“A CHANGE OF PLANS”
Matthew 2:1-12
(01-06-08) Epiphany

I have an old picture of me, dressed as a wise man in a Christmas pageant,
taken at the old Korean Presbyterian Church in Calgary.
I remember that you had to be a little older to play a wise man.
I think the picture of me is when I was in Jr. High School.
You started as a sheep or lamb, usually.
Then you became an angel, or a shepherd.
But as you got older you got the better roles, like Mary or Joseph,
or if you were really lucky, you got to play Herod, or one of the Wise Men.
Everybody else had to wear some tacky terry cloth bath robe for their costume,
but if you were a Wise Man, you got to wear the choir’s shiny, satin robe.
And you got a crown, and you got to wear all sorts of jewelry, the more the merrier. What Christmas pageant would be complete without the Wise Men,
or Magi as they are sometimes called, kneeling before the infant baby,
offering their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh?
They are such a time honored and welcomed part of the tradition of Christmas.
And its all a bunch of sentimental nonsense!

Sometimes I don’t think we get just how revolutionary the Bible really is.
From time to time we need to put some distance between ourselves
and our too familiar, and often too uncritical, reading of the Bible stories.
The first readers of Matthew’s gospel account
would have been rather shocked at the appearance of the Wise Men.
These were not honored guests, royalty seeking to honor royalty.
These were astrologers, perhaps magicians, charlatans.
They were probably from the area of Persia,
they were most definitely Gentiles, impure and unclean.
In fact the Bible warns against associating with such people.
A Jewish rabbi, writing not long before the birth of Jesus notes,
“He who learns from a Magi is worthy of death.”
So for the first readers of Matthew’s gospel account,
the presence of these Magi would have been troubling at best
and more likely quite appalling.
It would be something akin to having a group of Muslims today
come into a Jewish synagogue or Christian church and wanting to be part of the worship.
Not your usual Wise Men image, is it!

But Matthew wants to make a clear point here,
from the very outset of his gospel account.
In fact Matthew sets the tone even earlier when he lists the genealogy of Jesus.
In a culture which traced family history exclusively through males,
Matthew includes four women, besides Mary.
Tamar, Rahab and Ruth were all non Jewish,
and though Bathsheba, while not mentioned explicitly, may have been Jewish,
she is referred to as the wife of Uriah, who was a Hittite.
From the earliest part of his gospel,
by including women and foreigners,
Matthew seems to make a point of noting
that God’s activity will not be limited to only men or only to the people of Israel.
So the appearance of the Wise Men, as unexpected as they may be,
is very consistent with what Matthew is intending.

But how it is that they appear in the first place?
We don’t really know.
The text says that they came asking where the child was who was born king of the Jews, for they observed his star at its rising and came to pay him homage.
There are many answers to the question, what star, and none of them are certain.
Perhaps they were familiar with the words of the prophet Isaiah
who wrote from exile about the future of Jerusalem saying,
“A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah,
all those from Sheba shall come.
They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.”
In any event, they came in search of the king
and went to the place where one would expect the king to be, to Jerusalem.
There they encountered Herod, who upon hearing what the Wise Men said,
was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.
Being guided to Bethlehem, the Wise Men took leave of Herod
and found the place over which the star had stopped.

Whatever else the Wise Men might have been,
they were reverent in the face of the divine.
The text says that when they saw that the star had stopped,
they were overwhelmed with joy and once they entered the house,
they knelt down and paid homage to the child.
Interestingly, after all their journeying,
after who knows how long they had been on the road,
when they finally reach the end of their journey, the goal of their quest,
they aren’t interested in getting anything from Jesus,
in fact Jesus doesn’t say or do anything and neither does Mary.
No, rather, these Wise Men, in an act of true wisdom,
worship the child and pay him homage.

It makes you think.
How often do we come in search of Jesus
only so that we can ask him for something?
Jesus help me, Jesus do this for me, Jesus tell me what I need to know.
But the Wise Men just worshiped and paid him homage.
Our first response to encountering the sacred must be worship.
As the Westminster Catechism puts it,
“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
It does make you think about all those so called theologies of prosperity,
where our first response to discovering God
is all about wanting him to bless us and prosper us,
where finding God is like finding the bottomless pot of gold.
The first response, the only proper response to encountering God,
is to serve him, worship him, to pay him homage.

But something else happens when we encounter the sacred.
We are changed.
The Wise Men found the child and they were to report back to Herod with the location. But upon encountering Jesus,
they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod
and they left for their country by another road.
A change of plans.
The truth is, my friends, that when we encounter the sacred,
when the sacred encounters us,
when we worship the Christ, the Son of God,
we are changed, our plans get changed.

