I preached this sermon at St. Andrew's United Methodist Church in Edgewater, MD on January 2, 2011.
Matthew 2:1-12
2In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, 2asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” 3When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 5They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: 6‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’” 7Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”
9When 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. 10When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
Everybody Follows Something:
Matthew 2:1-12
On Thursday mornings, I take a class at my gym called Boot Camp. Every week, our instructor, Kate, comes up with new ways to torture us. One of Kate’s favorite torture devices is this:
Its called a Bosu. The idea behind the Bosu is that it takes traditional exercises and makes them harder by adding a balance challenge. So, instead of just doing squats, you do them while trying not to fall off the Bosu. Instead of jumping up onto a stationary box, you try to jump onto the Bosu and actually stay there. I find this very, very hard. There is a trick to it, though, and its pretty simple: During each exercise, you pick a spot ahead of you and focus your eyes on that spot. You don’t look at your feet. You don’t look at the Bosu. You don’t look at the other people around you. You find your spot and you focus on it. It totally works- if your focus is steady, the rest of you will be too. As soon as you get distracted and look away, you fall off. Every time.
When I learned that I would be preaching on the Epiphany story, I immediately thought of the Bosu, because I think that this story is all about focus. This is a story about people who put their faith in something and decide to follow it, wherever it might lead. They focus on their goal, resist the temptation to stray from it, and, in the end, they find overwhelming joy.
To prepare for this sermon, I did a little research on the Wise Men and their journey. It turns out that we don’t know much about who these men really are. Matthew is the only Gospel writer who mentions them at all, and he isn’t heavy on the details. All he really tells us is that they come from the East, they follow a star, and they are looking for a child they believe to be King of the Jews. He never even says there are three of them- we get that idea from the fact that they bring three gifts.
In the absence of information from Matthew, centuries of theologians and scholars have developed hundreds of theories about the Wise Men. If you search for “Three Wise Men” in Google, you can find enough reading material to last until next Epiphany. You can also find tons of speculation about the star in the story- is it a comet? An eclipse? A supernova? You would need PhD’s in history, archaeology, ancient languages, theology, and astronomy to really understand all of the ideas out there. I’m not quite that educated, and I’m sure that you would all like to get home sooner or later, so I won’t go into detail about many of these theories. But there are a few ideas which show up often enough to mention:
First, the Wise Men came from far away. We’re not sure what Eastern country they came from, but they probably traveled close to 1,000 miles to find Jesus. On foot or on camel, that’s a long trip.
Second, the Wise Men were almost certainly Gentiles. In the reading, they don’t seem to know the Hebrew prophecy about the Messiah being born in Bethlehem. Also, Matthew takes many opportunities in his Gospel to emphasize that Jesus’s salvation is for all people. He opens his Gospel with a genealogy of Jesus that includes several non-Jewish ancestors. Many scholars believe that Matthew includes the Wise Men in his Gospel is to emphasize that the baby Jesus is already calling Gentiles. So, the Wise Men weren’t necessarily looking for a Messiah.
Finally, the Wise Men were probably people who spent their lives studying the heavens for signs. We don’t really have a term for their occupation in today’s language, but they were sort of like astronomers/astrologers/priests. Under their belief system, the appearance of a new star was an important sign of a new king. These were men who spent their lives watching and waiting. Big events visible in the sky don’t happen very often. Think about Haley’s Comet: we can only see that on Earth every 75 years, so it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event for most people. Or, think about the lunar eclipse we just had on December 21st. That was the first lunar eclipse to occur on the winter solstice since 1638, 372 years ago. By the time they saw Jesus’ star, the Wise Men had probably spent decades scanning the sky, just hoping to see something important.
If we put these things together, we get a fuller picture of the Wise Men: They are men who spend their lives studying and waiting for a sign. When they finally see that sign, they don’t really know what it means, because they aren’t waiting for a Messiah. Still, its important enough that they set off on a long and dangerous journey to find out more. Their only guides are the star itself and their belief that it will lead them to something important- that the star is something worth following.
When I think about following something important, I think about something I read on a blog by my seminary friend, Emily. Under the title “Everybody Worships Something,” Emily shared an excerpt from a commencement speech by the novelist David Foster Wallace. Here’s just a little piece:
... in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly… Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious.
When I read this, I am reminded of a well-known verse from the Hebrew scriptures, Joshua 24:15. In this passage, Joshua addresses the people of Israel as they take possession of the Promised Land. He says “Now if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve… but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” Although they are separated by thousands of years, both Joshua and David Foster Wallace speak the same truth: everybody worships something, everybody serves something, everybody follows something. We don’t choose that we follow; we can only choose what we follow.
Here in the United States in 2011, we don’t really like that idea. We believe in freedom and independence. We believe we are masters of our own destinies, charting our own courses through life. But I think David Foster Wallace hits on a really important truth: We’re all following something, all the time, we just don’t always realize it. In my counseling work, I see this play out again and again. People who come to counseling often feel trapped in situations and circumstances they want to change. They feel like they have the same bad relationship over and over again, or make the same mistakes in their careers, or have the same conflicts with their families. Many of them come with the same questions- why do I keep doing this? Why does every path I take seem to lead to the same place? I want desperately to change, so why can’t I?
