Several years ago right after
Christmas I found some of those automatic timers that can be hooked onto lamps.
We have a couple of dark, but well-travelled corners in our house where it is
helpful to have some light, but leaving the lamps on all the time runs up the
electricity bill. I fixed the timers on a few of those lamps and tried to
arrange it so they’d come on during the night and go off when it was daytime. It
didn’t take Melinda and me too long to realize that those timers needlessly
complicate things—at least the el-cheapo versions I had bought do. Melinda
started to remark that the light is never on when she needs it and then when
she tries to turn it on herself it won’t click on because the timer is in
control. One night she was making her way up the stairs with Clare in her arms and
the light right in front of her went out, inexplicably, leaving her in the
dark. Exasperated, she hollered out, “Honey, your light just went out again.” Maybe
I’m just no good with technology, but we ended up deciding that it’s still just
easier to reach down and turn the lights on or off when you need them.
The magi—or the wise men, as
our gospel text translates the word today—are drawn to the child Jesus by a
strange light that turns on and off, inexplicably, in the sky above them. They
don’t have control of it. Rather, it has control of them. It mystifies them,
beginning somewhere in the East, in their country (or countries) of origin, luring
them like the tornadoes lure the storm-trackers on the Weather Channel.
This strange starlight brings
them from miles away, but they are mysterious figures, in and of themselves. We
have come to call them wise men, or magi, or kings, but it unclear exactly who
they are or who, if anyone, they represent. Most likely they were something
akin to astrologers from the area of modern-day Iraq or Saudi Arabia, but even
that is not certain. We have also long numbered them as three, just like the
front of our bulletin does, but that’s only because three gifts are mentioned
in the story. This could have been an entire entourage of star-trackers in a
big middle eastern caravan.
Regardless of who or what
these magi really are, their mysteriousness is part of the point. The mystique
that surrounds their identity, even to this day and age, is exactly why Matthew
wanted to make sure we knew this story. The point is that a group of total
foreigners see an extraordinary star shining in the sky and are drawn to the
place where it shuts off. After a brief detour to King Herod, during which all
of Jerusalem gets worked into a tizzy, the wise men find the child Jesus and
pay him homage with their gifts. Perhaps, as Martin Luther once suggested, the
wise men went first to Jerusalem because it was the capital city, and where
else would a king be born but near a royal palace? In this case, the royal city
happens to be Bethlehem, not Jerusalem, which they discover after Herod’s own
team of scholars discovers this passage from the prophet Micah. Once they start
for Bethlehem, the star automatically clicks on again, and the wise men are
filled with great joy. “Why did the star not take the wise men straight to
Bethlehem without any necessity of consulting Scriptures?” Martin Luther asked.
“Because God wanted to teach us that we should follow the Scriptures and not
our own murky ideas.”[1]
Matthew makes it clear from
the very beginning of his gospel message that all people will be drawn to this
light. Even though Matthew firmly places Jesus within the lineage of Israel, tracing
his pedigree all the way back to Abraham, the first people to pay Jesus homage and
recognize his royalty are not even Jesus’ own people. All people may claim
Christ as their king. It doesn’t matter how mysterious or exotic or plain or
ordinary your background is.
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| "Adoration of the Magi" detail on a tapestry (1894) |
What has drawn you to Jesus? What
leads you to seek his company and the company of fellow seekers? Whether or not
you are able to claim he has some authority in your life, what continues to
bring you here on a regular basis? When we reflect on the wise men’s trek from
afar, we realize that each of us has our own journey across life’s desert to come
face to face with the Lord. What has been the star for you? What is that light
in the dark hallway that helps you make your way? It may be Holy Scripture. It
may be the words and presence of a particular person who shared God’s love. Or
it may be the life of forgiveness and selfless care as it’s embodied by the
community of believers, which was so evident in the way you surrounded the Nye
family yesterday.
One may say that a church
needs to be many things. It needs, for example, to be a center of worship and
community service. It needs to be a place where children and adults can learn
more about Scripture and their faith tradition and how to forgive and love
others. Above all, the church needs to be a place where all people are
continually drawn in communion with Jesus Christ so they may pay homage to him.
Whether or not the congregation is named Epiphany, the church always needs to
be aware of its epiphany duty: that is, the church needs to humbly keep in mind
that we are still, at our core, a stable way-station that is accepting gifts
for God from total strangers.
No congregation ever really
exists for the sake of the people who have already joined, for the sake of the
people whose ancestors are on the charter or who have been on the roll for
generations. Any congregation’s existence, no matter how strong or weak their
programs may be, is based on meeting those who’ve not yet come to faith or who
are lingering on the fringes of it, those interactions that the Holy Spirit
enables. The church exists to draw in those who are seeking, to be a first
taste of the communion of saints for those who realize that they’re sinners, (of
which I count myself one). Imagine the kind of God who gathers all of his
people together not simply for their own sake, but for the sake of the world that
his Son may be known! That’s the God those magi were seeking.
There is some anxiety within
individual congregations and in denominations as a whole about declines in membership
and activity and influence. Some church leaders have noted that this anxiety and
sense of urgency can lead congregations to take too many measures of
self-preservation—for example, prioritizing certain ministries or developing
certain habits that keep members happy or comfortable over ones that reach out
to newcomers and welcome them in. To be quite honest, I think any congregation
can fall into this trap at just about any time, and, to complicate matters,
it’s not always so clear-cut which ministries and programs are all about
self-preservation and which ones really grow out of pure intentions to spread
the word about Christ.
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| "Adoration of the Magi" by Paolo Verone (1573) |
Whatever the scenario, one
former Episcopal pastor, Barbara Brown Taylor, has wisely observed that “at
least one reason for the urgency,” even when it ends up being about
self-preservation, is because people know that “the church is the place of
divine transformation. It is the place where people say yes both to God and to
one another. The church is where Christ turns our water into wine.”[2] I
would add: the church is where strangers from afar are made brothers and
sisters of the one true King. After all, the wise men did go home by another
way. They were transformed by what they encountered in that first epiphany
way-station.
Remembering our epiphany duty
and enabling these holy encounters is a mighty task for any congregation, and
we can sense urgency in everything we do, but when we let it be Jesus who
shines—not some nifty little gizmo or gadget ministry or some murky idea of our
own—the light will not go out.
When all of us help each of
us remember that it is chiefly Jesus who is being offered here for the sake of
the community, for the sake of the world, then we will never really have to
worry about our survival, and we will never have to be ashamed of what he calls
us to do.
When we take to heart that
every little interaction that each of us has, that every little word we say to
each other can be a holy reflection of the gift in Jesus—or it can be like
Herod’s scheming and turning people away—then we are taking seriously our task
as church.
When we realize this
congregation, like all the others, exists primarily for the sake of those who
are still making their way through the wilderness, then, as the writer of
Ephesians says, the “wisdom of God in its rich variety will be made known
through us” to the entire universe.
And when we think that the
little light of grace and glory goes blinking and fluttering inexplicably from
time to time, it is not because Christ has left the building, or because we
need to shout out, “Honey, your light has gone off again!” More often than not
things have gone dark because we’ve taken our eyes off that Brightest and Best of
the stars of the morning.
Amen.
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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