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. 

Journeying to hope

Sometimes the Bible is hard to understand.  Strike that, most of the time the Bible is hard to understand.  It’s hard because we don’t really know what kind of book it is.  A history book?  A novel? A fairy tale?  A newspaper report? A bunch of lies and exaggerations?  We scratch our heads and try to force the bible to fit into a category that we are comfortable with.  And many people assume it is an inflexible collection of facts and absolutes, while others throw it out of their libraries and lives.  It’s not to be read like a conventional book from cover to cover.

I often assume that United Church folks try reading with the intention of starting at Genesis and plowing all the way through to Revelation, then give up the first time they hit the begats.  The only time we read our bible is in church but that’s another extreme for sure.

Case in point, today’s reading from Isaiah.  Many would be excited to see the reference to gold and frankincense, and say that this is all about Jesus because Isaiah was predicting Jesus and the wise men on the first Epiphany.  Except, of course, it’s missing the myrrh.  But the bible is inerrant, right?  It can’t have mistakes as glaring as forgetting the third wise man’s gift to Jesus?

This shows up the huge gulf between what we read in the bible and what we think is in the bible.  We often think, for example, that Isaiah and the other prophets were like the stereotypical gypsy fortune teller, using tea leaves, tarot cards or stars in the sky to tell us mere ignorant mortals what would happen in the future.  Isaiah stares into his God-given Crystal Ball and predicts the birth of Jesus.

It’s a shame when we do this.  The Bible is not meant to be a Crystal Ball, and while it is often used as such, I don’t think God wants us to use it that way.  Our pattern of taking chunks of scripture every Sunday can add to that misunderstanding.  The United Church’s “Song of Faith” says that Scripture is our living word passed on from generation to generation to guide and inspire, that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era.

It also says the Bible is a library of songs, poetry, stories, memories, sermons and letters where generations of people record their best understandings and experiences with God. Sometimes the understandings clash – is God with us in our suffering or punishing us by sending our suffering?  Is God in history or is God in my life?  Does God care about foreigners or only care about the descendants of Abraham, Jacob and Moses?  And because the bible is a conversation, we see people claiming both views.  Isaiah’s passage today is such a view of Israel’s place in God’s vision, an inspiring beacon of hope for the whole world to gather around. A grand family reunion that also has all the neighbors wanting to join in the party.  So many camels coming that there is a dust storm covering the roads to Jerusalem.  Hope is a magnet for all humanity to gather around!

And Matthew remembered that scripture.  He sprinkled his gospel with many quotes from Isaiah and other prophets.  He referred to them 40 times, connecting what he knew of Jesus with what he knew of his sacred story.  Scholars see these quotes and the style he uses as signs that Matthew was a scribe, trained in scriptures, Jewish traditions and a deep understanding of the heritage of Jesus.  He was also on the cusp of separating from the synagogue institution, like an ancient Luther, John Knox or Charles Wesley, still connected to the faith of his childhood yet absorbing new understandings of scripture inspired by the teachings of Jesus.  He is the only one to talk about wise magi and stars in the sky, which again help him connect his ancient scriptures to the modern understanding he was sharing, the understanding Jesus had taught him.  On one hand, he was making those connections to the Moses story, the Isaiah story, but on the other hand, he was making connections to people who were not part of his ethnic group.  And when he has these images of royalty come from the east, the first thing he has them do is throw themselves down in the humble home in Bethlehem where they found him – no inn here, no manger, just a home – and give their deepest respects.  Only after that moment of worship did they hand over their presents.  That moment of worship which must have confused everyone who saw it, also changed them.  They saw through Herod’s evil plot, and they changed their direction home. 

Their only guide, other than, wait for it, consulting the scripture scholars in Herod’s palace, scribes like Matthew in fact, was the star in the sky. It too has a million explanations and rationalizations.  Even scientists join in the conversation of whether it was a conjunction, a comet, a horoscope event or a plot device by Matthew. In one theory, in 6 BC, Jupiter and Venus shone together like a single star, and Jupiter as the king star or planet shining with Venus, the love star, would have looked like one very bright new star.  The King of Love indeed! For six nights it shone in the early morning twilight, leading the magi forward into mystery. 

I think the Bible can be a star that lights our way, but like the magi, it is best seen through teamwork.  Isaiah and Matthew and all the other writers worked separately on their understandings of God, then church and synagogue leaders put it together like a conjunction of stars and planets. When we gather together to hear these words week after week, we are being like the wise magi, thinking and pondering and asking for directions. This can help us find bible wisdom for our time, hope for our journey, faith and inspiration for our lives. May it be a guiding light for our Epiphany season.