There is a story that I read which sounds like it might be true. A Sunday School practised for hours and hours to make sure their Christmas Pageant was perfect. Everything was brilliant until the moment the wise ones arrived at the scene. Overwhelmed by the moment the young child playing the role of the wise one, took a dramatic bow before the manger holding Jesus before announcing:

 “Greetings, baby, I bring you gifts.

Gold,

Circumstance,

and Mud.”

That’s precisely what Epiphany brings. Gold, much gold in the kindness of neighbours, the endurance and persistence of health professionals at the front line of the pandemic, and the patience of parents housebound with school aged children. We have had Circumstance aplenty. The mud is key. Not into perfectly ordered lives does God plant the seed of God’s divinity, but into the mud of chaos. The literal mud of a home shared by animals. The literal mud walked in from Nazareth by Mary and Joseph and the donkey. But also, the figurative mud, the mud of broken dreams when life isn’t what you imagined it to be. The mud of messed up relationships. Barbara Brown Taylor has a delightful story that happens after Christmas Nativity, after “the happily ever after”.

“…That is when the picture was taken—right then, while the star was still overhead, and the angels were still singing in the rafters. But twenty minutes later, what? The hole in the heavens had closed up and the only music came from the bar at the inn. One of the cows stepped on a chicken and the resulting racket made the baby cry. As she leaned over to pick him up, Mary started crying too and when Joseph tried to comfort her, she told him she wanted her mother. If she had just married a nice boy from Nazareth, she said, she would be back home where she belonged instead of competing with sheep for a place to sleep. Then she said she was sorry, and Joseph said not to think another thing about it. He meant it, too. They both hurt all over and there was nothing to eat and it was cold as the dickens, but you know what? God was still there, right in middle of the picture. Peace was there, and joy and love—not only in the best of times, and also, and especially in the worst of time: (Home by Another Way, pp. 23-3). God comes to us in gold, circumstance, and mud. It’s in the moments of mud that we have to hang onto the Gospel message, God is with you. Emmanuel.