First Presbyterian Church

First Presbyterian Church

Rev. Sam Pendergrast

January 6, 2008

Matthew 2:1-12

 

 

“Following a Mystery”

 

I love to travel. I always have. When I was an adolescent I was the navigator on family trips and vacations. I sat in the front passenger seat, held the maps, watched the road signs and told the driver where to turn. At least I thought I was the navigator. My father and mother probably knew where they were going already, but they encouraged my love of maps and geography. They let me believe I was guiding the family through the wilderness and keeping us from becoming hopelessly lost.

 

My father was the one who taught me to love maps. In one of his file drawers he had maps of nearly every county in Georgia. One of my favorite memories from childhood has to with those maps. During the week, if the upcoming Saturday was promising for getting outdoors, we would begin to plan what we called an “expotition.” My father would pull out a county map, and we would look for a large blank spot to explore. On Saturday, my mother would pack us a lunch and my father, brother and I would drive to the edge of the blank spot and start walking. We found some of our favorite hiking, fishing and picnic spots that way. There were several we went back to over and over. Some were unremarkable, to which we never returned. It is surprising to me now that I don't remember getting chased off anyone's land.

 

What is intriguing to me as I look back is that we had no idea what we would find as we set out into those blank spots on the map. We had no GPS, no directions. All we had was a hunch, based on the topography, that we might find a secluded creek or a fine view from a mountain top. We headed out into the mystery of open country and the empty spots on the maps. We didn't even have a star to guide us.

 

Given that part of my personal history, it is no surprise that a part of ministry I dearly love is leading mission trips. However, love of travel is not a good enough reason to spend my time and the church's money on organizing an interesting vacation. A good mission trip is about a whole lot more than travel. The purposes of a mission trip include: giving of oneself by working, serving and being present; learning about other churches, cultures, political and economic structures, and oneself; taking a walk outside one's own comfort zone; and, most important, personal and spiritual growth and transformation. My hope for any mission trip is that the people who take part come back different people, that they will bring those differences back to their church and community, and because of that, God will be at work in church and community in new ways because of the changed lives of those people. What I hope does not happen is that people who go on a mission trip simply catalog it as another interesting experience and say, “Boy, look how poor those people are; I'm glad I don't live like that!” and then go on back to their same old lives. The purpose of mission engagement, is to take part in God's work of transforming the world and bringing in the Kingdom. That's a process bigger than any of us and is a mystery that we don't bring about but can only give ourselves to. In the process, we are changed as well.

 

Were the magi looking for that kind of experience? What did they believe about what they might find by following the star? Who knows? All we can say is that they had an idea, based on their knowledge of the sky and their beliefs about signs in the heavens, that the strange, new object they observed in the night sky was a sign of the birth of a new king. They were curious enough, motivated enough, to travel hundreds of miles through more blank spots than you and I will ever see, without maps, in order to see a baby – a baby they believed was born to be a king.

 

Matthew is the only one of the four Gospels to include this story. The traditional interpretation of Matthew's story of the Magi is that in the visit of these foreigners to the child, Jesus, the Light of the World shone beyond the bounds of the Jewish people and the First Covenant, and began to reveal God's light to the Gentiles. Matthew, the one so preoccupied with demonstrating to the Jewish people how Jesus is the fulfillment of their scriptures and of their vocation to reveal God's truth to the world, begins his Gospel with this story of eastern astrologers coming to worship the Messiah.

 

Who were these strange visitors? The word, magi, is the plural of magus. The word means magician, sorcerer, wise man, astrologer. They would have been considered experts in the interpretation of dreams, reading signs in the heavens and explaining phenomena we associate today with the occult, New Age philosophies and the area we call “spirituality.” Those who know the history of that time tell us that these men were likely Persian or Babylonian. That means that they came from the area of Iraq or Iran. At the least, they came from a place that is six hundred miles in a straight line from Bethlehem. Since they probably traveled up the river into what is now Syria and then south along the trade routes, they could have traveled two thousand miles or more – by camel. This meant a journey of months, all because of a star in the sky. How many of them were there? Our song, our tradition calls for three. We don't know. It doesn't matter. The text says, “wise men” came from the east. Our tradition is that there were three because they brought three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

 

More important to me than the questions of who they were and where they came from are these questions: Why did they make the journey? What motivated them? And what did it mean to them after they found the baby? What does it mean that they rejoiced with a great joy when they found the baby? What did they think they had found? What difference did it make to them?

 

Dorothee Sölle was a German church leader, theologian and seminary teacher. Her 1969 collection of poems, titled Revolutionary Patience, includes a piece entitled, “The Three Kings”. In the poem she explores what it might have meant for the Magi to make such an extraordinary trip.

 

I’ve thought a lot about

Why they went –

A major disturbance in the sky,

A threefold source of light

In an unexpected place,

An unfamiliar star among familiar ones.

Is that reason enough to set out

On sand-drifted roads,

Carrying stale water in leather bags

Month after month.

Putting aside for now the question of higher powers

That might have influenced them –

I have no grasp of things like that –

I would call

What drove them from home,

Where they must have had it good,

I would call

This revolutionary virtue of the modern era

Curiosity.

This, I’d guess, is what spurred them on.

They wanted to see what was up,

To straighten out a new confusion,

To account for this unexpected brightness

And incorporate it in the existing order.

