Matthew 2:1-12 "Grace's Epiphany" Scott Hoezee

In common parlance if someone says she had an "epiphany," she means a new insight that came from out of a clear blue sky. Technically, "epiphany" means "appearing" or "appearance," which is how it is used in the New Testament in terms of Christ's "appearing" in judgment at the end of history--this was the apostle Paul's favorite term for what we often call "the second coming" of Christ. The Savior who has been invisible since his ascension into heaven will one day be made manifest once again. In terms of the liturgical year, Epiphany refers to the appearance of the star in the east, leading the Magi to the Christ child.

But for Matthew's original readers, the story of Matthew 2 must surely have been something of an epiphany in the sense of a shocking revelation. Mostly, though, we tend to miss the scandal of this text. Because of the Magi's routine inclusion in Christmas pageants right alongside of the shepherds and angels, we have come to expect, and even welcome, the presence of these Magi, or Wisemen, or Three Kings of the Orient. They add a dash of color to the spectacle with their royal blue garments embroidered with gold foil. They provide a whiff of the exotic through their Persian ways as hints of spices fill the air. Above all, perhaps, they sound just the right note of royalty for the child-king in the manger.

Well, I hate to tell you this, but near as I can tell, no such thoughts were intended by Matthew, and probably Matthew's original audience would have sensed this acutely. First of all, the Magi were almost certainly not royalty--at best they may have been associated with the royal courts of Persia, though even that much is uncertain. Further, we don't really know how many of them there were. The long tradition of "three wisemen" is mostly based on the slender a piece of evidence that they gave young Jesus three gifts. But when you think about it, that proves virtually nothing. If you tell me you received a bathrobe, a watch, and bottle of cologne for Christmas, I will not necessarily infer that you received these items from three different people. So also here, the fact that Matthew lists gold, frankincense, and myrrh does not necessarily make you tumble to the idea that there were three gift-givers to correspond to the three gifts.

But the notion of three kings was furthered in the 8^th century when St. Bede the Venerable strangely supplied the names of Melchior, Gaspar, and Baltasar for the Magi. Where he got those names is by no means certain. He may have just made them up. Some centuries after that odd new development in Magi lore, the Empress Helena made her own contribution to Magi mythology by claiming to have had a vision that led her to the burial site of these three kings. She had the remains exhumed, and the ostensible skulls of the three kings remain to this day on display in Cologne, Germany.

It's all fantasy, of course, on a par with Steven Spielberg's fast and loose fiddling with the legend of the holy grail or the Ark of the Covenant in the Indiana Jones films. The biblical record is the only evidence that we have to go on, and if you take a good look at Matthew 2, you will conclude that this evidence is rather slim. What can be said with some certainty is that these magoi were the ancient equivalent of "magicians." No, they were not magicians of the Harry Houdini or David Copperfield variety--people who pull rabbits out of hats or turn quarters into doves--but the Magi were more like what we would call astrologers and star-gazers, people who tried to get the hang of present and future events by reading what was in the stars. These were, in short, the guys who wrote the daily horoscopes for the Baghdad Gazette.

The Magi, in other words, were what many today would label as quacks and maybe even charlatans. Currently, though I have never watched it, there is a popular show on TV called Crossing Over on which the host supposedly is in communication with the dead and so conveys messages from the dead to their living relatives who appear on the show. It looks for all the world like another high-tech flim-flam, but if the Magi were alive today, that might just be the kind of show they would be interested in hosting themselves! That's why the Old Testament actually provides even more choice language for such persons: the Bible condemns Magi-types as idolatrous deceivers who are to be avoided by Godly folk. Indeed, a Jewish rabbi, writing not long before the birth of Jesus, once wrote, "He who learns from a magi is worthy of death."

Oddly, however, in Matthew's gospel these Magi managed to get at least one thing right: something cosmic had happened in Bethlehem of Judea. By their lights they somehow correctly sensed from the heavens that something important had happened on the earth. They were so sure of this, in fact, that they undertook a long and dangerous journey to investigate the matter. Just how and why that all worked is unclear. Traditionally we talk about the Magi "following the star," but you can no more follow a star than you can follow the moon.

