Two Ways to Know
So…. are you a shepherd-like person? Or more a “wise man” type person?
Would you prefer the dark night sky to dissolve over your head, from deep black into blazing light in an instant, with a choir of angels singing and playing harps… a display so sudden and bright that you fall to the ground and raise your arm to shield your eyes from the dazzle?
Or would you prefer to pore over maps and charts and esoteric scrolls? And struggle to understand ancient predictions and cyphers and symbols? Then spend days planning and packing for a trek from who knows where across deserts, mountains and plains, encountering who knows what along the way… toward a single star in a vast heaven of stars?
I don’t know about you, but I’m an academic. I kind of “get” the wise men. I’m afraid if I had been one of the shepherds, I’d have dismissed what was happening as a crazy dream, perhaps brought on by that greasy pizza I had for dinner! Or some odd but natural phenomenon caused by the earth’s movement through a meteor shower…
In short, I’m not particularly open to encounters of the miraculous kind. I tend to believe in studying and planning and testing theories. I love maps and charts and telescopes—extensions of the human brain.
Yet the journey of the wise men was also a journey of faith.
Study, planning and preparation give an illusion of control, yet the wise men embarked into the unknown, across uncharted territory, from one watering site to another, encountering travelers of unknown origins and intentions along the way.
It took something other than wisdom to overcome fatigue, boredom and second thoughts on such a journey. We call them wise men, but given the hazards of travel in ancient times and the fact of a guiding star that must have been invisible in the daytime, how “wise” could they have been? Not very, if you ask me!
But here’s a startling thought: If it weren’t for the wise men, Christmas might mean nothing to us!
Today we celebrate Epiphany. We have all heard many times that “epiphany” means “to show forth” or “to bring to light” or “to manifest.”
Being a visual thinker myself, I just imagine what we all have seen in hundreds of cartoons: a light bulb going on over someone’s head!
Today, the light bulb going on over our heads is an important step in our journey from the manger to a more grown-up understanding of Incarnation.
In Matthew’s Gospel, that more grown-up understanding is represented by the wise men from the east, who show up in Nazareth to worship the baby Jesus and give him gifts.
Tradition has it.., and this is important because we actually know very little about this event from an historical point of view! So, tradition has it that one of these gentlemen was Asian, one African and one Caucasian, and that is how they are depicted in countless artistic renditions of the story.
All Matthew tells us is that they were gentiles from “the East,” a general reference to all those mysterious, far off lands and peoples known primarily to Jews like Matthew as “not Jews.” And that of course is central to their importance to us.
We Christians have a strong tendency to want to forget that Jesus was born, lived and died a devout Jew, never once giving any indication he intended to or thought he was starting a new religion.
Thankfully, Matthew, and only Matthew, for this story does not appear in the other Gospels. Thankfully Matthew tells us with this story that Jesus is for us, too. And not just for us, but also for all the peoples of the world, and equally so.
We tend to think the concept of “diversity” was invented in the 20th Century as a tool of “political correctness.” We would be wrong. Matthew and early Christians who interpreted these stories about Jesus were there way ahead of us.
Here’s another slightly shocking thing about this story. Matthew calls these guys “wise men,” which we often translate to “kings,” as in the hymn, or “Magi,” as in the story, but in fact a better translation might well be “nerd or “psychic”!
We know they were people who believed that the positions and alignments of stars and planets at the moment of a person’s birth were important indicators of who that person was and how they mattered. Today we call such people astrologers and they write horoscopes for mass media!
Of course, today we also have astronomers—the academic and scientific descendants of the wise men. But the distinction between astrology and astronomy is pretty much a modern invention. Two thousand years ago, they were largely indistinguishable.
My point is that the meaning of these stories of the shepherds and the wise men are the meanings given them by humans struggling to express and explain the miracle that God loves us enough to live and die with us. That’s Incarnation.
And all of us need to learn what the shepherds have to teach about being present to the moment, open to the miracle, willing to be struck down in wonder at the presence of God in all of creation, in each other, even in the least lovable, the most impossible to like person, the most radically different-from-ourselves person we can think of.
And we also need to learn what the wise men have to teach about daring to march into unknown territory, outside of our social and cultural and religious comfort zones. We need to learn from them to go the distance and keep the faith, beyond what is “perfectly safe” and makes “perfect sense.”
On any given day, we can allow ourselves to be struck down in wonder, as the shepherds were, if we are but open and present to God’s presence within and around us.
Or we can wake up in the morning and choose—even when we don’t particularly feel like it and when the world seems devoid of goodness, not to mention angels and dazzling light—to journey toward God that day.
And Jesus used his short time on earth to show us how. He was “the Incarnation.” But let us not trap incarnation in history. Jesus showed us how to practice incarnation, how to live the love that put him here.
And there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to spread it around—back to God and our neighbors—all of our neighbors, without condition—as ourselves.
In the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, AMEN.
[5 January 2014, Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, LA, Year C, Epiphany, Matthew 2:1-12]
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