January 7, 2024
Isaiah 60:1-6
Matthew 2:1-12
In parts of the world, yesterday was a big celebration. As Eliseo Perez-Alvarez writes at Working Preacher:
“In Puerto Rico, the Three Kings Day warrants great celebration, in which businesses are closed and the whole country is feasting. This is a cultural vestige that takes us back to the slavery time when January 6 was the only day off in the entire year for the Afro-Caribbean people. Needless to say, the black king (Melchior) is always at the center.
‘In the Eastern hemisphere, Epiphany is the celebration of Jesus’ baptism, where the ‘three magi’ became the first liturgists who celebrated the birth of the political Messiah: ‘the king of the Jews.’ These ‘three scholars’ were also the first Gentile missionaries to share the good news to the Gentiles beyond Judea’s borders.
“People sometimes joke that this trio was the first and last group of men invited to a baby shower, since their presents were not practical at all!”
I’ve usually heard that last joke go something like this: If the three wise men had been three wise women, they’d have asked directions, arrived on time, delivered the baby, cleaned up, and most of all, they’d have brought practical gifts.
My version of that joke goes: The wise men did stop and ask for directions from King Herod in Jerusalem. In doing so they revealed the birth of the Messiah to a bloodthirsty and cruel tyrant, resulting in the “Slaughter of the Innocents.” As a result, no man has asked directions since.
The jokes reveal what a strange and puzzling story this is. In two thousand years, we’ve domesticated this story, making it familiar, even comfortable. We usually skip the consequences of visiting King Herod, for example.
We also settled on a number of wise men, three, corresponding to the three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The story, you may have noticed, numbers the gifts but not the people. We don’t know how many wise men there were except that it was more than one.
I also have to say that the gifts turned out to be very practical. Joseph and Mary used them to fund their flight to Egypt to escape King Herod.
And then there’s the wise men themselves. The word Matthew used was the Greek word “magoi,” which we tend to render as “magi.” It could mean wise men, or scholars. It could also mean priests or astrologers (which makes sense, given that they were watching the stars). It could also mean “magicians,” as Luke used it precisely that way in Acts of the Apostles.
As D. Mark Davis observes on his blog LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “This unusual route from the stars to the Christ is unique to this story in Matthew and quite unexpected, given the numerous occasions in the Hebrew Bible where astral cults are strongly condemned.”
These were not observant Jews.
Yet they came.
Judaism, as Rev. Davis said, took a very suspicious view of astrology. Christianity, despite the appearance of these wandering astrologers in Matthew, followed that thinking. For the last few centuries, science has cast more doubt on the idea that the stars have predictive impact on human life. I would guess that if the magi were to appear today to a Christian gathering, half would doubt them because they thought astrology was bunk and half would doubt them because they thought astrology was demonic.
Strange.
It was a strange star, too. Did you notice? “When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.”
Stars don’t move like that. They move across the sky over the course of the night, we know that. We know that they appear to move about with the seasons. What they don’t do is start moving across the sky one night and stop the next.
Really strange.
What a strange and puzzling story this is.
They saw something nobody else noticed. They followed it – even asked directions, which turned out to be a bad idea – and found someone most people were ignoring. They offered a disregarded child the honors due to a monarch, including gifts that would turn out to be all too practical. Then… they went home.
As far as we can tell, nobody else in Bethlehem did anything similar. No other astrologers followed this oddly behaved star.
The Messiah was hidden in plain sight, in the town of David’s birth, and who knew but his parents, maybe some shepherds, and these strange stargazers from far away.
That’s why we have to take a close look at the world before us and around us. It’s because ‘apapane hide in plain sight, looking for all the world like another cluster of flowers. It’s because each human child bears so much promise, so much possibility, so much blessing, and because they look like every other human child. It’s because the children of God, keiki to kupuna, bear the image of God. If none of us are the Messiah, that’s fine. But we can follow the example of the Messiah, imitate the Messiah, and if we look closely enough, appreciate the blessings of the Messiah in one another and in the world.
They saw. They wondered. They followed. They saw. They gave. They went home.
It’s not a bad example for any of us to follow, who have determined to find and follow Jesus, the Main Attraction.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Between new inspiration and tricks of memory, the text Pastor Eric prepares and the sermon he actually delivers are… different.
The image is The Adoration of the Magi by Giovanni Bernardo Carbone (ca. 1635). Photo by Sailko – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39502188.