For over 2,000 years this day, Epiphany, commonly known in the USA as Three Kings Day, celebrates the feast of the revelation of the Christ to the Gentiles. Biblically and historically, this is represented by the interfaith pilgrimage of the three wise men (Magi) bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, still lying in a manger’s crib.
Now, this same date irrevocably recalls today’s first annual memorial to America’s first twenty-first century insurrection on January 6th, 2021, when the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. was attacked and defiled by violent domestic terrorists carrying Nazi, Confederacy and Trump flags into inner sanctums, threatening elected officials and murdering Capitol police standing in their way. Events of January 6th, 2021, follow another infamous day of precedence 207 years ago when British military forces under the orders of a King also torched and severely damaged this nation’s legislating cathedral cornerstone to American representative democracy, in 1814.
Religious Epiphany is a mosaic celebration of birth, hope, love, inclusion, prescience, resilience, convening and the promise of resurrection. Treason’s Epiphany is the opposite. It is said that both poison and antidote grow side-by-side in Mother Nature. Let us pray today, on Epiphany, that this be made so, that antidotes of good always triumph over acts of evil so that a disfigured, disuniting nation may heal and recover its constituting, uniting eighteenth century soul in reuniting twenty-first century revelation.
