“Our Threatened Identity”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Paul S. Wilson
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Text: Is. 60:1-6; Ps. 72:1-7, 10-14;
Ephesians 3:1-12; Mt. 2:1-1
We sometimes hear someone say, “I just had a moment of epiphany,” they mean I just had a flash of insight, I found the solution, a lightbulb went on in my head. We use Epiphany in church a little like that, suddenly I had insight to the truth, in particular, I knew that God was in Jesus Christ. On this Epiphany Sunday we mark a lightbulb going on in the collective consciousness of the world: God is not just for the Jews or Christians or any other group of people, or just for the religious, or just for the good and the faithful. God is for all people, for the weak and the lame, the sinful and the broken, the anxious and the obnoxious, our friends and our enemies, for all genders, races, and nations, for everyone. Christ is God's gift for all people. But saying that does not make it so.
A gift given can be received or not, as we see plainly in our text. Take for instance the Magi, the Wise Men from the east, they gladly accept the revelation they are given. In spite of the carol, “We three kings of orient are, bearing gifts we travelest afar,” scholars agree that they were probably not kings, they were astrologers who studied the night sky for divine meaning. At least among the faithful of Israel, they would have been regarded as near the bottom of the social scale—that God would invite them to the birth of Jesus is shocking. It would be like God inviting fortune tellers from Queen Street instead of bishops and archbishops. These three Magi were watching the skies when a new star appeared in a quadrant of the heavens that indicated to them a king is born to the people of Israel, a king worthy of homage. We only assume there were three Magi because there were three gifts, and we assume they were kings perhaps because of their wealth, their gifts were in treasure chests: gold, frankinsense, and mhyrr. In fact the gospel writer Matthew is unconcerned with how many there were or exactly where they came from. What matters is their destination, the newborn King. They were wise first because they knew the stars even in ancient times, but even with the star to lead them, they could not find Bethlehem—they had to knock on the palace door in Jerusalem to find out where Jesus was born. They were wise because they were men who were lost and actually admitted it and sought help. And they were wise because when they continued to follow the star they encountered Jesus and worshipped him.
By contrast, King Herod was not open to the gift of revelation. When the Wise Men came knocking at his palace door, he called his own wise people together. Where is this king born? The chief priests and scribes figured out Jesus' birthplace the same way we do, by going to Scripture. Nature, like the stars, gets us part way to God's truth, but in the end we still need Scripture. Scripture told them the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem of Judea. Herod sent the Magi on their way with the instruction to return to tell him the exact location. But the text says he “was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him,” as well they might have been. Herod was a madman who feared any rival, and Jerusalem feared a frightened Herod, whom history tells us killed some of his own children and many leaders, and massacred innocent infant boys in his desire to kill Jesus.
Two contrasting approaches to revelation. The Magi kneel before Jesus in worship—they are one source of contemporary kneeling in worship in some denominations. Herod rejects revelation, he wants to remain sovereign over his own life and that of others. He does not want to worship Jesus, like he told the Magi, he wants to kill him. The revelation of a God who is love can threaten our identity.
A gift can be given but not received. Some decades ago a troubled young woman from a wealthy family was about to graduate from high school. Cheryl and her parents had a rocky relationship. Her father promised to buy her a new car upon graduation. Cheryl and her Dad looked at cars, and she made her decision, a red 1957 Chevrolet Belair. She was certain that the car would be hers on graduation night. Imagine her disappointment when the big day came and Cheryl's father handed her a gift-wrapped Bible instead! Cheryl was so angry, she threw the Bible down and stormed out of the house and took off with her boyfriend. That was the last she and her father ever saw of each other. I do not know why, maybe they were both pig-headed, maybe she did not want to be found. Thirty-five years later it was only the news of her father's death that brought Cheryl back home. As she sat one night, going through her father's possessions—her inheritance—she came upon the Bible her father had given her. She opened it only to find a cheque, dated the day of her graduation thirty-five years earlier; made out for the exact amount of the '57 Chev they had chosen together.
