The Foolish Wisdom of the Cross

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1 Corinthians 1:10-31

High School yearbooks, I don’t know if it’s still the case but for mine, they really did it up for the Seniors.  They dressed you in a robe.  The pictures for Seniors were bigger than for the other classes.  Under your name they listed everything you participated in during high school and any awards received.  And finally, the kicker; they let you come up with a quote that would forever haunt you.  Some of those quotes were really quite good.  Some were just famous quotes by famous people that were, of course, not properly cited.  Some, well, somebody should have pulled us and said, “Is the hill of foolishness really the one you want to die on?”  You know, “Stupidity lingers like stench when printed in a yearbook.”  The last thing you want is to go to your 50^th Year High School Reunion and your classmates are looking at the yearbooks matching young faces to the wrinkle club standing before them.  They read your quote and whisper under their breath, “What a moron!”

Mine was sort of a mixture of the last two categories.  It was partly a quote from someone famous and partly just stupid.  It was, “I pity the fool who says ‘I can’t.’”  I mean, like, gag a maggot, for real, du-uh!  I should explain it, I guess.  At the time there was a TV show called the A-Team in which one of the characters was the very famous and memorable Mr. T.  At some point during every show Mr. T would remark about the villain they were chasing saying, “I pity the fool.”  The other part of my quote was biographical, reflecting something I was proud of accomplishing but you wouldn’t know that from the quote.  At my mother’s insistence, I doubled up my Junior and Senior years and graduated a year early.  It was a difficult academic accomplishment, but it really wasn’t a smart thing to do for so many reasons.  I could have used my Senior year to develop some more relational maturity and confidence.  But instead, I wound up out in the real world and not ready for it and made some foolish mistakes particularly academically.  To quote John Prine, “That’s the way the world goes round”.

The High School yearbook: a spruced-up picture, a list of achievements, and a pretence of wisdom but, you know, it says nothing about the hurts, the angers, the failures, the rejections, the rivalries, betrayals, petty jealousies, malicious rumours, the picked-overs, the not-good-enough’s, the bullying, the broken homes, and…that kind of stuff.  All those things that made the high school years something so many would rather not revisit and certainly not repeat.  The foolishness of high school.  It’s a rare critter who made it through high school without being touched or touching someone with cruelty.  High school is a microcosm of humanity.  If you came through it without being hurt or hurting someone else in a way that will profoundly affect the way you live the rest of your life, well then, “And there’s a hand, my trusty friend, and gie’s a hand o’ thine, and we’ll tak’ a right gude-willie waught for auld lang syne.”  Nostalgia like bacon makes everything better.  The high school yearbook seems to be the way the world goes round: We want to look good, boast about our accomplishments, and have some wisdom to pass on all the while denying the world of hurt that was behind it all.  Some might call that foolishness.

It's interesting here in our reading that Paul says the word of the cross is foolishness.  In fact, the word group for foolish comes up quite a bit in this passage. The Greek word group used sounds like moria, mora, moros, moraino.  We get our words moron and moronic from it.  It’s one thing to call someone a fool and another to call them moronic.  If we had such a word as moronity or moronicness that would bring what he is saying over into English with the appropriate effect.  It’s a bit more of an insult than just saying something or someone is foolish.  Paul also quantifies for whom the word if the cross is moronity; the perishing.  A more accurate translation of that would be “those who are destroying themselves.”  They aren’t simply wasting away, they're destroying themselves.  The word of the cross is moronity to those who are destroying themselves all the while thinking themselves strong and wise, significant somebodies born noble.

The word of the cross – In love God the Son became a human being as the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, born to be their Messiah who would deliver them from Roman rule and the corruption of their own leadership and institutionalized religion and establish the Kingdom of God.  Instead of organizing a revolt, Jesus healed people, cast out demons, ate with sinners and tax collectors, and called Galilean tradespeople (of all people) to be his disciples.  To the Jewish political and religious leadership, he was scandalous.  The Gentiles just laughed at how moronic the whole story sounds.  Gods don’t love and befriend humans.  Gods only appear to be human when they foolishly fall in love with a human woman.  Gods don’t heal humans.  They play with us like dolls.  Then the most foolish thing of all, to put an end to the shame of this Jesus matter, the Jewish authorities had the Romans crucify him.  He died for simply doing things that only God or a god could do.  But gods don’t die.  They glory up like a well-blinged Mr. T and go Apollyon, the angel of death, on all their enemies. 

