But I was relieved, because, even though I still wear a tie, they seem to have accepted, or at least looked the other way, with regards to some of my other departures from normative attire. For example, only one person has ever mentioned the fact that I tend to wear Chuck Taylors instead of dress shoes, and that was in a positive regard. Also, as of yet no one has made a disparaging remark when I come in on a Sunday morning less-than-clean-shaven.
But one of the more casual aspects of my appearance which I was kind of in between about at first was the D-ring. I know it seems insignificant, but it really sets a tone. On-casual; off-formal. I wasn’t sure if it might not have been a step too far. But, in the end, it had to be done, I had to wear it. Not because I wanted to look more casual, but because I’m dependant upon it.
You see, I have a tendency to forget and lose things. Especially small things, like keys. In fact, it was a sort of family joke when I was a kid. My grandma will still occasionally talk about times when I was in Middle School and I’d get home on a day when I was supposed to be on my own for the afternoon, and, finding that I didn’t have my key, I’d have to hope our neighbor was home so I could call her. Otherwise, I’d have to walk all the way back past the school and up the hill to her neighborhood, so she could let me in.
At least once every year they had to punch a new key for me at the store. Somewhere around my parents house must be lying at least a handful of copies of the same key. And, of course, once I got inside, then it was time to tear apart the house looking for the errant piece of metal. My room was always a mess in it’s normal state; it was horrible by the time I gave up looking.
And, as you might imagine, my mom made the same silly joke every time. “It’s always in the…” “last place you look.” Well, of course it is Ma, that’s why it’s the last place. And we always had the same ideas for inventions. If you could just make something that would let you know where your keys were, some sort of key homing device, that could be great. Something like that for remote controls would be nice as well. Of course, people later came along and invented these very things, sold them on the T.V. for a while. I don’t think they took off.
Anyway, as I’ve said before, my mind goes funny places sometimes when it hones in on an idea when working on a sermon, and that’s where my mind went this week. When I thought of the Magi and that star shining in the West, I thought of a blinking light on a key chain and how I used to always misplace my keys.
And I remembered, too, that it was often when searching for my keys that I’d find other misplaced things. Like sometimes I’d find my homework, usually way late. Other times I might find a bit of misplaced change. When searching for my keys, I was often looking for the right thing, but in the wrong place. When I would find these other things, I was looking in the right place, but for the wrong thing.
As we take a look at our passage, I think that summation can serve as categories for the Magi as well as for Herod and the rulers of Jerusalem.
These Magi, they were essentially searchers long before they ever came to the feet of Jesus. At least, that’s the conjecture. You don’t get led by stars if your not spending a significant amount of time searching them.
Now that, in and of itself, is a sort of mystery. It’s pretty clear that the indication from the passage is that they were Gentiles, given that they were from a far away land. It’s also pretty clear that they were astrologers, which, while it has had a on again off again relationship with Christianity, it’s generally seen as a pretty big no-no.
Most of us, of course, don’t believe there’s much going on in the celestial movements, at least as regards giving us information into the realms of the spiritual world. We’ve been formed by the post-Copernican, scientific approach to the heavenly bodies. We look at any attempt to “read them” as superstitious, at best.
As far as we know, the celestial heavens are empty. There’s nothing to be gained from searching the stars for clues to what’s going on here on Earth. The Magi, were, in a sense, looking for the right thing, but in the wrong place. They were searching for a word from the beyond, but in a place where the beyond doesn’t usually speak.
And as the Magi follow the star, in search of the new King, where do they stop to get more information? The home of the current “King pro tempore.” Perhaps they were under the impression that this would be where the new King was to be born. Either way they could at least get the directions.
In a sense, the Magi, in two instances, were searching for the right thing, but in the wrong place.
Herod, on the other hand, had not been a “searcher” as such, prior to his encounter with the Magi. Now, as you know, there are two Herod’s mentioned in the New Testament. This one, and his son, who is instrumental in the crucifixion of Christ. Apparently the death of Christ was a sort of family tradition for these two.
Erin and I are big fans of buying whole seasons of TV shows on DVD. We don’t have cable right now, so we occasionally ask for one at Christmas time, or during our birthdays. One of our favorite shows is this little sitcom that was produced by the BBC called “The Vicar of Dibley” about a woman-priest in the Church of England who’s assigned to a rural parish.
In one of my favorite episodes, the town and church board decide that they’re going to do a live nativity on an actual farm for Christmas, so that there could be a real stable and actual farm animals. As the vicar is gathering participants for the nativity, the town aristocrat and mayor, David, who the vicar is constantly butting heads with, indicates that he’d like to be chosen for the role of God. Instead, of course, he is chosen for the part of Herod.
In an attempt to redeem some of his pride, David decides that he wants to “try a new angle” with Herod, to see if there wasn’t something missed there in the story. First, he attempts a script rewrite in which Herod’s soldiers simply misheard him; he didn’t really say “go kill all the babies,” but “go kiss all the babies.” Given that one soldier was slightly hard of hearing, the slaughter occurs.
After the rewrite is shot down, we later see David during the play, just before his segment is finished, getting up and giving all of the children in the audience candy, telling them how much he adores children. All the children are thanking him as he is passing out the candy, and before it cuts to the next scene you here one of the children say “I love you Herod.”
