St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in St George's Cathedral, Cape Town, on Sunday 4 January 2009 at Evensong which celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany

“Last night I had the strangest dream,” perhaps you have heard yourself say something like that often enough. I certainly have.

In Shakespeare's Richard III, Brakenbury asks the disheveled Clarence, a prisoner in the Tower, “Why looks your grace so heavily today?”

Clarence replies:

“O. I have pass'd a miserable night,
So full of fearful dreams, ugly sights,
That, as I am a Christian man,
I would not spend another such night
Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days -
So full of dismal terror was the time.”

As Matthew tells the story of Jesus to his Jewish readers, Joseph, the earthly father of the Messiah that his Gospel proclaims, is a dreamer of dreams. Matthew is fascinated with dreams and their power. This is not true of the other Gospel writers. In Matthew's Gospel dreams appear at important, climactic moments of the story of the life and death of Jesus. It is as though Matthew gathers the harvest of the Old Testament tradition of dreaming - in which God cooperates with the unconscious and the noetic - to prompt the human choices that shape a people's destiny. There are 111 references to dreaming in the Bible, but only 9 of them occur in the New Testament. 6 of these are in Matthew's Gospel - there are no references to dreams in either Mark, Luke or John.

Listen to the dreams that Matthew recounts as central to the life of Jesus. First, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife for the Holy Spirit is working a miracle of a child within her. Next, there is the dream that informs the celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany. The wise men are warned in a dream not to return to Herod but to go home by another road. After the wise men wisely depart in this fashion, the angel of the Lord again appears to Joseph in a dream and directs him to take the child and his mother and to flee to Egypt to escape the murderous tyranny of Herod. When Herod dies, the angel of the Lord again appears to Joseph in a dream to tell him: “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead.” Even as he is being faithful to this dream, Joseph is told in yet another dream that he should avoid Judea and instead go directly to Galilee. These dreams shape the experience of the infant Jesus. Twenty-five chapters later, as Matthew tells the story of Jesus' passion and death, there is another dream. This one is all the more significant for its being recklessly unheeded. While Pilate was sitting in the judgment seat, in a daring and risky break with magisterial protocol, Pilate's wife presumes to interrupt court procedure by sending word to him that he should stop and desist: 'Have nothing to do with this innocent man,' she warns her husband, 'for I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.'

The story of the Epiphany is spellbinding. In it we encounter strangers with alien powers who bear rare and extravagant gifts as they follow a new star, palace intrigue, a city thrown into crisis, a cruel and tyrannical king ready to do anything to hold onto his puppet throne and paltry power, secret plots and schemes, an innocent child perilously at risk, and a host of dreams. What strikes me most about the Epiphany story is how it ends. Listen to what Matthew writes: 'After being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, the wise men left for their own country by another road.' Here on the threshold of the new year, we are reminded that the purposes of God come to us in unexpected ways and take us on other roads.

Just when we are busy staking our claims to what this new year will mean, just when we are filling out our crisp new diaries and marking up our as yet pristine new calendars with the shape we mean to impose on the realities we are setting out to meet, the story of Jesus reminds us in the most dramatic and surprising terms that God's ways are creative and ambiguous. God's way of breaking into our lives is by addressing the imagination with poetry and paradox, by inviting us to enter into the world of the imagination where the risk of interpretation makes us both vulnerable and attentive.

This is the meaning of the Epiphany - God is breaking into the dark world of our perplexed and anxious lives to fill them with the marvelous radiance of faith, hope and love. This is the scope of Epiphany - God is gathering into the embrace of God's loving purposes all people, without exception, without exclusion: there are no strangers, no outcasts, no untouchables and no misfits. This is the mystery of the Epiphany - that the powerful vulnerability of God's love seeps into the very fabric of our lives, making us new creatures, innocent as newborns, each and every one, without exception, raising us all to the dignity of daughters and sons of God in Christ.

When Christ was born the world was dark with terror. Herod decreed the massacre of the innocents - the systematic murder of all the male children in order to forestall the possibility of a new order breaking in. Our world is dark too. Across the world people and nations are menaced by terrible violence and frightening civil strife, wars escalate and terror reigns. The bedeviled legacy of colonialism with its exploitation of the poorest and the most vulnerable is the tragic context in which legitimate political aspirations clash with the brutal lust for domination. But it is not only the international scene that is under the shadow of death: people everywhere are overwhelmed by isolation and despair; hopeless victims of poverty and homelessness, they are held captive by the unfair distribution of wealth and a lack of access to opportunity. Sickness and disease which ravage whole continents rack up frightening statistics – and yet they are personal catastrophes for families and individuals. Our world is dark.

To stand as the radiant light of the new life of the Gospel, as a servant of the Epiphany at the office or in the check-out line, at a political meeting or in a casual conversation, at school or on the Metro, at a cocktail party or at a cricket match, is to dare to let the light of Christ transform the whole world person by person, moment by moment. On the feast of the Epiphany we are called to stand to be counted as those who celebrate the bright light of the wideness of God's mercy.

The brightness of that light throws into stark relief the world it saves. When Christ was born the taboos of exclusion and the conventions of privilege rendered anyone and anything unfamiliar unacceptable, unworthy, disposable, inferior and contemptible. His was a world wrapped in darkness. Our world is dark too - all around us people are alienated by prejudice and xenophobia, victimized by exploitation, made objects of derision. Women are disrespected, gays and lesbians are cast out, those who differ from us, who hold other opinions are vilified. In our homes children are at risk, women are abused, families are dysfunctional, Our world is dark.

To live in the orbit of the Epiphany is to stand ready to be caught up in its life-giving radiance. It is to dare the life of the imagination, to hazard our dreams, and to risk the other road home. Can we venture precarious dreams instead of our apparently secure plans and our ostensibly protected strategies? Can we take the chance on the road less traveled?

Here at the gate of the year, with twelve long months of potential for life and love, health and hope, wholeness and wonder before us, are we going to commit ourselves to live Epiphany all the year long, letting go of complete control, abandoning the marshaling of forces and the manipulation of events to dare the bright light God's ingenuity, to thrill to the surprising open spaces of God's loving caresses and to dance on the edge of time a tango of risk and dreams?

Will we be doomsayers, staking our bets on the paltry guarantees of predictability - or will we take a chance on God, knowing that our God is light and love, joy and peace in a hundred thousand uncountable ways, beyond our asking or imagining?

I pray that we will, and that the marvelous light of God will fill our lives with the very fullness of God.

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