 

The poem goes on, but I'll stop there for now. Curiosity. Is that a good enough reason for such a trip? If the magi had responded with nothing more than curiosity at the end of the trip, if they had only marked down in their list of interesting phenomena this young king and then traveled on in search of more curiosities to catalog, I would have to answer no. Curiosity is not enough if that is where the journey ends. Such curiosity is a shallow and self-centered ending, but it is a good beginning. Think about Moses. What if he had not been curious? What if he had not turned aside to look at the burning bush, to see why it was not being burned up? Sometimes curiosity might be nothing less than God nudging us to turn aside, step out of our routine, take a look at something that might lead us in a new direction, might just change our life. Curiosity can be a good beginning. Curiosity can be a realization that there is more out there than we know, and that we always have more to learn. To follow our curiosity can be an admission that God has another journey for us to take and something more to show us.

 

Our world is glutted with curiosities today, full of any form of entertainment you can imagine. You can go to YouTube or BoreMe, among others, and watch pointless videos designed to distract you from whatever it was you were supposed to be doing. The kind of curiosity I'm talking about is the kind that calls you outside to stare at the night sky, the kind that quiets you to listen to the still voice of God, the kind that turns you inward to pay attention to the hopes and fears inside you that you hardly ever pay attention to because you're too busy or too scared. I'm talking about the kind of curiosity that invites you pay attention to the person next to you and to learn something you've never realized before, or to step out on a new journey.

 

Having invited us to consider the virtue of curiosity, Sölle's poem continues by considering the patience and endurance such a journey must have required.

 

So they built

A more powerful telescope.

It didn’t help,

Didn’t clear anything up.

The new light just glowed

More brightly than ever.

So they chartered,

Well-to-do as they were,

A fair-sized caravan

To run down that star.

So they bargained, bought, organized, laid in supplies,

Mapped out with thoroughness and foresight

Their route and watering places,

Planned to travel at night

So they could promptly modify their plan

In accordance with the somewhat erratic

Course of the star.

So they set out

On their arduous way to explore

This mysterious disturbance

Brought into the world

By light.

 

Curiosity can be fleeting. One's initial interest can fade. I will settle right back into my old patterns and habits if I don't have the energy to stick with the journey. The magi didn't just jump up and run off toward the east. They planned for and set out on a journey that took months – one way. They considered the risks, the cost and the strange compulsion that came from beyond their familiar world, and they decided to venture our, following a mystery. Any journey worth taking requires time and energy, patience and persistence. Imagine – what did they talk about around the campfire at night? Where did they think they would end up? What did they do to keep their spirits up when the journey became tedious? What did they expect would happen to them? They were following a mystery. They were following the light. That still does not explain why they rejoiced with such great joy when they found the baby. Matthew's words can be literally translated, “they rejoiced with a really, really big joy.” Did they know who they had found? We don't know. All Matthew tells us is that they went home by a different road to avoid King Herod.

 

Herod was afraid. The Magi were joyful. I think that on any journey any of us feel a mixture of fear and joy. There is the fear of the unknown, the fear of change, the fear of danger. For some there is simply the joy of the journey. For some there is the joy of the destination. But on a trip like this, following a mystery, we don't know the ending. We are invited to believe that if God is leading us the end will be beyond our wildest hopes and that we can expect to rejoice with a really, really big joy when we get there.

 

Did the Magi know they had found the Savior of the world? Did their encounter change them? What did they do next? Those are some of the questions  Sölle asks in the conclusion of her poem.

 

Were they able to explain this star?

Did they go home

Conscious of a higher order?

Are they still under way,

Tracing irregularities

In the heavens and on earth?

Did they accommodate unexpected brightness

To the everyday twilight around them?

Or is there a chance

That they accommodated themselves

To amazing light?

Could it be harnessed? If so, for what?

Did they see clearer when they got there?

More important still,

Did they who saw it

Change?

Reports are few,

Evidence scant,

But assuming they did change,

I would praise the travelers

And rejoice in them and,

If this uncommon light is still shining,

Look at it long and often

For their sake,

Hoping fervently

For change.

 

This uncommon light is still shining. What about you? Do you look at it long and often? Do you hope for change? What have you seen that calls you beyond yourself, your familiar routines, your old habits? What light is shining that calls you to get up, step out and travel in pursuit of a mystery? Are you willing to be changed? We are not accustomed in the habits of Presbyterian Christianity in the United States to the practice of testimony. I think we need to recover the spirit of that practice. We need to know how God changes people. We need to look back at how God has changed us, look around at how God is still changing us and the world, and look ahead to how God calls us into daily conversion to be changed by the Light of the World.

 

As we consider the story of the Magi and their long journey following a mystery, a question for us to consider is this. Are we willing to go on that journey with joy, to relinquish our comfort and control and to go where the star and its Lord lead us? Can we, as a church, rise to a new sense of adventure, listen to one another and take hope in the way God can transform lives and make all things new?

 

Maybe that's the chief requirement for being and Christian – a willingness to go on a journey. Too many people, I think, come into church as if this were the end of the journey rather than the beginning. Remember that we follow a living Lord, who calls us to follow, who has commanded us to make disciples, baptize and teach and to trust him for all the journeys of our lives for he is with us always. What journeys yet lie ahead of us? Are we willing to be changed? Let's follow the star and find out.