Can I Get a Witness?
A Star is Born
Rev. Amy Butler
(Audio)
Susan Blythe Goodman spent most of this week packing for a semester abroad way across the water in New Zealand. She has printed instructions from school about what she should pack and these have been the starting point for her preparations. All week we’ve been watching her carefully write lists and plan what will fit in the bags she can take, thinking out loud (along with opinions from most of the rest of us in the house) about what she’ll really need for what is still a largely unknown experience.
Observing Susie’s process of preparation for her move to another country brings back memories of a move I made to Switzerland to begin studying at seminary. The day after I arrived, groggy with jet lag, I came to consciousness long enough to realize there was no food in the house. Just as I was wondering how one might possibly go about obtaining food in this totally strange country, I heard a knock at the door. When I opened the door I encountered a very tiny, gray-haired lady who announced that her name was Jane Martin. I’d never met this woman before in my life, but she told me firmly that she was there that day . . . to take me grocery shopping.
Still bleary-eyed from jet-lag I followed her out the door. Jane then briskly took me through all the details of shopping in Zűrich: tight underground parking; the one-franc coin it took to release a shopping cart; timing your trip for exactly 4 pm, when they put out the fresh, hot bread. That day I learned how to ask for ground beef from the butcher (in Swiss German), where to find the toothpaste (upstairs!) and the fact that I was expected to bring my own bags and bag my own groceries. As I squinted my way through a wholly unfamiliar experience I learned that Jane and her husband, Earl, had spent their whole lives serving as foreign missionaries in Europe. Jane told me that there was an American expatriate who came to her door on her first day in a new country to take her grocery shopping. When Jane dropped me off after our trip she told me it was my job to do the same for the next foreigner who arrived in our seminary community.
Looking back I don’t know what I would have done without someone to show me the way—someone to take my hand and guide me through a situation that seemed utterly unfamiliar to me.
See, there’s something about a real eye witness, someone who’s been there before and who knows the ropes, someone who can take the lead in a situation that’s downright strange.
Today is the Day of Epiphany, the start of the liturgical season of Epiphany, the weeks in the church calendar in between Christmas and the start of Lent.
During this season of the church year we read the stories of Jesus’ ministry on earth, starting from his birth in a stable in Bethlehem all the way through the three years of ministry during which he taught his disciples everything he could before he left. Our task as followers during this season of the year is to hear and read and study the stories of Jesus’ life and ministry, looking in expectation for what it is we are invited to discover about God.
As we follow, closely observing to learn as much as we can, the biblical witness shines a light for us. At first it’s a dim light—just one bright star spilling a puddle of light onto a poor stable in a little Judean village. But as we learn about this man Jesus and the message he came to teach us the light gets brighter and brighter and brighter. As we hear about miracles he performed, lessons he taught and relationships he built, that growing light illuminates a picture of God that is so compelling we will want with everything we are to follow that light, too.
And all of that sounds really nice, but it’s going to take a pretty powerful spotlight to help us see clearly all the way from here—Washington, DC in 2008—back to the beginning of Jesus’ story, all the way back to a dusty, one-donkey town and a smelly stable, fearful young parents and a crying baby, a strong-armed political regime and one star, right where it all begins.
The improbability of us being able to see clearly, to even get our minds around the strange idea of God-with-us, much less God-with-us as a fragile newborn baby 2000 years ago, well, that’s pretty high. I don’t know about you but it all seems very unfamiliar to me—nothing like what I know or expect, even.
So, as Epiphany invites us to consider this incarnation of God-with-us, it’s no accident that the gospel writers thought it might help us a little to have the input of a few eye witnesses.
And this is just what the biblical account is: stories of people like you and me whose paths crossed with the God who lived among us. See, I there’s something about a real eye witness, someone who’s been there before and who knows the ropes, someone who can take the lead in a situation that’s downright strange.
Over the next few weeks we’ll see the light through the eyes of all sorts of characters, and we’ll be invited to walk alongside them a little, to experience this Jesus as they did. Hearing and listening to the stories of these biblical witnesses might just help us see the light a little more clearly than we could before.
Our guides today are, coincidentally enough, actual travelers who followed maps in an unlikely journey way, way out of their comfort zones—just like us. Who they were, why they went, what they found when they got there and how their lives changed . . . well, that story is a witness for you and me as we set out on this Epiphany journey toward the light.
Now, if you’ve spent any time around Church at Christmastime you might know today’s witnesses as wise men, or, even better, kings—rich rulers from the East. You would know there were three, from singing the Epiphany hymn We Three Kings and, of course, from the three gifts they carried to present to the baby Jesus: gold, frankincense and myrrh, which they presented to the baby whom they found shortly after he was born in the stable of the inn. And depending on what kind of Christmas pageants you were in, your mental image of our biblical witnesses today could include everything from your Dad’s old bathrobe topped with a foil covered Burger King crown to fancy brocade costumes and elaborately decorated treasure chests holding the gifts that were piously and ceremoniously delivered to the manger in holy reenactments.
