Who Are the True Prophets?
Dr. Standish
Luke 4:14-24
January 24, 2010
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town.
Do you have a favorite heirloom? I have one in my office that is one of my prized possessions. You may not be surprised to know that it is a book, but what book may seem kind of odd in light of the values of our modern age, where only new ideas, new products, and new fads seem to have credibility. This book is a collection of writings by an obscure, 6th-Century monk named Dorotheos of Gaza.
Dorotheos lived outside the city of Gaza, which today is the main city of the Gaza Strip. Back then the area he was in was a desert. Before becoming a monk, Dorotheos lived a privileged life. He came from a wealthy Christian family who taught him to read and write at an early age. This was a rarity in those times when only 20% of the population could read or write. He eventually became a professor of rhetoric at a school in Gaza, and became a man of great prestige. It was in the midst of this that he made the decision to become a monk. No one is sure why, but it seems that it may have happened after his parents were killed in a great earthquake. Dorotheos was wealthy himself, but gave away his wealth so that he could become an impoverished monk. As a monk, he quickly distinguished himself as a deeply spiritual and faithful man, a man whom others—both lay people and monks—sought out because of his wisdom. After his death, his writings were collected, copied repeatedly by hand, and passed on for a thousand years because of their wisdom. For the past 500 years his writings have been printed and passed around. His writings have touched millions of people for over 1500 years.
During his lifetime he was considered a sage by many, but not so much by the monks in his own monastery. He was a prophet unknown in his own hometown. The monastery he lived in was not like those of today. Back then monks often lived in a large, makeshift dormitory where they slept, ate, and prayed. They had little food, and all were devoted to eking out an existence. They were in the desert, so during the summer they lived in extreme heat, and in the winter extreme cold. When a particular monk was considered to be more spiritually adept, he would be given a small hermitage to live in. These were very small, one-room huts with little more than a mat inside to sleep on. The elements were barely kept out. Often they shared their huts with snakes and scorpions that made their way inside.
The attention Dorotheos garnered caused some of this other monks to become jealous. They criticized him for talking to so many people, rather than praying all the time. They criticized him for being popular or sought out. There was a period of time when the monks treated Dorotheos very poorly because of his popularity. They tormented him by spreading their garbage around his hut and shaking their mats out before his doorway. So what? What’s the big deal about that? The big deal is that in the desert the small pieces of food attracted all sorts of insects, many of which were stinging insects. For a number of years, Dorotheos woke up every morning covered with bumps and welts from all the insects that had shared his hut. It was how he reacted that makes him so special. You see, Dorotheos believed in being radically humble, and it’s these ideas that really impacted me.
Let me share with you what Dorotheos taught about humility. First, he taught that humility begins with recognizing that neither you nor I are great. It begins with recognizing that we are not the center of the universe. As we become more humble, we recognize that God is the canter. And so we are able to dedicate ourselves more and more to living how God wants us to live, not as we want. Through this we begin to bear God’s fruit and share blessings.
He used a metaphor for humility, saying that in the Middle East there are a certain kinds of trees that when they grow naturally bear little or no fruit as long as their branches remain upright. In order to bear fruit, they must have stones tied to their branches so that they hang low to the ground. He says that the lower the branches go, the more fruit they bear. We are similar. The lower we are, and the more humble, the more fruit we bear in our lives, and this fruit nourishes others.
He also used to say that the nearer a person is to God, the more he or she sees himself or herself a sinner. That’s not the way we think it should be. We think that the more we grow spiritually, the more we should escape sin. But Dorotheos says that it’s the opposite that happens. Once, when he taught this, a prominent citizen of Gaza challenged him. Dorotheos responded with some questions of his own. He asked the man how he sees himself in relationship to others in Gaza. “Why, as a master of the first rank,” the man responded. Then Dorotheos asked him how he would see himself in Caesarea, which was a major port for the region. The man responded, “Well, certainly as one of the more important citizens.” And if he was visiting Antioch, one of the most important cities in the Roman Empire? “I would see myself as one of the common folk.” Finally, Dorothoes asked him how he would see himself if he went before the emperor in Rome. The man said, “I would see myself as one of the poor.” Dorotheos then said, “This is what I mean when I said that the nearer a man gets to God the more he sees himself a sinner.” When we come close to God, we see our faults and our flaws in God’s light. We see ourselves as we really are, and it causes us to ask God to lead and transform us even more. This is what humility is all about. Dorotheos was an amazing Christian thinker, but he wasn’t always appreciated in his own home.
Dorotheos easily could have said what Jesus said in our passage for today, which was, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” It’s amazing that a man whose words were copied by hand for over 1000 years, and were sold for the past 500 was dismissed in his time. But that’s often the way it is with the great ones—with prophets.
What’s funny about prophets is that pretty much as a rule they had a small following in some circles, but were ignored by the world. In fact, most of the prophets we know of in the Old Testament would have been considered failures in their times. Often they were ignored, persecuted, and every once in a while, killed. We have a misconception about prophets. We tend to think of them as people who see the future. They really didn’t see or foretell the future. In fact, the few passages from the prophets that speak about the future are very sketchy. What prophets did was to tell about the present. They always spoke to people about their present situation, and how it reflected their relationship with God. The prophets tell people what God is saying now. Because they told the truth, the powerful of the day often hated the prophets.
