Tonight a little bit of New Orleans will try and push back against the grip of winter at St. Luke’s here in Worcester.
After our 4:30 Saturday service we’ll gather the young folks of the parish (regardless of their ages) and celebrate the ongoing Epiphany Revels with the ritual of the Mardi Gras ‘King Cake’
Baby, Baby, Who'll Find the Baby?
The history of the King Cake is complex and has it roots in a number of different traditions, you can read more about it’s history here.
Long story short, the Making, Cutting and Eating of the King Cake is about having something really good to eat, but also about what it is to look long and hard for treasure. What we do is make the traditional coffee cake style King Cake (I like mine with cream cheese filling!) and hide a small toy baby figure in the cake as we bake it.
The idea is this, we imitate the search of the Magi in Matthew’s Gospel for the Christ Child in the sharing of the King Cake as part of our Epiphany Celebration. Part of the beauty, it seems to me, in this as it’s traditionally done (that is several times throughout Epiphany) we get used to the disicpline of seeking. What’s more we do our seeking in the context of a community. It is customary to have several King Cake events in the same circle of friends and acquaintances with the person finding the ‘baby’ in the cake responsible for hosting the next party and baking the next cake.
It seems to me there’s a healthy bit of evangelism, hospitality, expectancy, community building and celebration in this custom and ritual. The fact that we all share in the sweetness of the cake is only made more exciting (usually) if we happen upon the baby in the extravagance of sugar, butter, eggs, flour, lemon and nutmeg. What seems critically important to me is that getting the baby is not for keeps, but calls forth the virtues of shared work, play, and seeking in a community of God’s faithful
I pray that we’ve all come upon the child Christ in a new way during this season of light and community and that in the process we’ll learn to share in the journey whether or not the baby finds its way to our plate and that we might take as much joy in another finding Christ as we would in our doing so.