Have you ever been traveling somewhere after dark only to have one of your children say from the backseat of the car, "Dad, the moon is following us!" "No, no, son" you might reply, "it just looks like that because the moon is so high in the sky that you can see it from everywhere you go." So also with whatever star the Magi saw: some scientists theorize it was a star that had exploded in a supernova somewhere out in space. But even if so, they could not have followed that star, and there is no good way to explain the idea of some heavenly body coming to rest over a house in Judea! But probably all those speculations are unimportant. The point is that whatever the mechanics of all this were, it was God himself who brought these Magi to the right place at the right time. That's why Matthew presents them at the side of the Messiah.

But unlike modern congregations observing the Magi next to Christ's manger, few in Matthew's largely Jewish audience would have welcomed these men. For one thing the Magi were the same bumblers who tipped off Herod, leading to the slaughter of the innocents. Though modern scholarship has suggested that the actual number of children killed in Herod's pogrom may have been as few as twenty or thirty, the memory of such a mini-holocaust surely lingered. That was a dreadful event! Had it not been for the Magi's query, that bloody episode may have been prevented. Any fool who had even the slightest inkling of Herod's raging paranoia would have known that coming to Herod with news of a new king in the area was like tossing a lighted match into a gas can.

But it's not primarily that mistake that would have appalled most of the original readers of Matthew 2. Instead it would very simply have been the scandal of having astrologers from a foreign land mingling so freely with God's Christ. How could the likes of these magicians, condemned by Scripture mind you, be a welcome presence next to the Messiah? In reality, however, Matthew has been presenting similar scandals from the very outset of his gospel. Matthew seems intent on opening up the circle of salvation to include all people and all nations in fulfillment of what God had promised to Abraham millennia before: "You will be a blessing to all nations."

That's also why in his opening genealogy of Jesus, which we have looked at together in previous years, Matthew broke with genealogical convention by including not only four women but four women each of whom had something foreign or scandalous attached to her. Tamar played prostitute in order to get impregnated by her father-in-law, Judah. We looked at that sordid story in our Genesis series one Sunday evening last year. Rahab was a prostitute and from the foreign city of Jericho at that. Ruth brings Moab into the picture, and though Bathsheba is not specifically named in Matthew 1, Matthew actually finds a way to twist the knife more painfully by referring to Solomon's mother as "Uriah's wife" (and everyone remembers what David did to hapless Uriah! That's one of those incidents in the Bible that looks more like an episode of The Sopranos than a cozy Sunday school story!).

Apparently, Matthew is trying to strike a universal tone in his gospel. He wants not just men but women included; not just Israelites but people from all nations; not just those whose lives conform to the standard shape of orthodoxy but even Magi who were the least likely candidates for God's love that you could imagine. Matthew 2, of course, does not vindicate astrology or deny the Bible's earlier warnings about diviners and quacks such as these Magi. What Matthew may be trying to convey, however, is the reach of grace. Matthew is giving a gospel sneak preview: the Christ child who attracted these odd Magi to his cradle will later have the same magnetic effect on Samaritan adulterers, immoral prostitutes, greasy tax collectors on the take, despised Roman soldiers, and ostracized lepers.

Matthew 2 truly is an epiphany for any and all who tend to think that salvation is a Members Only club, the adherents of which are easily recognizable to those in the know. As such, this Epiphany story is at once the shoe that fits and the shoe that pinches. The Epiphany question raised by Matthew 2 is, "Who are today's Magi? What people or types of people make us uncomfortable or upset when they try to come to the Christ?"

It's a good question for us to ask as we stand at the head of this brand new year. As we look ahead to what, the Lord willing, will be another year of ministry at Calvin Church, we can wonder just how wide open our front door is--not just the literal front door of this building but also the front door of our very hearts. How wide open are the hearts of us, the people who are already inside? What will outsiders sense if they come inside? Will they feel welcomed?

During the Advent and the Christmas season it was easy to look at manger scenes of all kinds and find them lovely and maybe even moving. It was so easy to view that hodge-podge of shepherds, Magi, animals, new parents, angels, and the infant in the middle of it all and not bat an eye at the spectacle of all those wildly diverse people and creatures all dwelling under one little roof. But then the season ends and by the time Epiphany rolls around most manger scenes have been packed away for another year.

