The Epiphany of Our Lord 2025 - "Not For Quitters"

Saint Matthew 2:1-14

I had experienced the phenomenon many times in my life but up until this year I didn’t know it had a name.

At the beginning of each new year new faces would begin to appear at any health to which I belonged.  One could spot them a mile away by their outfits.  Some looked like they were left over from high school or, at best, college phys ed. classes.  A little tattered and torn and much the worse for wear.  Other outfits looked brand new, like they just emerged from a sporting goods store bag. 

The owners always appeared a little lost looking at the weight machines as if they were creations from outer space.  Some gave up trying to figure them out and just used them for benches.

In the comic “The Duplex,” one guy observes “I hate in January when the gym fills up with all the newbies who hog the machines. Look at that bozo sitting on the leg press. He’s been texting for ten minutes.”  Then he turns to his girlfriend and says, “That’s where I like to take my selfies.”1

Seasoned veterans of the health club scene always knew we could wait the new people out and before long they would find other things to do with their mornings.

What we didn’t know that there was an actual date assigned to the day they would disappear until an Apple watch commercial that has been playing on almost every sporting event I watched over New Year’s told us that the second Friday in January, this year January 10, was known as “Quitters Day.”  

The premise of the commercial was obviously if you purchased one of these Apple watches, it would motivate you to the point that you would not be a quitter.

The history of this very pejorative term dates back to “2019, {when} extensive research was conducted by Strava — a social network for athletes —  found that approximately 80% of people who made New Year’s resolutions have tapped out by the second week of January. {By} Making deductions from the available 800 million user-logged activities in that year, Strava even went on to predict that the second Friday of January was the fateful day when the motivations of most quitters begin to decline. 

An accompanying article stated the obvious.  “The key to not quitting something you started is to not just decide to do something but to be totally devoted to doing it.”2

The main characters in today’s Gospel were not checking their watches but checking the stars and when they found that one star that seemed to them to be specially special and totally devoted themselves to finding out what was behind this celestial phenomenon, they decided that they would not quit even though there were countless obstacles in their way.

The first may have been their families.  I’ve always wondered how their spouses and children reacted.

Did their children stare at their fathers with stunned expressions on their faces until they yelled: “Mom!  Dad’s looking at the stars again!”

Did their wives reply? “I’ll show him stars.  Where’s my rolling pin?”

Still the three astrologers were not going to give up.  They closed up their storefront tarot card reading businesses, put away their crystal balls, and began their search until they found what their were looking for.  They were determined not to quit.

Even the weather and conditions of travel did not slow them down.  As W.H. Auden wrote in his poem, “The Adoration of the Magi.”

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

A hard time we had of it.

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.3

Still they didn’t quit.

Even when they found themselves in the wrong place face-to-face with evil incarnate in one person they didn’t quit.  Face to face with Herod, they simply, naively ask:  “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”4

As my former pastor Shannon Kershner observed: 

I cannot even imagine the way his blood pressure must have risen when the magi asked him where was the child who had been born King of the Jews. “King of the Jews?!,” he must have thought. He was King of the Jews. That is what Rome declared, and that was the way it would forever be.

Following the normal way power works in our world, the king responded to his own fear not with a spirit of openness and courage, but by holding on to his power even more tightly and deciding to do whatever was necessary to keep it.5

That’s the way power works observed another pastor friend Shawn Fiedler:

Fear is a powerful, haunting thing. Fear grabs hold of the powerful; a false reality is created, and using their resources of plenty, they protect themselves at any cost.”6

Up against this kind of power they could have quit but they didn’t. Even when Herod lies right to their faces with an unctuous: “Go and search carefully for the young Child, and when you have found Him, bring back word to me, that I may come and worship Him also.”7

They don’t quit or even cower before Herod and his kind. They see through Herod like a cheap suit. They know that Herod and his kind always lie.  They are good at it.  They’ve spent their whole lives saying the most outrageous things and puffing themselves up with their own self-delusions so that lying comes as easy to them as breathing. 

The intrepid seekers have come to far to quit now.  With their newfound information and the correct coordinates they head off until they find what they have been looking for. 

And now the star, which they had seen in the east, went in front of them as they travelled until at last it shone immediately above the place where the little child lay. The sight of the star filled them with indescribable joy.

