Revelation: the first disciples

1990 (Year A), 21 January /
Epiphany 3

St Peter de Beauvoir Town and All Saints Haggerston

Over the course of time things sneak up on us without us really being aware of them. Grey hair is one, and ever so slightly larger waist is another, our age and what’s probably worse our children’s ages all conspire to surprise us at one time or another. It always comes as a jolt to realise that you haven’t seen a friend for such a long time.

So it is with the things of religion. I know I thought when I came here almost seven years ago – now that’s a shock as well – I know that I thought all people are revelations of the divine. All people show us something of the nature of God. I thought that then with my head, it comes as something of a shock now to realise I never had the slightest idea what the implications and the reality of that might be. It’s something that has become imperceptibly clearer – just every so often I can grasp the enormity of it all.

Listening to different people pray here in church week by week, is the way that this particular revelation is brought home most obviously for me. For it’s through those prayers that I see pictures and hear descriptions of the divine. Suddenly someone will say something and I’ll think of course why didn’t I think of that before. Of course that’s how God is and always has been. It will be something that is incredibly obvious to the person who said it, maybe they’ve always thought it, or it has always been part of their tradition; but for me, the vision of God which the prayer contains, is full of newness and life. It is a window into the very nature of God.

Now this is the season for revelation and shocks, first for shepherds, then for kings, now the disciples. What they must have felt like I cannot even begin to think. To us, if we have ears to hear, we are given little insights into the divine – to be convinced that it’s God standing before you in person, is a quite different thing altogether.

It is fortunate that those like me, who are slower than most, who take time to discover things and to make them their own, are still loved and waited for, and still found room with those who can see more clearly and run on ahead. Slowcoaches have their role models in the Christmas story as well.

There is the parable of the kings, coming laboriously, taking sights and calculations, a clear contrast from the others who had run barefoot in their eagerness to see the child. At the end of the Kings’ pilgrimage, they came to the manger, and were not turned away. They too found room. Their gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. They are the patron saints of latecomers, of the slow, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all those who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all those who stand in danger because of their talents.

The Kings have something to say to us all about how revelations take hold on our lives. If the disciples were the hares in this story as they left homes and families to immediately follow the Christ, then the Kings were the tortoises. All slow and ponderous taking their time but getting there in the end.

And along the road that leads to the final union with God there are these close encounters, these revelations of the divine. Some we may recognise immediately others will take an age to get though to us. But come they will – and that’s only to be expected too, for our sisters and brothers are not only those who God, in great mercy came that first Christmas to save, but we are now the agents through whom God in all graciousness has chosen to continue saving the world.

So, Almighty God, by whose grace alone we are accepted and called to your service: strengthen us by your Holy Spirit and make us worthy of our calling; through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN