Wise Men 1/9/11

Over the holidays, I talked with a woman who had been surprised at a church Christmas party. They were doing Christmas trivia and she was stumped by the idea that Mary didn’t ride a donkey to Bethlehem. Or at least by the fact that the Bible doesn’t specify how she got there. This woman is very familiar with her Bible. She can quote a lot of verses and tell you where they’re found. She went home from that party and scoured the stories about Jesus’ birth because she was sure that somewhere it talked about Mary’s donkey. But it doesn’t. We get our images of these stories from Christmas cards, and that’s probably OK, but every once in a while, we might want to really read what the text says.

We probably have some specific images of the wise men in our heads too. There are three of them, right? Actually, we don’t know how many there are. They brought three gifts and tradition has supplied three names for these men, but there could have been 3 or 6 or 22. We don’t know. We sometimes call them “kings” because of the song “We Three Kings” but again, that’s not in the Bible.

So who were these wise men? The Greek word for them is magi, the word we get magic and magician from. Originally magi were dream-interpreters. By Jesus' time, the term referred to astrologers, fortune-tellers, or star-gazers. They were not so much respectable "wise men" or "kings" but horoscope fanatics -- a practice condemned by Jewish standards. We might compare them to people in fortune-teller booths, or people on the psychic hotline or other occupations that tell the future by stars, tea leaves, or Tarot cards. [1]

They’re on the fringes of respectability. They’re foreigners, Gentiles, in Matthew’s gospel which is usually considered the most Jewish of the gospels. And yet, they’re part of every nativity scene, every Christmas pageant. Most importantly, their story offers us a profound summary and foreshadowing of the story of Jesus. I’d like to look at three attitudes, three responses to Jesus, that are present in this story.

First, there’s hostility – the response exhibited by Herod. Why is he hostile? Well, partly because he seems to be a fearful and insecure person who wants to hold on to his power, and violence is his typical way of doing that. But also because he doesn’t understand who Jesus really is. Herod thinks Jesus wants his throne. Jesus wants a great deal more than that. He will ultimately challenge the system of domination that keeps Herod in power, but he doesn’t want to be king himself, as Herod fears. But Herod’s fear and misunderstanding lead to his hostility.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s not the case with other people who are hostile to Jesus. I wonder if some folks are rejecting an image of Jesus that has been created for them, an image that someone has told them, rather than the person Jesus was and is.

One evangelical pastor has described Jesus this way:

“In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”[2]

As someone who believes that Jesus advocated and modeled non-violence as a way of life, I find this image of Jesus provokes some hostility in me. And I would love an opportunity to read Revelation 19 with that pastor, because in that text, the sword is coming out of Jesus’ mouth, not in his hand. It symbolizes the power of his message of forgiveness and reconciliation, not the power of human weapons. The blood on his clothes is not those of his enemies, but his own blood, shed on behalf of others. [3] It is a distortion and mis-reading of Jesus to portray him as a warrior just itching for a fight.

I once knew a woman who was adamantly against the consumption of alcohol in any form. One day, someone said to her, “You know, it can’t be all bad. After all Jesus turned water into wine.” To which she said, “I never did like that about him.” That was an honest response. She didn’t try to pretend Jesus was someone he wasn’t. She just admitted that there were things she didn’t like about him.

We owe it to ourselves and to others to be honest about who Jesus is, to deal with the Jesus of the gospels, not the Jesus we, or someone else, wants to make over in our own image.

Yesterday’s tragedy in Arizona is another bitter reminder about how words and actions go together. Certain theological attitudes lend themselves to slanting the truth to get our way, or refusing to make peace or work with others because we think we are alone on the moral high road. Our image of Jesus matters, the image of Jesus we allow to be decimated in popular culture matters, because it informs our actions.

Herod’s response was hostility. That’s one response. The second response I see is the response of the chief priests and scribes. Their response was indifference. The magi made an understandable mistake. They assumed that they were looking for a king and that a king would be found in a city like Jerusalem, not an unknown village like Bethlehem. But when asked, under a certain amount of pressure, Herod’s religious advisers came up with the text in Micah that speaks of Bethlehem. These people had PhD's in Biblical studies. They knew the scriptures and they had good reason to suspect that maybe those scriptures were being fulfilled in their lifetime. But did any of them go with the magi? Were any of them even curious? The story that Matthew tells doesn’t even hint at that.

It seems that the religious leaders were too closely aligned with the empire. Their people had been waiting for a Messiah for generations, and now maybe he had arrived, but they couldn’t be bothered to make the journey of 9 miles to Bethlehem to find out.

You and I know of people today who are indifferent towards God and towards the church especially. It’s a concern for me as a pastor , because it can be hard to make connections, to form relationships, with people who simply don’t care. But indifference by those who’ve never been part of a faith community, never heard the gospel story, that kind of indifference is at least understandable. This indifference comes from religious insiders, and as something of a religious insider myself, I have to stop and think. How am I captive to other interests? How closely have I aligned myself with the empire, with the expectations of middle class America, or with my desires for comfort and convenience? Just how far out of my way would I go for Jesus’ sake?

So we have two responses: hostility from the political leader and indifference with maybe some hostility by the religious leaders—Jesus is going to face that kind of reception from those sorts of people throughout his adult ministry.

But there’s a third response – the response of the magi. In order to fully understand what Matthew is telling us, we need to know more about who these magi were. They were from the East, from the areas of Persia and Arabia and Babylon. And once you mention Babylon in this context, you trigger a whole host of responses. To Jewish people, Babylon was the ancient enemy, the nation which had destroyed Jerusalem 600 years earlier. It was the place of exile. The exiles thought they would never come home again, and some of them hadn’t. And now, right at the beginning of his account of the Jewish Messiah, Matthew includes these enemies, these foreigners.

It might help us see how potentially offensive, how scandalous this was, if we pause to consider our own attitudes towards those Eastern homelands of the magi. Arabia is Saudi Arabia, Persia is now called Iran, and Babylon is Iraq. Those are probably not the images we get from Christmas cards. Even if it’s not unsettling to us personally, I’m sure we can all imagine certain people who couldn’t envision or accept the idea of those foreigners at the manger of “our” Jesus.

Lutheran pastor Brian Stoffregen says, “Magi in Jesus' day were not "wise men". They were not models of religious piety. They were magicians, astrologers, star-gazers, pseudo-scientists, fortune-tellers, horoscope fanatics; but Matthew makes them the heroes in his first story following the Savior's birth. The Magi should not be there. They are heretics. They don't worship the right God. They are the wrong race, the wrong denomination, the wrong religion.[4]

For all that Brian says they get wrong, they have the best response to Jesus. They kneel before him in worship. They present him with gifts. And they are filled with joy!

So here, at the very beginning are the outsiders being included, here are those on the margins finding a way in. And so there is a word here at the beginning about the radical welcome God offers, the inclusivity that Jesus will embody in his earthly ministry. “The earliest Christians were Jewish and happy to remain a kind of subset of Judaism. But Gentiles kept hearing and responding to the message and the early Christian church’s first real struggle was to break out of and away from the restrictions of race, nationality, and ethnicity and to become a gospel, a faith for all people.”[5] And that is still our struggle. Christians today are often thought of as those with rigid boundary systems, defining who is in and who is out. Or even . as those who actively persecute those who disagree with us. In the times and places when that has been true, it is when we have lost our way, and were no longer following Jesus’s example.

But there are times when we do get it right. A week ago, I was at a reception following a wedding for two gay men. In the women’s room, I overheard a cell phone conversation. A high school girl was returning a missed call. She explained that her phone had been set on silent because she was listening to this couple’s pastor. It seemed to me that he had said typical preacher’s stuff -- he talked about their love and their strengths as a couple and as part of his church; he made a joke praising one of them at the other’s expense; and he offered a prayer of blessing on their union. In her phone conversation, this high school girl raved about that pastor. She thought his remarks had been wonderful, fabulous, really great. I wondered whether she has a pastor and what her relationship with God is like. And for a few minutes, I just gave a silent cheer for her joyful response to the inclusive grace and love of God.

Sisters and brothers, this is my first Sunday with you in this new year. I hope that in this year, we will model ourselves on these wise men, that we will go out of our way to be where God is, even in the most unlikely of places, that we won’t give in to fear or be cowed by hostility, but that we will respond with joy as we become part of God’s ever widening circle of grace. Amen.

[1] John Buchanan, in his sermon Beyond Bethlehem, 2002, posted at www.goodpreacher.com

[2] Brian Stoffregen, Exegetical notes, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt2x1.htm

[3] Mark Driscoll, in an interview with Relevant Magazine, January/Feburary 2007

http://web.archive.org/web/20071013102203/http://relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7418

[4] I’m grateful to Brian McLaren for his observations about this passage in A New Kind of Christianity, Ten Questions that Are Transforming the Faith, p. 124-125

[5] From Brian Stoffregen’s exegetical notes http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt2x1.htm

	Emmanuel Baptist Church 275 State St. Albany, NY 12210 (518) 465-5161 Click here for directions
A Welcoming and Affirming Congregation	Minister: Rev. Kathy J. Donley

*Wise Men* Rev. Kathy Donley 01/09/2011
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 2:1-2
Over the holidays, I talked with a woman who had been surprised at a church Christmas party. They were doing Christmas trivia and she was stumped by the idea that Mary didn’t ride a donkey to Bethlehem. Or at least by the fact that the Bible doesn’t specify how she got there. This woman is very familiar with her Bible. She can quote a lot of verses and tell you where they’re found. She went home from that party and scoured the stories about Jesus’ birth because she was sure that somewhere it talked about Mary’s donkey. But it doesn’t. We get our images of these stories from Christmas cards, and that’s probably OK, but every once in a while, we might want to really read what the text says. We probably have some specific images of the wise men in our heads too. There are three of them, right? Actually, we don’t know how many there are. They brought three gifts and tradition has supplied three names for these men, but there could have been 3 or 6 or 22. We don’t know. We sometimes call them “kings” because of the song “We Three Kings” but again, that’s not in the Bible. So who were these wise men? The Greek word for them is magi, the word we get magic and magician from. Originally magi were dream-interpreters. By Jesus' time, the term referred to astrologers, fortune-tellers, or star-gazers. They were not so much respectable "wise men" or "kings" but horoscope fanatics -- a practice condemned by Jewish standards. We might compare them to people in fortune-teller booths, or people on the psychic hotline or other occupations that tell the future by stars, tea leaves, or Tarot cards. [1] They’re on the fringes of respectability. They’re foreigners, Gentiles, in Matthew’s gospel which is usually considered the most Jewish of the gospels. And yet, they’re part of every nativity scene, every Christmas pageant. Most importantly, their story offers us a profound summary and foreshadowing of the story of Jesus. I’d like to look at three attitudes, three responses to Jesus, that are present in this story. First, there’s hostility – the response exhibited by Herod. Why is he hostile? Well, partly because he seems to be a fearful and insecure person who wants to hold on to his power, and violence is his typical way of doing that. But also because he doesn’t understand who Jesus really is. Herod thinks Jesus wants his throne. Jesus wants a great deal more than that. He will ultimately challenge the system of domination that keeps Herod in power, but he doesn’t want to be king himself, as Herod fears. But Herod’s fear and misunderstanding lead to his hostility. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not the case with other people who are hostile to Jesus. I wonder if some folks are rejecting an image of Jesus that has been created for them, an image that someone has told them, rather than the person Jesus was and is. One evangelical pastor has described Jesus this way: “In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”[2] As someone who believes that Jesus advocated and modeled non-violence as a way of life, I find this image of Jesus provokes some hostility in me. And I would love an opportunity to read Revelation 19 with that pastor, because in that text, the sword is coming out of Jesus’ mouth, not in his hand. It symbolizes the power of his message of forgiveness and reconciliation, not the power of human weapons. The blood on his clothes is not those of his enemies, but his own blood, shed on behalf of others. [3] It is a distortion and mis-reading of Jesus to portray him as a warrior just itching for a fight. I once knew a woman who was adamantly against the consumption of alcohol in any form. One day, someone said to her, “You know, it can’t be all bad. After all Jesus turned water into wine.” To which she said, “I never did like that about him.” That was an honest response. She didn’t try to pretend Jesus was someone he wasn’t. She just admitted that there were things she didn’t like about him. We owe it to ourselves and to others to be honest about who Jesus is, to deal with the Jesus of the gospels, not the Jesus we, or someone else, wants to make over in our own image. Yesterday’s tragedy in Arizona is another bitter reminder about how words and actions go together. Certain theological attitudes lend themselves to slanting the truth to get our way, or refusing to make peace or work with others because we think we are alone on the moral high road. Our image of Jesus matters, the image of Jesus we allow to be decimated in popular culture matters, because it informs our actions. Herod’s response was hostility. That’s one response. The second response I see is the response of the chief priests and scribes. Their response was indifference. The magi made an understandable mistake. They assumed that they were looking for a king and that a king would be found in a city like Jerusalem, not an unknown village like Bethlehem. But when asked, under a certain amount of pressure, Herod’s religious advisers came up with the text in Micah that speaks of Bethlehem. These people had PhD's in Biblical studies. They knew the scriptures and they had good reason to suspect