A New Year's Epiphany

As a preacher, I always delighted in the intersection of the Feast of Epiphany and New Year’s Day.  The world is fresh.  Change is possible.  Life comes bearing gifts.  Unexpected visitors may show up on your doorstep bringing gifts.  Behold, along with God, you can do a new thing, even if your step has lost its youthful spring.

From one perspective, we can say, “It’s only a day.”  Just one of the 28,000 or so I’ve lived so far.  On the other hand, our faith is punctuated by special days: Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost, and also Epiphany. Our personal life is defined by special days as well – birthdays, weddings, the birth of a child, anniversaries, and remembering loved ones who have died, and live on in our hearts.  Time is never homogenous.  As the author of Lamentations says, God is faithful, and God’s mercies are new every morning.

As we grow older, we still want to matter.  We still want to leave a mark.  We don’t want to live monotonously, measuring our life out in coffee spoons with T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock.  We want to live a holy adventure in which we see life, with the philosopher Plato, as “the moving image of eternity,” seeing the infinite in finite moments and holiness in domestic tasks. 

As we look at 2025, many of us are apprehensive.  We are uncertain about the nation’s leadership.  We worry that without us realizing it, we have reached a tipping point in climate change.  We see the rise of violence against marginalized persons and want to be a safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community and treat undocumented persons with the respect they deserve as God’s beloved children.

We can feel helpless, especially as we experience tired joints and an ebbing of our once vital energies, and yet we can take solace in the spiritual, “this little light of min, I’m gonna let it shine…everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine…let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” Our light may seem weak to us, but the tiniest light, the one on our cell phone, can illuminate a room and guide us in the darkest room.

With the new year, we can live out the spirit of Epiphany: seeing God everywhere and in the most unexpected places.  Recognizing that God is bigger than our nation and religion, and that God calls us to recognize the big possibilities in small actions.

Yes, we matter.  Like a boy with five loaves and two fish.  A beauty queen who saves her nation at just such a time as this.  A woman who anoints Jesus, and whose sacrificial love reverberates through the centuries.  A small action can save the world.  Jewish mystics say that when you save a soul, it’s as if you save the world, and when a soul is destroyed, the world is destroyed.  I would go even further, the world is saved one action at a time: one look, one call to your political representative, one welcome to a stranger, one crossing of boundaries, one smile and outstretched hand, one book read with a child, one yes to love and one no to injustice.

In her poem to the South African women marching against apartheid, June Jordan says, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”  Even though we may no longer have the title or position, we can minister.  Even though we sit in the pew and no longer preach, we can say a kind and meaningful word.  We can lead from behind and be the still small voice that echoes through the community.

Life is filled with epiphanies, moments when everything lights up and we see the holiness of our lives and all creation. Let us be lights in the world this new year.  Let us look for epiphanies.  Let us let our light shine, for we are the ones we have been waiting for to heal the earth and tip the world toward love and justice.  Happy New Year! Happy New Day! Blessed Epiphany!