So, they went into the house and saw the little child with his mother Mary. And they fell on their knees and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts—gold, incense and myrrh.8

At this point they could have called it quits but, and don’t miss this, after they had completed their mission and done what they set out to do their lives were in the greatest danger.  Disobeying Herod put these outsiders outside the law and who knows what Herod would have done to them.  Still, “they left for their own country by another road.”9

T

he image of the Three Kings, and really, who cares if there were three or not or whether their names were Casper, Balthazar and Melchior or something else entirely.  Who cares if they came from the Orient or more likely  Persia  the very region were so many conflicts rage today? 

This image reminds us that life is more than a moment from a Christmas pageant but is about people who did not quit.  It is about people who looked evil in the eye and turned their backs to go another way.

It is about people who never quit making choices for good and that is where we fit in.  

There are, there will always be, temptations to give in and give up. We will always face temptations to quit and throw up up our hands and say, “What can we do in the face of the Herod’s of our day?” 

But we know, deep down in our heart of hearts we know, that to put our faith in some earthly leaders is folly.  To trust some is pure foolishness.  And to believe their words are dangerous.

We also know there is another way.  We know that there must be another way.  There must be someone else to follow, to put our faith in, to trust. There must be another leader whose way is not built on lies and deceit but whose ways are always justice and peace.  There is another one whom we can’t quit on.  There is another one whom we must be totally devoted to finding and then holding on to.

We cannot give up on his ways.  The Wise Men met Jesus once and it changed their lives.  We’ve met him countless times in story and song and so we do not quit on following his way, holding on to his promises, and finding in him the one true light of our lives.

Like the magi we have found the one, been touched by the one, who came among us to rule not with power or might but the power of love.

Following his ways and never quitting. Never quitting on his promises we’ll be found once again by Jesus Christ, who at the beginning of each new year, at the beginning of each new day, never quits showing us a better way.

Christ’s way! The way that never quits.  The way that never gives up!  

________________

1. Glenn McCoy, “The Duplex,” The Beacon-News, January 3, 2025, sec. Section 1, p. 11

2. Tamkeen Kiani, “Quitters Day,” National Today, August 23, 2023, https://nationaltoday.com/quitters-day/.

3. W. H. Auden, “The Adoration of the Maji” in “Poems about the Three Kings: A Majestic Journey,” PoemVerse, May 27, 2024, https://poemverse.org/poems-about-the-three-kings/.

4. St. Matthew 2:2. (NIV) [NIV= New International Version (Colorado Springs, CO International Bible Society, 1984).

5. Shannon J. Kershner, “Lessons Learned.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. January 4, 2016.

6. Shawn Fiedler, “By Another Road.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. January 6, 2019.

7. St. Matthew 2:8. (NKJV) [NKJV= The New King James Version (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Incorporated, 2014).

8. St. Matthew 2:10-12. (PHILLIPS) [PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English (London, ENG: HarperCollins, 2000).

9.    St. Matthew 2:12. (NRSV) [NRSV= The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)

 

Christmas 2024 - "In the Midst of the Muddle"

 

Saint John 1:1-14

I am always amazed when somebody remembers what I said once in a sermon.  Particularly because I can’t even remember what I said from one week to the next.  I have a hard time remembering what I have said in conversation from one day to the next.

Sometimes I ask my friends what I said, and their usual reply is, “You know, I really wasn’t listening.” I come away with the feeling that they haven’t heard a word I have said in years.

That is why a few weeks ago I was stunned when a good friend remembered over drinks that last Christmas Day I talked about the musical Mame and how one day she was one of New York City’s highest rollers with a gaudy wardrobe and a lifestyle is as outrageous as her behaviour.  

She was the personification of the roaring twenties right until October of 1929. If Auntie Mame was the representative of the glory days, she is also a symbol of the gloom.  One by one we see her garish treasures being removed from her apartment.  No longer able to live on her investments, which are all gone, she has to find a real job.  When she discovers that she is such a failure at this thing called work that she is even unable to sell shoes and her cupboards contains only shredded wheat, she pauses for a moment and announces.

“We need a little Christmas; right this very minute

Candles in the window; carols at the spinet

We need a little Christmas now!”

