God. I’m not saying that we all have to have advanced degrees, if indeed that’s still where wisdom lies. But what I am saying is that we should be fearless in our openness, fearless in our learning, fearless in our love, not only for our own but also for the other, for the outsider—for no-one in the cosmos is beyond the love of God.

 

You cannot go where God is not. You cannot find a truth that is not His. And you will not ever meet a single human being, or indeed a single iota of Creation, whom God does not love with all of His heart, for whom He did not die. Learn from the atheists, learn from the pagans, learn from the Jews. God is with them. Christ is with them, veiled perhaps beneath another name.

 

We are all of us stargazers, searching through the heavens, searching for wisdom, searching for truth. And Christ will lead us, by whatever means, to find Him and bring Him our gifts. After all, He’s the one who gives them in the first place. Look to Christ, our morning star, who outshines all the rest.

 

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.