In order to answer these questions, I help my clients look carefully at their backgrounds: their families, their experiences, their relationships. When we really delve into this work, we almost always find patterns. One woman shares how, when she was a child, her father only seemed to pay attention to her looks. As an adult, she is vain and drawn to men who only care about her beauty. A man shares how he was relentlessly bullied on the playground. Now, he has a successful business, but is abusive toward his employees. Another woman spent her childhood helping her parents care for a terminally ill sibling. As an adult, she always finds herself involved with people who depend on her, and she resents them for it. Without realizing it, all of these people have been chasing something: a father’s affection, revenge on past bullies, a longing to save someone who couldn’t be saved. Its like they were handed maps early in life, and they’ve been following them without questioning where they lead.
Once my clients recognize the paths they are on, they can think about going in a different direction. It sounds like a contradiction, but we become more free when we acknowledge that we all follow something. Once we accept that, we actually have some choices. We can choose to stay on the same course, or we can choose to follow something else. Of course, this brings us to some difficult questions: How do we decide what to follow? And how do we know if we’re following the right thing?
As Christians, we already know the answer to the first question. We have decided to follow Jesus. The tougher question is how do we know that its actually Jesus we’re following? How can we be sure that we’re going in the right direction? I can only think of one way to answer this: we know whether or not we’re following the right thing by paying attention to where that thing leads us.
When I was a freshman in college, my parents came to visit me and I asked them to take me to a mall a few miles from my campus. This was almost 15 years ago, before I knew about Mapquest and before everyone got GPS. So, all I had was an address, but my Dad thought that would be enough. Now, to be fair, my Dad has an amazing sense of direction. He grew up in a tiny, rural town where they barely had streets, let alone street signs and maps. He learned to find things using instinct, and landmarks like hills and trees. It works for him- he hasn’t lived in his hometown for over 60 years, but whenever we visit, he just knows where everything is.
But my Dad didn’t know the area where I went to school, and he had never been to this mall before. We set out, in what he thought was the right direction, but we knew pretty quickly that something was wrong. We drove for quite awhile, but we just didn’t seem to be getting close to a mall. We didn’t see any billboards, or restaurants, or other businesses. We didn’t even see that many houses- the further we drove, the further we seemed to get from anything. After a good hour, my Dad finally accepted that something was wrong, and tried going a different direction, but things didn’t get any better. A couple hours into our journey, we pulled into a little town and had to stop for 20 minutes while a parade went down the street. Judging from my Dad’s mood, he took that parade pretty personally. After it passed, he finally accepted that his instinct was not the thing to follow in that situation, and he asked for some actual directions. We were at the mall in half an hour.
Its easy to make fun of my Dad in that story, but don’t we all do the same thing sometimes? Don’t we ignore the signs all around us that what we’re doing is not getting us where we want to go? Doesn’t it sometimes take something as big and loud as a parade to wake us up? I think that recognizing we’re on the wrong path and changing direction is one of the hardest things we do in life, and we all have to do it sometimes.
Being on the right path has its challenges too. Sometimes, our own guiding stars shine so brightly that we can follow them easily. Other times, they are so dim that we can barely see them anymore. This is why we need to journey with other people. That’s another important detail about the Wise Men: they aren’t alone. Based solely on the Gospel, we can’t be sure that there are three of them- maybe there are 4, or 12, or 2. We just know that its Wise Men and not Wise Man. And I think that’s very important. When we set out to follow Jesus, we need companions to accompany us and help us stay on course. In fact, I think that one of the ways we recognize the right path is by the companions we find there.
When I was in seminary, I went to chapel every day and I loved it. The services were always interesting, creative, and spirit-filled. I loved the people there and I got great energy and ideas from them. I often thought about how easy it was to be excited about ministry in that atmosphere, and I wondered how I would sustain that energy when I got out of school and returned to the “real world.” Fortunately, my friend Emily was there to help me back then, just as she helps me now. At one of the last chapel services before I graduated, Emily gave everyone a small ribbon. Then, we all tied those ribbons onto the cross in our chapel. By the end, we had chains that stretched from one end of the room to the other. Emily told us that those chains represented our community. No matter where we are, for the rest of our lives, we can think about those chains and know that we are all united around the cross.
I remember that service whenever I have doubts about devoting my life to ministry. I know that whatever led me to that place and to those people is worth following. I also think about that when I sit here on Sundays, or attend a United Methodist Women meeting, or volunteer at the Lighthouse shelter. I thought about it at Rachel Forney’s funeral. If what I’m following leads me to a place like St. Andrew’s, and to people like Fred and Rachel, then I know I should keep following it. And with people like that around me, I know I can face the challenges of the journey.
As United Methodists, we also have another source of encouragement on our journeys. We believe in what our founder John Wesley called “prevenient grace.” Prevenient grace is the belief that God actively seeks relationships with each and every one of us. Even when we are not seeking God, God is seeking us. When Jesus was born, God sent a sign to a group of Gentile astrologers 1,000 miles away, leading them to the Messiah. Today, God still sends signs to us, leading us to places like this and people who can help us. Its up to us to recognize those signs and follow them. In a few minutes, when we all get up to greet one another, take a look around: I think you’ll see hundreds of little signs that God is reaching out to us, drawing us into closer relationship.
In the church, Epiphany Sunday always falls right around New Year’s, and I think that makes a lot of sense. New Year’s is a time when many of us think about the path we’re on, and whether or not our lives are going in the right direction. Now is a great time to reflect on what you are following and where its taking you. If you’re not on the right path, it’s a great time to change direction. If you’re beginning to waver- like me on that Bosu- it’s a great time to re-focus. If you see one of your travel companions struggling or doubting, it’s a great time to offer some encouragement. Keep in mind that there are people who follow you, and think about where you want to lead them.
We’re all following something. It led us to this place, it led us to each other, and I believe that it will lead us home. Amen.
