The Star... Moves (Epiphany Sermon, 2018), Jan 7

Epiphany sermon, 2018
The Star… Moves
Matthew 2:1-12

In the season of Epiphany, we reflect on the light of God that is manifested to different people in different places. Traditionally, we imagine that the love of God – reflected in the beautiful light of the Christmas star – is so big and so wonderful that it dissolves the boundaries between the insiders and the outsiders and ethnic and religious differences. The light is shown to the Magi and the shepherds. In Epiphany, we remember and we celebrate the revelation of the Christ child “To the gentiles”, meaning, ethnic outcasts or any who are not considered ‘insiders’ due to cultural origins, racial differences, faith and other identities.

In our era, light is plentiful; even at night we possess an abundance of light. The nights in Winnipeg are soberly lit, I would say, compared to larger cities like Seoul, where I come from, whose nights dazzle with glaring neon signs that stay ablaze until the break of dawn. 
I watched the 2018 New Year’s countdowns and fireworks in the world’s most famous cities such as London, Dubai, and New York, through YouTube. It’s fabulous. Think about the brilliance and the sound of those lights, rising so high in the night sky! (How about the last fireball over the Manitoban prairie? Those who watched it said it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen in their life time!)

In the old days, however, before the invention of gas lighting, when night fell, it was dark, very dark. We’ve learned how to domesticate the night with artificial lights – it’s easy to forget what a spectacle the blazing night sky of the first Christmas would have been.

Christmas and Epiphany are burnished with the imagery of light. These stories are filled with light, radiance, glory. We are told that the Magi were guided by the star to show them the way to the infant Jesus. The shepherds encountered not only the star but also, “The multitude of the heavenly host”, the firmament ablaze with God’s glory; which means that not just one single extraordinary star, but blazing starlight, in its complete brilliant array, met those who were watching over their flocks that night. Then an angel (a being of light) appeared and announced to the shepherds the good news that a Saviour, the Lord, had been born for them.

Imagine the contrast – the humble young shepherds finding the celestial lights of the midnight firmament greeting them, on top of the already astounding spectacle of an angel in a blaze of light. Imagine the size of this good news to the poor, the hungry, the peasant, the marginalized young on their occupied land, the shepherds. Remember, the first concern of the Messiah is to bring good news to the poor: the good news that would turn the world upside down and empower the powerless.

If what stands out for the shepherds is the spectacle of the light filling the night sky, the Magi’s star shows us another aspect of the good news of the birth of the Christ Child. Almost every year in the weeks before Christmas, stories appear in the media that seek to identify the star with some ancient natural phenomenon. The most common suggestions are a comet, a conjunction of planets, or a supernova. However, any attempt to identify the guiding star with a natural astronomical event is misguided; the star in Matthew’s Gospel does not simply shine in the sky; it moves. It not only leads the wise men westward to Jerusalem, it then turns and moves south to Bethlehem. There, “It stopped over the place where the child was.” This is no comet, conjunction of planets, or supernova. If it was, the star where the light came from would be fixed in its position in the sky, relative to the other stars. But it moves as if it doesn’t follow the laws of nature – the laws of physics that are at play in the entire cosmos. It’s inexplicable - it really means that we are not talking about astronomy or science. We are talking about a wonderful parable of God’s love and glory: the story that teaches us about following the star.

Have you ever wondered who the Magi really were? Traditionally, they were depicted as three wise men, (In fact, the Gospel of Matthew, the only Gospel which talks about the Magi’s visit, has no mention of how many people there really were.) The notion that there were three comes from the three gifts they bring: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. There is an oral tradition that they were kings from the Orient – which would have been the Middle East. Their ethnicities have been speculated upon: from Persia, Babylon, Arabia or the Syrian desert. Plus, they are illustrated in many pictures as two old white men and one younger man with darker skin, all with beards of different lengths – but the Bible reports none of these details; human imagination took over where the Bible left off.

Really, who are the Magi? Why did the first Christians choose to put the Magi in the first Christmas story? In other words, why do the Magi have to appear in the story of the first Christmas? This story is not history; it’s a parable. It’s a story to teach us and show what the good news is like.

Racially, the visitors are gentiles, coming from the “nations”, they are magicians, enchanters, diviners: their job is to interpret dreams and unusual/irregular signs in the night sky; interpret something bigger than an earth-bound event.

So, who are the Magi?

I believe that the Magi represent all who are drawn to the light.
 
Jesus’ birth is the coming of light into the darkness. 
(Here, we don’t need to understand the dark as always being bad, sinful, dangerous, evil. Jesus’ light coming into the darkness can also mean coming into the life-nurturing dark of the mother’s womb, a necessary shelter and time for healing. Our soul and body need the unique gifts of both light and dark. )
These magi are those who interpret the dreams and the signs of the night sky – looking into the darkness to read the light that lives there. They deal with unusual signs, whose modern-day equivalents might be: diversity, voices from the margins, friendships at the margins, irregularity, variations, divergences, which Catherine Keller says in her book, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming: “Behold the chaos of suffering that bursts from the margins. On ecology, economics, race, gender, sex … they all come flooding in. These others refuse to stay faceless. Their eyes form galaxies.”

The shepherds, the magi, the moving star, the galaxies of dreams and hopes tell us that the good news is like a miraculous star in motion. It’s not fixed somewhere in the distance, unrelated to us, unchanged and irrelevant to our changing times. The birthplace of Christ is not fixed in Palestine two thousand and some years ago. The star appears before us again and again and moves to another and another direction, toward the new birthplaces of Jesus. The star calls all of us who seek a sign of change, a sign of light, a sign of love, compassion and justice. We all take this journey to pay homage to Jesus, because we are drawn to the new light, the new hope. And so, for us, the star still moves, and we follow it onward, to find Jesus, again.

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