Why are prophets typically so reviled when they’re alive, and so revered once they die? The answer is that prophets speak truth, and as Anthony de Mello once said, “The truth that sets us free is the truth we’d rather not hear.” If you are powerful, or like the system the way it is, who wants to hear that what we are doing is going against what God wants us to do? Often it’s not until prophets have passed that even the wealthy and powerful are able to recognize how true what the prophets said was.
The problem with prophets is that they tell us what God is really saying to us, and often we’d rather not hear what God has to say. In contrast, false prophets tell us what we want to hear. And the sad truth is that our culture is filled with so many popular false prophets who shout out only what we want to hear. For example, I hear false prophets on the left who whisper to us that religion is a farce, that going to church regularly doesn’t benefit your life at all, and that you can be spiritual on your own. What they are really saying is that you don’t have to listen to God if you don’t want to, you don’t have to serve God if you don’t want to, and that God really isn’t making any demands on your life. God, if God exists, is just a big puppy dog who merely wants us to pet him every once in a while. They are false prophets because they tell us what we want to hear, which is about a faith that requires nothing from us.
Meanwhile, we have false prophets on the right who tell us only that we are sinful, or only that we are bad. Also, there’s a new breed of falseness on the right coming from proponents of the prosperity gospel. I don’t know if you have heard that term, but it is a term applied to many of the megachurch pastors (like Joel Osteen) who preach a message that God only sees good and that God wants to bless us with stuff. Some of these preachers are more subtle, some are more outrageous. Osteen is much more subtle, and his message is appealingly positive, which I don’t necessarily have a problem with. The problem I see comes when they preach a message of God giving, giving, giving to us without any call for us to make sacrifices in our lives to join God in what God is doing.
For example, there are pastors like the Rev. Creflo Dollar (yes, that is his real name), who has churches in Atlanta and New York City, and preaches to members that God wants them to be wealthy and to have stuff or bling in abundance. He often leads his church in chants of “I want my bling! I want my bling!” He teaches that we can measure God’s grace in our lives by the possessions we own.
Interestingly enough there have been articles written recently questioning the role of the prosperity gospel in the recent housing and economic crashes (you can read one of those articles at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel). It seems that members of prosperity gospel churches are overrepresented among those who have defaulted on their loans. For example, one article I read talked about a landscaper, who made only about $35,000 a year, yet had taken out a loan to buy a $250,000 house, all because the pastor of his church told the members that God would provide them with possessions if they were willing to take the risk. It led him to financial ruin and bankruptcy.
Certainly God wants us to take risks, and God does bless us sometimes with material goods, but what these prosperity preaches preach is not what the gospel teaches. What they are missing is the reality of sin, the reality of the need for sacrifice, and the reality that sometimes following God doesn’t lead to gaining stuff and an easy life.
There are real prophets from God speaking all around you, but can you tell the real ones from the false ones? You can tell the difference because the real ones will generally speak about issues that we both do and don’t want to hear. There are three basic things that true prophets will talk about.
First, they will talk about the reality of sin. Real prophets don’t push the idea of sin away. The recognize that sin is a fact, and that we can see it in the violence, greed, warfare, selfishness, and indifference we can see all over the world. As G. K. Chesteron once said, all you have to do to recognize the presence of sin is to look around the world. There’s evidence in abundance.
Second, true prophets will also talk about love. True prophets will teach us that no matter how powerful sin is, love is many times greater. They will teach us that God’s love is all around us, and that it is ready to work through us, and that we are God’s hands and feet. True prophets will tell us that the answer to sin in the world is God’s love in and through us.
Finally, true prophets teach us that the only answer to sin, and the only way to immerse ourselves in God’s love, is to turn our lives over to God. It is in radically giving ourselves to God that we open our hearts, minds, and souls to love.
So, here’s my question for you. Are you able to hear not only the prophets in your midst, but Christ in your midst? Are you willing to listen to the truth you don’t want to hear in order to hear Christ’s truth that God wants you to hear?
Amen.
Are You Using Your Gifts?
by Dr. Graham Standish
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
Did you watch the Baltimore Ravens/Indianapolis Colts playoff game last night? It was a pretty good game until the fourth quarter. I have to tell you that it took me about the whole first quarter to be able to watch the Ravens’ offense when they had the ball. That had nothing to do with any kind of lingering Steelers/Ravens rivalry. It all had to do with the fact that when the Ravens had the ball I was focused on only one player: number 74, their right offensive tackle. I was fascinated by him.
It’s a strange thing to just watch an offensive lineman when watching football. You miss the whole play and don’t see what really took place until the replays. So why was I watching number 74? Because he is an inspiration to me. Number 74 is an African-American player named Michel Oher. Normally I wouldn’t mention his race, but it has something to do with why I was watching him. You see Michael Oher is the subject of a wonderful film, The Blind Side. The film is about how Oher went from a wandering teen living in the slums of Memphis, Tennessee to become a college All-American offensive tackle and an eventual NFL first-round draft choice.