That conversation got me to wondering what the song for this Christmas might be and then, at a concert I attended, a friend sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

It comes from the musical Meet Me in Saint Louis and it comes again to a family who is distraught over their father’s decision to move from Saint Louis to New York. In the movie, on Christmas Eve, Judy Garland sings the song to cheer up her little sister.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

Someday soon we all will be together

If the fates allow

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

This year, and perhaps it is me, what stood out from that classic was the promise that “next year all our troubles will be miles away” and the realization that “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

The simple dictionary defination of “muddle” is to be “in a messy or confused state.”

And sometimes that is exactly where we are and not because we have consumed too many drinks last night that have been “muddled” but in a good way.

In his column last week in “The Dispatch” Jonah Goldberg reminded me of the scene in the movie Parenthood where Steve Martin is a stressed-out dad complaining about the burdens of life to his wife, played by Mary Steenburgen. She says, “What do you want me to do? Give you guarantees? Life is messy.” 

Martin replies, “I hate messy. It’s so … messy.”

Life is messy and the good news of today’s gospel is that we don’t have to muddle through it alone.

I always like to think of John the Evangelist, philosopher and theologian, staring up at the night sky and perhaps trying to make some sense of this Jesus story,

Yes, he had heard all about Mary and Joseph. Yes, he had heard the story of the shepherds and the angels. Yes, he had heard the story about the wisemen from the east.  But more than that he had heard the story of the life, death and resurrection of this man Jesus whom it seemed to him that the plot of the entire universe was caught up with.

You see, he’s studied the scrolls and the Torah and the words of the prophets. He’s studied the  works of Greek philosophy and has read all the poetry he can find trying to explain this Jesus but he just couldn’t find the words to describe him and what he meant.

Then it hits him.  How can he explain what happened? This is it! “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us ... full of grace and truth.”  

I love the way, Dr. Eugene Peterson paraphrased this in The Message. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. (John 1:14)

Flesh and blood, living next door.  That means that Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us is in the messies we do not like helping us as we try our best to muddle through.  He is the light shining in the darkness helping us to find our way.

But, as Madeline E’Engle wrote in her book, A Ring of Endless Light.” “Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.”

But we don’t want that. 

As Dr. Scott Black Johnson observed once in a sermon.

I want the light to arrive and to win, and I want it to win big. I want the light to deal with the darkness in a way that is so overwhelming, so completely devastating, that I can switch channels at half-time because there is no way, no possible way, that the darkness is going to come out of the locker room to start the third quarter. 

(I don’t know this for sure but Dr. Johnson is a native of Duluth, Minnesota and a graduate of St. Olaf college so he’s probably a Vikings fan and, unlike Bears fans, doesn’t know the kind of darkness we endure.)

Instead of total victory, we get something painfully modest. The light came into the world, and the darkness did not extinguish it. The darkness was not able (at least, not immediately) to reach over and pinch out the flickering wick of the light.

What John is telling us in his Gospel is that most of all, Jesus is with us when we go through the darkness.  

As Dr. Tom Are said once, “This light does not destroy the darkness, but it is a word strong enough to keep you human in a world of inhumanity.”

That is what we need to know everyday when we are muddling through the mess and need a little Christmas.

We need to know that Jesus is our light in our darkness. In him we find someone who is with us in our deepest depths as well as our highest heights.

And John helps us to discover that he has been there all along, “at work in your life ... bringing creative hope in every dark moment.”

Not just our lives but our world. John wants us to know that Jesus story is not limited to “the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee...” or “those days when a decree went out from Ceasar Agustus” but goes back all the way to the beginning of time and will continue to be with us until the end.  

Jesus story is present in the midst of it all.  In the midst of the mayorship of Brandon Johnson of Chicago and J.D. Pritzger’s governor ship of Illinois.  Jesus is with us when transition from one president to another.  In the midst days of wars and rumors of wars and days of blessed sweet peace, Jesus is with us.

So, if you remember only one thing, I have said this Christmas remember this:  From the very beginning says John in his gospel Jesus has been with us in the midst of the muddle and the mess.  

In the midst of our messy and muddled life the message of Christmas is  Jesus is with us.  

There is no place where we’ve been that he hasn’t been. There is no place that we will go where he will not be. Jesus will be with us, “always and everywhere as near to us as our own breath.”

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.