Quick Summary:

As this new year dawned, the New Horizons spacecraft came within reach of the most distant object ever visited by humankind: a small mysterious looking space nicknamed, “ULTIMA THULE” – a place beyond the known world.
When it comes to our gospel for this Feast of Epiphany, we’re in the realm of mystery as well; a mystery rooted in ages past when prophets spoke of a special child who would unite heaven and earth; a prophecy that came to birth in a Bethlehem stable. Shepherds, says St. Luke, were the first to catch word of his birth. But there were others, Matthew tells us, who were on a search for the newborn king. And whether the astronomical sign they saw in the night sky was a star, a comet, a supernova, or an unusual conjunction of planets, the magnitude of what they saw sent them on a seeker’s journey to find not the ULTIMA THULE but the ULTIMUS REX—the king beyond all others.