O God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.
The celebration of Epiphany comes, for us, near the end of the Christmas Season. But as this ancient Collect reminds us, the Feast of the Epiphany is actually a lot older than Christmas!
The Collect in its present form comes to us from an eighth century Gregorian Sacramentary. And it’s fascinating the way it connects the star and the Magi to us!
The name Epiphany, the epiphany, means the revelation or the showing of the Messiah to the world he has come to save. You can see that rather obviously as Mary hold the Christ child up for the adoration of the Magi: Balthasar, Melchior, and Caspar representing all the nations of the world.
But how did this showing come about? How did the Magi find their way to the Christ child who had been born into their world? Well, every school child knows the answer to that question: the were guided by a star! Without the star, they never would have found him...just like a pillar of fire led the way for the Israelites to leave the slavery of Egypt, a bright star led the way for the nations to find their Savior.
Now that’s where the prayer comes in. For it begins by recalling that the star led the nations to the Only-begotten-Son of God. But it then asks the question: how do we find him? How do we find the Lord who promised to remain with us until the end of time?
And the answer is by faith. In his great mercy, God has planted the light of faith in our hearts: the faith first lit in the heart of the Blessed Virgin and of the Apostles and handed down through the ages as the great treasure of the Church. That faith leads us, we modern-day Magi, to find the Christ.
And what do we find, when we are led by this faith? We find the beauty of the sublime glory of God. For when we look upon the face of God, when we see Jesus, we see that bright shining glory which is pure love, pure goodness, pure light.
And at that moment, when we stand before the glory of God, all we can do is imitate the Magi and bow down very love....as the hymn says: “Come, let us adore him!”
So where does the light of faith lead us to behold this sublime glory? It leads us to the heart of the Church, where we eat his Body and drink his Blood, gazing upon his glory. It leads us to the every person who is poor or sick or abused or afraid or imprisoned or alone. It leads us to the quiet of our room where we kneel before the cross and bow our heads and adore him in that place deep within our hearts.
You know they’ve been singing Adeste Fideles since before the American Revolution, and some claim its opening lines are almost seven hundred years old: Adeste fideles laeti triumphantes: O come, all ye faithful, Joyful and triumphant!
O God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.
And the answer is by faith. In his great mercy, God has planted the light of faith in our hearts: the faith first lit in the heart of the Blessed Virgin and of the Apostles and handed down through the ages as the great treasure of the Church. That faith leads us, we modern-day Magi, to find the Christ.
And what do we find, when we are led by this faith? We find the beauty of the sublime glory of God. For when we look upon the face of God, when we see Jesus, we see that bright shining glory which is pure love, pure goodness, pure light.
And at that moment, when we stand before the glory of God, all we can do is imitate the Magi and bow down very love....as the hymn says: “Come, let us adore him!”
So where does the light of faith lead us to behold this sublime glory? It leads us to the heart of the Church, where we eat his Body and drink his Blood, gazing upon his glory. It leads us to the every person who is poor or sick or abused or afraid or imprisoned or alone. It leads us to the quiet of our room where we kneel before the cross and bow our heads and adore him in that place deep within our hearts.
You know they’ve been singing Adeste Fideles since before the American Revolution, and some claim its opening lines are almost seven hundred years old: Adeste fideles laeti triumphantes: O come, all ye faithful, Joyful and triumphant!
O God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.