What they failed to see was that as this Jesus, God was healing humanity of this mortal disease we have come to call Sin.  God came as one of us so that we can see God as God really is.  Our failure to recognize God and instead killing God in the cruellest way imaginable was God’s way of exposing our sin.  God raised Jesus from the dead in an act of new creation creating a new humanity which we share in by the gift of new life by the Holy Spirit. We become newer as we strive to live according to the way of the cross – humbly laying aside our pride and self-importance which only lead to perishing and in the struggle of denying our selfish self’s we strive to serve one another in unconditional love until Jesus returns with the ultimate healing of resurrection to make all of Creation fully new.

This story may sound like foolishness or moronity.  It may not make sense to us and our vainglorious reason.  But it is the power of God to save, to heal us.  Following Jesus, taking up the cross is where we find healing, peace, love.  This is the foolish wisdom of the cross.  In this world where people, many Christians included, think that being strong like Mr. T and muscling in morality is the way to a better more prosperous world particularly for those who already have wealth, the foolishness of the cross, the way of dying to oneself, the way of humility, the way of generosity and hospitality, the way of welcoming the stranger, the way of striving for what is best for us rather than simply what is best for me, the way of unconditional love; the foolish way of the cross is the way God is saving his world.  And so I leave you with an invitation: Would you put the High School yearbook back on the shelf and join me in being a moron for Jesus?  Amen. 

The Wealth of Fellowship

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1 Corinthians 1:1-9

When I was a child, we had a Jewish family in the neighbourhood.  One of the sons was my age and we frequently played together.  He was an imaginative and brilliant kid.  I remember a couple of times being at his house after school during Hanukkah.  Sunset would come and it was time to light the menorah.  They would invite me to stay for that.  I thought it was really cool that my friend could read the Hebrew prayer.  It was a different alphabet and all that.  They lit the menorah and received their gifts.  They didn’t have a gift for me per say as I was unexpected.  What they did have to give me was a little bag of gelt, foil-covered chocolate money.  That was pretty cool.  

There’s a lot of tradition as to why a little bag of chocolate money is given to children on a particular day of Hanukkah and I won’t go into for time’s sake but it is safe to say that it’s meant to be a blessing, an enriching blessing you could say.  It’s a way of remembering or sharing in the temple lamp oil that never ran out centuries ago when Jerusalem was under siege by Greeks and for eight days the Maccabees held them off and eventually defeated them.

That little bag of chocolate money meant a lot.  It makes a kid feel rich.  But more importantly, it made me feel included, included in friendship, somewhat in the family, in a tradition, in a faith.  The gift of that little bag of chocolate money stuck with me.  I have always tried to put a bag of it in my children’s stockings at Christmas. 

This passage from 1 Corinthians reminded me of that bag of chocolate coin when I started to work with it. I’ll try to flesh that out for you.  Our reading here is the opening of the letter in which Paul says what he’s thankful for in the congregation.  To let you in on a little secret, Paul wrote most of his letters to address a particular problem in the congregation to which he was writing.  Almost without fail, you can find the solution to the problem in the part of the letter where Paul says what he’s thankful for concerning them.  It’s sort of a way of saying “You’ve already got everything you need to solve this problem, if you focus on the solution rather than the problem.”

In Corinth the problem was disunity.  Their fellowship in Christ was being torn asunder because of a leadership vacuum.  Paul had been there planting house churches for roughly a year and a half.  When he moved on, he didn’t appoint leaders hoping, I guess, that the Holy Spirit would.  They were very charismatic in Corinth.  Several factions began to declare themselves the leaders: the patrons who owned the houses where the churches meet; some philosopher-types who thought they were the wisest; some very spiritual women who spoke in tongues and prophesied; and name-droppers who claimed allegiance to certain apostles.  Paul goes one to show that this factiousness was resulting in sexual immorality, suing each other in pagan courts rather than solving disputes among themselves, disorderly worship, and their communion celebrations had become simply parties in which the rich feasted and the poor had to stand back and watch.

