| Merry Christmas, everyone! It is still Christmas, you know. My neighborhood doesn’t know it. Christmas Eve was the last time people turned on the outside decorations. But for the church, it is still Christmas. One young blogger with the pen name Lutestring wrote:
Sure, Grandma took down the trees because it was most convenient - but I still have my little one up. And the church calendar says it is still Christmastime - so there. That makes it real, whether I feel it or not, whether the world goes and packs everything up or not. http://lutestringsroad.blogspot.com/2009/12/quest.html I like her spunk! Why does the church continue to celebrate Christmas for 12 days? Maybe because the church knows that there is more to Christmas than cute manger scenes, romantic Christmas carols and pageants. The church says, “OK, that’s all good, but keep on circling the story from all vantage points until it takes hold of you and pulls you down into the deeper meaning of Christ’s coming. Take twelve days and explore, search, brood and ponder.” We are the richer for it! That is why Matthew’s story is up on this Epiphany Sunday. Luke has had his turn at telling us of the birth and the song of the angels and the visitation of the shepherds. In our imaginations and celebrations, Luke and Matthew are blended. We see the shepherds and the wise men all at the manger at the same time. And there is nothing wrong with that: the more the merrier. There is nothing in Matt that contradicts Luke; its just that Matt tells another story—a different story. What is Matthew up to? What does he want us to know or do or feel or find? Note Matthew’s distinctive features: wise men are the central human figures in the story. (We don’t know that it was three—maybe it was six! Or ten! We do know that there were three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and so, we assume three wise men.) There is a joke that if the magi had been women they would have brought practical gifts like diapers, blankets and some hot soup. There is no mention of camels, though our Christmas cards picture them! That we pull in from the Isaiah 60 reading. Matthews’s story also features an anti-hero, King Herod, who is afraid when he hears that there is a newborn king of the Jews. A rival. Yikes! But I invite you to pay attention to the star. Can you see it? Bright, shinning in the dark night sky—even still visible at dawn. Maybe in your imagination it has rays extending. Or, maybe it is just an intensely bright point of light in a dark sky. Whatever you imagine, the wise men have followed it for two years. The star is the central figure in this story. It is seemingly silent and still. Yet it leads our strange, mysterious figures from the east all the way to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem and the baby and Mary. It “rises” and arrests their attention. It leads them for two years and finally it comes to rest—it “stops” over the place where the child was. At this point it becomes obvious to us who live in the 21st century that this is not an ordinary star. Matthew employs a different cosmology than our scientific one. His star is not light years distant in cold interstellar space. His star seems to be animated and communicating. What if we could hear it? What if we could somehow understand its intention? W. H. Auden in an extended poem, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” written in 1941 gave voice to the star. In a section called “The Summons” the star says:
Onto that Glassy Mountain where are no Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread Where knowledge but increases vertigo: Those who pursue me take a twisting lane To find themselves immediately alone With savage water or unfeeling stone, In labyrinths where they must entertain Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain. Remember, Auden wrote this poem in England in the dark years of WWII when inhumanity stalked Europe and the Pacific, and the outcome of the war was unknown. The world’s moral compass was off kilter and people were facing “confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.” And then in Auden’s poem, the wise men each say why they are following this dizzying and dangerous star, and then together they say:
The countryside is dreary, Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock, Calling our hope unlawful; … At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners, That this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners, And miss our wives, our books, our dogs, But have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are. To discover how to be human now Is the reason we follow this star. (W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being”) Why were they following the star?
