Epiphany - January 3, 2010

Text: Matthew 2:1-12

If you decide to stop by Wal-Mart or Target this afternoon, you will find that Christmas is long gone; it is now officially Valentine season.  If you want, you can drive around looking at Christmas lights this evening, and while most have not been taken down yet because of the snow, it is also true that many or most will not be lit up.  There definitely won’t be any carolers making the rounds this evening, and most all of us have taken our Christmas trees down.  We’ve already celebrated New Years’ for goodness sakes, and we have already moved on to other things.  We’ll be taking down the Christmas decorations here at First Baptist after worship, and I hope you can stick around and join us.  But on the Church calendar, it is still the Christmas season.

You are all familiar with the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” – my favorite is the John Denver and the Muppets version.  Well, today is the ninth day and January 6 is the twelfth day of Christmas, which is Epiphany.  Epiphany marks the visit of the Wise Men to baby Jesus.

Considering the stores have several months for Christmas, we have relatively little time to explore the Christmas story in the church.  In recent years we have been dealing with the Christmas story more in the season of Advent, because that’s when the culture is telling the story and I would while folks are paying attention, I’d rather have the church proclaim what Christmas is about than the mall, but still, there is a lot to the story and we only have a few weeks.  (Because of the weather, we didn’t even have Christmas Eve this year.)

So today we will look at the visit of the Wise Men, which is really an Epiphany story.  Literally, the word “epiphany” means “showing,” or “revealing.”  In order to be shown something, there has to be light to see, and it was the star that led the Wise Men, as they are called, to the Christ child.  The visit of the Wise Men was the first revealing of Christ to the Gentiles.

Just who were these Wise Men?  We really don’t know.  The Greek word that is used here is transliterated as “Magi.”  This is the root of the word magic.  The word is most often translated as “astrologers” or “wise men,” but in the only other occurrence in the New Testament, in Acts chapter 13, it is translated “magician” or “sorcerer.”  Whoever they were, they were able to get an audience with Herod, and were people of some means and some importance, and the kind of people who were open to being led by revelations and dreams and stars.  We really don’t know how many there were – we often think of them as the three wise men, because there were three gifts, but the text doesn’t say that.  In fact, in Eastern churches, the tradition is that there were 12 of them. 

The Wise Men are usually there in nativity scenes, but they were not at the birth – there arrival was perhaps some months later.  In fact, I know of churches with large nativity sets that will have the Wise Men somewhere down the hallway on the first Sunday of Advent, and each week they get closer until after Christmas, on the Sunday nearest Epiphany, the Wise Men make their appearance.

We generally call them wise men, but however wise they may have been, they didn’t have everything right.  They had trouble finding the place they were looking for.  (Someone pointed out that if they were Wise Women, they would have stopped and asked directions, arrived on time, cleaned the stable, helped deliver the baby, made a casserole and brought practical gifts.) 

The Wise Men follow the star, but they assume that a newborn king would surely be found in the palace, and so they go to Jerusalem.   They go to the center of power, to the center of wealth, to the center of culture, to the center of urban sophistication.  It’s a pretty good assumption that this is where the new king will be found.  They go poking around the town, asking if anybody knows anything.  But nobody does.

Herod gets wind of this and is understandably irritated and upset by these visitors.  There is only room for one king.  So he inquired of the experts and asked where the messiah was to be born, and was told that according to the prophet Micah, it was to be Bethlehem.  So he meets with the Wise Guys, sends them to Bethlehem and asks them to please report back so that he too could pay homage to this newborn king.

We do know that, the carol we just sand notwithstanding, the Magi were probably not kings.  Herod did not treat them as kings – there is no fancy state dinner, and while he assists them with the information they are looking for, he treats them more as errand boys, asking them to report back to him.  It’s not the way heads of state are treated.

The Wise Men are such a familiar part of the Christmas story that we lose sight of just how surprising their appearance really is.  Matthew is the most Jewish of the gospels.  He takes great pains to tie Jesus to Old Testament prophecy.  He clearly has a Hebrew audience in mind.

And yet, right in the middle of the story of Jesus’ birth, we have Gentiles, and not simply Gentiles, but very different Gentiles, strange foreigners from another land coming to worship the newborn king.  They are not Jews, but practitioners of some kind of weird foreign religion.  I have known of people getting upset at Harry Potter, with wizards and all, but one could make the case that there were wizards right there at Jesus’ birth.

What in the world are foreign astrologers doing at the birth of Jesus?  How would Mary and Joseph feel about the arrival of these strangers?  What would the neighbors think?

The visit of the Wise Men is a clear indication, right from the beginning, that Jesus is not simply a messiah for the Jews.  It is a clear message that this birth holds great meaning and great hope for all people.  If this birth merits a long, hard journey by astrologers from Iraq, then this birth is for everybody.

Notice the effects of the Wise Men’s pilgrimage and the actions that they take. 