Well, I don’t know about you but even though we live in a town where power and prestige are two of the most highly valued commodities, I can’t say that I personally relate too closely with three powerful rulers decked out in finery, traveling internationally on an important diplomatic assignment and bringing along with them priceless gifts to offer the new king when they found him. It’s a good thing, then, that pretty much everything you and I ever learned about this story of Epiphany is not supported by the biblical account and cannot be corroborated by cultural and historical studies. Are you ready?
Now, remember: in his memoirs the writer of Matthew worked hard to portray Jesus as the king—the holy ruler, savior, messiah that the Jewish people had been awaiting so long. It’s understandable then that Matthew’s account of the Epiphany story is told with language that describes kings and rulers, courts and political advisors, a quest for Jesus, the King of the Jews.
In fact, the Jewish readers of Matthew would hear this story and immediately think back to the prophecy of Isaiah we heard this morning: “Nations shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” See, the puzzle pieces would fall together in their minds and, later, in the minds of the early church.
Even by the seventh century, long after Christianity had become independently established, the tale of the three kings got more elaborate: “Star of beauty, star of light, start with royal beauty bright . . .” it’s all about royalty. The legend of these ancient kings come from the East bearing gifts was so elaborate that by then each one had been assigned a name . . . and even a race! Melchior, Gaspar and Balthasar, Balthasar being African.
But if we go back to the text and read carefully again, we’ll quickly see that Matthew never numbers the visitors. Sure, there could have been three. Or six or three hundred.
Their visit, according to historical dating, probably happened several years after the birth of Christ by which time, presumably, Joseph and Mary would have found another place to live instead of the stable next to the Inn.
And Matthew never calls them kings. Instead, he calls them wise men—in some translations, Magi, the root of our English words magic or magician.
Yes, get ready for our beautiful Christmas nativity scene to historically fall apart, because wise men, Magi, were not kings at all. Historians suggest that the seekers who found Jesus by the light of a star probably came from Persia, where they possibly were part of a priestly order of Zoroastrianism.
These were not card trick, bunny-in-a-hat kind of magicians but students of the black arts, sorcerers, enchanters, experts at reading omens, casting spells, interpreting dreams and predicting events by the study of the planets and stars. Think of Nostradamus or somebody like that, folks who dabble in the mystical, who read crystal balls and Tarot cards, psychic hotlines and tea leaves, proprietors of dusty Voodoo shops in the New Orleans French Quarter. And the gifts they brought to the baby, gold frankincense and myrrh, were elements they used in their various potions and spells.
Because of pagan influences even in Judea, of course, sorcerers and magicians were not unknown to devout Jews, but they were firmly condemned for their practices and no religious Jew would have anything to do with magicians like these, if they could help it. The Magi who showed up at Mary and Joseph’s door were not royal, and neither were they wise models of religious piety. Bottom line, in any reasonable world these characters should not have been anywhere near a young Jewish boy and his faithful parents.
Ahhhh, what an epiphany . . . and what a relief. I don’t know about you, but even with my Dad’s bathrobe on I’ve always had a hard time aligning my life with the lives of wise and rich kings.
Instead, there’s some comfort in the image of rogue chance-takers knocking on Jesus’ door, heretics who spend their lives seeking a God they can’t understand, who represent the wrong religion and the wrong race, folks who don’t know how to worship the right way and who bring unholy and inappropriate offerings to God, who dress funny and talk funny and don’t do things the way they’ve always been done, folks who should probably be used as examples of what NOT to be, held up for us in the Gospel of Matthew as witnesses, guides for you and me as we try to seek, to trust and to worship a God who seems utterly foreign to some of us, too.
How revolutionary that the writer of Matthew, a devout Jew writing to devout Jews about Jesus, the one who, in his view, came to fulfill messianic prophecies, would lead us by the hand to the baby God by folks who were firmly outside the original plan—the most unlikely witnesses of all.
The first witnesses in our Epiphany journey are outsiders; foreigners; strangers. And here they are, welcomed to the presence of God and immediately put into key positions in the unfurling of God’s plan for the world. These witnesses are welcomed by God-with-us . . . miraculously paving the way for inappropriate outsiders like you and me to find a place in God’s grand story of salvation, too.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at the lives of other biblical characters who encountered Jesus, God-come-to-earth, and “went back another way,” utterly changed by their encounter with him.
If you think following three Magi to find a baby far away is so strange, wait until you take the hand of John the Baptist, crazy homeless man living in the desert; or, the disciples, poor, uneducated day laborers; or, any number of mentally and chronically ill, prostitutes, tax collectors, criminals who walk alongside us as we look for the light of God.
So today we saddle up and do the unthinkable: we follow these first, unlikely witnesses toward something we’d probably never think of following to a place we’d never think to look for God.
And, right behind the most unlikely witnesses we would to discover God in a most unlikely place, and here’s our epiphany for today: there is no land so far away that the path of salvation does not reach it; there is no human life so lost that God’s reclaiming work does not reach out to draw it in; there is no search for truth so insignificant that clues of God’s redemptive purpose cannot be found in it.
And as we are strangers, too, following a distant star, we can only say, thanks, thanks be to God. Amen.