that maybe those scriptures were being fulfilled in their lifetime. But did any of them go with the magi? Were any of them even curious? The story that Matthew tells doesn’t even hint at that. It seems that the religious leaders were too closely aligned with the empire. Their people had been waiting for a Messiah for generations, and now maybe he had arrived, but they couldn’t be bothered to make the journey of 9 miles to Bethlehem to find out. You and I know of people today who are indifferent towards God and towards the church especially. It’s a concern for me as a pastor , because it can be hard to make connections, to form relationships, with people who simply don’t care. But indifference by those who’ve never been part of a faith community, never heard the gospel story, that kind of indifference is at least understandable. This indifference comes from religious insiders, and as something of a religious insider myself, I have to stop and think. How am I captive to other interests? How closely have I aligned myself with the empire, with the expectations of middle class America, or with my desires for comfort and convenience? Just how far out of my way would I go for Jesus’ sake? So we have two responses: hostility from the political leader and indifference with maybe some hostility by the religious leaders—Jesus is going to face that kind of reception from those sorts of people throughout his adult ministry. But there’s a third response – the response of the magi. In order to fully understand what Matthew is telling us, we need to know more about who these magi were. They were from the East, from the areas of Persia and Arabia and Babylon. And once you mention Babylon in this context, you trigger a whole host of responses. To Jewish people, Babylon was the ancient enemy, the nation which had destroyed Jerusalem 600 years earlier. It was the place of exile. The exiles thought they would never come home again, and some of them hadn’t. And now, right at the beginning of his account of the Jewish Messiah, Matthew includes these enemies, these foreigners. It might help us see how potentially offensive, how scandalous this was, if we pause to consider our own attitudes towards those Eastern homelands of the magi. Arabia is Saudi Arabia, Persia is now called Iran, and Babylon is Iraq. Those are probably not the images we get from Christmas cards. Even if it’s not unsettling to us personally, I’m sure we can all imagine certain people who couldn’t envision or accept the idea of those foreigners at the manger of “our” Jesus. Lutheran pastor Brian Stoffregen says, “Magi in Jesus' day were not "wise men". They were not models of religious piety. They were magicians, astrologers, star-gazers, pseudo-scientists, fortune-tellers, horoscope fanatics; but Matthew makes them the heroes in his first story following the Savior's birth. The Magi should not be there. They are heretics. They don't worship the right God. They are the wrong race, the wrong denomination, the wrong religion.[4] For all that Brian says they get wrong, they have the best response to Jesus. They kneel before him in worship. They present him with gifts. And they are filled with joy! So here, at the very beginning are the outsiders being included, here are those on the margins finding a way in. And so there is a word here at the beginning about the radical welcome God offers, the inclusivity that Jesus will embody in his earthly ministry. “The earliest Christians were Jewish and happy to remain a kind of subset of Judaism. But Gentiles kept hearing and responding to the message and the early Christian church’s first real struggle was to break out of and away from the restrictions of race, nationality, and ethnicity and to become a gospel, a faith for all people.”[5] And that is still our struggle. Christians today are often thought of as those with rigid boundary systems, defining who is in and who is out. Or even . as those who actively persecute those who disagree with us. In the times and places when that has been true, it is when we have lost our way, and were no longer following Jesus’s example. But there are times when we do get it right. A week ago, I was at a reception following a wedding for two gay men. In the women’s room, I overheard a cell phone conversation. A high school girl was returning a missed call. She explained that her phone had been set on silent because she was listening to this couple’s pastor. It seemed to me that he had said typical preacher’s stuff -- he talked about their love and their strengths as a couple and as part of his church; he made a joke praising one of them at the other’s expense; and he offered a prayer of blessing on their union. In her phone conversation, this high school girl raved about that pastor. She thought his remarks had been wonderful, fabulous, really great. I wondered whether she has a pastor and what her relationship with God is like. And for a few minutes, I just gave a silent cheer for her joyful response to the inclusive grace and love of God. Sisters and brothers, this is my first Sunday with you in this new year. I hope that in this year, we will model ourselves on these wise men, that we will go out of our way to be where God is, even in the most unlikely of places, that we won’t give in to fear or be cowed by hostility, but that we will respond with joy as we become part of God’s ever widening circle of grace. Amen. [1] John Buchanan, in his sermon Beyond Bethlehem, 2002, posted at www.goodpreacher.com [2] Brian Stoffregen, Exegetical notes, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt2x1.htm [3] Mark Driscoll, in an interview with Relevant Magazine, January/Feburary 2007 http://web.archive.org/web/20071013102203/http://relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7418 [4] I’m grateful to Brian McLaren for his observations about this passage in A New Kind of Christianity, Ten Questions that Are Transforming the Faith, p. 124-125 [5] From Brian Stoffregen’s exegetical notes http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt2x1.htm