First, they are filled with joy.  The birth of a child can have that kind of effect on you, as many here know.  A child always represents great hope – it means that the chain of life will continue, a new generation has arrived, the family will go on.  And we would like to think that the future is wide open.  Who knows what this child will become?  An artist, a scientist, a doctor, a musician, an athlete, a leader, a parent perhaps, someday.  Who knows what this child will experience, the things it will see, the places it will go.  And besides that, babies are just so cute and it is all so exciting – a birth is an occasion for great joy.

This is all true for any baby.   The birth of Jesus brought all of these feelings for his parents, but more besides, and not only for his family.  This child represented great hope – hope for peace, hope for goodness, hope for salvation, hope not only for his own people but for all of the world.

The Wise Men, if they had much wisdom at all, had some premonitions that Herod was not completely on the up and up.  Making a long journey as they had, they had seen their share of oppression.  They had seen Roman corruption.  They had seen the demoralizing effects of poverty, which was rampant at that time in that part of the world, just as it is today.  The fact that they made this journey seems to indicate that they had some level of restlessness within their hearts – they were seekers.  Life was not all joy.  And yet, when they finally found Jesus, they were filled with joy at the birth of One who might bring change and usher in a new age.

The Wise Men were filled with joy, and they worshiped.  They recognized that this child was different, was one worthy of worship.  As an act of worship, they brought gifts – not practical gifts, not blankets and a changing table and pampers, but gifts to convey honor.  Precious gifts for one who was precious.  Gifts appropriate for a king.  Not only was gold of great value, but frankincense and myrrh were expensive aromatic resins that were not native to Palestine.  These gifts carried a variety of religious and medicinal connotations.  These were gifts to welcome a king.

It is all very strange, really.  Strangers from another part of the world bring expensive, exotic gifts to a child born to peasant parents in Judea.  If this birth could mean something to them, it means something to everyone.

But then comes an interesting part of the story.  These are men who are open to revelations.  They have followed a star.  And now they have a dream.  Whether they all had this same dream, it does not say.  But there was a dream in which they are warned not to return to Herod.

And so they don’t.  They take the dream seriously.  (After all, they are wise men.)  After finding the baby, after experiencing great joy and kneeling in worship and offering their finest gifts, they return home, but Matthew reports that they go home by another way.

This is our experience of faith.  We meet Jesus, we find joy, we offer our worship and gifts, and when we do that, or perhaps because we have done that, we go home a different way.  Oh, we may follow the same geographic route, but we have changed.  Things are not the same.  When we go home, things are different.  We are different.

Going home a different way means that we are able to focus on what matters and not be deterred.  It means avoiding those things which, like Herod, might bring us down.

In July 2000, Marla Runyon placed third in the qualifying trials for the Women’s 1500 meter race, earning a spot on the 2000 U.S. Olympic team that went to Sydney, Australia.  What made this especially notable is that Marla Runyon is legally blind.  Diagnosed with Stargardt's Disease at age nine, the 31 year-old Marla had been legally blind for 22 years.  But she does not consider this to be a handicap.  “It is not a factor or an excuse for a bad race,” she said.  In the 2000 Olympics, Marla finished eighth, just three seconds behind the medal winners.

How does she do it?  Marla cannot see colors, and what she does see is a fuzzy blob.  In a race she just follows the blob of figures in front of her.  She told TV commentator Tom Hammonds that the real difficulty was in rounding the final turn and “racing toward a finish line that I can’t see.  I just seem to know where it is.”

Here at the beginning of a New Year, looking ahead to a wide-open future, we are a lot like Marla.  We are all “racing toward a finish line we can’t see.”  Much as we might think we know what lies ahead, we are all moving into a future that we cannot predict.

I read an article recently in which the writer commented, “I find reflecting on the last decade to be overwhelming.  I cannot imagine what the next one will hold.”

The beginning of the New Year might be a good time to think about going home another way.  What change would you like to make?  How is your relationship with Christ making a difference?  How is God calling you to change?  As we move into the clean slate of a new year, a new decade even, how will we allow our experience with Jesus to mold our lives?

Sometimes we can get so caught up in doing things the way we have always done them that we can lose sight of what we’re trying to accomplish in the first place.  We can forget that there are other ways, other options.

I think that somehow the sacrifice that was needed in making the long journey and in giving these extravagant gifts opened the wise men to God’s revelation – made them ready for the Epiphany.  It can work that way for us.  When we truly give of ourselves, when we are truly seeking, we make ourselves available and are better able to perceive God’s leading.

The star was not the only epiphany.  The dream was an epiphany.  And the greatest epiphany, the greatest revelation, was Jesus himself.

The Wise Men were open to new learning, open to new opportunities, open to revelations, open to life’s epiphanies.  Because of that, they made a long journey and found the baby Jesus.  They were filled with joy.  They worshiped the child.  They were changed, transformed.  And they went home another way.  Things were different.  They were different.

What about us?  What about you?