Oher didn’t start out as a football phenom. His introduction to football came about accidently (although I believe it happened providentially). Oher, almost by accident, became a student at the Briarwood Christian Academy, an elite private school in Memphis. He became a student mainly because the basketball coach saw him fooling around with a basketball shooting baskets. Oher was 6’ 5” and 300 pounds, but he had the agility of a guard. So the coach advocated for the board to admit Oher, not because he was such a great athlete, but because they had a duty to be Christian in reaching out to a poor young man.
When they admitted him, they didn’t realize that Oher didn’t have a home. His mother was a full-time drug addict, part-time drug dealer whom social workers guessed had something like 12 children with 12 different men. Oher had been forcibly removed from her care when we was seven years old, and he had bumped around from foster home to foster home. In the process he gained a reputation as a “runner,” meaning that he would be in the home for a bit, but would eventually run away. At the time he entered Briarwood he was sleeping on the couches of anyone in his neighborhood who would put him up. His possessions were several pairs of shirts, some extra underwear, and socks, all of which he washed in the sinks of Laundromats.
He had been attending Briarwood for a month or so when a white family, the Tuohy family, noticed him. The parents, Leigh Anne and Sean, were at a volleyball game with their son watching their daughter, and noticed Oher sitting in the upper bleachers. Sean Tuohy is somewhat well-known. He owns something like 80 Taco Bells and Kentucky Fried Chickens around Tennessee, and is the color analyst for Memphis Grizzlies basketball games. As Leigh Anne and Sean drove their family away from the volleyball game, they noticed Oher walking in the cold rain wearing nothing but a shirt, shorts, and shoes. They asked him if he needed a ride, and he said he was just going to the gym. As they drove away, Leigh Anne realized something wasn’t right, and went back to Oher and asked him why he was going to the gym, since it was closed. Oher said he was going there because it was warm. She realized Oher had no place to sleep.
They brought him home and let him sleep on the couch for the night. That one night turned into two, then three, then a week, then two weeks, and finally they gave him a room of his own. As they got to know him they realized that he was a special man, a gentle giant, who needed to be loved. They felt is was their calling to give him the home and the love he had never before received. And Oher blossomed. Eventually they adopted him and he became part of their family, causing some of their extended family and friends to question them. The Tuohy’s didn’t care. They knew that caring for and loving Michael was their calling.
As I said, Michael Oher blossomed in their home. He became a great football and basketball player, a good student, and eventually received a full scholarship to play football at the University of Mississippi, after which he became a first-round draft pick of the Ravens. Oher not only inspires me, but so do the Tuohys, who sensed the Holy Spirit moving in their lives, and responded with faith, love, and action.
Who inspires you? Which people, by the example they lived out in their lives, have taught you to live a better life? Gwen and Larry Mellon are another couple who’ve inspired me. Do you know who they are? If you haven’t, you may have heard about their legacy, a legacy that is now crucial in helping the earthquake victims in Haiti. Both Gwen and Larry started out living the lives of the super wealthy. Larry Mellon grew up here in the Pittsburgh area as part of the Mellon family. After graduating from college he joined the family business overseeing investments and their work with Gulf Oil, but after two years he couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted a different life. He ended up getting divorced and moved to Arizona, where he bought a ranch, herding cattle from sunup to sundown. This was around 1937.
Meanwhile, Gwen grew up in New York City, and went to elite eastern private schools and colleges. She married shortly after college, and had three children. But when her husband told her that he was moving to Europe for a business opportunity, leaving his family behind, she decided to divorce him and move to Arizona. It was there, while working on a dude ranch, that she met Larry Mellon. They were soon married and, along with her three sons, they raised cattle. Still, Larry was restless.
One day in 1946, Larry walked into the living room of their home, holding a Life Magazine that had an article on the efforts of Albert Schweitzer to start a hospital in Africa. He told Gwen that he wanted to do something similar. She agreed, so they moved the family to New Orleans so that both could engage in medical studies at Tulane University. Larry became a medical doctor in 1950 at the age of 44, and the two of them moved to Deschapelles, Haiti to create L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer. Deschapelles is about 90 miles northwest of Port au Prince in an area that had no doctors for a population of a about 195,000 people. The people of the region were so poor that they couldn’t pay money, and often paid in rice, chickens, eggs, or pigs (Mellon believed that people should pay for their care, if only a pittance, because they would be more motivated to take better care of themselves if they did).
L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer is more than a hospital. It also teaches people how to farm more effectively, how to ensure their water supply is clean, and how to read. The hospital has had a huge impact on the life of Haitians for half a century. This hospital has been one of the main ones responding to earthquake victims this past week.
What inspires me about the Mellons is that though they were rich, which could have caused them to become self-focused and self-consumed, they were selfless. Their lives ran counter to our culture, which equates happiness with being rich and selfish. Our culture is persistent in thinking that wealth leads to happiness, despite the fact that in studies people today are less content than 50 years ago, and that something like 80% of people who win the big prizes in the lotteries are decidedly less happy than before they won.
