Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Yesterday was the Feast of the Epiphany, the discovery or revealing, of Christ. It’s one of those feast days that doesn’t get nearly the attention in our tradition as it does in the Eastern Christian traditions.

It’s easy to get caught up in calendars and dates and to try and figure out why certain dates are given for certain feasts—and few of our feast days are likely on the precise dates in our calendar on which they occurred. The celebrations of the events of the life of Jesus Christ as they are celebrated today were not instituted at the very beginning of the Christian era; they were held by the believers of the early Church as vivid commemorations without a connection to certain days and hymns, but as a real event of the Lord who was present in the Church.

Later on, when the Church was firmly established and its believers were free to worship, they decided to commemorate and observe annually in the calendar year the events of the life of the Church and especially those of the life of Jesus Christ, whom they worshiped along with the Father and the Holy Ghost with prayers, hymns, and readings appropriate for the occasion.

The reason why the first Christians did not institute these celebrations and observances at the very beginning is mainly because of the persecutions of the Church and its believers.

For three entire centuries, the Church of Christ was underground, in catacombs, where, under the grass and flowers of the earth, was nourished the tree of faith and worship. The Church extended the Kingdom of God to the hearts of its faithful from one cave to another, from one dusty cellar to another, from one heart to another. These winding underground centers, the catacombs, were both the workshop of the rebirth of the Christians and also their burial places.

So three centuries of Christian faith were passed down orally. The events and the truths of Christ were shared and, gradually, those events and stories found their way into annual commemorations.

The Church's first concern, after the persecutions, was the development of its prayer and worship, which ratify the faith and cultivate the relations of its members. This is why the 4th century is the crucial link which connects the underground life of the church with its later course out in the open.

The celebrations of Epiphany and Christmas, the writing of liturgies, the formulation of faith in the Creed, and so many other incidents are permanent foundations which took place during the 4th century and which developed from those underground roots which existed beforehand.

So these commemorations and feasts, like the Epiphany, are their own bridge to the faith of the earliest Christians. As those bridges were built, from one generation to the next, different traditions have emphasized different parts of that early faith with different weight. Each tradition has developed a kind of coherent vocabulary with which it is in dialogue with the early Church.

Each Church’s endurance depends, in no small part, on the fluency of its members with the grammar and vocabulary with which that dialogue occurs. Our own liturgies, calendar, music, art, and more are the unique expression developed over time that is like our own Anglican and Episcopal dialect or accent.

It is crucial that we maintain our historic patterns, connected to both the Reformed and Catholic parts of our heritage—but also a holy thing that we do so in our own native tongue and with our own gifts.

The earliest Christians could only have dreamed of the freedom we have to worship, pray, sing, study, baptize, and share in Communion. It is our gift and our treasure that we have these patterns of life together.

However you mark this particular feast day, whether by moving your wise men to the Nativity, or bringing blessed chalk home to mark your doors, or some other way, know that those devotions are shared with those of the Church across two millennia who have built a bridge to this very day with their faith and hope in Christ.

—Fr Robert