Drop the Routine, Follow a Star: A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84:1-8
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Matthew 2:1-12

St. Christopher's Episcopal Church
Kailua, HI

“We observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage."

May I speak to you in the name of the true and living God, +Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Well, this has been a lovely Holiday season hasn’t it?  Christmas has come and gone, New Years has come and gone.  Decorations, if they haven’t been taken down already, have begun to be taken down.  In-fact, the displays for Valentine’s Day are being put up.  Have you thought about what you might be giving your significant other for Valentine’s Day yet?  A friend of mine in the UK posted on Facebook that his local Tesco, a large supermarket chain in the UK, has already put out Easter candy for people to buy, even though Easter falls on the far off date of April 5th this year.  People are back at work, and schools will be in session soon.  This is something I am too familiar with as I leave on Thursday to return to my own seminary.

Happy Easter?!?!?

Our lives have moved on.  We have things to do, places to go, people to see, jobs to do, bills to pay, and we move forward looking forward with our work looking forward to the next three-day weekend.  To be sure though, with so much activity over the holiday season, I am sure we are all happy to allow for the calmness of the day-to-day routine to return.

God has become incarnate in the world by the birth of Jesus Christ.  Jesus is the hope of all the ages, that which prophets, priests, sages, and philosophers pointed to as coming in centuries past.  Mary accepted her role to bear the Christ-child, Joseph took Mary into his home, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, and now life has moved on for them.  Even with a newborn child, the life and routine of the family can be established easily—usually around the cycle of a crying baby.

One day, or perhaps one evening, a few years after the birth of Christ, three random blokes show up at the home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem.  They are dressed in a strange manner; they look somewhat out of place among people in Eastern Mediterranean communities.  After introducing themselves and telling the befuddled family that they followed a star to their home (perhaps they spoke enough Greek or Aramaic to converse with Mary and Joseph), they come before their child, worship him, and then give Mary and Joseph gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the child.  I will presume they spent the night either in their home or in Bethlehem, and then head out the next day.

We dress this story up in very cute imagery and scenes that make it far more precious than it really is.  Imagine, in the midst of your routine, a bunch of strangers show up at your home, tell you they have been following a star, bust in, bow down before your child, and then toss very expensive gifts at you.

Of course, what is most interesting is not so much that the routine of Mary and Joseph was disturbed by the arrival of these strangers, but what would compel these strangers to drop everything in their lives, in their routine, and travel to Bethlehem following a star?  I think there are many mysteries to be uncovered here.

Did the wise men ever get lost along the way?

 Who were these wise men, these magi, these kings as we call them?  What does it mean that they come from the East?  What was it they are looking for?  How many were there?  These are questions that people have tossed around, scholars have developed some theories as to their origin, and there has been multiple depictions of them in art such as in song, poetry, painting, and sculpture.  We imagine there being three wise men, one for each gift.  Tradition even gives them names: Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchior.  There are many stories that circulate around these figures, stories that have attempted to fill in the gaps of their lives.  Sure, when you look at the biblical text itself, there is no reason to assume there were just three wise men, no indication of their names, and no real sense of their origin.  

I think it might be helpful to frame these figures, these three wise men, through one of those particular depictions of them.  There is a novel called Lamb, written by Christopher Moore.  We are introduced to the wise men when a teenage Jesus and a childhood friend of his travel into Asia to learn why it was that the three wise men or magi came to Bethlehem, and perhaps to also learn Jesus’ destiny as the Messiah.  They encounter Balthazar in the mountains of Afghanistan, and he is a wise sage knowledgeable in Confucianism and Daoism, and a practitioner of the arcane science of alchemy.  They encounter Gaspar in a Buddhist monastery in China, a man who was considered by his followers and the local villagers to be a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being.  Finally, they encounter Melchior in India, a Vedic-yogi who practiced asceticism to reach Moksha, the escape from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Each of them, despite being so knowledgeable in their practices and being surrounded by everything they could want or need, material wealth, social wealth, or spiritual wealth, desired and sought something more.  It was that desire that caused them to drop everything and follow a star to seek what it was they perceived missing in their lives.

To be sure, this is a fictitious account, but I think it could be a helpful framing tool to understanding the magi and their motives.  They are clearly people who were wealthy, and had the means to travel far to Bethlehem.  In the ancient days, one required substantial wealth to afford animals and servants to carry the goods necessary to survive through the diverse terrain of Asia.  What drove them may have been that desire for something more, some greater knowledge, wisdom, understanding, or something else.  This is a natural part of the human condition, that drive for more is built into us through evolution.  It has been what has helped our species to survive, to gather during times of plenty to survive in times of famine.  But this condition can easily morph into greed or gluttony.  We desire more and more, despite having enough, and we seek to consume more and more, even when we ought to be full.

Perhaps the wise men had everything they could possibly need.  Maybe they were indeed respected figures, even enlightened.  Yet that same human desire for more drove them westward.  However, what they discovered was not some great font of wisdom, not some book with all the answers to their lives.  What they discovered was a child, the Christ, the only one who could fulfill all their desire and hunger.  Even though Jesus was still just a baby, probably no more than two years old, they saw something far greater than that child.  They witnessed God incarnate, present among us mortals, and all that Jesus would accomplish.

There is a thirteenth century hymn written by S. Thomas Aquinas that can help shape in our minds what it is that what may have gone through the minds of the magi:

Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen,
who thy glory hidest ‘neath these shadows mean;
lo, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed,
tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.

Taste and touch and vision to discern thee fail;
faith, that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil.
I believe whate’er the Son of God hath told;
what the Truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold.

There is nothing more that they could do then to bow down in adoration before Christ.

That is what the power of Christ can do.  When we turn to him, when we orient our lives towards him, he keeps filling and filling and filling our wants, needs, and desires.  It is there that there can be contentment for who we are and what we have.  No amount of internal striving towards enlightenment or self-actualization can ever fulfill that human need for more, since that human instinct keeps growing despite our best efforts.  And yet the grace, mercy, and love of Jesus Christ towards us, towards God’s creation, fills those needs until it overflows like a pool in a storm, or a river overflowing its banks.  So, you better have a big appetite.

We will go about our day-to-day routines.  Perhaps we are content with our lives.  Perhaps we see others who in their day-to-day routine desire more in life.  Perhaps they have a desire to see that which is unseen  I would encourage you then to share with them the grace, mercy, and love of Jesus Christ with them.  Invite them to the Sunday Holy Eucharist service, invite them to share in this community.  Who knows, in time, they too might bow down in adoration before the Christ that is truly present in his Body and Blood upon the altar, and maybe they too may seek the waters of baptism.  We too can be that star that leads others to the Christ.

There are few guarantees of what might occur.  We are never promised a clear and concise answer to all our problems.  We may never become rich.  We may never become poor.  We may never be in the most ideal of circumstances.  However, bowing down in adoration before Christ, receiving the waters of baptism, eating his Body and Blood—all these things lead to a life filled with more wealth than even those of the top billionaires on Earth.  So go, be the star that leads others to Christ.  Share it with others, go tell it on the mountain to the crowds of people on Oahu.

O come, let us adore him.

Amen.