What has inspired me about the Tuohy’s and the Mellons si that they are people who understood our passage at deep levels of their lives. Our passage tells us that God gives each of us gifts from the Spirit, gifts that are used to build up the body of Christ. It also reminds us that it is our choice whether we act on our gifts or not. The problem of our culture is that it is such a narcissistic culture that we have a hard time unleashing our gifts. Why? Because the more self-focused we are, the harder it is to want to use these gifts, which are always given to diminish ourselves and lift up others.
Our passage for this morning teaches a whole different mindset from our cultural mindset:. Each and every one of us has been given gifts by God to make the world better. They have been given to us to use in serving God. We were given a great example of how true this is this morning when Kim Sebring spoke to us about Project Hope. Project Hope is a mission she and her family started five years ago after the death of her son, Tyler, at age seven due to a congenital heart condition.
It would have been very easy for Kim, Mark, and their family to turn inward after such a hard tragedy, but they didn’t. They were inspired themselves, during Tyler’s stay at Children’s Hospital when they were given a basket of goods to make their stay easier. The basket had things such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, note cards, snacks, and more.
A few years after Tyler’s death, they decided to turn their inspiration into a mission of creating similar baskets for other families. The list of items in these baskets (actually now they are tote bags) can be found on their website (http://projecthope-zelienople-pa.com). They produce 60 tote bags a month, and have given Children’s Hospital, and thus parents of sick children, 3300 bags over the past five years. Kim, Mark, and their family found their spiritual gifts by tapping into their compassion for people who had struggled like them. By being open to the Spirit, they turned tragedy into love.
Whether you know it or not, you have a gift. Sometimes we aren’t so aware because we just aren’t that open to God, or at least to tapping into God all the time. But the truth is that you have been given a gift. You’ve been given many gifts. And the amazing thing about these spiritual gifts, the more we use them in life the more our basket of gifts from the Spirit overflows. Conversely, the less we use them, the more our basket shrinks. So the question is, what are you doing with your gifts? Are you keeping them for yourself, or using them for God? Are you making the world a better place through them, or are you keeping it the same?
Amen.
Have You Been Baptized in the Spirit?
by Dr. Graham Standish
Acts 8:14-24
January 10, 2010
Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give me also this power so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness.’ Simon answered, ‘Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may happen to me.’
On April 14th, 1906, on a small street in Los Angeles, something significant happened that changed the face of Christianity. A movement was started by someone few would have selected as the leader of a major movement. The man’s name was William Joseph Seymour, and he was a half-blind, self-educated African-American who had only recently moved to Los Angeles.
Seymour was the son of former slaves. His father had escaped slavery at the onset of the Civil War and had joined a Union Army “negro” regiment to fight the South. After the war his parents wandered the country until finally settling in Louisiana. The family was so poor that at one point they listed their family possessions as a chair, a table, and a chest of drawers. Who would have expected a man from this environment to launch the fastest growing Christian movement of the 20th century, and so far of the 21st.
Seymour had studied under the evangelical theologian, Charles Parham, in the late 1890s, and was fascinated by Parham’s emphasis on getting back to the original church by getting back to the experience of Pentecost. Parham taught that the modern church had forgotten about the Holy Spirit, and that it needed to become open and aware of the Spirit. Otherwise the church could do nothing because the Spirit is the engine of life for the church.
So, beginning on April 14th, in 1906, Seymour gathered people in a small house in Los Angeles, and taught them to become radically open to the Holy Spirit. Soon people were manifesting gifts and signs of the Spirit. Many spoke in tongues, which means that they spoke in a language often identified as God’s language (the apostle Paul called it “glossalia”), but which sounds unintelligible to us. Others prophesied. One woman, who swore that she had never taken piano lessons, was suddenly able to play the piano. Over the course of the ensuing months more and more people flocked to Seymour’s gathering, hoping to be touched by the Holy Spirit. Soon they bought a church on Asuza Street in Los Angeles, and thus began the “Asuza Street Revival,” which many see as the birth of the Pentecostal movement.
The Pentecostal movement has grown at an amazing pace in the U.S. In the early parts of the 21st century it was growing at a rate of 250% per year in the U.S., and 500% world-wide. There is something about becoming open to the Holy Spirit that tangibly touches people.
I’m not a Pentecostal by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I anywhere close to suggesting that we become Pentecostals here. Still, I think that the Pentecostals recovered an idea that many of us other Christians ignore, an idea mentioned in our passage. Did you hear the part in the passage where they mentioned being baptized in the Holy Spirit? It says, “Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” What do you think it means to receive the Holy Spirit?
In the Pentecostal tradition, receiving the Holy Spirit (being baptized in the Holy Spirit) means both receiving the power of the Spirit within us, and manifesting the Spirit through gifts such as speaking in tongues, holy laughter, prophesy, healing, and more.
