Everlasting Light

We had a six hour power outage last Monday. Peanuts compared to what others have had after a bad storm, but it seemed like a looooong time without heat or light.  We couldn't open our fridge door, and we were in the middle of making soup for lunch when it happened. There’s nothing like losing power for a period of time, especially in the winter, to highlight how important light is for Canadians.  The sky starts dimming before 4 pm, and even with candles, it’s hard to read or knit or play cards as the sun quickly sets.  If it’s cloudy or snowy, there’s even less light. And by 5 pm a bunch of candles won’t make much of a dent in the gloom of the evening. We bundled up as the house temperature dropped, and even tried putting a mirror behind the candles to magnify the light.  We were very relieved when everything started up again. It’s easy to take light for granted in this country when we can have as much as we want, whenever we want, at the flick of a switch.  

Light was not taken for granted by ancient people because so much of what they did depends on it.  That dependence explains why people were so aware of what was happening in the night sky. Humans have been fascinated by the stars for a long time. 

The twelve signs of the zodiac were first developed by Babylonian star watchers about 600 years before Jesus.   Outsiders following a star to Bethlehem might not have been that unusual back then.  It may have been their way of doing scientific research.  Did this particular star or planet arrangement mean something significant?  Let’s go test our idea, check out the hypothesis and report back to the others at home. That might have been what the Magi were doing.  There are reports of Magi visiting Nero in 66 AD, and other historic records of similar visits to prominent people, but no records of who the Magi were or where they lived. We still speculate about where the Magi came from and how long they traveled to find Jesus.  One of the reasons for the twelve days of Christmas is that the early church guessed that it took 12 days, a biblically significant number, from the birth of Jesus to the arrival of the visitors in Bethlehem.

This visit by the Magi would have been quite scandalous to Matthew’s listeners.  Matthew and his congregation were steeped in the Jewish scriptures, they would have known the Isaiah passage from frequent readings, they would know the stories of refugees like Joseph’s family going to Egypt to avoid danger, and babies like Moses being targeted for execution by ruthless leaders like Pharaoh.  They would have appreciated Matthew’s family tree for Jesus, connecting him to Abraham and David and Ruth and Bathsheba.  But then Matthew threw his people a shocking thought.  The first people to recognize the royalty of Jesus were not Jewish! Jewish royalty, Jewish spiritual leaders, they were just as surprised as anyone when the Magi showed up on their doorstep looking for a baby and an heir to the throne.

And Matthew doesn’t specify what country they were from, what ethnicity they were, how many they were, or what their names are.  Balthazar, Melchior and Gaspar are first mentioned some 700 years later, not before.  It’s a nice piece of theology to think that they were from three different parts of the world, showing the divergence of the people who were hearing the message of Christ and responding to it so warmly.  The first churches that were established were in places like Ethiopia, Samaria, Egypt, Rome, and India, and that’s a surprisingly broad reach.  The Ethiopian Church prides itself in being the oldest outside of Jerusalem, dating back to the time of Acts.  

So it was foreigners from a different faith tradition who followed a sign, a hunch, a conjunction of planets, or maybe a comet.  Foreigners who came to a palace and went away without meeting the new heir to the throne. The chief priests and religious scholars gave their advice but showed no inclination to check out what may be happening in their own back yard.  Herod didn’t go either, content to stay in his warm palace full of soldiers to keep him safe.  These foreigners found Bethlehem without a tour guide or escort, and found Jesus, their expectations turned upside down, and their assumptions of what made a king was also reversed.  

Many people still go looking for answers even today.  They look for security and safety by travelling far from home when what they look for might be in their own back yards. They go to experts and gurus who are so sure they know all the answers that they won’t try looking with an open mind.  Foreigners and visitors seeking something so astonishing that they will fall to their knees in humble awe in front of something as simple and common place as a baby.

It's easy to be more like the chief priests and scribes, listening to news but not letting it shift our thinking.  Like taking light for granted until we lose electricity. But it’s more life-transforming to hear newcomers with curiosity, to join in their quest, to listen to their surprise and to share in their journey of faith.

What does it take to welcome foreign travelers looking for spiritual meaning?  It takes what the magi had.  Curiosity to ask questions about what they are experiencing.  It takes patience to listen and ask questions, like the Magi did when they went to Herod’s palace.  It takes humbleness; the magi knelt to a baby in a poor household with a dirt floor instead of a palace with marble tiles.  And it takes intuition, recognizing when we are talking to a dangerous Herod and taking the long way home for safety’s sake.

Curiosity, humbleness, patience and intuition are as valuable today for modern seekers as they were for the Magi.  They are tools for a healthy spiritual life and part of the signposts of a healthy congregation.  Curiosity, humbleness, patience and intuition help us grow our own faith.  They also help us make room for both newcomers wanting to find Jesus, and old-timers welcoming others to our community of faith.  They help us invite others to seek the light. May we all seek the light like the Magi did for a more Christ-filled 2025. Amen.