Stupiphany

 

 The Feast of the Epiphany
January 5, 2025
St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Lewes, DE

I may be dating myself here, but does anyone remember The Car Talk guys? Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, used to broadcast on NPR from WBUR in Boston. (Remember the tag? “Don’t drive like my brother.” “Yeah, and don’t drive like my brother.”)

Every January, they would announce their own list of suggestions for new dictionary entries. I had two favorites: “Inoculatte” ( IN-oc-U - latte - to consume coffee intravenously) and “giraffiti” (GIRAFF-iti -vandalism spray-painted very high). But the best, for me, is the invented word “stupiphany.” (STU-pifany). Not to be confused with “epiphany”, according to Click and Clack, a stupiphany is to realize, suddenly, that you’ve been real idiot.

Let me give you a modern example: 

There was an episode of that classic TV show that ran during the 1970's, "All in the Family," when Edith and Archie were attending one of Edith's high school reunions. Edith meets an old classmate who over the years has gained a lot of weight. They have a delightful conversation, catching up and remembering old times. Later on, she remarked to Archie about the classmate, in that high, thin, voice and Astoria, Queens, NY accent, "Ain't he a beautiful person?"

Archie, of course, had a different opinion and, obviously disgusted by his obesity, says, "Edith, you're a pip! You and I look at the same guy, you see a beautiful person and I see a blimp."

Edith responds, "Yeah, ain't that too bad.”

I’d like to say that the look on Archie’s face was one of stupiphany, but Archie, well, Archie wasn’t the most inciteful bulb in the pack. Archie’s real gift, however, was to reveal to us our own moments of stupiphany about our own biases and prejudices.

Sometimes, in an instant, we can be called up short and realized that we have missed seeing Christ in others precisely because, in our arrogance, we have missed knowing the Christ within us. It’s not an epiphany so much as it is a forehead-slapping moment of stupiphany.

Here's another which I learned from Walter Brueggemann: For centuries, noble scholars of Torah, Talmud and Mishnah thought that the prophecy of Isaiah 60 meant that the King of the Jews would be born in Jerusalem. However, there was another, smaller, less significant and hardly elite school of thought that remembered the prophecy of Micah 5:4 and thought it more accurate that Bethlehem would be the place.

Bethlehem is 9 miles south of Jerusalem and it is as humble and lowly a town as Jerusalem was a large, busy city. Turns out, the elite scholars were off by only 9 miles, but might have been worlds apart for what that meant in terms of expectations about The Savior - as well as the nature of that salvation.

I wonder how long it took before the larger school of scholars slapped their foreheads and said to their friends, “Bethlehem! Of course Bethlehem and not Jerusalem! How could we not have known? Why did it take us so long? What were we thinking?”

It was, I imagine, a real Tappett Brothers “Stupiphany”.

At the 10 o’clock service, the children and a few members of the congregation who are “young at heart” will present an Epiphany Pageant. It will be, I have no doubt, a grand retelling the Epiphany story with a sense of awe and dignity and wonder befitting the occasion. And costumes. Lots of costumes. With earth-toned towels. And, colorful striped sheets. And, maybe an angel or two with tinfoil wings and a tinsel halo.

I am remembering a Christmas Eve pageant when I had a Stupiphany. I was in Baltimore. It was the late 80s.  The church I was serving did not have a “Midnight mass” which made me very sad. One of my colleagues was a Jesuit priest who, hearing my lament, invited me to St. Stanislaw’s, an old Polish Catholic Church over in SoWeBo – or  Southwest Baltimore– for, he promised, “a Midnight Christmas mass unlike any other you’ve ever experienced”.

 

Oh, my but I could not have known how right he would be.

That part of SoWeBo had been initially settled by hardworking Polish immigrants, who built their homes in the typical “Row Home” style well-known to the city of Baltimore. They built a magnificent church and, of course, an elementary school to accompany it which was staffed by Polish nuns who taught the children in their native Polish. They all learned English together as the nuns taught themselves and the children and the children helped the nuns and taught their parents.

Horrified and deeply scared by what had happened to them during WWII and the intentional extermination of the Polish people in the Warsaw Ghetto and Concentration Camps, they wanted to insure that succeeding generations knew and understood the heritage of the Polish people. They clung fiercely to the language and foods and customs of their homeland.

As happens with the second and third generation of immigrant families, their children got a fine education, went on to college, moved away from home to the suburbs and then, moved to different states, and never came back, except, perhaps, for Christmas and Easter. Or funerals.

As they left, there were still jobs at the factories and warehouses and ship building in the harbor that needed to be filled. However, the new wave of immigrants to that neighborhood did not come from Eastern Europe but rather, from Southeast Asia. Specifically, Cambodia.