Epiphany, however, returns us to the reality of the church as a place likewise filled with a motley hodge-podge of all kinds of different people all standing together around the Christ. God calls all kinds of folks and he then places them under one roof as we are all called together by the one, singular grace of Jesus. How challenging it is, however, to view the real church with its real mish-mash of divergent people and to do so with the same unalloyed joy we so often capture during Christmas in its display of different people.

The Magi are at once a cameo of grace and a reminder that real grace--truly tough, gritty, divine-style grace--can be difficult to swallow. It's one thing for any one of us to revel in the reality of grace. As this morning, so every week we enjoy getting to that "Assurance of Pardon" portion of the service and its wonderful reminder that we are swaddled in grace and so are forgiven despite our foibles, faults, flaws, and sins. But even so, who among us finds it easy to accept that same grace when we see it getting applied to someone who really hurt us, or someone who never hurt us but whose lifestyle over the years has been a good example of everything we despise? Don't we often find ourselves silently wishing that so-and-so would get his comeuppance before he gets any grace? Don't we chafe just a bit when we get the sense that a certain person is getting off scot-free, getting off the hook, slipping out of the noose, escaping his just deserts? That is what grace is all about, but sometimes it's a little tough to take!

As C.S. Lewis once wrote, we all agree that forgiveness is a lovely idea, right up until the moment when we have someone to forgive. Lewis wrote that right after World War II and in connection with the need for British people to forgive the Germans and the Italians. Today we could apply it to terrorists, to rogue and renegade nations, or less dramatically to any number of people whom we personally know and who have wounded us. But if we are to radiate grace, if we are to let our light shine as we talked about last Sunday morning, then this is our challenge.

Philip Yancey once noted that whatever else you might conclude about Jesus based on reading the gospels, it is clear that he was eminently approachable. People, including some of the most tawdry and sinful folks around, did not shy away from Jesus. Isn't that a curious fact? These days people who sense that their lives are not very religious steer well clear of folks who are religious. As I have noted with you before, when I tell strangers on a plane or hairdressers in a salon that I am a pastor, one of two things happen: if this other person is a Christian, lots of questions will come about my church, my work, and so forth. But if the other person is not a church-goer, all conversation stops. It seems like then they are shy to say anything for fear I'll be disapproving or scolding or something (although hairdressers who are wielding sharp instruments over my scalp should know that I am unlikely to criticize them just then!).

But that's often the way of it. Good people and bad people, righteous people and those who are perceived to be unrighteous don't associate together, and if they do, the unrighteous expect harsh upbraiding. Philip Yancey once told me about the letters he got after it became known he had had breakfast with President Clinton at the White House. Morally upright Christians from around this country damned Yancey for mingling with a man many people deemed to be downright sinful.

Again, that's the way it often goes. But as Yancey also said, no one was ever more perfect than Jesus, and yet far from being scared off by Jesus, sinners somehow found Jesus magnetic, attractive, approachable. Although Jesus was just an infant at the time, the Magi felt the same tug as a kind of preview of all that would follow once Jesus launched his public ministry. The fact that Jesus was so comfortable with sinful people does not mean that we may adopt an "anything goes" mentality. Jesus never did! But it does mean that when you are full of grace, as Jesus was full of grace, it means that you keep that grace as good news, as an instrument of healing and not a club with which to bludgeon people--we need to present good and healing news to especially folks who are different due to their past lifestyle, their skin color, their sexual orientation, their ethnic background, their socio-economic status, or their outward appearance. The baby Jesus did not reject these magicians from Baghdad, but then he was after all just a baby. But you know that if these same folks had come to Jesus when he was thirty years old, the story of acceptance would be the same.

And that needs to be our story, too. As I said earlier, in Advent we do not struggle with accepting a wild variety of people all gathered under the one roof of Bethlehem's stable. Our challenge the other 11 months of the year is to capture that same joy when we see all kinds of people gathered under the one roof of Jesus' Church. In a world riven by sin, strife, and division, that is not easy. But I don't think Matthew would deem this to be an impossible dream. Instead, Matthew views such a grace-filled community of inclusion to be nothing less than the dream of a world re-born--a world re-born through the Child who was born long ago in Bethlehem's stall. Amen.