2026 — Lectionary primer

The Epiphany of Our Lord

The Light of the Nations · Wednesday, January 6, 2027

One-year lectionary · Isaiah 60:1–6 · Ephesians 3:1–12 · Matthew 2:1–12

The Epiphany of Our Lord takes its name from the Greek epiphaneia, “manifestation.” Before December 25 became the date of Christmas in fourth-century Rome, January 6 was the Church’s chief feast of Christ, and the East still keeps it as Theophany. That one ancient feast celebrated the nativity, the visit of the Magi, the Baptism in the Jordan, and the first miracle at Cana all at once. Once the West kept the Nativity on December 25, Epiphany became a “Christmas of the Gentiles,” centered on the Magi as the moment Christ was first revealed to the nations. The Sundays that follow unfold, one at a time, the other manifestations the ancient feast held together, until the season ends on the mountain of the Transfiguration. The color is white. Parish custom keeps the Christmas greens through the octave, and in the nativity display the shepherds give way to the Magi: the day’s turn from Israel’s shepherds to the wise men of the nations, enacted in miniature.

Lectionary Primer PDF

Coming this week: The Epiphany of Our Lord.

The shape of the service

The Collect prays that as God made known His Son to the Gentiles by the leading of a star, He would lead us, who know Him by faith, to enjoy in heaven the fullness of His divine presence.

The Gradual and Verse. Psalm 117 praises God’s steadfast love among all nations, and the Verse sings the Magi’s own question from Matthew 2:2: “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?”

The Proper Preface confesses that what was hidden from before the foundation of the world God has now made known to the nations in His Son, the same mystery St. Paul announces in the Epistle.

The Nunc Dimittis is the Post-Communion Canticle. Simeon’s song of “a light to lighten the Gentiles” is sung by people who have just received that Light in the Sacrament.

The readings at a glance

Old Testament

Isaiah 60:1–6

Two feminine imperatives open the reading, qumi (“arise”) and ori (“shine”), spoken to Daughter Zion as she lies in humiliation and darkness. They are a word of power, not advice: like “Let there be light,” this word gives the strength it commands. “Your light has come” is a prophetic perfect, God’s promised dawn spoken of as already done. The glory (kavod, God’s weight and unveiled presence) “has risen” (zarach), a verb for God’s own dawning; the Greek Old Testament renders it with the verb behind anatole, the “Dawn” of Luke 1:78 and the star’s “rising” in Matthew 2:2. Darkness covers the peoples as it once covered the deep in Genesis 1:2, yet the nations (goyim) and their kings walk to Zion’s light. Camels from Midian and Sheba arrive with gold and frankincense, and the caravans “proclaim good news” (yevasseru), the Hebrew verb for preaching the Gospel. Matthew shows the first fulfillment: Gentile Magi kneeling before the Child with gold and frankincense of their own.

Epistle

Ephesians 3:1–12

Paul writes as “the prisoner of Christ Jesus,” bound by no emperor but by his Lord, and the mere word “Gentiles” sends him into a digression on his office. He calls it an oikonomia, the charge of a steward who distributes the master’s goods to the household. Those goods are a mysterion: not a secret rite for an elite circle, as in the pagan cults, but God’s eternal decree, once hidden and now openly proclaimed in Christ. Verse 6 states it with words built on syn-, “together with”: the Gentiles are fellow heirs (synkleronoma), members of one body (syssoma), and fellow partakers (symmetocha) of the promise. Paul takes the superlative elachistos, “least,” and adds a comparative ending to call himself less than the least, yet he preaches riches that are anexichniastos, too deep to be tracked out. Through the Church, where former enemies share one Baptism and one Altar, God displays His many-faceted (polypoikilos) wisdom even to the powers in the heavenly places. In Christ we have parrhesia, the free speech of children, and prosagoge, a royal introduction into the Father’s presence.

