A Sermon by Pastor Tom Lacey . . .

Another road

Matthew 21-12, Preached by Tom Lacey at Congregational Church of Boca Raton, January 4, 2009

They came. They saw. They gifted. That's about all we know of the foreign visitors who traveled to Bethlehem to see the infant Jesus. Nobody really knows who they were, exactly where they came from or even for sure how many there were. The wise men enter from the mysterious East; leave their gifts and slip away into the dim mists of imagination, never to be seen again. The scene ingrained in the public imagination—a stately procession of three kings in turbans, crowns, elaborate capes and fancy slippers, with an entourage of servants and camels trailing behind—isn't from Scripture. In fact, there's no evidence in the Gospels that the Magi were kings, or even that there were three of them, much less that they sidled up to a manger on dromedaries exactly 12 days after Jesus' birth. Matthew must have been thinking of what the prophet Isaiah said centuries before about the restoration of Jerusalem: “Arise, shine, for your light has come. Kings shall come to the brightness of your dawn…the wealth of the nations shall come to you….They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.”

Only the Gospel of Matthew mentions these "wise men from the East," who follow a star to Bethlehem. In the original Greek, they were called magoi (in Latin, magi), from the same root that gives us the word magic. It's been posited they were astrologers or members of a Persian priestly caste. But what matters more than their exact number and status, say historians and biblical scholars, is the fact that they were not Jews. This is because for Matthew, the magic star leading the wise men to the place of Jesus' birth is his way of saying what happened in Jesus is for the Gentile world as well. While Matthew doesn't say they converted to Christianity, popular legend holds that they were baptized by St. Thomas and died in Armenia in 55 A.D. They believed that a star could be the indicator or angel of a great man. When they saw this bright star rising they were drawn to its light and began their journey. The wise men set out led by their star until it stopped over the place where the child was born. The sight of the child filled them with great joy as they offered their gifts. After being warned in a dream to avoid the murderous King Herod, the Magi returned home "by another road."

In time the three men were given names, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. Some artists show them with different skin tones representing Europe, Asia and Africa. The gifts that came out of the treasure chests have captured our imagination. The gold brought by the royal Caspar represents wealth suitable for royalty. The imagination of our heart may interpret the gold as our offering of all the wealth of who we are and all that is important to us. The Frankincense offered to the child by the astrologer Melchior is a costly fragrance and incense. It may be associated with divinity and spiritual things; like the offering up of prayer and praise. Myrrh, presented by the wise Balthasar, was a costly and bitter spice used for embalming. Later Christian thinking interpreted that gift as a foreshadowing of the anointing and death that must come to Jesus. The visit of the wise men to the birth of Jesus was often painted on the walls of burial places as a sign of hope for eternal life.

The story is a sign for us too. There is in each human soul a deep longing for a guiding star for our journey, to have a point of orientation, a compass. People are going to continue to read tea leaves and horoscopes looking for a clue. We can be enchanted by the stars, but to me those stars seem cold, distant and silent. In the midst of all that is wrong with the world, the newborn child is such a promise of life and hope for the future. The three kings must have felt that way too. A baby boy in a manger would not be cold and distant and certainly not silent. No wonder those kings fell to their knees. They had thought that the universe was ruled by gods, capricious and all-too-human deities of limited power and indifferent ethics, whose quarrels and love-affairs with one another determined the course of human history. Instead, they found one God, but a God who was not indifferent to his creation. This God was loving and just, willing to enter into creation and suffer with and for his creatures, if that was what it took to raise them from the life of dust and clothe them in the garments of heaven. This God did not rule people as if they were puppets, but gave them free will, allowing them to share in the life of creation. This God abandoned the gilded halls of power and instead inhabits the shelters of the homeless, if that’s where the people are. This God poured his grace into even the most insignificant people, strengthening them and filling them with joy and sending them out to do the work of God. And so, at the end of all their travel to Bethlehem, the Magi could only kneel in wonder, offering all they were to this God who was so much more than they had imagined. Then they “left for their own country by another road.”

The story expresses a truth that like the wise men, each of us has come from a faraway place and we are on a journey to find Christ and worship him. The story tells us that when we find Jesus and worship him our minds and hearts are changed and our lives continue toward home on another road.

After seeing God, we all leave for home by another road. The night of November 28th, 1969, began like any other night for California police officer Jon Bruno. When he “received a call” to join a stake-out on South Sunset Canyon Road, there was no way he could have known that the following few hours would transform his life forever. Around 10:30, “a man named Wallace Noe, a 28-year-old marijuana dealer and suspected kidnapper, drove up, parked and walked toward the rear of the property. Another officer shined a flashlight on Noe, and Bruno shouted, ‘Freeze! Police!’” But Noe did not freeze. Instead, he “fired a pistol at the officers, and Bruno,” wishing to protect himself and his partner, returned fire with his own weapon. He hit Noe several times, killing him. The subsequent investigation ruled that the shooting was justifiable force, and Bruno was given an award for courageous service in the line of duty. But as he sat at the awards banquet, he was overwhelmed by the irony of the situation: he had joined the police because he wanted to help people, but he was being presented with an award for killing a man. Suddenly, Bruno saw his whole life in a new light, and realized that he could not remain part of a system in which violence was central even to maintaining the peace. Struggling to find something different, he turned toward the Christianity he had been taught as a child, and realized that here, in the self-giving love of God who calls us to love and serve one another, was a way to live that centered on giving life, not taking it.

What happened to Bruno at the award banquet was an epiphany, a moment of insight into the nature of reality, a moment of grace in which God was revealed to him. It was not a comfortable moment, but an unsettling one: a time of awful clarity in which he was able to see himself and his life in the light of truth, clearly enough to live from it in a new way. Many people who have converted to Christianity as adults can point to such an experience, a turning-point in which they resolved to reject the person they had been, renounce the way they had been living, and embrace a radically different life of faithfulness. People who have been raised in the Christian faith may have a harder time with this; if a person has known Christ since young, it can be difficult to sense the difference that being in relationship with Christ makes. Rather than growing steadily into God, it can be easy to take God for granted, to allow ourselves to lose sight of the radical nature of God’s claim upon our lives.

Today when the three Wise Men came to visit the infant Christ and to lay at his feet their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh it is a good day to examine the ways that Christ breaks into our lives, and the response he calls us to make. Let me continue with Jon Bruno’s story. At the time of his call, Jon Bruno was an uneducated man, a cop walking the beat in Burbank. After that awards banquet, he turned his back on his old career, earned his bachelor’s degree by taking night classes while working full-time, and entered the ordination process in the Episcopal Church. He is now the Bishop of Los Angeles. At the time of his call, Saul of Tarsus was an angry man, a Jew who adhered to the most stringent ritual laws which separated him from Gentiles; a few years later, he was in prison for the Gentiles, bringing the good news of Christ to those with whom he would have disdained to share a meal. When the three kings came to kneel at the feet of Jesus, they demonstrated that there is no boundary to the love of God. It spills out into people of every tribe and race and kingdom and nation, bringing life, giving growth, renewing hope. That is Christ’s power.

There is a time to do the same thing again and again, if it’s right and true and of God. But there is also a time to see a star, to come to Christ, to worship, and to leave a changed person.  May your heart know if the time is right to let God take you home by another and better road.

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