“The
Wise Men”
A Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Jean Niven Lenk
Sunday, December 30, 2012
First Congregational Church of Stoughton
United Church of Christ
Text: Isaiah 60:1-6; Micah 5:2-3; Matthew
2:1-12
So,
Christmas is behind us. Or is it?
The
story of the shepherds and wise men visiting the baby in the manger has been
told. Or has it?
It’s
time to put away our nativity scenes for another year – right?
Not
so fast. Christmas isn’t over yet because
Christmas is not a day, it is a whole season.
And not a season that begins right after Halloween, regardless of what
retailers want us to think. The season
of Christmas begins on Christmas day and continues for 12 days – as in the
twelve days of Christmas. That means the
Christmas season continues until January 6, which is called Epiphany. The word Epiphany means “appearance,” and
Epiphany celebrates the visit of the Wise Men to the baby Jesus.
Wait
a minute, the Wise Men visited Jesus on Christmas with the shepherds. Or did
they?
It’s
true that tradition and culture have so interwoven the Epiphany story with the
Nativity story that we expect to hear them together. However, it is unlikely that the Wise Men
made their visit to the Holy Family until two years after Jesus’ birth. Notice in our Gospel lesson this morning that
Matthew says the Magi arrive to see Jesus while Mary, Joseph and the “child” –
not the baby – are “in the house” – not in the stable lying in a manger where
the shepherds found him.
Well,
there were three Wise Men -- weren’t there?
And
their names were Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar – right?
Actually,
the gospel of Matthew doesn’t give us a lot of particulars, and so throughout
history people have filled in the details of this bare-bones story. In fact, a lot of what we think we know about
the Wise Men is reflected in the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow entitled
“The Three Kings.”
Three Kings came riding from far away
Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar;
Three Wise Men out of the East were
they,
And they traveled by night and they
slept by day,
For their guide was a beautiful,
wonderful star.
Matthew’s
focus in writing his Gospel is not to give a lot of facts and specifics. Rather, Matthew writes for a Jewish audience,
which would have been familiar with the foretellings of such prophets as
Isaiah, Hosea, and Jeremiah. And he
writes his Gospel to show that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah, the
fulfillment of these prophecies. This
morning’s gospel lesson contains a reference back to the prophecy of Micah, and
throughout his gospel, Matthew sums up the events of Jesus life with the words,
“All this took place to fulfill
what the Lord had said through the prophet.”
But
there is an additional underlying message to the story of the Wise Men.
We
get hints of it in the genealogy which opens Matthew’s gospel. He uses this list of “begats” to trace Jesus’
lineage back to David, in fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. But Matthew does something more. A genealogy in those days was traced through the male
lineage, but Matthew breaks from tradition and includes four women in his list
of the ancestors of Jesus: Tamar, Rahab,
Ruth, and Bathsheba. And they are not
just any four women. Shockingly, they are
women whose lives bear the scars of prostitution and incest, of adultery and
murder. And three of them are Gentiles,
non-Jews.
And
Matthew’s inclusion of the story of the Wise Men is equally purposeful.
In
addition to a Jewish audience, his Gospel is also directed at new
Christians. At the time he wrote it, somewhere
between 50 and 60 AD, Christ-followers were still considered a sect of
Judaism. But even in so young a church, they
seemed to be tightening the boundaries of inclusion in their little
community. They seemed to be too easily
settling into the idea that this new way of life in Christ was for them but not
for others.
And so in his
Gospel, Matthew tries to dispel this insider/outsider mindset. He may have some personal reasons for doing
so; he had once been the hated tax collector named Levi; but then Jesus called
him away from his tax booth with the words “follow me,” and through Jesus’ love
and acceptance, Levi was transformed into the disciple Matthew. And so, Matthew lays the groundwork of his
inclusive message in his genealogy, showing in that seemingly boring list of
names that the new day of God’s Kingdom that was dawning would be quite
different from anything anyone might be expecting.
And Matthew
keeps up the theme when he introduces the Magi. They come not from the nearby hillsides of
Judea, but from a land far away in the east.
In other words, these are not hometown folks, with hometown values and
upbringings and religious traditions. These
are outsiders from a foreign land, the kind of folks that the Scriptures warn
good religious people to stay away from.
Moreover, they
are thought
to be astronomers who read the heavens at night, looking for portents in the
stars. In the eyes of the Jewish people,
their stargazing makes them pagan idolaters -- a far cry from followers of the
one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And even worse
– when these strangers arrive, they start asking questions: "Where is the child who has been born
king of the Jews? We have followed his
rising star and we have come to give him honor." How dare these pagans, these outsiders from a
foreign place show up in their hometown and start asking questions, deigning to
worship and adore the Jewish Messiah!
And that’s exactly the point of this story. Jesus comes not for some, but for all. Not for those who believe just like we do,
but also for those who are struggling to believe anything at all, those who
have lost their faith, or have never found it in the first place.
Yes, Jesus comes for all.
Not for men only, but also for women. Not for the perfect only, but for those whose
lives bear the scars of unmentionable human pain. Not for the hometown crowd only, but for those
on the other side of the hills, the next town over or halfway around the world.
Christ’s birth is first announced to the shepherds –
showing that he has come for the poor, the lowly, and the Jewish in Palestine.
But Christ’s birth is also welcomed by the Wise Men
– showing that he has come also for the outsider, the foreigner, the stranger.
Jesus has come for everyone. Rich and poor. Jew and Gentile. Hometown folks and foreigners. Neighbors and strangers. The faithful and non-believers. People like us and people as different from
us as can be.
In the story of the Wise Men, and throughout the
Gospel of Matthew, we see that the God who comes to us as one of us in Jesus is
the God of gracious invitation who says, “I invite tax collectors and
prostitutes into my kingdom. I invite
the bad and the good. I invite the outcast and the marginalized. I invite the reviled and the rejected. I invite people from the highways and
byways. I invite all nations into my
kingdom. And most important of all, I
invite you.”
In response to this gracious invitation, may we,
like the Wise Men, kneel down and pay homage to the One born in Bethlehem. Amen.