Let me give you a taste of church in Corinth.  To begin with, there wasn’t one big church that met in a big building downtown, with pews and a preacher, a fellowship hall, and Sunday School classes.  There were many small congregations that were 20-30 in number.  They likely consisted of a few families inclusive of servants along with friends of the families meeting together in the house with the largest accommodating space.  There would be a teacher or two or three who jumped from meeting to meeting like Paul did.  Their worship services would have been rather spontaneous, led by the Holy Spirit’s prompting and included: prophesying, sharing of a word, praying for each other, speaking in tongues, and singing songs they likely wrote themselves usually adding Christian themed words to familiar tunes.  They likely just went around the room and everyone shared something – a psalm, a hymn, a spiritual song, a testimony, a thanksgiving, a request for prayer.  Then they shared a meal which included Communion at some point.  

Everyone was permitted to participate regardless of ethnic roots, gender, or social status.  Even slaves got to participate in the same way as their masters.  They became as close as family, the family of Christ.  Paul called this the fellowship of the Son and therein lay their true wealth.  It’s what made them into the image of Christ.  Their spiritual giftedness facilitated by their openness to the Holy Spirit was the proof that Jesus was in their midst strengthening them.  Unfortunately, it was being torn apart and made ugly due to people trying to take over and run the show.

In his Thanksgiving, Paul points out their strengths and the things they should focus on to return to unity.  He is thankful for the grace of God in Christ in their midst.  Grace is a term that comes from the world of monarchy not the courtroom.  It means to be permitted to come into the presence of the monarch (in this case God) to receive his favour and promise to act on your behalf.  God’s presence, blessing, and protection is theirs in their fellowship in Christ.  They have been made rich, enriched – given a bag of chocolate coins if you will – particularly one, in their ability to share openly in what Jesus is doing in them and in their lives and two, in their knowledge of God and what God is doing through Christ Jesus through the presence and powerful acting of the Holy Spirit in their midst.  This enrichment, their giftedness is the real, evidential, historical proof that establishes that Jesus Christ is raised and ruling and will return.  The Corinthians are not lacking in anything.  Jesus will continue to fortify them with his presence and work in their midst to the end that they will be found blameless when he returns. 

Paul closes his thanksgiving with an assertion that God is faithful and it is this faithful God who has called them into the fellowship of the Son, his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.  This final assertion – the God who is faithful has called them into the fellowship of his son – is the zinger.  This is what they need focus on to get them past their present problems of disunity.

The Greek word for fellowship is koinonia, hence my little bag of chocolate coins.  As I reflected earlier about receiving a little bag of these things as part of my Jewish friend’s family’s celebration of Hanukkah, how it made me feel enriched, included in their friendship, family, tradition, faith.  My family and our participation in the Christian had been rent asunder by the divorce of my parents.  That little bag of chocolate coins was more than just a little bag of chocolate coins.  

Chocolate coins – Koinonia – the wealth of fellowship.  Congregations can overcome any obstacle, if we focus on the wealth of our fellowship, our love in Christ for one another.  As Paul says towards the end of the letter in Chapter 13, the Love chapter, “Love never ends”.  This is what I’m thankful for in being the minister of four small churches.  It’s that we know and love one another.  Granted all roses have their thorns, yet we still love one another regardless.  It is often said in larger churches that “Ain’t nothing going to change around here until a few so and so’s die.”  In a small congregation when someone passes it changes everything.  Everybody grieves.