Again, I’m not ready to suggest that we become Pentecostals, but I do believe that there’s something to their experience. But let me give you a little context to what I mean. As you already know, I’m a bit of an odd duck. I don’t think the way many, or even most, Christians think. I tend to think more in terms of how to bring things together rather than determining what’s right and what’s wrong. I believe that we live in a day-and-age in which people are stuck looking for the exact “right” answer to everything. We live in an “either-or” age in which people believe the answers to all questions, situations, problems, and crises has to be either this or that. I don’t agree. I believe that often the best answers are “both-and,” which means that sometimes the truth encompasses many different belief perspectives. For example, I’m not a Roman Catholic, nor will I ever become one, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that some of what they do is right. I believe in sharing the sacrament of communion weekly, as do the Roman Catholics, because I recognize that weekly communion has an amazing power to connect people with God. As a result we have communion every Sunday during our first service. Like the evangelicals, I believe in a personal relationship with Christ, and as a result I preach about experiencing Christ in our lives. And like the Pentecostals I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit.
One reason we have such an extensive healing ministry is due to my belief in the legitimacy of something the Pentecostals recovered, which is that prayer can heal. I may not believe in the idea that when faith and prayer connect with healing, it should be evidently miraculous the way we see on television with televangelists. I don’t go quite that far. Still, I believe God that God heals, and that God responds to prayer. But unlike many Pentecostals, I believe that healing can come just as much through the hands of doctors and nurses as it can come miraculously. God can heal through both. I don’t believe in either prayer or medicine. I believe in both prayer and medicine.
What all of this means is that I believe that we should work in our faith to become more intentionally open to the Holy Spirit. I don’t believe we should do this to become more Pentecostal. I believe we should do it in order to become more authentically Christian. At the same time, my understanding of what it means to receive and be baptized in the Holy Spirit is different from the Pentecostals. I believe that the sacrament of baptism we do is an important baptism because it connects all of us with God’s grace, a grace that cleanses all of us. At the same time, I believe that there comes a point at which we also need to make a radical decision: am I willing to become open to the Spirit, let it enter my life, and help me to live in God’s way? When we do this, life changes in amazing ways.
So what happens when we are baptized in the Holy Spirit—when we receive the Spirit? I believe that four basic experiences grow in our lives.
First, we begin having a sense of connection with something beyond. We begin to experience the Divine, the Holy, God, in a tangible way that leads us to know God exists. We don’t need objective proof of God’s existence because we have tangible experiences of God. Just as when we fall in love we don’t need someone to prove to us objectively that love is real, when we are open to the Spirit we don’t need proof that God is real. We develop a tangible connection with God that moves beyond objective proof.
Second, we begin having an intuitive sense of what God wants in each moment of life. We develop more than a connection. We gain a sense of God’s will. This is more than just knowing what is right or wrong in life. It’s a sense of simply knowing in each moment what God wants. I don’t want to make it sound as though this sense of God’s will makes each of us an ultimate authority on what God wants. I’m not talking about having a grand sense of what kind of healthcare system God wants for our country. Our sense of God’s will is humbler than that. It’s simply a sense of knowing what God wants for our lives.
Third, we develop a sense of knowing where we fit in life. I believe that one of the primary problems of modern culture is that too many people don’t know where they fit. They wander, wondering what the purpose is for their lives. The Spirit helps us come to know where we fit. That fit may be in something very small, recognizing that where we fit is in simply serving God in simple ways. Whatever our place of fit is, the Spirit leads us to know where that place is, and to accept it.
Finally, we experience coincidences. I believe that experiencing holy coincidences, or providences, is the hallmark of receiving the Holy Spirit. The Spirit makes things happen. Most of these providences are small, and act just as reminders that God is with us in joyful ways. For example, one coincidence has happened as I preached this sermon. The choir sang a song, “I See the Light,” which was an early 20th century gospel song that was a favorite among the early Pentecostals (this is a different song from the Hank Williams song of the same name). What was coincidental about them singing this song was that this hymn was a favorite among the early Pentecostals. And our choir chose the song almost by accident. They had to pick a song for this past Sunday that would work for the members who would be in worship. Because so many would be missing, they had a difficult time finding the right song. They went through six others before finally settling on “I See the Light.” The amazing thing is that by seeming accident they chose this song on the Sunday that I was preaching about Pentecostals. Out of all the Sundays to sing it, why this past Sunday? But this is the kind of thing that happens when we are open to the Spirit. We get joyful coincidences.
I don’t know how many of you actually believe in the ability to be baptized in the Spirit, but if you do and want to receive the Spirit, I have some suggestions. First, ask God to give you the Spirit. Do it simply and sincerely. Just ask God to let the Spirit enter your life. If you are sincere about it, you’ll receive the Spirit. And don’t worry about having some sort of “slain in the Spirit” experience. What I’ve learned over the years about God is that God is merciful, generous, loving, powerful, and polite. In other words, God’s not going to force something on you. You’ll experience the Spirit in a way that fits with your openness and personality.
Second, make a decision to be open to the Spirit in more moments of your life. Don’t just become open in one part. Bring the Spirit into every part. This is not as easy as it sounds. We compartmentalize. We make Sunday morning the time for God. Sunday afternoon is the time for football. Sunday evening? More football. Monday morning we go to work. In the evenings we watch television. Saturday is to play. Sunday is back to God. That’s not the way God wants it to work. God wants us to bring God into every moment of life by becoming open to the Spirit in every moment. God can be there to guide us and help us at church, at home, at work, and everywhere else, but only if we are open to the Spirit in each moment.
