Arise, your light has come!

By Bishop Brian Maas
Happy New Year! Welcome to the season of fresh starts, resolutions and good intentions. It’s human nature to seek a new day, a new opportunity, a reason to change. The problem of course is the follow-through. Good intentions and a new calendar provide a little inertia, but it’s only discipline that makes change possible.

Fortunately, here comes the gift of Epiphany; the festival and the season. The stargazing Magi see a new light in the night sky, and they recognize the change it signals. Drawn by wonder and hope, they disrupt their lives. They risk their lives. They change.

That change took great discipline, true discipleship. They became disciples, not of a star but of the one whose birth the star announced. If they ever heard Jesus speaking, it was in a toddler’s babble, not profound instruction. Seeing the star was enough to change their lives, to make them disciples.

They weren’t even believers. They were foreigners, Gentiles, true outsiders. But the light shone, and they responded.

The adult Jesus would later say, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket…. let your light shine.” Jesus asked nothing more of us than he himself lived. Knowing the end that awaited, God nonetheless lit up the sky to announce Jesus’ birth; and Jesus himself let the light of the Good News shine through all he did, right up to his last breath on the cross.

Epiphany is a season of gifts. Jesus’ birth is a gift to humanity; the Magi bring gifts to honor his birth; we are gifted with new light in the darkness of winter, and with the Good News itself. For everyone who would be a disciple, each of those gifts implies two things.

First, we hear the Good News that God’s light shines on us, making every day a fresh start, a gift in its own right. Second, we hear the call of Jesus to let God’s light shine not only on us, but through us.

We know the invitation to change, to become disciples, to practice the discipline of living the gospel. Epiphany’s gift is the reminder that God is ever with us, lighting the path and aiding us in making the changes that discipleship requires.

We also know, even in a world where people are turning away from church as we have known it, that every human walks in darkness from time to time, and seeks the dependable light of an invitation to hope, to belong, to make a difference. That light—which we too often hide under the bushel basket of our ‘churchianity,’ the habits we mistake for discipline, the membership we substitute for discipleship—shines in us and through us. It’s there. God put it there. It can’t be extinguished; hidden, but never extinguished. This is good news!

So receive Epiphany’s gift. Trade your resolution for a revolution. Dare to change. Practice radical hospitality, be grateful, generous, hopeful. Live the grace that makes every day new.

Arise, your light has come; to you, in you.
Receive that gift. Let that light shine.



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