1-7-07                                     Sudden Cessation of Stupidity

 

Ephesians 3:1-12

 

            Did everyone have a wonderful and festive Epiphany celebration? Did you bring out all the Epiphany traditions that you look forward to all year?

 

            I’m guessing not. Very likely quite a few were not aware that yesterday was Epiphany. I say this not in disgust or disappointment or as proof that the nation is headed south in a rocket-powered hand basket. It simply shows how church traditions change over the years. For many centuries, the Christian church ignored, frowned on, discouraged, and even outlawed the celebration of Christmas. Epiphany was considered by far the more important holiday.

 

            Christianity eventually lost the tug-of-war to secular society, which found Christmas a much more joyful, adaptable, understandable, and inspiring holiday than anything else the church had to offer. Beginning a little over a century ago, Christian churches finally gave in and accepted Christmas as a high point of the year, equal to or even surpassing Easter. Ironically, Christians now get mad if people don’t celebrate Christmas enough.

 

            What happened to Epiphany? We still celebrate it in the church on a very small scale, as kind of an appendix to the Christmas story. Epiphany has become a 6-week season of the church year, most commonly associated with the visit to the manger of astrologers from the East.

 

            If Epiphany is simply the celebration of the gift-bearing wise men about whom much legend has grown, it’s no wonder the church lost the battle. Let’s face it, these astrologers aren’t that important. They serve as colorful bit players in the wonderful story of Jesus’ arrival on earth to save humankind and that’s about it.

 

            The Greek word Epiphany means a sudden appearance or shining forth. We celebrate epiphany as the revealing of God’s self to humankind. Well, isn’t that what Christmas is all about? Does epiphany add anything to that?

 

            What was the church thinking all those years in trying to claim Epiphany as a bigger holiday than Christmas?      

 

            Today’s passage from Ephesians lays out what Epiphany is supposed to be about.  Paul talks about how “a mystery was made known to me by revelation. In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, but it has now been revealed by the spirit.” He talks about “the plan of mystery hidden for ages in God, but now revealed.”

 

 

            Do you get the sense from this that God had a plan for the world but chose to hide it from everyone all these centuries? Then suddenly, 2000 years ago, God pulled back the curtains and said, “Voila, here’s plan.”

 

            That sounds like a very ungodlike thing for God to do. Why would God hide the plan from us, and then suddenly one day decide to let us in on the secret? That would be sort of like me deciding to go to seminary but cleverly concealing that fact from the neighbor’s dog until I’m good and ready to spring it on him.

 

            Why would God toy with us like that? There’s no challenge to it, there’s no purpose to it. If God had a plan, and is powerful enough to carry it out, why not just do it? Lay it out from the beginning and get on with it?

 

            Paul uses the word mystery in talking about the plan, and I think if we study the nature of mysteries, we may get a better understanding of what’s going on.

 

            About six years ago, I was asked write a book about a mystery known as the Bermuda Triangle. The Bermuda Triangle is a 140,000 square mile area of the Atlantic Ocean, east of Florida, in which more than 100 ships, airplanes, and even nuclear submarines have disappeared in the past half century, carrying over 1,000 people to an unknown fate. In each case, disaster struck so suddenly that they were able to give little or no warning on their radios—not a hint as to the danger they were facing. No trace of them was ever found again. Newspapers, magazines, and books were filled with harrowing stories of this Sea of Death. It was utterly unpredictable—no one knew when or where the deadly curse of the Bermuda Triangle would strike next.

 

            What was causing this? A strange weather phenomenon--a freak jet stream, air turbulence, water spout? Perhaps an electromagnetic disturbance, or a radio dead zone?

A pocket of antigravity matter. Or stranger things such as an alien abduction zone, multiple dimensions of reality, a time warp, or the influence of the lost undersea civilization of Atlantis? During the 1970s, all of these were suggested, but no one could crack the mystery of one of the terrifying puzzles on Earth.

 

            Something interesting happened, however, when a librarian at Arizona State University decided to probe the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. A meticulous researcher, he spent hundreds of hours tracking down the facts. He discovered that many of the reports about the Bermuda Triangle were highly inaccurate. Some of the disappearances turned out to have occurred hundreds and even thousands of miles beyond the boundaries of this triangle.

            Another researcher did a comprehensive statistical analysis of tragedies at sea that concluded the accident rate was actually lower in the Bermuda Triangle that in the surrounding areas. The high number of accidents could be explained by the fact that this was the busiest sea lane in the Atlantic, and that it was heavily used for pilot training missions by the U.S. military.

 

 

            This book was a huge surprise to me. I never expected to solve the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle when I took on the project. The publisher was not at all pleased with the manuscript because a mysterious killing zone in the ocean is far more dramatic and will sell more copies than what I came up with. The solution turned out to be so simple and routine, that the book came close to not being published at all.

 

            Of course, I didn’t solve the mystery; I just took the information from the people who had and put the story together. And the researchers did not solve the mystery through some stunning breakthrough, or brilliant insight into the problem. The facts were there all along, and in plain view. All they did was ignore the smokescreen of hype and hysteria that humans have created, and look at what was really there.

 

            It reminds me of a quote by Edwin Land, inventor of the Poloraid camera, who defined creativity as “the sudden cessation of stupidity.” The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle was solved, basically, when a few people stopped being stupid about it and looked at what was really there.

