May it be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please do be seated.

Welcome to a new beginning. 2026 is but a few days old, full of potential. I wonder what we feel as we look at the year ahead.

Are we optimistic or fearful? Maybe a bit of both. Whatever we bring, we welcome it this year with the celebration of Epiphany on this first Sunday of the year. At its heart, the Feast of the Epiphany is about who God chooses to reveal himself to and how he does it.

It's about insiders and outsiders. Just at the end of last year, the journalist John Simpson reflected on everything that had happened that he'd reported on over the year. He said that in his 40 years of reporting, he had never seen a year like 2025.

He spoke of war, of terrorism, of escalating global conflicts and of a growing sense of fear about what lies ahead. He also named something quieter but just as significant. A slow and steady shift towards insular, isolationist thinking across Western democracies.

He focused particularly on America, but he could have talked about much closer to home because it's happening here as well. Politicians focus on a need for higher military spending and endlessly debate immigration figures. News stories about seemingly innocuous things are framed in ways that encourage suspicion and fear and so that they can justify calling anybody other.

Debates about national identity are increasingly used to decide who belongs in this country and who doesn't. It's easy to understand how this atmosphere has taken hold. Rising living costs have pushed many into crisis.

Public services are stretched thin. Global powers compete for land and influence. Even here on our island, our sense of security feels fragile.

Historically, in many places across the world, financial pressures combined with political instability have tended to lead towards societies turning inward. When life feels hard and frightening, it makes psychological sense that we focus on ourselves first, that we tend to view those who are other as a threat. Well, what does epiphany have to say to all of this? Well, we might be tempted to say not much.

How could an ancient feast marking events over 2,000 years ago have anything to say about the geopolitics of 2026? But when we look more closely at the context of the epiphany, the world into which Jesus was born appears actually not so very different from our own. Politically, Judea was ruled by an unpopular king who was sustained by the wealth and power of a few. Herod the Great ruled not because the people chose him, not because he had any divine right, but because Rome installed him.

He, in fact, wasn't even Jewish by birth. He was Jewish by conversion. He governed not by consent, but by force.

Militarily, Israel was an occupied land. Roman power was continually contested, however, by armed groups like the Zealots who dreamed of restoring independence, remembering the Hasmonean dynasty that had overthrown Greek rule only a generation earlier. Economically, things were really difficult and financial burdens fell hardest on the poor.

Heavy taxation from Rome was joined with even heavier taxation from Herod's administration for his building projects, particularly the expansion of the Temple Mount and then his lavish palace in Jerusalem. And so those already surviving on the edge could be pushed into absolute poverty by debt. Hear that as a context.

Political instability, unpopular leaders, military conflict, economic pressures, widening poverty. Suddenly, the world of epiphany doesn't sound quite so different from ours. And in that context, it's perhaps no surprise that so many people hoped that the Messiah would come quickly and that the birth of the Messiah, which we celebrated just a few days ago at Christmas, would bring about a strong military and political leader.

Israel was a proud people who had been subjugated by foreign rule and they longed for their land and their power and their dignity back. Israel for the Israelis. Our reading from Isaiah could be and often was understood as a prophetic promise to fulfil those exact hopes.

Read in Isaiah 60 verse 5, then you shall see and be radiant. The wealth of the nations shall come to you. Read triumphalistically, this sounds like a promise of national dominance of the nations finally serving Israel rather than ruling over it.

And across Israel at the time, there were signs of this triumphalist Israel for the Israelis type of mindset. Religious leaders emphasised strict adherence to the law and to established custom. There wasn't much space for outside outsiders or their views.

Militant groups wanted not only to remove the Romans, but to undo the influence of the Gentile world altogether. Even the temple reflected separation with Gentiles, non-Jews barred from entering beyond the outer court. How neatly then it would have fitted into the way things were working and the hopes of the people if the Messiah had arrived to reinforce boundaries, to remove outsiders, and to reinforce security by exclusion.

But of course, that isn't the story of Epiphany. Instead, the Messiah was born as Jesus of Nazareth to a poor unmarried woman named Mary, raised by a man who wasn't his biological father named Joseph. Not long after Jesus' birth, his family became refugees.

Warned of coming political violence, they fled on foot. They carried little, if anything, with them. They crossed an international border without any official permission, and they resided in the land that they arrived in again without any permission whatsoever.