Is the reason we follow this star. Auden helps us to imagine and play with Matthew’s imagery; to experience it not so much as fanciful story telling as it is an invitation for us to follow, to search, to journey, to welcome an “inquiring spirit,” even if it means leaving the familiar behind. For too long an insecure church has wanted to give us the answer to the questions, when the gospel is a call to follow the questions to wherever they lead us. In some ways Jesus is not THE answer, like in all the children sermons. Jesus raises more questions than he answers. He is the one who provokes the questions: “how shall I live my life? For whom shall I live my life? What does it mean to love, to be alive, to be a truth, to be human? What does my suffering mean? What do my blessings mean?” Jesus Christ is the one to whom life’s mystery leads us, to being human, and to the new humanity that is God’s gift in Jesus Christ. For Matthew’s mysterious figures, the star is the symbol of search, questing, journey, and venturing to what matters most: the mystery of who we are before God. And we, who cannot journey to the manger with the wise men and the shepherds to see Jesus, can journey again and again to the table where Christ Jesus gives himself to us in the sharing of bread and wine. The star brought the wise men to the child; in the bread that becomes his body for us: “This is my body…This is my blood…for you.” St. Leo the Great made this explicit when he wrote:
Church' Sermo. 74, 2: PL 54, 398. As the star, so our baptism and our experience of the Lord’s Supper: the sacraments are not cold and distant stars. For us they are a continuing summons to pay attention, to journey, to risk all to live into the relationship with Jesus. Jeff Blackman, a pastor in Kansas City, asks,
says, ‘You know, pastor, the riding lawn mower is not working,” or a matronly woman in the congregation tells me, my granddaughter is coming for Christmas.” and never be the same. They might be summoned to a new life by Jesus and all the little things—the details, the mental memos, all that anchors us to the mundane and familiar--will be swallowed up in a thirst for God like the star that led the wise guys from the east to leave everything behind.’” Annie Dillard writes: On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? ... The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and … draw us out to where we can never return." (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper & Row, 1982) Do you know what? The wise men never went home! They may have gone back to their country, but they were changed persons! Here are some names for you of people who never returned: Paul, Mary, Barnabas, the Samaritan woman at the well, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, Dag Hammerjold, John and Charles Wesley, Sojourner Truth, and, a name you may recognize: Kanichi Miyama. He was the first legal Japanese immigrant to the United States to be baptized a Christian. He was also the first Japanese ordained in the US. Kanichi was born to a samurai family in 1847. His Japanese teacher favored opening Japan to western knowledge and influence. Unable to pass an Army physical exam, Kanichi traveled to San Francisco, where he enrolled in an English class taught by Dr. Otis Gibson, the superintendent of the Chinese Methodist mission in Chinatown. Gibson asked him, “Will you give your whole life to Christ?” Kanichi replied, “Yes, I will give my whole life to him.” This led to baptism in 1877. Kanichi organized a Gospel Society for Japanese—the first in America. In 1886 he was ordained a deacon and in 1887 an elder. He was appointed to do mission work with the Japanese in Hawaii. With practically nothing, he came to Honolulu and began evangelistic work among Japanese laborers. With 38 members he founded Harris Memorial, the first Japanese church, in 1888. He baptized 155 persons in the years 1888-1889. In 1890 Kanichi returned to Japan and founded churches in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kamakura. His countrymen resisted him as someone corrupted by a western outlook and a threat to traditional Japanese culture. Then, in 1891, an earthquake shattered the city of Nagoya. Miyama and his wife sustained injuries and their nephew died. But despite his own problems, Miyama devoted himself to rescuing the survivors, with the result that his Americanization and his Christianity were seen in a new light. In a sense, he became an Epiphany star!
aspx?c=ghKJI0PHIoE&b=3637671&ct=4515271 accessed on Dec. 31, 2009. are worthy of crash helmets, of leaving comfort and the familiar behind to follow the star! We are not here to kill another Sunday morning. As the hymn of response puts it: “[The God of love] bids us never lose our zest, though age is urging us to rest, but proves to us that we have still a work to do, a place to fill.” (Fred Pratt Green, The Faith We Sing, no. 2027) For reasons of time, I omitted the following: St. Paul pondered the mystery of Christ embodying a new humanity in Ephesians 2. It works well with the symbol of the inviting star: “Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups [Jews and Gentiles] into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us…that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two,…through the cross…. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.” Ephesians 2: 11-22. That is part of the meaning of the Epiphany—the manifestation, the revealing—that not only those who were children of the promises (the Jews) receive the gift of Christ. Those who are far off are also summoned to perceive and receive the gift of Christ. |
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| A Subversive Star Matthew 2: 1.12 Daniel Benedict January 3, 2010 |