Finally, trust the Spirit to flow throughout your life. Trust that if you are open, wonderful things will happen. Learn to look for them. Learn to be open to them. Learn to expect them. If you do, you’ll discover the Spirit everywhere.
We’re called to receive the Spirit in our lives. Faith isn’t just supposed to be an intellectual activity. It’s meant to be a life activity. The question I want you to reflect on is this: how open you are to the Spirit?
Amen.
God's Presence in Our Midst
by Dr. Graham Standish
1:1-18
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
I became very familiar with this passage when I was in seminary. Why? Because I had to spend three months translating it from Greek to English. All Presbyterian pastors have to take two years of a biblical languages during seminary, which means that we have to learn to read both Greek and Hebrew. So, during my first year in seminary I took Greek, learning it through the “inductive method.”
What does that mean? It’s a bit different than the way you would have learned languages in school, where you memorize vocabulary and are taught sentence structures. Inductive learning teaches the language by immersing students in it through translation of a text. Our text was first chapter of John, the very passage you read above. For almost three months we translated the passage, little by little each day, all the while learning the sentence structure and vocabulary. The result was that I became very familiar with it, especially with the first five verses, which you can see below in the original Greek.
1Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. 2οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. 3πάντα δι' αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν 4ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων: 5καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.
I realize that when you look at this passage,… well, it looks like Greek to you. It does so also to me now that I’m twenty years away from having translated anything from Greek. Still, when you spend three months intensively translating a chapter of the Bible you become very familiar with it. In those three month I became very aware that these five verses may be among the most profound in the Bible. Perhaps that’s why they get ignored so often. They are so profound that people don’t pay attention in their pursuit of something simpler.
I have a theory about religious belief, which is that we want so much for faith to be simple and easy to understand that we intentionally miss or ignore the deeper things of faith. I find this to be true not only among Christians, but among non-Christians. For instance, one reason atheists are attracted to the belief that there is no God is the simplicity of it. When God is cut out of life, then life, at least intellectually, becomes simpler. When you deny the existence of God you don’t have to read the Bible, understand complex theologies, or worry about a relationship with God. Agnostics also have similar benefit to deciding to make no decision on God’s existence. New Agers make religion much simpler by believing whatever they want to believe. They can believe in crystals, the goddess, God, nature, or whatever else they want. Also, you see this kind of oversimplification of faith in radical Islam, where Muslims oversimplify their beliefs to make it allow for the mass murder of innocents in the name of Allah. That is not what Islam teaches, but that doesn’t matter to extremists.
Ironically, this tendency to oversimplify religious belief allows Christians to denigrate Islam as a violent religion, suggesting that just because an incredibly small minority believes in mass murder in the name of Allah, then all 1.2 billion Muslims must believe that. That’s much like suggesting that because White Supremacist Christians believe in the killing of African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, and all non-Christians, that must be what all of us Christians believe.
The point of all this is that it is a chronic human tendency to ignore the more complex and profound points of religious belief in order to find clarity through oversimplification. Thus many Christians miss the depths of our passage for today, which has wonderful things to teach us, if we are willing to learn.
What I find so profound about our passage is that it teaches an understanding about Jesus that you find in only one other place in the Bible, which was the passage last week from Colossians 1:15-17: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Our passage, especially verses 1 through 5, have a similarly profound message. Let’s take a look at the three main points of the five versus in depth, and you’ll see what I mean.
1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
Does this passage strike you as profound? The first hundred times I read it I noticed very little. Then, slowly, I became aware of the ramifications of this passage. It presents a different picture from what we normally think about Jesus. We normally think of him as a historical figure who lived 2000 years ago, or as a messiah who sits on the right hand of God. This passage says that Jesus was and is much more than this.
To give you some context, it helps to give you a quick lesson on the gospels and Jesus. Do you know where each one begins its story of Jesus? Mark begins by telling us about Jesus’ baptism. So Mark basically starts the story of Jesus when Jesus begins his ministry. Matthew goes back a little further and starts with Jesus’ birth. Luke goes back even further and begins telling the story of Jesus with his conception. Look above at where John begins the story. He starts it at the beginning of creation. He is saying that Jesus wasn’t just a man born in 4 B.C. who lived to 30 A.D. John is telling us that the man, Jesus, was the incarnation of God who was at the beginning. There was no time without Christ, since Christ was both with God and was God at the beginning.
Also, John gives Jesus a new name, calling him the “Logos,” which we translate as “Word.” I’m not sure that this is the best translation. “Logos” means much more than just “Word.” It is the root of the word “logic,” which means “reason.” But those words don’t capture the fullness of the word logos. In the ancient Greek world the word logos also referred to something called the “Golden Ratio,” which was a ratio that many in the ancient world thought was perfection. The actual formula for the ratio is this:
I can honestly tell you that I have no idea what this means, but it is a ratio found in mathematics, architecture, and all of nature. It is a ratio that exists in most physical things, such as a right angle of a door, the Parthenon, the pyramids of Egypt, the construction of the chambers in a nautilus shell, and the stem and veins of a leaf. It was a number applied to creation, and it was believed to manifest perfection.
