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Homily on Feast of the Epiphany and Immigration Sunday: Matthew 2:1-12
The Reverend Billy Graham tells the story of the time he was doing one of his big tent revival meetings in a small town in the south, and he needed to find the Post Office so he could mail something. After wandering around a bit, he ran into a boy who was about 10 years old, and asked him where the Post Office was.
The boy quite politely told Rev. Graham that the Post Office was down two blocks and to the left, and as he was leaving to head off that way, Rev. Graham said to the boy:
“Say, you probably saw that big tent just outside of town. Why don’t you stop out there tonight? We’re having a big meeting, and I’ll be telling everyone the way to get to heaven.”
The boy thought for a minute and finally said: “No, I don’t think I’ll be going. Don’t see the point in listening to some guy tell me the way to heaven when he doesn’t even know the way to the Post Office.”
Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany, and we hear the three kings, or wise men, or magi, or—most properly—astrologers—stop and ask directions as well. Went a bit better for them than it did for Rev. Graham.
And today, at least in this Archdiocese, we also celebrate “Immigration Sunday,” and commence “National Migration Week,” whose theme is “Creating a Culture of Encounter.” Archbishop Hebda announced all this in a letter January 8, 2017.
Now at first glance these might seem like two quite-different topics—the Epiphany and Immigration Sunday—and we might wonder why Archbishop Hebda decided to schedule things this way. But perhaps there are more connections between these two celebrations than we might first understand.
The focus of our Gospel reading for the Epiphany is the three “magi from the east,” as Matthew tells us. We don’t know much about them but we can see one of their major personality traits from the narrative Mathew gives us, and that trait is humility.
Humility—not being filled with false pride but being grounded, understanding who you are, where you come from and what your limitations are—seems front and center with these three people if we look at them.
First of all, they stopped for directions—hardest thing in the world for us men to do, but they were lost and they knew it. So they went to this great and undoubtedly very scary king—Harod the Great—and asked for help.
And that was near the end of the journey, which they started without knowing where they were going or what they would see when they got there. They just knew it was something they should do, and set aside everything else in their lives to do so.
And when they got to Bethlehem, they didn’t see a king’s dwelling, but a smelly, dark, dirty place where cattle lived. Even so, wealthy people with elegant things and presumably elegant clothes, they prostrated themselves—down in the mud and straw and who knows what else—to worship Jesus.
No false pride, no arrogance, no self-importance there.
And the consequence of that humility, the consequence of setting aside of their own agendas and asking for directions and entering into this mystery of a king in a cattle shed, was that they encountered Jesus.
And it is interesting to note that the folks who should have encountered Jesus, the chief priests and scribes, who knew where the king of the Jews was to be born, were somehow unable to encounter Jesus. We don’t know why but apparently none of them could free themselves from their own preconceptions and prior engagements to accompany the magi to see Jesus, even though Bethlehem is only about 4.5 miles from Jerusalem.
In fact the only other people who encountered Jesus in that stable were shepherds, as we hear in Luke’s gospel, who are about the most humble people around—the lowest of the low in Jewish society.
And of course we see this throughout Jesus’ life—he is most comfortable with, and most often has a genuine encounter with, people who are not full of themselves, who are not prideful, who are not all about worldly success and wealth and prestige—but who are lowly, humble, willing to ask for directions and get down in the mud.
And it is that attitude—self-effacing, down to earth (literally), humble—that folks had who encountered Jesus that seems to be central as we look this “Immigration Sunday” at “Creating a Culture of Encounter.”
I think that’s so because in our consideration of immigrants, migrants, refugees, that attitude seems so often lacking. We seem so quickly to go to a place of superiority, of judgment.
They didn’t follow the rules when they came here, we say. Or they don’t speak the language. Or they seems like they stick to themselves and don’t want to become part of our country.
And when we look at people that way, from that prideful stance, it is hard to truly have a meaningful encounter with them.
Archbishop Hebda writes in his letter that this Sunday is an ideal opportunity “for informing and examining our conscience in this area,” so let’s do that.
“They came here without following the rules”—we hear that all the time, usually coupled with the idea that the one who says that is somehow better because he or she—or really his or her ancestors—did follow the rules.
Really? How many of us when we check out the family tree have someone who came into this country from Canada? My grandfather did. Born in Norway, came over when he was 2 with his family, and came to the US through Canada. Many of my wife’s Irish ancestors came through Canada too.
Why? Because they liked cold weather or wanted to learn a little hockey?
No, the fact is that through the second half of the 19 th century lots and lots of people from Europe came through Canada because it was a way to avoid going through US immigration. What you were supposed to do was go through New York or Philadelphia when you would be checked out by US customs, looking for people who had diseases or were terrorists (yes, we had them back in the day as well—Alexander II or Russia was assassinated by one in 1881) or whatever.
But if you didn’t follow the rules, you could sail from Oslo or Hamburg or Amsterdam or London or Dublin to Halifax or Montreal, and then board a train for the US, and never have to see anyone from the US government. It wasn’t until 1894 that the US and Canada negotiated a treaty that let US customs agents interview people on the Canadian trains carrying immigrants to the US from Canada.
I’ll bet most of the people here today with northern European roots have ancestors who came to the US that way—not exactly rule-followers.
And my grandmother, born in 1899 in northern Wisconsin, for years as a teenage girl would take the train to Antigo, Wisconsin, to spend the summers helping her German-speaking grandparents, who went to their graves never learning English.
There were generations of German immigrants like that. Until the 1950s there were German-language newspapers in Stearns County—St. Cloud—because there were so many people not comfortable in English.
For the most part, we’re just a generation or two or three removed from people who did all the same things and had all the same struggles that cause us to look down our noses at migrants or refugees now.
And we might also remember that Jesus Himself was a refugee, fleeing for his life with his parents immediately after the magi leave, as Matthew describes in the verses that follow the ones we read today.
In his letter Archbishop Hebda also reminds us that the Old Testament is filled with admonitions that we care for immigrants, quoting, as did Pope Francis, from the Book of Exodus that “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Nor does Jesus in articulating the standards by which we will be judged in chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, caring for the sick, sheltering the homeless—nor does Jesus add a footnote that says these standards only apply to folks in need with the right paperwork, or who speak the right language, or who look and act like us.
But if we adopt a posture of humility—like the magi- -perhaps we might find ourselves smiling at the women in a hajib, or saying “good morning” to people not speaking English, or opening a door or offering a seat on the bus to someone not dressed like us. Perhaps we might catch ourselves when we find ourselves becoming judgey, finding fault, or making excuses for intolerance.
Perhaps we might even go out of our way to encounter—in a fully human way—those who seem to be so different.
And if we do that, perhaps like the magi we will have an additional encounter, in a place we might never have expected. We might also encounter Jesus.
