Sermon preached at Evensong on the Baptism of Christ 2024

‘Homewards’ is the name of the Prince of Wales’s new anti-homelessness initiative. Prince William has decided to focus an enormous amount of his energy on making homelessness in the UK ‘rare, brief and unrepeated.’ ‘What does home mean to you?’ His Royal Highness asked on the video which launched this project. The answers included, ‘community’, ‘feeling safe and protected’, ‘belonging.’ It seems that there is a fundamental human instinct for home, not to mention a human right; adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The concept of home, linked to questions of origin, identity and security, is something which seems to be hard-wired in most of us.

This weekend we have celebrated the great festival of the Epiphany, when the Magi—‘wise men from the east’—came to worship the Christchild, offering him deeply symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. These mysterious figures were not Jews, but rather pagans perhaps from Persia, Babylon or Arabia. They were clearly people who followed the stars, astronomers, mystics from another land. Perhaps they were kings, of some kind or another. We are told that their visit to Jesus is of serious interest to King Herod, the Roman-appointed King of Judea, keen to suppress any potential threat to his sphere of influence, and who therefore tells the Magi that he, too, would like to come and worship this new-born child. The Magi, however, are wise to all this as to so much else; having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, we are told that they returned to their own country by another road. They may have had a premonition of Herod’s violent intent towards Jesus, which by tradition then overflowed in the mass slaughter of the Holy Innocents in and around Bethlehem. But by then, they were on the road, another road, returning home.

Stage left, the Magi exit, and nothing more is heard is of them. Later on, diverse traditions develop. Clement of Alexandria in the 2^nd century thought they were Zoroastrians. By the 12^th century, their relics were enshrined in Cologne Cathedral, having been brought from Milan (where they had rested since the 5^th century) by Frederic Barbararossa. Another tradition said that they were buried in Savah, Persia, a tale preserved by the famous traveller Marco Polo. T. S. Eliot, in his wonderful poem The Journey of the Magi, inspired by a sermon on the Epiphany preached by the famous 17^th-century Dean of Westminster Lancelot Andrewes, imagines the journey from the perspective of one of these mysterious figures. The old magus reminisces about the journey, about their lodgings, and recalls some of the premonitions they encountered of what was to come for this mysterious, magnetic child who was somehow drawing them onwards. And presumably after a lifetime of reflection, this Magus articulates a question which casts our celebrations of Epiphany and these days afterwards in a different light:

were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

How could they go on as before? Their journey across many, many miles, from a very different culture had led them into a context from which they could not really turn back. This young child and his destiny would shape the whole of the future. All they had known beforehand was in the shadow of this meaning—this birth, this beginning, was also an ending of a world which had been waiting for this child. These wise ones, brought up to pay close attention to the stars and to the language of signs, now encountered the Great Sign which would contain in his infant self all meaning. This is the Word Made Flesh, the Wisdom of the Father, God-With-Us. Eliot’s magi have the creeping sense that they cannot simply remain as tourists in the land of God.

And so, at the very end of the poem, the old magus reflects,

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

They had indeed returned home, but by another way—perhaps the strangeness of the route home had been a premonition of how their own sense of home must have changed. They could no longer be at ease in this old context. Home no longer felt like home. Their kingdoms had been exchanged for an encounter with the Kingdom of God. Their own people seemed alien to them now in their religious practice, ‘clutching their gods.’ Instead, these magi found themselves held by God, gripped by the truth they had glimpsed in the cave at Bethlehem. What they had seen in their pilgrimage to the Word Made Flesh was now their home. There is an unavoidable sense of mourning, loss, death, in what was previously their own context and their own community, as they begin to fathom the meaning of life in Christ.

Eliot is an extraordinary poet, and his writing is, of course, a work of imagination. But he draws deeply upon Christian themes and expresses them with the richness of a mystic. Many of the early Christian writers articulated a sense of alienation from their wider context as they sought a heavenly homeland. They were strangers and pilgrims, still seeking the City of God. There is a danger in this language of ‘removal from the world’, because of course it is precisely in the world that we discover God’s love, encoded in our relationships, in nature, in the life of the human heart. But wherever we call home, will only be somewhere we can finally and fully rest if that is shaped by an encounter with the love which is the origin and the heart of all things, and their promised destiny. The restlessness which characterises so much of human life, St Augustine would later teach us, is itself a gift which tells us not to get too comfortable. Because once we have seen Bethlehem, once we have stooped to worship the Christ child, once we have been baptised into the death of Christ, we die a death to so many of our other little gods, that we should no longer be able to find our home among them.

Christians use familial language to describe one another—brother, sister—because the community into which we are baptised, the Church, is a family. And together, we seek a homeland, a Bethlehem, where everything is put into a richer, fuller, more complete context of absolutely creative self-giving love. In the sermon which inspired TS Eliot’s poem, Lancelot Andrewes said, that to this Bethlehem, ‘we love to make no great haste.’ It’s easier to drag our feet, to pitch our tent elsewhere. But it is in the birth and death of the Christchild, that we will find our community, our identity, our security. Let an instinct for that homewards-pilgrimage be our commitment this new year.