When Jesus is called the Logos, John is saying that he was manifesting the perfection of God in creation. It is saying that in Christ you find the perfection of God—a perfection also found throughout creation.
2. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
Look at what the passage says. It says that in the beginning Jesus existed, he was with God, and he was God, and that all things were created through him. In other words, Christ is the ongoing power of creation. We can say that the Father is the Creator, the Source, but Christ is the power of ongoing creation.
Think of the ramifications of this. It isn’t just saying that Jesus was the power of creation at the beginning. It was saying that Jesus was and is the power of creation now and in the future. Whenever you look at the growth of a plant, you are seeing the power of creation in Christ at work. Whenever you see stars in a night sky, you are seeing the power of creation in Christ. And when we look at each other, we are seeing the manifestation of Christ in us. Christ isn’t just God incarnate in this one human being 2000 years ago. Christ is the life and power of God in all of life today, although unlike the rest of creation we are given the power to deny that life. What is significant about the man Jesus is that we believe he was the full manifestation of God in that his humanity didn’t strive with his divinity. In him divinity and humanity were one. In us, we are always at war internally, as our humanity and spirituality duke it out, but that wasn’t the case with Jesus. And through the life, death, and resurrection of that one man, we’ve seen the way God is. But we can also experience something of God in nature and each other, too.
3. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
This is a continuation of the idea presented in the first few sentences. It tells us the Christ wasn’t just the power of creation, but that he was and is life. In other words, Christ is the life-force in all of us. He is the power of what makes us alive. He is the power of life that God gives to the universe, and he is that ongoing life. It’s for this reason that we can say as Christians that when we are open to God in Christ, we become more alive. Our lives take on a greater substance. In contrast, when we give into the darkness of life and give ourselves over to addictions, attitudes, and actions that are toxic, life diminishes in us because we become cut off from God. The more open we are to God in Christ, the more God’s life fills us and we come alive in wonderful ways.
Do you have any idea of what this passage says to us about our faith? It’s because of this passage that I often talk about the life of Christ within us during communion. I don’t say it as a platitude. I believe that when we take part in the sacrament, we create an opening for this life of Christ allowing the ongoing power of creation, the Logos, to come alive in us. The sacraments allow God’s life to grow in us.
It’s also because of this passage that I often talk about us being little christs. It suggests that the more we are truly open to Christ, the more we are able to incarnate Christ in our thoughts, our actions, and our love.
It’s because of this passage that I believe in more than just the historical Jesus and Jesus on the cross. This passage has led me to believe in Christ who is everywhere, in everyone, and continually leading us to a greater way of living—if we are open to him.
So, with all that said, I want to leave you with a question: How open are you to this Christ? How you answer that question will make all the difference in the world.
Amen.
Jesus Grown Up, Faith Grown Bigger
by Connie Frierson
Colossians 1: 15-20
Graham advised me to make this sermon simple. After the rush and frenzy of the commercial season this is the Sunday for the true faithful, the troopers of the faith who turn out even on the day after the big day. Graham went on to suggest that I use a film clip or keep the sermon to a few good stories. In that vein I scanned through my brain for popular films with theological importance. And I came up with Talladega Nights, The Legend of Ricky Bobby. As you can see my treasury of film clips isn’t as esoteric as Grahams.
In this silly movie there was one theological idea that is worth sharing. Ricky Bobby is a stock car driver and an idiot who enjoys unreasonable success. This movie owes an apology to all things southern and I can’t actually show the clip because there is just no way to clean it up. But here is the scene. Will Ferrell who plays Ricky Bobby is offering a prayer at the dinner table. Ricky loves the Christmas Jesus best, so he begins his prayer to “Dear tiny Jesus, with Golden Fleece diapers and tiny, fat balled up fists.” Ricky Bobby’s wife interrupts and reminds him, “Jesus did grow up you know. You don’t always have to call him baby.”
“Oh no,” says Ricky Bobby. “I like the Christmas Jesus best.” So he goes on, “Dear 8 lb. 6oz. newborn infant Jesus. Don’t even know a word yet. Just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent… Thank you for all your power and your grace, dear baby God. Amen.”
I think Will Ferrell might be on to something here. We like the baby Jesus best too. We sing, “Away in a Manger no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.” We sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night…Holy infant so tender and mild.”
So this morning let’s think together about this love of the baby Jesus and wonder a bit if we aren’t drinking a little too much eggnog, thick and sweet. Is there a problem with our ideas about Jesus? It seems this Sweet Baby Jesus can be both a good and bad thing in our relationship with God.
What is good about a swaddled savior? The good is that God came down, lived in the neighborhood, and dwelt among us, as the First Chapter of John says. A baby Jesus who is allowed to grow up knows what it is to be fully human, is no stranger to family dynamics, bullies next door, greedy tax collectors, oppressive Roman armies, sickness, friendship, love, loss and even death. If we let the baby grow up, we know God to be with us in a brand new way. That fabulous, precious baby Jesus is a way of knowing a God, who knows us.
