Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Most of us, I imagine,

have been hearing that story since we were children;

in some ways,

it’s probably one of the most familiar in the Bible.

In other ways,

we hardly know it at all.

Start with a simple question:

In the story as Matthew tells it,

how many kings came to see Jesus?

[wait for responses …]

Ah, it’s a trick question, isn’t it?

In two different ways!

In the first place,

Matthew never tells us that they are kings.

Various traditions suggest it;

many of the hymns about their visit suggest it,

the most familiar probably being "We Three Kings of Orient Are" …

but Matthew only says that they are "wise men from the east."

In fact, they were probably not kings at all, but astronomers.

The second part of the trick questions

is that Matthew never tells us how many there were.

We only know there was more than one,

since he says wise men from the East.

Tradition has made the number three,

since they offered him three gifts:

gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

And again, that’s how we usually sing about them!

But that’s just a guess.

Incidentally, there’s a lot of strangeness in Christmas carols

that we tend just to sing through and not particularly notice.

Did you ever notice that in "The First Nowell," in the second stanza,

it has the shepherds looking up and seeing a star,

"shining in the East beyond them far"?

I defy you to find that in Luke’s story about the shepherds.

Only in the next stanza of the carol

do we find "three wise men" coming "from country far"

"by the light of that same star."

But I digress.

Another thing: don’t we all have this mental picture

of the wise men – however many there were –

in the stable along with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus

and the shepherds and whatever critters were already out there?

Wrong.

In the first place, it’s a simple matter of logic,

unless you want to believe that the shepherds left their flocks unattended

for all the days it took the wise men to get there.

But even more so … the text tells us.

In verse 11, when the star finally stops traveling over the place where Jesus is,

what do the wise men do?

"Entering the house," … not the stable, the house …

"they saw the child with Mary, his mother."

And what were Joseph and Mary doing with a house in Bethlehem, anyway?

According to Luke, they were from Nazareth.

Two thousand years of tradition, and storytelling, and carol-singing,

has the Christmas stories all mixed together in our memories.

Which perhaps doesn’t matter a whole lot,

except as it suggests that the details of that nature

didn’t matter much to those who wrote the gospels,

or to those who put the gospels and writings together into the Bible.

What seems far more important

is Jesus’ effect, his impact, the influence he had.

And Matthew, most especially,

takes pains to suggest that Jesus’ influence is not only widespread,

but begins at almost the very beginning of his earthly life.

The wise men do what seems to them the politically savvy thing:

they go to Jerusalem, to the man they know of as king of the region,

to ask him where the new king of the Jews has been born.

Surely Herod, king over all the Jews in the region,

should know the answer to that question.

But he doesn’t.

And not only that,

but instead of rejoicing that the promised messiah may in fact have come,

as one might expect from a Jew living under Roman authority …

he is frightened … and all of Jerusalem with him.

And when the wise men are warned not to return to him,

and so he doesn’t get the specific information he wants

about where that specific child is,

he simply order the slaughter of all children in the region

under the age of two.

That should take care of that!

Even as an infant,

Jesus is apparently a threat to the established order of things.

Kings, chief priests, and scribes, afraid of a baby.

What’s that all about?

And what is this journey all about,

by however many wise men it was,

making a journey of hundreds of miles to see the baby king of the Jews?

They weren’t Jewish themselves …

They came from the east, from Persian, Mesopotamia.

Probably they were followers of the Zoroastrian religion,

but we don’t know that for certain.

Why do they care about the king of the Jews?

It’s clearly not just intellectual curiosity,

else, why did they bring him gifts and pay him homage?

We never find out the answer to that question,

but Matthew makes clear the contrast

in the responses he portrays.

The outsiders, those from far away, the not-Jews,

travel a far distance to acknowledge and to honor Jesus at his birth.

The insiders, the chosen people themselves, those close at hand,

don’t know what’s in their own back yard;

and when they find out, they are scared to death of it.

What’s this all about?