The Polish were a proud, hardworking people. They admired the hardworking, industrious nature they saw in the Cambodian people and rewarded them by teaching them and their children to be Good Polish Catholics in their church and in their church schools.

That is the context for the Midnight Christmas Eve Mass at St. Stanislas Church, SoWeBo, Baltimore. Even so, I don’t know if I can convey the experience I had there.

First, the sanctuary – oh, dear, what shall I say? It was supposed to be a replica of St. Stanislaw's in their home village but there was just no comparing the carved marble of home with the  . . . um . . . I'll just say that it was a marvel of art and architecture in plaster of Paris. It was compounded by the fatal flaw of “trying to do too much.”

It would have been enough to have the wall behind the very large altar a magnificent mosaic of the Resurrection. It would have been enough that under the large, wide, hand carved wooden altar was a plaster of Paris replica of the burial tomb of Jesus – a bright yellow light filling every corner of its emptiness – complete with a large stone moved to one side.

It would have been enough that, on the side of the tomb under the altar, in the shadow of the mosaic Resurrection on the wall, was painted the images of Mary Magdalene running to tell Peter, and Peter and James and John standing there and pointing to the empty tomb with disbelief on their faces.

Oh no, but tonight, this very special night, in the bright yellow glow of the empty tomb, was (you guessed it) the Nativity Scene.

Yes, complete with large, carved, statues of a very white, Western European Mary and Joseph, attired in beautiful clothing that were high fashion in the Middle Ages, along with statues of oxen and donkey, shepherds and lambs and three Wise Men, with their camels.

There it was – the whole story of Jesus – from birth to sacrificial death to resurrection. My Jesuit friend could hardly contain his giggles as he told me that this was an exact replica of St. Stanislaw’s church from their village in Poland.

“Isn’t this just the BEST?” he snorted. I had to agree, it was, as my mother would say, trying to be polite, “Quite something.”

But, wait! There was something missing. There was a manger right in front of Mary and Joseph. But, where was Baby Jesus? Ah, our question was about to be answered. The houselights went down, tapered candles were lit, and the voices of little children singing “Silent Night” in Polish were suddenly and rudely interrupted by the very loud sound of a rope and pully. A rusty pully and a frayed rope.

My Jesuit friend was holding his sides trying not to laugh as he pointed upward to the choir loft. There. A great spotlight shown in the darkness. There. The Baby Jesus, strapped into a sling, making a slow but steady descent from the choir loft.

 . . . as the pully wheezed –

Wee-hoo, Wee-hoo, Wee-hoo –

. . . . . and the spotlight shown its blinding light –

Wee-hoo, Wee-hoo, Wee-hoo –

. . . . .  and some of us spotted a place where the rope was frayed and gasped at the thought that Baby Jesus might be dropped –

Wee-hoo, Wee-hoo, Wee-hoo.

. . . . . and the sweet children’s voices sang Silent Night in Polish –

Until finally – miraculously, actually – the Infant Jesus landed with amazing, precise accuracy into the manger in front of Mary and Joseph, who were in front of the empty tomb, which was under the altar, which was in front of the mosaic of the Resurrection.

Honestly? I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Until . . .

. . . .  until I looked over at the choir loft and saw there a most miraculous sight. There they were, row upon row of beautiful olive-skinned, round-faced children, with straight, jet black hair and beautiful almond-shaped eyes, singing Silent Night.

The choir was made up of beautiful Cambodian children.

They were singing Silent Night.

 In Polish.

And, right then and there, I had a “Stupiphany”. I didn’t slap my hand to my forehead, but I got it. I got the message of Christmas and the Epiphany. (Of course! What was I thinking?) Which is this:

You are most likely to find the Incarnation of God in the least likely places.

Of course, I said to myself, SoWeBo, not Jerusalem or even Bethlehem. St. Stanislaw’s, not the Vatican or Canterbury, or Constantinople. No. A little Polish Catholic Church in SoWeBo.

We are most likely to find the Incarnation of God anywhere people try to tell the story of the miracle of salvation – of finding and having been found by Jesus, the Body of Christ, in foreign places, far, far from home.

We are most likely to find the Incarnation of God whenever one person sees another person’s exterior as disgusting but another person sees past the exterior to the beautiful person they are, inside and out.

We are most likely to find the Incarnation of God whenever people wisely ignore the expected, traditional route, mapped out by the establishment and, instead, choose the unexpected, the small, the humble, the insignificant, just 9 miles away.

We are most likely to find the Incarnation of God whenever a person misses the humility of the Christ right in front of them because they have ignored, with no small amount of arrogance, the Christ within.

Because, sometimes, the only way to get to the Epiphany is by experiencing a few Stupiphanies.                       

Amen.