Yesterday, in case you missed it, was Epiphany-with-the-capital-E.  Sunday will be the first Sunday of the season of Epiphany. What is that, you might be asking. Other than the time between the end of Christmas, and the beginning of Lent. In other words, a sort of in-between time between two “sad” things (isn’t the end of Christmas season a little sad? I have to take down the tree today, ugh…and Lent is a little sad too, I mean, who wants to give up chocolate for 40 days???).

Yeah, I had to ask too. Luckily, I happen to have a live-in liturgical expert who comes home everyday for lunch and doesn’t mind fielding random questions like, “hi hon how’s your day so far and what on earth is Epiphany about, anyway?”

One way to think about it is as an extension of Christmas–that glorious moment when God breaks into our world in the surprising form of a little baby. Epiphany teaches us that the surprises don’t end there. God didn’t just burst into our reality in that one isolated moment, and that was that. Perhaps that might be enough–but God is a God of abundance. So the surprises keep coming. In a world that is disappointingly, predictably sad and wrong and awry, God’s surprising presence keeps showing up in odd, glorious, sometimes extremely quirky ways. (I mean, water into wine for Jesus’ first miracle? Tell me that’s not quirky.)

So I want to embark on a little Epiphany season experiment, and I invite you to join in too. For this season, I am going to experiment with seeing the good. I don’t mean turning myself into one of those relentless and oppressively cheerful Pollyannas. But personally, it’s always been easier for me to see the ways in which the world is not how it should be, than those surprising, hopeful ways in which the good shines through. And yet–it does, and not just once, but over and over. Epiphanies: those moments and places where presence of God in our dark reality shines through, always unpredictable and always surprising and yet, always there, waiting to be seen.

Seeing the Good: an experiment for Epiphany.

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