On the one hand,

it’s about Matthew’s frustration with those among the Jews

who, even after Jesus’ earthly life, and death, and resurrection,

still don’t believe that he is the messiah.

Look, says Matthew,

even strangers from another land figured it out …

why are you so hard-headed?

But at another level altogether,

it’s about all of us as human beings

who give in to the temptation to stay put and to stay with what is known

rather than venturing out into something unknown,

even when we’re pretty sure it’s what God wants of us.

I’m not saying we’re as bad as Herod …

even in his own day, Herod was recognized as being

so paranoid that he was out of control.

Anyone he perceived as a threat ended up dead,

including most of his friends, his wife, and three of his sons.

But then, he perhaps had more to lose

than most of us do.

But it is standard human behavior, more often than not,

to want to stay put and preserve what we have

than to leave it behind – even temporarily! –

to follow a star, a dream, a call.

In that respect,

Jesus is just as much of a threat to us

as he was to Herod.

If you glance through scripture,

one of the things you’ll find is that God rarely "calls" someone

to stay exactly where they are and keep doing what they’re doing.

As far back as Abraham,

God says to him – at age 75, no less! –

"Get up and leave your family home and your family land,

and go to the place where I will show you."

Now, if that call came to me at age 75,

I’d probably say, Excuse me, God,

but your timing stinks.

I just made the buy-in payment for my cottage at the Village,

and you know I’m going to have to have both knees replaced,

and what do you mean, go somewhere else?

Sound at all familiar?

Abraham didn’t know where he was going

until God finally told him,

okay, you can stop now; this is the place.

The wise men didn’t know where they were going

until the star finally stopped and made it obvious.

That’s more traveling, and more uncertainty on the journey,

than most of us are at all comfortable with.

And, it’s a sad irony that this is probably even more true of those of us in the church

than those who are not.

We have found the place where we encounter God.

We like it here.

Why would God tell us to pick up and go somewhere else?

Why would God want us to follow a star on some strange cross-country chase?

Isn’t that sort of thing for people who really are still searching,

and who don’t yet know who God is,

or where God can be found?

Well, yes and no.

The advantage to a heart that likes to wander,

to a mind that’s always seeking,

is a willingness always to experience something new,

and to find God in unexpected places.

The potential disadvantage is that one may become so enamored of wandering,

and of the process of journeying in and of itself,

that we don’t hear it when God says,

okay, this is the place, you can stop now.

Imagine if the wise men had decided,

wow, this traveling is such fun;

let’s not stop when the star does but keep right on going,

and maybe we won’t ever go home, either!

The advantage to a heart that likes stability,

and to contentedness exactly where we are and how we are,

is that we can function normally, efficiently;

we know where God is to be found,

and we seek God out regularly in those places

to be guided and sustained and nudged.

The disadvantage to our enjoyment of being settled,

is that we risk missing God in new places,

in extraordinary experiences, in strange people.

We may not hear God’s voice when it says,

get up and go somewhere different today;

listen to an opinion you don’t think you share;

look for Me in someplace where you think you’ll never find Me.

For too much of Christian history,

we have assumed that Jesus is the destination.

That once we or anyone has "found Jesus,"

well, that’s it.

All done now.

We all lived happily ever after.

Instead, in many respects,

finding Jesus is only the beginning of the journey.

The wise men went back home

and, presumably, told what they had seen and heard,

or Matthew wouldn’t ever have gotten the story.

For Jesus’ disciples,

their journeying with him during his life was only the beginning;

where they had the most influence was in the journeys they made

after they had "found him."

Likewise, my friends,

it is a good thing that we have found Jesus;

it is a wonderful thing that we have found him in this place,

and with one another.

But where are we going to journey with him?

Where do we need to take him,

so that others may know about him?

Where do we need to explore,

and to find him in places that are not so familiar,

and so learn something more about who he is?

Where will the star lead us next?

It is, after all, "still proceeding,"

and will someday "guide us to [God’s] perfect light."

Amen.

© 2008 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)