Though we are small in number, we have a wealth of fellowship, a wealth of love in Christ, that is undergirded by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  We lack nothing as long as we engage in the love of Christ.  When I first got into ministry nearly 30 years ago, Congregational Redevelopment was the hot area to be into.  Consultants would go to churches and tell them what they needed to do to be more attractive to people who don’t attend church.  They’d say things like “get rid of the dusty plastic flowers” or you need to have more contemporary music and so on.  I even did a doctorate on how to turn a church around.  My conclusion was that all a person need find when they come to a church is inclusion into a wealth of fellowship; a group of people who love each other deeply and who will include them in it.  If that’s the case, they’ve found Jesus.  If not, they’ve stumbled upon something else.  Like Paul, I give thanks for the wealth of Christ-like fellowship in our churches.  Amen.

 

Talking about Jesus

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Matthew 10:34-48

Peter’s meeting here with Cornelius is one of those moments, God orchestrated moments, when Peter is having to step up and say what it is that he believes and why he believes it.  Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of pre-story that goes into the meeting between these two men that needs to be told so bear with me.  

This the second time in The Book of Acts that a person who was not a Jew by blood is told about Jesus.  Phillip and the Ethiopian is the first time, but the Ethiopian was likely a full convert to the Jewish faith.  For its first few years, the early Church appears to have been a strictly Jewish sect located in and around Jerusalem.  That in itself is surprising in that Jesus and his followers were predominantly not from Jerusalem and mostly Galilean.  Jerusalem Jews looked down their noses on Galilean Jews believing them to be a bit lax when it came to keeping the Law of Moses.  More over according to the Book of Acts, after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the disciples made Jerusalem rather than Galilee their home.  This also was surprising in that the Temple authorities considered the disciples to be blasphemers and would just as soon have seen them dead as well.

The relationship between Jews and non-Jews, particularly Romans, was littered with prejudice.  I can’t exactly call it racial prejudice where one race sees itself superior to all others.  It was definitely religious and ethnically oriented.  Jews saw people of the nations as unclean meaning they were not pure enough to come into the presence of God.  I don’t think it was ever commanded in the Law of Moses but it was certainly popularly believed by the Jews that they should not associate or socialize with non-Jewish people, much less speak to them.  If one associated with a non-Jew, that uncleanness could rub off on you.  It’s very similar to the way a certain segment of Christianity today believes a person is not a real Christian, a Holy Spirit filled follower of Jesus unless they are anti-these things and pro-those things so be careful to associate with them.  

So, Peter believed he wasn’t permitted by the Law to even speak to this non-Jew named Cornelius.  But God remedied that.  Earlier that day God gave Peter a three-peat of a vision clearly indicating that non-Jews are clean as far as God is concerned and so get over your prejudices, Peter!  God does not play favourites.  No one is any more or any less welcome in God’s presence.  God’s exact words were, “What I have called clean, you shall not call profane.”  The Church today could also take this lesson to heart.

So, Cornelius was a Roman centurion known to be “a devout man who feared God.”  He was what is known as a God-fearer, a non-Jew who practised the Jewish faith with the exception of going the full Monty of circumcision.  Though he was a practicing Jew for all shapes and purposes he was not allowed to go to Temple.  There were a lot of God-fearers back then.  They were drawn to the Jew’s adamant faith in only one God who created and loved everything and who had also chosen a particular people to be historically involved with in order to reveal himself to the world.  This God loved and was faithful to his who people.  God-fearers appreciated this One faithful God as opposed to the Olympian gods who lived in their own fickle soap opera of a world in which humans were only play things.  But for Cornelius being a Roman male, a military officer, circumcision would have caused a lot of problems.  Thusly, the Jews wouldn’t let him fully participate in all the reindeer games particularly worshipping at the Temple.  Regardless, Cornelius was a very generous man, particularly to the Jews.  He wasn’t a thug, as were many of the Roman soldiers.

Well, God wanted Cornelius to be a follower of Jesus and so he told him in a vision to send for Peter.  So, Cornelius sent another devout soldier and a couple of servants to where Peter was staying to retrieve him.  Although God had spoken to Peter telling him to go with them, we can reasonably suspect that Peter thinks he might be getting arrested, but still he goes to the home of Cornelius to talk about Jesus, to say whom he believed in and why.  This meeting was what I would call a God-orchestrated moment for the sharing of faith.  It was replete with visions and all that right time, right place stuff.  I would suspect that each of us have had moments like this where it just seemed the right place at the right time for the sharing of faith.  