Holy Gospel

Matthew 2:1–12

Matthew sets two kings side by side. Herod, an Idumean placed on the throne by the Roman Senate, is “troubled,” and all Jerusalem with him. The magoi were neither kings nor pious philosophers but pagan astrologers from the East, the very class that failed before Daniel’s God, and these unlikely men come seeking the true King of the Jews. They saw “His star at its rising,” and they have come to worship (proskyneo), the full bow reserved for God alone. The chief priests and scribes can cite Micah, yet none walks the six miles to Bethlehem, the “house of bread.” Matthew closes the prophecy with the Lord’s words to David in 2 Samuel 5:2: this Ruler “will shepherd My people Israel.” Led by the star and then by the Word, the Magi rejoice with exceedingly great joy, enter the house, and lay down gold for a King, frankincense for God, and myrrh for a Man who will die and be buried for the sins of the world.

The hymns and their stories

Carol at the Procession

“The First Nowell”

No one knows who first sang this carol. Its oldest surviving copy is a manuscript of nine stanzas with a melody, made around 1816 or 1817 by John Hutchens for the Cornish antiquarian Davies Gilbert. Gilbert printed the words in 1823 in the second edition of his Some Ancient Christmas Carols, saying only that they came from the West of England. William Sandys printed words and music together in London in 1833, and his melody is the one we sing. “Nowell” is an old English cry of Christmas joy, already found in Chaucer. John Stainer’s harmonization of 1868, with its parallel thirds in the refrain, made the carol a fixture of the English Christmas. Its story runs from the shepherds to the star and on to the wise men’s journey, and so it bridges Christmas and Epiphany as the Magi enter our procession.

Hymn of the Day

“The Star Proclaims the King Is Here” · LSB 399

This hymn descends from one of the oldest Christian Latin poems still sung. Coelius Sedulius, a poet active in Rome in the fifth century, wrote A solis ortus cardine, a life of Christ in twenty-three stanzas, each beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. Luther called him Christianissimus poeta, “a most Christian poet.” Stanzas A through G survive as the Christmas hymn “From East to West, from Shore to Shore” (LSB 385). Our hymn picks up at H: Hostis Herodes impie, “Impious enemy Herod.” Counter-Reformation editors of the Roman Breviary later changed Hostis to Crudelis (“cruel”) to smooth the meter, breaking Sedulius’s alphabet in the process. The four stanzas from Sedulius hold together the ancient Epiphany manifestations: the Magi and Herod’s fear (Christ “takes no realms of earth away who gives the realms of heavenly day”), the sinless Lamb sanctifying the Jordan’s waters, and the water reddening into wine at Cana. The Trinitarian doxology was added from the Sarum Hymnal around 1200, and John Mason Neale’s 1851 translation carries the whole into English.

Hymn

“We Three Kings of Orient Are”

John Henry Hopkins Jr. (1820–1891), an Episcopal clergyman and editor of The Church Journal, wrote both words and tune. The carol is often dated 1857, yet the earliest record is a notice in his own Journal on December 1, 1858, announcing it as forthcoming; the words appeared there on January 5, 1859, the eve of the Epiphany. Hopkins wrote it to be performed. The first and last stanzas belong to all three singers, and each stanza between them is a solo for one king presenting one gift: gold for a King, incense that “owns a Deity nigh,” and myrrh for One who will suffer and die. The names and crowns come from later tradition, not from Matthew, but the reading of the gifts is the early Church’s own, found already in Origen. Hopkins set the music in the treble clef “for the accommodation of children,” and it became a Sunday school favorite and one of the few American carols that England adopted as its own.

Closing Hymn

“As with Gladness Men of Old” · LSB 397

William Chatterton Dix wrote this hymn in a single day, and that day was the Epiphany. In 1858 or 1859, the young layman lay in bed recovering from a sudden, severe illness. On January 6 he read the festival Gospel, the visit of the Wise Men, and finished the hymn by evening. Dix was no clergyman but a marine insurance agent; he also gave us “What Child Is This” (LSB 370) and “Alleluia! Sing to Jesus” (LSB 820). Editors named the tune DIX in his honor, adapting it from an 1838 melody by Conrad Kocher. Dix disliked the pairing, conceding, “I dislike it, but now nothing will displace it.” His first text placed the Magi at a “manger bed,” so the editors of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1875) changed it to “lowly bed” and “cradle, rude and bare,” honoring Matthew’s house rather than Luke’s stable. Each of the first three stanzas pairs “as” with “so”: as the Magi saw, sped, and offered, so may we be led, seek the mercy seat, and bring our costliest treasures to Christ.