The nuclear scientist, Robert Oppenheimer said, “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.” John Yates of The Falls Church in Virginia tells a story about a little girl who understood the same profound idea that Oppenheimer quote. The little girl said, “Some people couldn’t hear God’s inside whisper, and so he sent Jesus to tell them out loud.” Our God came in person, so that we can know God, in the person, of Jesus Christ.
The only problem with the sweet baby Jesus is when we limit him to babyhood. If we limit Jesus to babyhood, Jesus never grows teeth. A Jesus with out teeth is small, personal and powerless. The danger is when we make our God so personal that we distort who God is. Ricky Bobby’s baby Jesus really had very little power to save anyone in his golden, fleece diapers. Ricky Bobby’s baby Jesus was all about helping Ricky Bobby. That Baby Jesus would never ask you to love your neighbor as yourself, take up your cross and follow him, give to the poor, heal the sick, care for our planet or be a servant to all. The teaching of a grown up Jesus are challenging and following that Jesus changes us and shakes up our world.
So what is the solution to having a baby Jesus and a baby faith? The solution is we need a bigger Jesus. We need to search for the grown up Jesus and even beyond that earthly Jesus. We also need to at least begin to conceive of the Jesus who is God, the Jesus that is the Christ. We can’t box up the Son of God in a cradle. Our passage today Colossians 1:15-20 allows us to glimpse a Christ that is beyond a baby, beyond a man, beyond even a personal savior. Colossians 1 is like the antidote to too many Christmas cookies. The Ancient Hymn of Christ in our scripture this morning is Jesus who is the Christ, a savior on a cosmic scale. This is the Jesus who doesn’t just save us, but saves the world, who remakes a new earth and even a new heaven. This Jesus is the image of an invisible God. This Jesus allows us a glimpse of the power of creation that is beyond our little lives, our parochial concerns and our limited view. When you tinker with your spiritual life you are entering into God’s world on a grand scale, not our own small scale.
Jesus shows us an invisible God. How can we wrap our heads around that? Because we are physical creatures we need to conceive of God in images, in metaphor and things we do know. That is why we love the baby Jesus. We know how to love babies. But how shall we glimpse the invisible God and love a God beyond our understanding?
I think science might help, specifically the science of comets. Scientists believe that comets are like underdone leftovers. Comets are bits of gas and dust that form our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Comets are little frozen storage containers of the original matter. So they are like little frozen time capsules. Astronomers and physicists believe that if we could capture just a little of a comet before it is burned up in our atmosphere, that we could learn some fundamental answers to how planets were born. NASA has been working on this. In 2006, NASA completed a mission to retrieve comet dust. They created an armored spacecraft with a cosmic catcher’s mitt to go out and catch the comet dust. Then the dust is tucked into a reentry pod and landed in January 2006 in the Utah desert. Decades of research will surround this little teaspoon of space dust. From that tiny bit scientists will draw conclusions about how the earth was formed.
It is the same with God. A single solitary person called the Christ can tell us what we need to know about the invisible God. The meaning of life, my life, your life all of life, is held in one life of Christ. Jesus is our face for an invisible God. Flesh and blood and a life lived and died can tell us about an infinite and eternal Spirit. We learn about God’s love in that little baby and in the man, Jesus. But even before that, “For and by him all things were created.” This is Christ the creator, beyond Jesus the man. Christ is the head of the church, not just our little church, but churches outside these door, and across time. Christ is all the fullness of God dwelling inside of him.
How do we begin to get this glimpse of a bigger Jesus, a bigger God? One of the ways we do this is to pray and meditate on the foundations of our faith in the bible. If you want a bigger God to empower your life, even take over you life, look to scripture. One of the ways we want to help you do this in the New Year is to encourage a practice of reading and praying through scripture. In the next week if you are a church member you will receive a letter and a pamphlet “A 2010 Bible Reading Guide.” The letter outlines how you might use this pamphlet. The very first reading on January 1st includes our passage today from Colossians. By reading, meditating and letting these words work on us, we can begin to see a bigger God and grow into a bigger faith. A bigger faith can respond to bigger challenges. A bigger faith can look beyond our own needs to the needs of others.
So if you want to glimpse God, if you want to grow in faith, look at the baby in Bethlehem. Look at the life and teaching of Jesus. See the compassion of a God who comes to us. Experience the forgiveness he offers. Be awed at the creation he made. Catch a comet’s tail and study the complexities of a world born of God breathed dust. This is the far-reaching aspect of glimpsing a Christ bigger than a baby faith.
My wish for you this Christmas season is that you have all the fullness of Christ in you, that you recognize, treasure and nurture an awareness of that thimbleful of God in us that is Jesus Christ.
AMEN.
Witnesses to Christ's Birth:
by Dr. Graham Standish
Matthew 2:1-12
December 20, 2009
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “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.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Matthew 2:1-12
December 20, 2009
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “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.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Witnesses to Christ's Birth: The Magi
by Dr. Graham Standish
Matthew 2:1-12
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “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.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Matthew 2:1-12
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “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.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)