 

            As I think about any good mystery story that I have read or watched, I see a similar pattern. A mystery in which all the clues are laid out in the open so obviously that you can figure out what is going on long before the end is not a mystery at all. On the other hand, a mystery in which the solution comes out of left field in a flash of brilliant insight and all the clues were red herrings and there’s no way anyone could have predicted it, is neither compelling or believable.

            A good mystery is one where the answer is there all along but it lies buried under our own assumptions and prejudices. The case is solved by someone who is able to cut through those false assumptions and see what is really there. A good mystery is one, like the movie, The Sixth Sense, in which the ending catches you totally by surprise and yet once you know the solution you see that the clues were all there in plain sight, and you wonder how you missed it.

 

            In many ways, that is a good definition of epiphany, the revelation of God to the world. Just like with the Bermuda Triangle, we get easily pulled in to the dramatic, the weird, the extraordinary, and that’s the story we like to tell about God.

            But most of the time, it’s not that we hit upon a stunning breakthrough or brilliant insight into what God is about. It’s not that God suddenly appears out of left field in some bizarre flurry of strange doings.

           

            What usually happens is that the facts are there all along, and in plain view. As Paul wrote in Romans, “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”

 

            What happens in epiphany is that, through the spirit of God, we have a sudden cessation of stupidity. We are able to see past the smokescreen of hype and hysteria that humans have created, and discover what is really there.

 

            Look at the mystery that Paul is referring to in Ephesians. He is talking about the mystery of who is to be God’s people. For centuries, the authority figures thought the case was solved. The facts all pointed to the conclusion that the Hebrew people were God’s chosen ones. It’s all through the Old Testament. The Jews were the ones with whom God decided to have a special relationship. Nobody else qualified. Not much of a mystery at all.

 

            But as so often happens in mysteries, the authorities get it wrong. Their open-and-shut case falls apart. And it does so not because some new revelation comes out of left field. It falls apart because a few people are able to cut through the false assumptions and the smokescreen of hype and hysteria, and are able to see what has been there all along. Way back in Genesis, in the story of God’s call to Abraham, was a clue so obvious that, once you see it, you wonder how anyone could have missed it.

            “I will bless you and make your name great,” God says to Abraham, “so that you will be a blessing. In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

 

            Who is to be God’s people? The clues were there all along. The Hebrew people were not chosen to be the privileged and elite—God’s favorites. They were chosen as the instruments by which God would be made known to all people, so that all humankind could enter into relationship with God.

 

            Simeon in the temple had an epiphany moment, a sudden cessation of stupidity, when the spirit came on him, and he saw through the smokescreen that people had built and declared, “My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all people. A light for revelation to the Gentiles as well as to Israel.”

 

            Peter had an epiphany moment in dealing with Cornelius, a Roman who sought to serve God. Peter didn’t want anything to do with him. As he looked at the clues they all pointed toward Jews only. Gentiles are out. But then the spirit came upon him, and he had a sudden cessation of stupidity, he saw through the smokescreen of false assumption that he had helped build. “I truly understand that God shows no partiality but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to God.”

 

            Paul refers in Ephesians to his own epiphany moment, a sudden cessation of stupidity, when the spirit of God came on him, and he saw through the smokescreen of false assumption that he himself had built. He had been so convinced that he was God’s chosen instrument as preserver of the Jewish tradition that he headed up a vigilante effort to destroy anyone who proclaimed faith in this newcomer Jesus.

 

            But finally, there was a moment of revelation, when Paul heard God’s true intent, when he realized that all of his own suppositions were false, that he had been the clueless police chief who couldn’t see the evidence right there in front on him, that God is a god of love who seeks to draw all people.

 

 

            For Simeon, Peter, and Paul, this mystery of who was to be God’s people had a very satisfying ending. The clues were in plain view that God loved the world and created us to share that love in the form of true and meaningful relationship. That didn’t just jump out of left field with the coming of Jesus at Bethlehem. The clues were there long before that. In fact, you could consider the birth of Jesus another in a long series of clues about the mystery of God.

           

            People did not see the clues that were there before Jesus was born because they were so caught up in their own assumptions, their own smokescreen of hype and hysteria that we call sin. And to be honest, we don’t all see the clues today, even with the glaring evidence of Christmas and Easter. We don’t see the clues because we get so caught up in our own assumptions, our own smokescreen of hype and hysteria that we call sin.

 

            Epiphany is a celebration of those moments when we get past that. When the Spirit of God comes on us so that we see what is really there. It celebrates the moment when a criminal, or a deadbeat, or an addict, or a rebellious youth, or an obsessively career-driven parent has a sudden cessation of stupidity and sees what they are doing with their life and what needs to change.

            It celebrates the moment when someone sitting in the pews of a church has a sudden cessation of stupidity and sees that they are here on this earth for a reason and that they need to take an active role in living out that purpose.

            It celebrates the moment, all too rare, when a world leader such as Anwar Sadat, has a sudden cessation of stupidity, and sees that the road to a better world takes the path of peace and not violence.

 

            The reason the church elevated Epiphany to such a high status was because in their view Christmas was one of the clues. You don’t celebrate the arrival of clues, you celebrate the solving of the mystery.

            Epiphany celebrates the solving of the mystery, the work of the spirit in the sudden cessation of stupidity that allows us to put together the whole story of God’s saving grace from all the clues that are sitting there in front of us-- from the process of creation to the birth and resurrection of Jesus to the real presence of the spirit of God in our own world.

 

            There are many mysteries about God that we cannot solve, one of them being what happens in the bread and wine that we are about to eat.  But epiphany does solve the mystery of who God is. And that is something to celebrate.