They entered Egypt as immigrants, seeking safety, and they lived there for about four to six years, working, surviving, raising their child. They didn't change their language or their culture or their faith practise to assimilate into Egyptian belief or practise. They were Jews through and through, Israelis through and through, and they remained that way.

They maintained their own identity, and they only returned to Israel when the political situation changed, and they could go back home safely. So in Epiphany, we celebrate an immigrant family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. But we also celebrate foreigners, the foreigners who visited them, the Magi.

They travelled from so far away that St. Matthew didn't even bother to record where they were from, only that they were from the east, somewhere over there. And they were invited to worship God the Son, not through Jewish faith or practise, but by signs interpreted through a foreign religious tradition, probably Zoroastrian astrology. And when they came, they brought gifts which would have allowed the holy family to survive, fleeing the violence to come, but gifts which also pointed towards Jesus's forthcoming ministry.

Gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, myrrh for a sacrifice. What's remarkable in all of this is not just that we celebrate an immigrant family, not just that we celebrate foreigners coming to visit the immigrant family through practises that are completely alien to us and to anything in our faith tradition. What is amazing is that we celebrate because of the very otherness of these people.

The book of Common Prayer calls the Epiphany the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. This is a feast which is actively celebrating outsiders because they are outsiders. Epiphany reveals the astonishing truth that the Jewish Messiah, who many hoped would secure an Israel for the Israelis, instead came to expand the kingdom of God, calling people that his own followers would have rejected.

For most of us, this should be comforting, but also a little unsettling, because most of us in this room are, or at least would have been, the outsiders. We are the Gentiles. We are everyone else.

We are the foreigners. We are the ones who wouldn't have been allowed past the outer court of the temple. We are the people whose presence anywhere near the people of God, the Zealots would have called a corruption.

We are the ones whose existence as Christians, some in the early church, would have denied even being possible. Some of Jesus's earliest followers, including Saint Peter himself at first, argued that following Jesus meant becoming Jewish. The idea of Gentiles being included without changing how they ate, how they dressed, how they worshipped, how they lived, was unthinkable.

Indeed, had that view prevailed, most of us would never have belonged. Certainly not without changing our bodies and our very ways of living. Chances are, this building that we're sitting in right now would never have been built.

So the fact that we're sat here this morning is grace. By grace, foreign Magi were guided by a star, though that has nothing to do with Jewish belief or Christian practise. By grace, Egypt made space for an immigrant family, though they had no legal right to be there.

By grace, Jesus centred his ministry on those who were pushed to the margins, though everyone else said that they were outsiders. By grace, Jesus died and rose again, so that those outsiders could be drawn to eternal life. By grace, God called Saint Paul, as we heard in our reading from Ephesians, who spent his life arguing and suffering and being rejected so that Gentiles could be welcomed into the church as God made them, not as others demanded they become.

And read in this light, Isaiah's prophecy is transformed. The wealth of the nations shall come to you. Reads no longer as a promise of domination, but of a kingdom defined by communion.

The nations come because they are called. The kingdom of God becomes a place where every people and culture is gathered, not erased, made insiders by Jesus. It's easy to dismiss hope of that kind of reality ever manifesting in this world as unrealistic, even naive.

And when we focus on the news and on the tone of public debate, we might be inclined to agree. The sensible thing we are told over and over is to protect what's ours, focus on the people who live here, not those outsiders. But fear and instability and conflict are nothing new.

Into a world that is as troubled as ours, people who were labelled outsiders, immigrants, refugees, people who didn't fit and didn't try to fit, became the people through whom God revealed himself. The behaviours of people sometimes labelled as other or outsider today, which are feared and condemned by unkind rhetoric, are the same behaviours that we're actively celebrating on the Feast of the Epiphany. The kingdom of God truly began to break in because God the Son didn't just welcome outsiders, he became an outsider.

Not just an immigrant, but throughout his ministry, he refused to be shaped by the fears of his time. He refused to become the politician that people demanded that he be. He refused to make a community or a nation which defined itself by keeping other people out.

And the kingdom of God continues to grow only when God's people allow the Holy Spirit to inspire us to do the same thing in our own place and amongst our own people. And so the message of the Epiphany is this. When the world says, stay out, we say, come in.

When the world says, protect what is yours, we say, feed and care for the poor. When the world says, build walls, we say, build bridges. This is the message of Epiphany.

We, who should be outsiders, have been welcomed in. And so it is our God-given duty to extend that welcome to others, to everybody, to anybody who might ever be called an outsider here in the church, here in our community, here in our country, and in our lives. Amen.