A gift given is not necessarily a gift received. Revelation is like that, God gives it, but it must be received. We have just come through Christmas and said and sung that Jesus Christ is born. Where is the birthplace of Jesus? Maybe we could ask the astronomers, the stargazers of our day. In September 2003 one of the most significant images in history was captured by the Hubble telescope. For 11 days it was aimed at a tiny patch of the night sky above the Big Dipper where nothing can be seen. For 11 days it peered deeper than any telescope has ever peered, 78 billion years, to what is the furthest edge of the still expanding universe. Instead of nothing in that tiny dot of sky, astronomers counted 10,000 galaxies like our Milky Way, with millions of stars like our sun, and the possibility of millions of planets. Astromers are able to get us back to a few minutes after the Big Bang, but they cannot tell us where everything came from in the first place. They might tell us about a possible comet or supernova at the time of Jesus' birth, but they cannot tell us where he was born, or why a God who created everything came to us as a baby, a gift to all people.
Where is Jesus born? Herod asked his scholars, and we could knock at the doors of our theological colleges, 'Where is Jesus born?' Those of us who teach there might be wise in some things and could give some learned answers about Jesus' birth place—namely that we have no idea, beyond what the Bible says. Christmas was not marked by the early church until the 4th Century, and then the date was chosen to coincide with the days becoming longer than the nights—also they figured from Genesis that Creation began at the spring equinox when day and night were equally divided and life was returning, so Christ as the new creation must have been conceived then, and if you count nine months from March 21 you get another good reason for Christmas.
Perhaps the real question to which we want an answer is where is Jesus born now, in our own time? A woman from the States who taught theology for many years was in a hospital bed. She spoke of the difficulty of her various health problems and said in a moment of wonderful candor about her faith, “I have a lot of knowledge of God, but I do not have much experience of God.” It was a quiet lament. Knowledge about God in the past is no substitute for experience of God in the present. And yet God gives each of us many signs of God's presence each and every day. Jesus said, “Lo I will always be with you.” (Mt. 28:20)
If we want the location of Jesus' birth today we have to do what the learned people did in Herod's palace, we have to go to Scripture. The birthplace of this king is anyplace we might feel is unft for royalty, a stable in a humble inn, a cardboard shelter in a back alley downtown. The birthplace of this Saviour is any place where people discover God where they did not expect God to be, help at some critical time of life, hope though worn and exhausted, comfort in a hospital room, prison cell, or apartment. The birthplace of this Prince of Peace, Scripture tells us, is wherever people are truly loving and come like little children to worship God in Christ.
Every age depicts in its own way the nativity. Benedetto Bonfigli in 1470 painted a startling scene with the Magi and the holy family in the foreground and behind them on a cross hangs Jesus as a man. Bonfigli was saying that the cross and resurrection give us the identity of this baby.
In our own age, perhaps no one created more startling representations of the nativity than Canadian artist William Kurelek who died in 1977, many of whose works are displayed in the Niagara Falls Art Gallery. At age twenty-five, he checked into Maudsley Hospital in London, England, for depression where he tried to commit suicide. Margaret was an occupational therapist who discovered he was an artist and brought him art supplies, giving him an hour of her own time at the end of every working day. He discovered that she was a Christian, and from her learned about praying for others. When he asked her, “Do you pray for me?” He discovered that she did. Something about that experience changed his life, and four years later he joined the church, as he said, “Sometimes sorrow remarries a person to God.” He experienced the birth of Christ in his own life through Margaret. He started to see the birth of Christ in ordinary everyday places. He painted the holy family in all kinds of settings: in the back of a Mennonite horse-drawn wagon with a traffic warning triangle on the back; at a remote ski lodge; in a prairie barn with a two-lane highway in the background; in a soup kitchen with Mary and her child eating at a table of homeless men; in a Newfoundland fishing port; on an First Nations reserve; in a box car; in an igloo; in the auto bay of a corner gas station. When we join Kurelek in finding God's gift of Christ to all people in the midst of the ordinary, we become the Magi and are wise indeed. What makes us wise is not our learning but our loving.
Wherever you are right now on your journey is God's birthplace. We are no longer sovereign rulers of our troubled lives. Here in worship we put aside all pretense about wisdom and performance, and simply turn to a God who still loves us and comes to us just as we are, wherever we are.