Of course, we all know better. The real Herod, this Herod, Herod the Great, is described as insane, a murderer, who banished one wife and child, then has his next wife and several other members of his family executed. This, of course, fits with the profile of a man who would instigate the wholesale slaughter of an entire region’s infant population.
When the Magi show up, Herod and those who rule with him are necessarily a bit shaken up by the idea. Herod, as a Jew, actually came into his kingly power by backing the Romans against the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty. If you ever read the Maccabean books of the intertestamental period, that’s the Hasmoneans. They were the last legitimately Jewish monarchy in history. Herod, then, was installed by the Roman Senate as the “King of the Jews.” A familiar title.
Of course, if you had just taken the thrown of Jerusalem from a dynasty and sent the previous occupant to be executed, all backed by the consecration of Rome declaring you to be King of the Jews, and then you heard the words of the Magi, how would you feel? I’d probably feel a little threatened.
Herod might have been thinking “is this a distant cousin? Have I missed someone?” But what probably what stuck out in his mind the most would’ve been “who will the people support?” So, he sees a problem, and he solves most of his problems by killing people, thus, he begins to scheme so that he might similarly take care of this issue as well.
So, Herod gathers his rabbis, his teachers, together, so that he might have some idea of where the new heir is located. He goes to where he knows, or at least thinks perhaps, God Himself has spoken on the subject. Herod, as opposed to the Magi, is looking for the wrong thing, but in the right place.
As I thought about these things, I started to think that, in a way, this can be thought of as the two approaches which people often have towards religion or religious-type practices. Sometimes we are looking for the right thing, but in the wrong place, other times we maybe looking for the wrong thing, but in the right place.
A lot of people in the world are looking in all the wrong places, but looking for something which is fundamentally a part of our relationship with God. As I mentioned last week, St. Augustine tells us, by telling God, that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” I’m sure many of you have heard the phrase before “every heart has a God-shaped hole.” And when we aren’t allowing that hole to be filled by God Himself, we are often trying to fill it ourselves with anything we can think of.
For some people, it may look superstitious. They may turn to astrology, or new-ageism, or even more respectable religions. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that in an age in which we see decreased church attendance, we see also in our popular culture an increased interest in things like ghosts, vampires, and all things paranormal. Many of us are searching for something, some message from beyond the pail of this mortal life.
We want some sign of the future perhaps, some knowledge of what lies ahead, what we’re in for. Or we want some indication of security, some knowledge that someone out there loves us and is looking out for us. We want to know that we’re ok in our place in the world. We just want some sort of existential comfort.
Other people might seek it out in more natural, though sometimes somewhat pathological, ways. We might seek out our assurance in our jobs, trusting in our ability to procure a good future for ourselves. Or we may seek it out in our relationships, particularly our romantic ones, always on the search for that ideal mate, the one who can make all the world worthwhile.
On the other side of the equation, many of us are looking for the wrong thing, but in the right place. Everyday millions of people step through the doors of the church, but they aren’t looking for Christ. Not as He actually is at least. Sometimes the church serves as a sort of rotary club for people, a place to make good business contacts. Sometimes it serves as a dating service. Sometimes stepping through the doors of a church is a way of flying your cultural and political flag. And sometimes, when doing these things, the Christ in your head, like some vague notion of a distant-cousin-heir, takes on the form of whatever you’re looking for.
What I find so amazing about the Gospel which we proclaim in the church, though, is that, ultimately, it isn’t us who does the searching. The story of the Gospel is the story of a God who comes down and searches us out, the good shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, the woman looking for the missing coin. It’s the story of a God who steps into the middle of all our searching, and boom, all the sudden we’re looking at something else, at our savior.
That’s what happened for the magi, at least. In the midst of searching the vacant heavens, these tiny pinholes of light which seem liked fixed yet movable points, which the brain arranges into a complex series of messages; in the midst of all that the truly fixed and unmoving point of Christ steps in, God reveals Himself to those who perhaps weren’t sure what they were searching for.
All of a sudden, they go from following the stars as they navigated their way across the sky, to following after a star which seems to have an agenda all it’s own. A star which comes to miraculously light upon a house. I mean, stars don’t do that. Massive balls of burning gas and heat don’t just pluck themselves out of the sky and hang out above a particular rooftop. Something else was going on here. God was revealing Himself.
These guys were Gentiles, like us. People born of a race with no major previous cultural connection to the history of salvation. People who were trying to figure out life in the stars, with no solid connection to the God who put those stars in place, until one day, that fixed point of Christ turns up. A star appears and comes to rest above a house. All of their otherwise, perhaps, fruitless searching, is culminated in this one moment when a star behaves in a way that a star isn’t supposed to behave.
I’d like to think that those wise men, those Magi, returned to their home country, wherever that might have been, off in the East. I’d like to think they left with their hearts so changed by this divine intervention into the nature of the universe, that they never went to read the stars again. They’d read all there was to read in that one moment. They’d never be able to look up at the night sky again without remembering that star above a house in Bethlehem, the star which they had followed away from their home to the home of all who are in desperate need of the love and grace of God, the true message from beyond.
I’d like to think that they found what they needed, in the last place they looked. And I pray that for us, God would appear to us again and again, through His word and sacraments, giving us that same message from beyond, of love, hope, grace, and peace. I pray that He would make Himself for us the first, second, and last place to which we will always look.
Amen.
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