A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

January 6, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Beyond Bethlehem

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 72:1–7, 12–14
Isaiah 60:1–6
Matthew 2:1–12

Dear God, in the quiet aftermath, as life returns to normal, keep within our hearts the meaning of love given so humbly, so exquisitely. And as we return to our routines, keep alive within us the words, the startling truth of your love—for us and for the whole world. Amen.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly Christmas disappears. What took months in the coming, preparing, waiting, anticipating, seems to be over in an instant. Our commercial neighbors begin their preparations literally three months earlier. It’s something of a game around here to see who will be the one to put out the first Santa or decorate the first window in festive green and gold. It ordinarily happens sometime in September. The crews are busy in their shirtsleeves installing the tiny white lights on the Avenue. By the beginning of November the pace has quickened, the transformation is complete, and by Thanksgiving it’s here. Even the church succumbs. If you want to be theologically and ecclesiastically proper, you wait until the first Sunday of Advent even to hint at what’s around the corner, and even then, no real Christmas until Christmas. But for several years now—to be absolutely honest—because all the lights come on on the Avenue, a week before Thanksgiving, we have been throwing caution to the wind and turning our backs on 2000 years of liturgical tradition: we get out our own electric sheep two full weeks before Advent. It’s neither here nor there, nor relevant to much of anything, but when I referred to them earlier in the season, on the first Sunday of Advent, I believe, a young woman who is a devoted member of this congregation came up to me after worship and said, “You know I was around here for two years before I knew they were sheep. I thought they were pigs.”

In any event, what takes three full months in the preparation pretty much disappears in a matter of days and in one short week is gone altogether. Hardly a trace. And, as a matter of fact, if you look carefully, you can see the first hearts and flowers of Valentine’s Day begin to emerge.

I sensed a reluctance to leave it behind this year, a stronger reluctance than usual. It’s difficult to tear ourselves away from Bethlehem, Peter Gomes says. “There is a time to lay down one’s cares and duties and run to Bethlehem and the manger—a time to follow the star and take the road not taken . . . a time to flee for refuge from the troubles of the world and seek the safety of the mountaintop.” And who didn’t experience something of that this year? But, Gomes continues, “there is also a time to return—to begin where we left off” (Sermons, p. 26-27).

That rhythm of traveling to Bethlehem to see the Christ child, lingering a while, reflecting on our experience, and then returning—transformed, hopefully; changed, hopefully; perhaps returning by an altogether different road—all of that is included in one of our loveliest and oldest traditions: Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, on which your true love is supposed to give you “twelve drummers drumming,” having already given you “a partridge in a pear tree, five golden rings, ladies dancing, and lords a’ leaping.” Epiphany—the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem, following a star.

Priests, astrologers, scholars from the East, see a strange astrological phenomenon, the confluence of two planets, a bright comet perhaps. To them it’s a new star, a sign of a great event happening somewhere, the birth of a new king, and so they follow it as it moves westward in the bright sky of the desert.

They are not Jews. They are from the lands east of Israel: Persia—modern Iran; Arabia,—Saudi Arabia; Babylon—Iraq. But, being scholars, perhaps they are familiar with the sacred writings of the Jews, of one of their prophets, Isaiah, who wrote

Arise, shine, for your light has come
And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. . . .
Nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn. . . .
They shall bring gold and frankincense.

So they pack up royal gifts—gold, frankincense, precious perfumes—and travel westward, and in that they are looking for a royal baby, stop in Jerusalem at the palace of Herod, who is the current king of the Jews. Herod is perplexed. There is no new baby in his household. And then he is frightened. If there is a new baby with his eyes on the throne, that sounds like a threat. So Herod gathers his own scholars and asks where the long-awaited Messiah is supposed to be born. In a witty commentary on this text, Walter Brueggemann imagines Herod’s scholars saying, “They’re off by nine miles, because they have the wrong text. Isaiah 60 isn’t about the messiah. The place where you should be looking is in the Book of the Prophet Micah. He wrote, ‘Now you, O Bethlehem . . . from you shall come forth . . . one who is to rule in Israel.” (Christian Century, 10 December 2001).

So they’re looking in the wrong place—a royal palace in Jerusalem—when they should be in a dusty, nondescript little town. They are nine miles off, so Herod sends them down the nine mile road to Bethlehem with instructions to return with information about where he, Herod, might find the child so that he may pay his homage—which is perhaps one of the most cynical statements in the Bible. Herod is a cruel despot, propped up by Rome. Herod is so insecure and jealous and cruel that he murders his own children. When Caesar Augustus hears about it, he will remark that he’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son. So the magi will return to the East by another road and not report to Herod, who, when they fail to show up, goes into one of his murderous rages and sends his troops to Bethlehem to kill all the infants.

