A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

January 7, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Star Light

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 72:1–14
Ephesians 3:1–12
Matthew 2:1–12

“There, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising,
until it stopped over the place where the child was.”

Matthew 2:9 (NRSV)

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

U. A. Fanthorpe
from “BC:AD”

It’s lovely to welcome you all to worship and to wish you all a very happy new year on behalf of the ministers and staff and officers of Fourth Presbyterian Church. “A good new year to one and all,” as we say in Scotland.

I found myself with my family on New Year’s Day in one of my least favorite parts of the world: Heathrow Airport outside London. I can almost hear a groan of sympathy coming from the congregation. We were transferring from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4 to make a connection to a flight to Chicago. The good news, of course, is that before Heathrow I was in one my favorite places: I was at home in Scotland for a few days.

So we were coming through Heathrow on New Year’s Day, and it being Heathrow, of course we were delayed in getting our flight going. The one thing that saved me during that delay was the Herald, the Scottish national newspaper printed in Glasgow. The Herald had a huge New Year’s Day crossword puzzle on one of its pages. The Herald is a broadsheet, and the grid took up almost the whole page. There were more than 150 clues around the side, and I was in puzzle heaven. There was a rather envious woman looking my way, a fellow passenger also delayed, who eventually plucked up the courage to come ask me which newspaper had printed the puzzle. I had to commiserate with her that she wouldn’t be able to buy it in Heathrow, so she sort of walked off unhappily as I got stuck into the cryptic clues and the hidden words and the anagrams in the puzzle. (I almost let out a cheer when I solved one clue: the word agglomerated from the clue “got large dame insane.” I was so pleased with myself—and I hope a little pride in the pulpit is OK.)

Some people are puzzlers, and some people are not. I know that some of you are Sudoku fans and some are crossword fans and others not. My wife is not a puzzler, which made me very happy, because I had the big crossword all to myself on New Year’s Day.

On the topic of puzzles, I made a very interesting find recently. In the current edition of the New Yorker is an article written by one their staffers, a journalist called Malcolm Gladwell. The article examines the situation around the demise of the Enron company and the subsequent jailing of a number of the executives at Enron. The argument that Gladwell makes is controversial. Indeed it was challenged in the business pages in yesterday’s New York Times.

In the article, Gladwell takes as a frame of reference for his discussion of Enron the work of one Gregory Treverton, whom we are told is an expert on national security. In his work, Treverton has made a distinction between something that is a puzzle and something that is a mystery. The example given of this distinction from Treverton is this from recent history: “The whereabouts of Osama bin Laden is a puzzle. Bin Laden can’t be found because there’s not enough information.” The key to the puzzle, according to Treverton, is to get more information. This may be from a source close to bin Laden who gives the information. With more information, the puzzle can be solved. So it’s kind of like my crossword clue: I worked out that the word insane pointed to it being an anagram, and that helped me then to go and solve the clue.

Treverton, according to Gladwell, says, however, that “the situation that would be in Iraq after the toppling of Hussein was a mystery.” There was no simple factual answer; simply gathering more information would not allow people to surmise what that situation would be like. “Mysteries require judgment and assessment of uncertainties.” And Gladwell goes on to say about the situation in Iraq: “The CIA had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists. For that matter so did every cab driver in Baghdad.” So the argument goes that there was plenty of information; with a mystery it’s how you assess that and how you use that information to come up with likely scenarios. It is an interesting, complex argument. Gladwell, in the New Yorker, uses this distinction to discuss the Enron case by claiming that the situation at Enron—how it unraveled and how that came about—is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery.

What I want to do this morning is appropriate the terms puzzle and mystery for our reflection. That is, to suggest that the life of faith in Jesus Christ is a mystery and not a puzzle. That our encounter with God in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament is itself a mystery and not a puzzle. I think there have been and are trends in the history of interpretation of scripture and the history of the church that have treated aspects of the life of faith more like a puzzle than a mystery.

One example, I think, would be biblical archaeology, the belief that in searching for remains and artifacts of the biblical period we get insights into that life and help in solving some of the difficult things we encounter in scripture. Another example, I would argue, is the series of programs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for what’s termed “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” This is the idea that getting more information could help make decisions about who Jesus really was. For example, in the Jesus Seminar, participants voted on which sayings of Jesus are more likely to be authentic than others. The idea then is that if you get the key you can solve some of the complexities that we encounter.

I think that this approach to faith is attractive for some people, and I understand that. One example of this might be the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. Even when recognizing that this was fiction, a novel written by one Dan Brown, people felt it somehow accessed some secret information that gave them a deeper or newer insight into aspects of their journey of faith. Another example might be the books you find in the Christian self-help shelves of the bookshops—books on saying simple prayers over and over with the promise that this will bring prosperity. Or books that promise a key to understanding the secrets that are “locked” in the Bible.

I would offer that the journey that we undertake, the pilgrimage toward God, is not about the garnering of more information or finding keys to unlock puzzles but about how we, as individuals and as community, live into a growing openness to God’s challenging and comforting and grace-filled presence in our lives and in our world.

