The mega-themes of the seasons of the church year are rather tight. Lent is primarily a penitential season, a season of confession. Easter is the season of fulfillment.  Advent is hopeful longing.  Christmas is the incarnation, the fulfillment of the hope of God’s promises.  The long season of Pentecost is the life of the church in the world.  Which leaves Epiphany, stuck between Christmas and Lent. Epiphany is tougher to apply an over riding theme. It isn’t the more practical Pentecost, even though the paraments are green and it is occasionally called Ordinary Time. There is a temptation to make it about knowledge, growing in wisdom as Luke often says about Jesus. But to we modern westerners knowledge is about technique. “I know how to do this.” Whatever this is. Knowledge is something you can regurgitate on a test.  And given the rapidly emerging ability of AI, the returns to such knowledge in the future might be greatly limited.  The same way we all have adapted to “you don’t need to know that, you can always just google it” we might be adapting to AI knowledge. You don’t need to know how to do that. When you need it done, ask the AI.  But Knowledge was not always attained only through technique. Knowledge could be given through revelation.  Knowledge could be a deeper understanding.  The problem is what do we mean by that deeper understanding.

Understanding doesn’t really capture it because it is still too much in the head. We can know things in the head that we don’t do.  Likewise we can know things emotionally or in our gut that we do nothing about. Epiphany is a heart knowledge. It is a coming near to God in a way that changes how we live.  Our Old Testament reading (Nehemiah 8) has an Epiphany in full. There is an increase in head knowledge.  Gathered Israel hears the Law read to them for the first time in a long time.  ‘The ears for all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law (Nehemiah 8:3).” There is an Emotional knowing.  “For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law (Nehemiah 8:9).” Unfortunately that is where are reading cuts off. In the rest of Nehemiah though, those gathered people do change how they live.  They complete the walls of Jerusalem and they reestablish Temple service.  They keep the feast which had been forgotten, commit to Sabbaths and resupply the Levites.  There are some questionable things that get swept up into their zeal, like the treatment of Jews married to non-Jews (“and they confronted them, and cursed them, and beat them (Nehemiah 13:25)”.  But the overall picture of Israel’s Epiphany, or you could call it a revival, is understandably human. Even in knowing God better, we still remain far away in this life.

We come to church to hear and receive the Word.  Prayerfully that enters receptive ears.  Maybe it churns our gut whether in sorrow for how we have acted or in compassion for others – in faith toward God and in love toward one another. We come to church to hear that Word, and then we are sent to live it. We are sent to live it in the midst of this world. Unlike Israel who decided they needed to cleanse themselves by their own actions and kick out the world. God has made us clean in Jesus Christ. It is by living out what we have heard in the midst of the world that we keep the Epiphany.  As Peter writes, “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. (1 Pet. 2:12 ESV)”  When our hearts have been changed so that we live it in front of the World, that is when the world has its own Epiphany.