But now the Magi are near Bethlehem, and they have another problem. The gifts they have brought are suitable for a king: gold, precious perfumes, and ointments. Nobody in Bethlehem needs or wants gifts like that—except the gold, maybe. It reminds me of a wonderful story that was circulating a few years ago that the wise men botched the job because they were men. Had they been the three wise women they would have—

Asked for directions and arrived on time
Cleaned the sable
Helped deliver the baby
Brought a casserole
Given practical gifts

There they were, three men in the wrong place—or at least not the place they expected to be—bearing the wrong gifts. Lavish, extravagant gifts for a baby so poor his bed was not on silken sheets and soft coverlets, but the straw of the cow’s feedbox. When they saw the child, they knelt and presented the gifts they had brought, gave what they had, and now, transformed by what they had experienced, they headed home, but by very different road.

January 6, Epiphany is their day, the day tradition assigns to their arrival in Bethlehem, and it is celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox churches with great festivities and pomp and circumstance.

Over the years, traditions, not based on the Bible particularly, have grown up around them: that they were kings, and that they had names—Melchior, Gasper, and Balthazar.

Relics said to be their bones were brought from Persia to Constantinople in 490 and somehow made their way to Milan. When Emperor Frederick Barbarosa finished ravishing Italy, he took the bones from Milan and brought them to Cologne, where you can see them in the cathedral today and read in the “Ancient Obituary of the Saints” that the three of them had a reunion in 54 A.D., met in Armenia to celebrate Christmas, and then all three died: Melchior on January 1, Balthazar on January 6, and Gaspar on January 11.

Far more important than the stories and traditions that have accumulated over the centuries, however, is how their appearance in Bethlehem adds significantly to, and augments and begins to interpret, the birth of Jesus Christ.

In the first place, they are outsiders, Gentiles in a Jewish story. It is generally agreed that Matthew’s Gospel is the most Jewish of the four. His intended readers know about the prophets, the Law, the rituals of the temple. But here at the very beginning are three Gentiles kneeling at the manger. And so there is a word here at the beginning about the inclusivity and universality of Christianity. The earliest Christians were Jewish and happy to remain a kind of subset of Judaism. But Gentiles kept hearing and responding to the message and the early Christian church’s first real struggle was to break out of and away from the restrictions of race, nationality, and ethnicity and to become a gospel, a faith for all people.

One of the current struggles for the contemporary church has to do with a variation of that old issue. Should we concentrate more on defining who is in and who is out, theologically and morally, building walls and boundaries, endlessly arguing about the exact creedal formulas with which to describe our beliefs, fighting endlessly about what sexual practices disqualify one for leadership in the church, which sins are more disqualifying than other sins, all the while building the boundaries between church and world, righteous and sinners, redeemed and damned, us and them, higher and higher, and drawing the circle smaller and smaller until the only ones left inside are just like us? Or should we not be learning to live with lowered boundaries and open borders, trusting that the love and grace of God demonstrated in acts of hospitality and kindness and acceptance will always honor Jesus Christ more than rigid theological orthodoxy or moralism?

They were Gentiles, outsiders—to be precise, Arabs. There they are, Arabs kneeling at the manger. They are a reminder that there are Christian churches in their countries today, Iran and Iraq—not strong but brave and committed churches of Jesus Christ. And they are a sign that to kneel at that manger with them is to see the human race now differently, as one family of God, and the mission of the church to nurture, promote, work for, and celebrate the oneness of the human family, not to serve to divide it and fragment it, as it has so often done.

And in the second place, the magi, the first, after the shepherds, to kneel at the manger, are a sign that something transforming always happens in that experience. They had to take another road home, not the most direct route, or convenient, or comfortable. And so for us, we who have traveled to Bethlehem, things are different now.

To be sure, the world to which we return is much the same: troops are still in Afghanistan, terrorists are still at large, AIDS continues to ravish Africa, children sill die unnecessarily in America, Israel and Palestine still eye one another suspiciously. So what exactly is different?

To put it simply, we are. To see the Christ child is to be transformed. I love the way Peter Gomes puts that:

For we have come from an encounter with the world of the possible in the midst of the impossible. We have seen God . . . and survived to tell the tale, moving about not knowing that our faces shine with the encounter, bearing the mark of the encounter forever, and marveling in the darkest night of the soul at that wondrous star-filled night. (p. 28)

The world will change because we are changed.

A a friend of mine, Steve Doughty, wrote a poem this year that was published, that speaks to the question of what is different because of Christmas. It’s the gifts of the magi, Doughty proposes.

No one knows
what became
of the gifts
first given
to the child

Except

Whenever
the hungry receive their bread
and the grieving their comfort
and captives their freedom

and love wraps around the lonely
and our own wearied hearts
are filled with joy

There

The little one
lavishes his
now never-ending gifts
upon our needy world.

(The Presbyterian Outlook, vol. 184, 7 January 2001)

The world will change because we are changed.

We have seen God, not high and lifted up, but lowly, vulnerable, lying in a manger.

We have seen with our own eyes the reality and power of love to conquer hate and violence.

We have seen the sanctity of human life, kneeling before a humble, so very human family.

We have followed a star and the heavens—the bright moon and star-filled sky will never look quite the same again—and in the wonder of that moment, wonder itself, wonder at the mystery of life and love, will be reborn.

We have seen the child, and nothing beyond Bethlehem will ever be the same.

Star of wonder, star of night
Star with royal beauty bright.
Westward leading, still proceeding
Guide us to thy perfect light.

Amen.