Today is the first Sunday of the new year.
And though its already six days into the new year
and many of our new year’s resolutions may have already been shattered,
still, many of us will have given some serious thought
to how we will live this year and what our priorities will be.
No doubt some of that planning will have taken into account
who’s in and who’s out in our lives.
We make choices, whether intentionally or not,
about who we have room for in our lives and who doesn’t make the cut.
My hope and God’s invitation to us as we worship him this morning
is that we might have a change of plans
when it comes to making room for those who we might have already written off.
God encounters us in worship this morning and asks us,
who are the Magi for us today?
Who are the outsiders, who are the unacceptable, who are the undesirable to us today?
Who don’t we want to have any part of in our lives and why?

Think of what’s happening in the world.
No doubt we’ve heard about the difficulties in Kenya, about the slaughter of people,
including those who had sought sanctuary in a church only to be burned alive.
Maybe we saw the report on the atrocious and pitiful conditions in Zimbabwe.
And maybe we think that there’s just no hope for Africa.
Maybe we think that these people don’t warrant our help any longer,
after all nothing seems to change.
So we won’t care any more,
we’d rather put our resources and efforts into people
who will give us a better return on our investment.
Or perhaps its Pakistan and the ugliness of terror and violence
and the seeming impossibility of democracy to take root in that part of the world.
Maybe we think that its better just to write them off.
And while we’re at it, why not include the Afghanis, the Iraqis, the Iranians,
the whole bunch of them who seem to cause so much trouble?
They don’t deserve my prayers,
they don’t deserve to take up any space in my thoughts or concerns.
I don’t have room for them in my life, or in my heart.

Or maybe its closer to home.
There is one group of people in our own nation
who we often find it hard to make room for in our hearts, our native people.
You know that just off 37th Street, near Lakeview, on the T’suu Tina Reserve,
they have opened up a brand new casino.
The line up of cars going into the parking lot is unbelievable.
And part of the reason is that it’s the only casino in town that still allows smoking.
And we think, that’s just like them, flaunting the laws of the land,
claiming special exemptions, when the rest of us have to play by the rules.
And besides, what will they do with all the money they generate?
It’ll probably get squandered on alcohol or wasted through corruption.
Why try to find room for them,
why care about a situation that seems to go on and on and on with no solution in sight?

Maybe its our neighbour who doesn’t keep his yard up
and drives down our property value.
Maybe its our co-worker who isn’t pulling her weight
or its that classmate who sucks up to the teacher.
Maybe it’s a family member who slighted us
or even a spouse who hurt us and so we want to hurt them back.
There’s always someone, who we are convinced,
isn’t deserving of inclusion in our lives.
And God, the God we worship,
the living God whom we encounter this morning, who encounters us,
invites us to rethink our convictions.
God invites us to a change of plans.

Why do we find it so hard?
Because there’s a little Herod in all of us.
There’s a bit of us that finds it very hard
to let go of the control we want to have in our lives.
There’s part of us that wants to maintain our power over our lives.
We don’t want to cede that power and control to anyone else,
not even God, maybe especially not God.
But the good news is that God found room for us in his heart.
The good news is that though nothing seems to change about the human condition, though it might have been a whole lot easier for God to just write us off and start again, though we have hurt God, rejected God, disobeyed God and rebelled against God,
God still loves us so much that he sent us his only Son.
The good news is that while we find ways to exclude and marginalize people,
God is always finding ways to include and welcome people into his life.

There are two competing views of the kingdom at play here.
There is the view of Herod, which says that we can’t afford to be weak,
we can’t afford to lose the control we have over our lives,
over who we let in and who we keep out.
The view of Herod is one of fear and insecurity.
Herod’s kingdom is rooted in what we can get out of others,
how we can maximize our interests.
There is the view of Christ, which says that God’s control is more important than ours,
a view which sees obedience as a privilege, not a burden.
Christ’s kingdom in one in which fear and insecurity
does not compel us to keep others out because we don’t have control over them.
In Christ’s kingdom its not a matter of what we can get, but what we can give.
What gifts can we bring before our God
so that God may use them through us to serve others?
In Christ’s kingdom it’s the interests of God that get maximized,
and surprisingly, or really not surprisingly at all,
when God’s interests are maximized, everyone benefits.

Either Herod’s kingdom prevails or Christ’s kingdom prevails.
There can only be one true king.
It’s a brand new year.
We have our plans laid out.
As we encounter afresh the light of our living God,
and the wide embrace of his grace and mercy,
are we being called to a change of plans?

Prayer: Merciful and loving God, we are humbled at your gracious love. Your love is your response to our disobedience, to our rebellion, to our sin. Your love in Jesus is your solution to the condition of our world. We are astonished and amazed. Our only response to such love is worship, the only appropriate response to the God of creation is worship so that we may serve you and your interests. God of wide embrace, in this new year, stretch our capacity for grace, redefine our boundaries of acceptability, grant us the confidence to leave behind the fears of losing control or being vulnerable. Fill us with your wisdom and discernment so that our journeys will always lead to you and that upon finding what we seek, upon being found by you, we would worship and pay you homage. Through Christ our Lord we pray, Amen.