It may seem like a technicality, but we don’t actually know how many magi the gospel writer Matthew had in mind when he described them all arriving in Bethlehem.  

The tradition has come to settle on three, probably because of the three gifts, and it’s also gone ahead and given them each a name, an age, and a continent of origin.

This hasn’t stopped people from trying to find themselves in the story, though.  

For example, at one point, when Western Christians used the term “orient” quite broadly and uncritically, as in “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” there were Chinese Christians who recognized that at least one of the kings must have come from China.  

Because in reporting that the magi came from the east, didn’t the story clearly say so?

Matthew’s story wants to affirm that from the very beginning, the Gospel (the good news) was for all.  

But this hasn’t much stopped people from trying to be sure that people like them – that people like us – were universally acknowledged to have been at the front of the line.  

I’m sure somebody must still be invested in this. 

Maybe Epiphany should take a page from the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics and feature a parade of nations and costumes, with somebody stepping up to light an enormous flame.

Why not? 

That said, I’d guess that for most people now, the hope of finding themselves in the story means something different and more personal.  

It’s about finding ourselves in God’s presence, or if you prefer, maybe its finding God in our presence, the point being that, either way, we have moments we can point to when we know that we have crossed onto holy ground.  

Because isn’t that what an epiphany is, really?  

An experience of “the living God, present and acting [in the story of redemption].”^[1]

And isn’t the next question something like: what do I need to do to have one of those? 

Along those lines, I’ve always appreciated another version of journey of the magi, as imagined by the American author Henry Van Dyke.^[2]  

He imagines a fourth wise man, whom he calls Arteban, who sees the star as the others do and loads up his horse to go meet them and travel in a caravan together to Bethlehem.  

His own gift will be precious jewels: a sapphire, a ruby, and finally, “a pearl of great price.” 

Unfortunately, though, he gets detained on the way by trying to help a dying man, and he misses the rendezvous. 

He has to sell one of the jewels in order to switch out his horse for camels and the supplies he’ll need to cross the desert. 

He finally makes it to Bethlehem, but child and his parents, and the other wise men have already split, knowing that Herod was coming in hot pursuit.  

Arteban ends up giving another jewel while he’s there in order to save the life of some other child who happens to need saving.  

Then it’s off to Egypt, and then the next place, and the place after that, never quite catching up with Jesus, never quite finding himself on the holy ground he’s after, but always trying to do right by the people he meets along the way.

And so it continues for thirty three years, until finally Arteban arrives in Jerusalem on what turns out to be Good Friday.  

He ends up giving the pearl of great price, the last part of his gift for the Christ child, to free a girl who is about to be sold into slavery.  

Of course, he believes that he has failed.  That he has never quite managed to find the holy ground for which he has searched his whole life.  

But then he hears a voice that says, “Inasmuch as thou hast done it unto the least of these my brethren, thou hast done it unto me.” 

Without his realizing it, his goodness has offered holy ground to countless others all along the way.  

The living God has been present and acting, saving and transforming, right in front of him all along.  

It’s sentimental, I admit.  

Yet the question it raises seems especially pertinent to the life of faith in our own moment. 

Because: is it more helpful to see an epiphany as a moment when God shows up to do a new thing, or is it a moment when we newly recognize something as tremendously precious (perhaps for the first time) – when we understand it as something God has been doing all along?

Like Arteban’s life, our lives are full of missed connections, seemingly fruitless searches, unfulfilled hopes, and perpetual crises.

Are epiphanies supposed to be limited to those people for whom that somehow isn’t true? 

Or does the very idea of a God who comes to live the life we live and know the world we know point to much richer possibilities, not only for epiphany, but also for us? 

Maybe epiphany is what happens when we decide to be present as our faith tells us God is present, and lo and behold, faith turns out to be right.  

I don’t know what’s harder to believe: that God has a vision for the world, or that God’s vision involves us.

But clearly, epiphanies mean recognizing both. 

So, as of tomorrow, we leave the Christmas season behind. 

As of Wednesday, we have already entered the new country of another year.  

Some of us probably started strong, clearly on top of the weeks and months to come, with their resolutions only minor tweaks to a well-oiled machine.  

Others have started this year like they finished the last one, a day late and a dollar short, hoping and praying to make up ground just as soon as they get out of the weeds.  

The hope of epiphany is the hope that, either way, we will learn to be present—to look for the face of God in whomever we see before us—and so know God’s presence wherever brokenness is mended and winter yields to spring.  

Amen.

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^[1] The phrase is from Fleming Rutledge, Means of Grace, although she is speaking more specifically about the nature of Scripture. 

^[2] See Henry Van Dyke, The Story of the Other Wiseman (1895).