January 6, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 2:1–12

As I read the newspaper lately, I keep running across references to “big data”—the term seems to be traceable back to a Harvard Business Review article from last October, but the concept is being talked about in a variety of contexts. Big data is essentially about our exponentially increasing ability to collect and track large amounts of information. It started years ago with the invention of the computer, changed as computers went from big to small, and is now changing again as the number of bytes we can manipulate at one time goes from small to unbelievably big. A lot of the most obvious applications for big data are found in our interactions with the Internet—the way web pages are constantly collecting, processing, and utilizing all kinds of data you enter into a computer or your phone, everything from the pages you search to the vocabulary you use in an email. It is assumed that the collection and use of all of this data has almost limitless potential for understanding what motivates us and what causes us to make choices. These uses of big data will revolutionize business and economics in the next generation.

I was thinking about big data this week in a kind of surprising way. In some respects, the story we have today about the wise men visiting the Christ child is a big data story in our tradition: we know a lot about this story. Many of us can remember more details about the wise men than most other stories in the Bible. If I asked you to tell the story or to draw a picture of it, many of you could do a pretty good job, because there are lots of details, lots of data. Many of us probably have a sense of how they looked, the animals they rode upon, the appearance of the gifts and the treasure chests, the scene of various folk gathered around the manger scene as they take the gifts out of the travel packs and lay them before the baby Jesus, with his parents, Mary and Joseph, looking on.

The irony of the story is that it probably includes more flawed data than just about any other story in the Bible. Consider some common assumptions about this story and take a look at the text. First of all, most of us assume that there were three kings. The text never says that. It says that there were three gifts, and it is from that that we tend to assume there were three gift givers.

We also assume they were kings. The idea that they were kings appears nowhere in the story itself; that is most likely a detail that was extrapolated from a prophecy about the messiah as found in the book of Isaiah. Most likely they were not kings; the word in Greek—magoi, from which we derive the term “magi”—indicates that they were probably astrologers, people who studied ancient texts and traditions and watched the movements of the heavens for strange events, waiting for something special to happen.

We assume that they followed a star—that part does appear in the text. I think many of us assume that a star appears on the night the baby was born and that these magi get up and follow it, arriving at the manger scene twelve days later, on the day the church calls Epiphany. This is questionable when you consider that travel in that day and age was slow and that in the passage to follow, when Herod hears of the birth, he insists on killing all children under the age of two—that suggests that these wise men were on the road for a long time before finding the child.

Finally, we have the wonderful, odd names and descriptions given to the wise men: Melchior, who was an old man and wore a long white beard; Gaspar, young and beardless with ruddy complexion; and Balthasar, black skinned and heavily bearded. We have the Venerable Bede, the famous monk who lived and wrote in the seventh century, to thank for that list of details that is completely unbiblical.

So what are we to do when confronted with all of this bad data, particularly at a time when, in so many areas of life, big data has become so important? What are we supposed to think about the fact that one of our most beloved and picturesque stories in all of the Bible has been retold, time and again, using some of the very worst data we have?

Well, as complicated and perhaps troubling as that question may seem, I think there is a reasonably simple answer. The story contains a couple of the simplest and most important cues about who Jesus was, so people have always loved it, and they’ve told and embellished it time and time again because of its potential to draw us into the story, but the point has always been the same. The two cues are the gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh—and wise men themselves.

The gifts are important because of what they suggest about generosity. Throughout the Old Testament, ritual sacrifices are demanded of the Israelites: they give gifts as a sign of their devotion to God. In the same way, the lesson we learn from the gifts of the wise men is that worshiping God means giving gifts—bringing the very best of what we have and what we are and committing it to God’s service. An important detail is that in the same way that gifts are so often given, there is an exchange of gifts going on here. The wise men bring their finest gifts because they are responding to the infinitely generous gift God has given. In the gift of Jesus, God has given God’s own self to us. The one who comes into the world to teach us how to live, how to love one another, how to be generous with each other is given to us by God as a gift. During the Christmas season, the church often does a pretty thorough job of downplaying the importance of Christmas gifts, but if they are understood this way, gifts are an indispensable part of Christmas. In the gifts, we remember and recognize what God has done for us, and we recognize that the generosity we extend to each other is one of the most important parts of remembering Christmas.

The other key to the meaning of this story is the wise men themselves. They are foreign people who have come from far away. That’s because the wise men have always been understood as a sign that Christ came for all kinds of people. Jesus was not meant to be a savior for just one group of people, certainly not for one ethnicity and not even for one religion, and the wise men—foreign people from a faraway place—speak to that reality loud and clear.

Think about it: to begin with, the wise men certainly aren’t Jewish. They aren’t from the local area, where all the Jewish people would have lived; additionally, they are astrologers—they are involved in a completely different form of religion and spirituality than most people we are used to thinking about as followers of Jesus. Had you met them on the street, it would have been very unlikely for them to ask you how you were doing keeping the Ten Commandments and more likely for them to ask, “Hey, what’s your sign?” These people are not like Jesus and his family.

This is a rather vital piece of information for Christians today, because it says something about God’s openness to wherever each of us may be on our own religious journey. People arrive at church these days out of such a wide range of beliefs and experiences. A couple of generations ago, preachers could make a safe assumption that most of the people in the pews were on a somewhat similar kind of religious path or at least were equipped with the same collection of information. If you were in a Presbyterian church, most of the people in the pews had grown up Presbyterian, their parents were Presbyterian, they had been to Sunday school to learn Bible stories as a child, their parents had taken them to worship and taught them what to expect in church.

Most of that doesn’t apply anymore. There may be a few of you who fit that description, but most of you probably don’t. It’s much more likely that you grew up in a different kind of church or that your experience of church is very different from that of your parents. Maybe you didn’t grow up at church at all; maybe this is the first Sunday you’ve been to church in a long time. Maybe you aren’t really sure about being here, or maybe you’re trying to reconcile Christian beliefs with beliefs or practices that come from other religions or from no religion at all.

If you fit any of these descriptions or another one I haven’t even mentioned, it’s important that you’re here. And this is how we know: the wise men weren’t Christians; they weren’t Jews. They were astrologers. To most of the people Jesus would meet in his life, they were total outsiders. But they were some of the very first people to be welcomed at the manger. Their story of bringing gifts is one of the clearest indications we have that Jesus Christ is a gift for us all.

It’s amazing that, in spite of the problems with the “data,” the truths of this story come shining right through. When we hear the story of these wise men, with whatever details are given to dress it up, we always hear a story that is for all, for anyone who would search for God, bringing the very best of who they are and what they have. Ours is a faith meant to be as open and welcoming as it is generous, and even our oldest traditions should remind us of that. It is for this reason that it is a story worth remembering and telling again and again with whatever details you care to add. The powerful reminder the wise men give is that Jesus is a gift from God, a gift that is available to all people, and that his message is one to encourage us all to live generously. That is why we keep repeating this story about the ones who brought gifts and who knelt down and worshiped the child.

Amen.