A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam H. Fronczek

January 3, 2010 | 4:00 p.m.

A Story for Shepherds; A Story for Kings

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 72:1–7
Luke 2:8–20
Matthew 2:1–12

Earlier this week, while walking down Michigan Avenue, it occurred to me how odd it would be if someone were to come up to me and say, “Hey, what happened to that lady who was outside Macy’s all last month? Where’d she go? She was right here, wearing red, singing songs, smiling, had a pail, ringing the bell.” No one ever wonders about that. If someone ever did, I have to imagine it would only be because they had just moved here from another country and had no concept about why the Salvation Army bell-ringer was out there in the first place.

Trying to think from a radically different perspective is always a good way to read a story, particularly a story you’ve heard many times, because when things are familiar to us, we tend to stop noticing them. We take them for granted. We don’t even notice when things disappear, as long as that’s what we’ve come to expect.

There are a number of things that disappear the week after Christmas. The week after Christmas, it occurs to me, is a strange one in our culture, because there is so much that is present the week before and then all of a sudden disappears. For many of us, not much happens the week after Christmas or the first week in January; every year there are these two back-to-back national holidays one week after the next. December 25 and January 1 are days off. Many of us quit early the day before or take vacation the day after; most of us do all we can to leave a little early as often as possible. For some of us, there is a race to December 31 at midnight—last-minute things that must come in under the wire—but New Year’s Eve does come at last, and after that, a lull, a slowing down that was long awaited. If you’re really busy on New Year’s Day or the next few days after, you’re probably kind of on your own.

One of the things that does happen during these slow days is that Christmas lingers around us. There’s plenty of talk about how Christmas seems to start earlier every year, with store windows and music starting up well before Thanksgiving, but after Christmas, the holiday drags out a little. During this odd, slow time I’m referencing, we return and exchange gifts; we still hear Christmas music some, but a little less; we start to wonder how many days we should wait before we take down the tree. And here in the church, we start wondering how long we can go on telling the Christmas story before you will get sick of it. In so many ways, Christmas is disappearing.

But it does take a while for the story to disappear here in the church. It takes a while, because if you read the story carefully, you see that much of the story doesn’t take place until after Christmas Eve. Mary and Joseph find their way to Bethlehem, Jesus is born, and they lay him in the manger. But what comes afterwards—the stories of the shepherds and the wise men coming to visit the child—probably took a few days. They didn’t Skype in to the manger like grandma and granddad to see the newborn baby; it was 2,000 years ago, and so they came by camel or more likely by foot, and it took a little while. And it’s my hunch that one thing Mary and Joseph and the baby might have shared after Christmas was the same lull we feel: all of the buildup to the birth and then a few slow days as things calm down.

If we in the church squeeze the whole story into Christmas Eve, we do so because we know that you want to hear the whole story and some of you won’t be back again until Easter, which is OK. But in stretching the story out a little, we do retain for ourselves an advantage, because after Christmas I get the chance to slow the story down and see if I can get you to observe some things about the Christmas story that don’t usually get coverage on Christmas Eve. I get to call some things about Christmas to your attention before they “disappear.” Here’s the part of the story I’d like to talk about this afternoon:

In our hurried telling of the Christmas story, we often read the story of the wise men and retain a few facts: they saw a star and decided to follow it; they visited King Herod along the way; they went on to Bethlehem and found Jesus and Mary and Joseph; and they brought gifts—gold and frankincense and myrrh. But here’s a piece that often gets skipped over: why do they stop to see Herod? One reason scholars have noted is because these wise men are probably from a royal court of their own, and it would have been sensible for them to stop and visit the local ruler as they entered his domain. That’s plausible. Look at what else the story tells us: when they arrive at Herod’s palace, they have to ask him, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” They don’t know where to find him. And Herod doesn’t know either, because what he does next is to ask someone else: the story says that he called together “all the chief priests and scribes of the people,” and he “inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.” Now the chief priests and scribes are the experts in the law; they know the sacred texts and the history of their people, and when they hear this question, they know how to answer it; they quote the prophet Micah and inform Herod and the wise men that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem.

And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who is to shepherd my people Israel.

Pay attention to how that scene just played out, because—returning to all of the stuff I said at the beginning about what life is like for us right after Christmas—I have a theory: the high priests and the scribes are like people in our culture who get called in to work on New Year’s Eve. Think about it: the wise men show up in Israel, bringing important and pressing business to a very powerful leader, Herod; Herod comes to see them and they give him this major news; then he calls in experts, scribes and high priests, the people who thought they might be in the middle of some downtime but are urgently needed. They are experts in prophecy, so they are called in to interpret what has happened.

You can almost hear the scribes, coming into the palace: “I was already on my second glass of champagne when my Blackberry went off. How do long do you think this is going to take? Does Herod really think another king is going to emerge before the first of the year?”

And do you notice what happens? The scribes and the priests do exactly what you or I would do if asked to come in on New Year’s Eve: they do their job as quickly as they can do it well—and they leave. They do what happens to so many things right after Christmas: they disappear. They give the king and the wise men the information they are seeking, and even though that information indicates that something really important is about to take place, something they’ve been waiting for all their lives, they let the wise men go check it out and they go right back home. The scribes do their job and they go on back to their party. And they completely miss what has just taken place.

This is a danger for all of us, and let me explain to you how it works: I think a part of the human condition is that we assume everyone else will operate according to our timetables and our expectations. We expect that when we are busy, others should be busy; when our lives are slow, others’ lives are slow. Other people should be in need when we are ready to give, and other people should be ready to give when we are in need. Other people should talk when we are ready to listen and should listen when we are ready to talk. But most of the time, life doesn’t work that way. And events of tremendous significance often take place when we’re not ready.

In the days since December 25, our country faced a failed terrorist attack on an airplane in Detroit and a terrorism disaster in Afghanistan. These events are not on our cultural timetable. This is our downtime, it seems to us; we shouldn’t have to be so vigilant. And even without these more dramatic events, the world is full of difficult events that happen during our downtime. We often do a wonderful job feeding and clothing people in need during December, but the needs in January are just as great. Around holidays we make efforts to repair broken relationships with our families or to figure out how to coexist in the midst of that brokenness, but when the holidays are over, it becomes all too easy not to put in that important work.

The point of this is not to say that we should feel bad about letting down our guard a little, allowing ourselves to rest when we’re tired, or any of that. In fact, the problem with the scribes is not that they aren’t doing enough; it’s probably closer to the idea that they’re doing too much, so much that they can’t take the time to slow down and take notice of what’s really going on around them.

The point is for us to remember that we often find God in places and times where we don’t expect God to be. God assigns value to things we are inclined to ignore. To believe that God has created every place we inhabit and each new day means that God can still be found even when the rest of Christmas has disappeared. We expect to see God on Christmas Eve, but after Christmas, when everything else disappears, God is still here.

The scribes and high priests might have missed God that night, but the magi didn’t. They followed that star, not knowing what to expect, and at the end of it, they experienced God. And I want you to notice one more thing about the way this story is told. At the end it says that they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, so they “left for their own country by another road.” One way of understanding that is to say that they were scared of Herod, but there’s also this other piece: because they were open to what God was doing, the wise men were changed. They took another road. Where it is needed, may you be open to another road in the year to come. Amen.