This sermon was only preached at the 8:30am service this morning. The children presented their Epiphany program at the 11:00am service and children are the best at preaching the Gospel. It was a marvelous program.
January 8, 2012
Epiphany of our Lord (transferred)
Matthew 2:1-12
It went missing from the hymnal…it went missing from the hymnal and we might not see it again in future hymnals, either. That good old Epiphany stand by, “We three kings of Orient are” is slowly disappearing from the Lutheran landscape as other hymns have taken its place. But why? It’s a decent song, catchy refrain, good rhymes throughout, tells a story that we all know and love…but how accurate is it? Were there really three kings, were they even kings at all? What do we know about these magi…the so called “wise men” from the east who traveled all the way from ancient Iran to ancient Palestine to worship an infant they knew nothing about? And what does their real story tell us about the wonder of God’s story?
If you take a look at the story from Matthew 2 and compare it with the song “we three kings,” we bump up against some issues. The first main issue is the number of folks who traveled. The song claims three, the church has claimed three…they have even gone ahead and named them, Caspar, Melchoir and Balthazar. But this didn’t happen until the Middle Ages…and even there are some discrepancies as the Eastern Church claims there were four, and various works of art throughout the years have claimed various numbers of magi, from 2 to 6. All depends on who you want to listen to…but if you listen to the biblical text, there is no number mentioned…our translation of the text just says “wise men from the east.”
So there’s that…
The second issue that we run in to…the folks mentioned in the song weren’t kings…they weren’t wise men either, as our translation of the text wishes to indicate. Oh, there were kings and wise men involved in this text from Matthew, but the kings in Matthew’s story are Herod and the infant Jesus…and the wise men in the story were the religious leaders and prophets that Herod summoned to find out about Jesus after the magi had originally arrived and inquired of the newly born King of the Jews. No, these folks were Magi…and that’s about it. According to ancient Greek and Persian sources, the Magi were followers of Zoroaster, who is considered by the ancient Greeks to be the founder of astrology and magic and, as such, the Magi would themselves have been astrologers and dream readers. They were very well versed in the meaning of stars, but they were also common people from ancient Iran...not royalty.
So if we take these two issues into consideration…we could re-write the song “we three kings” into “We Magi of orient are”…I guess it works but it’s just not as catchy and that cartoon music video from the 80’s Christmas special hosted by and starring the California Raisins would be obsolete…and we can’t have that happen, now can we?
But does this all even matter? Who cares if there are 3 or 6 magi, if they were kings or wise men or common folk…what does it matter in the grand scheme of things? What does it matter in the grand scheme of the Gospel?
It matters greatly, actually…
Well, the number of the magi might not matter so much, that’s just a nit picky detail that built things up to the whole they weren’t even kings, deal…but the fact that they weren’t kings…they fact that the magi were common folk from a distant land and a different religious tradition matters greatly. When we put the magi in the role of kings, we are equating them with the roles that Herod and Jesus play…which isn’t just a big deal at first glance. But when you think about it, and truly study Matthew’s gospel…it is the kings from whom the things of God are hidden…and it is the wise who are placed in a lower status than the infants. When Herod first heard about the birth of Jesus, the King of the Jews, his first response wasn’t to go and look for the Messiah to genuinely worship him. Rather it was to go and look for the child born King of the Jews so that he could destroy him and keep his place as “so called” king of the jews…a puppet king of Rome. As Jesus continues in his ministry, it is the wise who become blind to the light that Jesus brought into the world, healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, speech to the mute, physical ability to those who did not have it. And it would be these wise men, these religious leaders, who sought to destroy Jesus…and his Gospel…on the cross.
But it was the magi, the men and women from a different country and a different religious tradition who recognized the grand nature of this birth and wished to go and genuinely worship this child, the true King of the Jews. They didn’t come seeking fame, or recognition, but rather, to come to worship and give extravagant gifts, and quietly find their way back to their homes, and their lives and their own religious tradition.
Epiphany is a wonderful feast day of the church, it is a day worthy of being celebrated…but not with the pomp and circumstance of kings…rather, with the delight and humility of servants. Epiphany is the day that we celebrate that even from the beginning of his life, Jesus and his message of hope and of love wasn’t confined to the in-crowd…but rather it was spread first among the outsiders, those who didn’t fit in, those who were not versed in the religious tradition of the time and place where Jesus lived. But they still knew…they knew the importance of this child, without having heard of the prophecies of the messiah, without having known anything about this child…a simple star was all they needed to know that they needed to leave their homes and their families and go on a trip to see a child and worship him.
This is the power of the gospel of Jesus…we see it in the light of a star, in the voyage of the magi, in the most unexpected places we can imagine…the gospel cannot be confined to this space, it cannot be confined to a certain group of people, because the gospel will always find a way of getting out and in finding itself in the least expected places in the world.
And to think, I used to think that the 3 kings were pretty cool…
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