“In today’s Gospel the three Wise Men, the three Magi talked about a star that guided them, guided them to Christ and in scripture there’s always an image of light, light and darkness. In Genesis it talks about how God made light and day or even when Judas betrayed Jesus it was night. There’s always kind of an image of light and darkness. Well here in Epiphany we have a star guiding the Magi to Christ and in our first reading Isiah the prophet talked about this shining light, the shining light of our world, the shining light that they waited in Israel for many generations, but is it only for Israel? That’s where today, the Epiphany, the three Magi coming proved that it is not just to Israel. Those three Magi are supposed to represent the whole world that Christ came into the world. Christ became one of us to be a light not only to the Israelites, but to everyone, the whole world to illumine the whole world. So what does this mean for us? It means that Christ didn’t come just for us, but for everyone in our lives everyone that we interact with. Christ came for all of us. You see, the thing about a light is that it helps you see doesn’t it? If I turn off all these lights and we just had the candles we would need that light to shine before us to walk before us. Christ comes into our lives to help us see clearer to help us hear clearer. He guides our steps in our lives, but once we get to Christ like the Magi once we come to God come to Christ we have a choice to let him into our lives or not and what does that look like? It looks like a stained glass window I like to point out. Right now you can kind of see the stained glass window especially right here (behind the altar). The stained glass windows show great images of scripture. It gives you glimpses of God’s love to each one of us in the world, but if there was no light behind what would you see? You wouldn’t see anything. You would see pure darkness. That’s the same thing when we don’t have Christ within our lives or when you do receive Christ in your lives. If you talk about the saints all the saints they become holy they receive Christ in their life, but they illuminate they shine out. Have you ever used the phrase for someone, ‘Oh they just radiated.’ You can almost feel their presence their smile their goodness. The same thing is true when we let Christ into our lives. They say that our life is a gift from God, but what we do with it is our gift back to God and and what we’re supposed to do is to receive Christ into our lives and have Him transform it so that our lives will shine brightly and attract others to it.
So I ask you today, is your life shining Christ’s light to the world? Does your life attract others? And in some ways it probably does, in certain ways yes, but in certain ways probably not and that’s why I want to ask you why? What’s the part of your life that is still in the dark per se? Are you willing to let Christ into it to purify it so that you can radiate more clearly Christ’s love? As you come to receive the Eucharist today on this great feast of the Epiphany where Christ is a light to all the world let us continue to ask the Lord for the grace and the courage to receive him into our lives into the dark crevices and valleys of our own lives to have the strength and the courage to then ask him to purify our hearts so that we can see as he sees and love as he loves so that we can also radiate the light of Christ in our life. Amen.”