Epiphany Feast: Being World-Changers

I used to think that God was looking for people who could change the world. (Okay- most of the time I still do). We’ve all been inspired by the likes of Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi, but my youth has been jammed full of these kinds of figures. When I was five it was my grandmother’s stories of heroic missionaries who cured the sick, wrote down languages for the first time, championed education, and connected the story of Jesus with the spiritual teachings of far-flung tribes in unheard of places.

When I was 12, it was Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, the prophet Micah calling his people to care for the poor, and St. Paul heroically braving prisons and beatings and shipwrecks. At 18, I began looking to Paulo Freire, transforming an entire continent through the power of education; Heather Mercer, imprisoned in Afganistan; and my own uncle, born in Uganda to a family of 18, who now develops innovative ways for the poorest countries to grow more and better food.

When I went to Colombia to change
the world, I discovered new heroes.

God, it was clear to me, is looking for these kinds of people: giants who can really make a differencein the world, pulling it toward the place it was made to be, the world I’ve come to call “the kingdom of God.” But here’s the problem: when you or I stand beside such people we are lost in their shadows. When we set out to be Ghandi  or Freire, we are not becoming the people God is looking for. No, God is not looking for people capable of changing the world: God is looking for people who know they can’t change the world.

I know, it sounds ridiculous. God NEEDS us. We are God’s hands and feet. But two things have convinced me that these are the sorts that God is looking for: the realization that we are created for community, and the truth that God is the one who changes things, not me. Each of the people I’ve mentioned above as heroes were members of movements; large, extended communities that changed the world together. Not one of them acted on their own, and (to my knowledge), not one of them tried.

Why? Because these people knew that God is the one who changes the world; God is the one who builds the kingdom, the one who calls us to be part of what God is already up to. When I try to be the person who changes the world (whatever that looks like), I end up pulling myself away from community and from the movements God is already creating.

Tomorrow, we will celebrate the Feast of Epiphany, a season which reminds us that God shows up in unexpected places among unexpected people. In Epiphany, God is revealed to the world as a “light to lighten the Gentiles.” The significance of this can be hard for us to understand today, but the fact that it was Gentile wise men who brought gifts to the toddler Jesus is very important. The seers were not the types that might have been expected to be world-changers that day and neither was that their intention. Instead, they were merely doing their job, following their God, and working together. God asks no more- and no less- from you and me.