The Rev. Noah Van Niel
January 5th, 2020
The Chapel of the Cross
Second Sunday after Christmas: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ps 84: 1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a; Matthew 2:1-12
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem Journey of the Magi. The poem takes our gospel passage for this morning, and, in the voice of one of the Wise Men imagines retrospectively what that journey from the Far East to that little town of Bethlehem was like. Eliot takes some artistic license in the poem, but he’s right about at least one thing—as we sit here on the eve of the Magi’s arrival, which we celebrate tomorrow on the feast of the Epiphany, as our Christmas celebrations come to a close and the post-holiday slump settles in, and the temperatures drop, we are heading into “the very dead of winter” which, to many, is indeed, “just the worst time of the year.”
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