Contemporary poet Scott Cairns wrote once about his golden rule: “If I understand something, it’s no mystery.” That may seem obvious, and yet it’s important as we reflect on this movement into the tension of mystery. “If I understand something, it’s no mystery.”

One of the great preachers of the early church was John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople in the fourth century. (Chrysostom is from the Greek, meaning golden-mouthed.) Chrysostom preached a sermon once in which he reflected on this encounter with the mystery that is the incarnation. He says, “Though I know that a virgin this day gave birth . . . yet the manner of this birth I have learned to venerate in silence, and I accept this is not to be probed too curiously with wordy speech.” (There’s a good caution for a preacher from a preacher about being careful of wordy speech!)

Chrysostom here is accepting the truth and the profound reality of the encounter with the mystery that is Christmas. I think he’s talking about what Paul paradoxically in Ephesians calls “seeing the mystery.”

Today we mark the Epiphany, meaning manifestation of the divine. The rest of our culture in general has gone off and taken down their Christmas decorations, and the trees are thrown out in the street. And the shops, I don’t know what they have now—Valentine’s Day cards, probably— on the shelves. But we hold onto Christmas because Christmas is not a day; it’s a season, and the season culminates in this celebration of Epiphany. The manifestation of God in the Christ child. The revelation of God becoming human and that revelation to the visiting wise men, the Magi who have traveled to find the child born king.

What do we do with this? Where do we go with it? You can go to the commentaries and the websites and you’ll find discussions about who these Magi were. That they were probably from Iraq, we are told by some people. That the root word of Magi, when it is used elsewhere in the New Testament, means magician. So were they sorcerers of some kind? They’re astrologers we’re told; they’re looking at the skies. And some people suggest that they were Zoroastrians, members of a Persian dualistic mystery religion. And what was the star that they saw in the sky, some people will ask. There’s a website I found written by, I believe, a faithful and thoughtful minister who has a great interest in astronomy. He offers half a dozen possibilities from Halley’s Comet in 12 bc to the conjunction of various planets that were supposed to happen around 4 bc and so on. I think the problem in answering these, in probing these questions, is that we’re going back and forgetting that we’re dealing with a mystery and we’re trying to treat it as a puzzle. To be honest, if it was proved beyond any doubt exactly what the conjunction of planets was that wise men saw at the time of the birth of Jesus, it wouldn’t make any difference to my daily struggle to live in relationship to God, the daily life of faith. And anyway, I don’t think we’re even meant to know what the star was or who exactly the wise men were. And that’s partly because if we spend our time thinking about that and trying to solve the puzzle, we’ll lose our focus on the mystery, that the star, as the hymn has it, is a “star of wonder.” It is a sign of God’s grace that the wise men respond to.

Anyway the star of Epiphany is ultimately not the one in the sky. The star of Epiphany is Jesus. We sang it in our opening hymn: “A star shall come out of Jacob,” quoting a prophesy of Balaam in the book of Numbers. The star is the Christ child.

William Willimon wrote a review of the movie Nativity in a recent Christian Century. I’m sure some of you have seen it. His was a really very positive review. However, he did take issue with the actual depiction of the birth, which he describes as being just like any Christmas card or crèche: all full of glowing light coming out of the stable. But I take issue with Willimon on that. I think that’s how the birth is supposed to be depicted, because it is about the coming of light into our world. The star is Jesus, who is the Light of the world. And that’s where the mystery meets our reality, where the Light of the world means the possibility of freedom and peace and justice on God’s terms. That’s what we mean by the in-breaking of the kingdom of heaven at Christmas.

A paraphrase of Isaiah chapter 9 puts it this way: “The race that long in darkness pined have seen a glorious light.” (Sounds like an anthem for Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats!)

We are encountering the mystery of light coming into the darkness that we know in our hearts, in our communities, in our world.

Jürgen Moltmann, the great German theologian of hope and liberation, reflects on that passage in Isaiah about darkness and light. He writes, “The Liberator, the one who brings freedom, becomes a pleading child in our world, a world armed to the teeth as it is. And this child will become the liberator for the new world of peace. That is why his rule means life not death; peace not war; freedom not oppression. This sovereignty lies on the defenseless, innocent, and hopeful shoulders of this child.”

What a world of hope when our mystery meets the reality of a world armed to the teeth and engaging in wars that beget more wars that beget more wars. Moltmann again:

According to the New Testament the dream of peace is not merely a dream; the liberator is already present and his power is already among us. We can follow him even today, making something visible, making visible something of the peace, liberty, and righteousness of the kingdom that he will complete. It is no longer impossible; it has become possible for us in fellowship with him. Let us share in his new creation of the world and—born again to a living hope—live as new men and women.”

That is “seeing the mystery” and “going home by another way” or seeing the light at the stable door. The poet Rilke’s meditation on the visit of the Magi called “The Birth of Christ” ends thus with reference to the gifts of the magi:

He, the child, already outshines them all.
All amber shipped from distant climes,
each golden artifact and perfumed spice
that roams distraught among the senses—
all these were of such sudden brevity
and, in the end, brought only sorrow.
But (you will see) he, alone, brings joy.

Amen.