I want to look at the basic rubrics, the content of what Peter says and does here.  Mainly, I just hope you see that Peter isn’t just talking about matters of personal and private faith in an effort to get Cornelius to believe the same.  Peter rather talks about Jesus, about God’s acting through him, about resurrection, and about a coming judgement.  All these things, to Peter, were historically valid realities – real history as opposed to myth or superstition – for he had witnessed them all.  

Peter starts out by acknowledging the pink elephant, the historic religious prejudice he had for non-Jews.  The prejudice that made Cornelius out to be like a second-hand citizen; that there was something innately wrong with him that God wouldn’t fully accept him because he wasn’t born a Jew.  God had caused Peter to see that God does not play favourites.  God will welcome all people who revere God and want to do what’s right.  

We Christians are known for drawing our lines with opinions as to who is or is not acceptable to God and have hurt people and actually driven them from God when God was actually drawing to himself.  The way God tore down the dividing walls here is a deeply profound message to a good bit of the church today on how we should get over our exclusiveness towards people who are different. 

Having acknowledged his willingness to move beyond the prejudices and the exclusivity, Peter moves on to acknowledge that God had spoken a new word to the Israelites for the world of the good news of peace through Jesus Christ who is Lord of all.  Please note the political implications here.  Cornelius was a Roman soldier enlisted to serve Caesar and the Pax Romana.  He was under orders to declare that Caesar was Lord and the Roman Empire was the means for world peace and trained to use sword and spear to enforce that.  Peter, on the other hand, proclaims that Jesus alone is Lord and peace is only through him.  This also is a lesson for a good bit of the church in North American today particularly American Evangelicals who need to put an end to their support of American Imperialism.

Then Peter moves on to talking about what Cornelius already knows about Jesus.  Being a Roman military officer in Judaea Cornelius would have been familiar with what had happened with Jesus of Nazareth - that Jesus started a very popular preaching ministry in Galilee that arose out of what John the Baptist had been doing to prepare God’s people for the coming of their Messiah; that the Holy Spirit descended unto Jesus and the voice of God declared Jesus to be his Son when John baptized him; that full of the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus went about doing good.  Cornelius knew Jesus was not a revolutionary but rather healed people and freed them from demonic oppression.  Regardless, the Jerusalem authorities had the Romans crucify him and I would add there though Pilate had declared him innocent.  Cornelius would have known that too.  Cornelius would have known that it was reported that God had raised Jesus from the dead and that he had been seen to be alive by eyewitnesses who ate and drank with him.  Jesus was not a ghost.  Peter declares that he was an eyewitness to all of these things that Cornelius, a God-fearing Roman centurion in the Province of Judaea would have known about.

Peter was an eyewitness to the fact that Jesus had done things that only God could do and, in fact, that God had promised through the prophets that he would come and do.  Peter saw him unjustly crucified.  Peter saw him raised from the dead.  The point here is that God was really acting mightily in, through, and as this Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus, his ministry, the miracles, his death, and indeed his resurrection all happened and are historically verifiable.  

 Peter then said that Jesus had commanded him and the others to go and tell the people that Jesus is the one God has appointed to judge the living and the dead.  Before you get thrown off by the word judge, I’ve got to ask you to put on the backburner this medieval idea that Jesus has a list of who’s naughty and nice, the naughty go to Hell and the nice go to Heaven.  The Old Testament idea of a judge was that of a person who hears and settles disputes and one whom from time-to-time God calls up to deliver his people from oppression even when the oppression is their own fault and it almost always was.  Also, the goal of justice is forgiveness which isn’t simply a pardoning of the guilty.  

Forgiveness involves accountability, reparation, reconciliation, and restoring people to being devout and good, whole and healed persons in the eyes of God.  Forgiveness is peace with God and with others when there was previously only hurt and broken trust.  Jesus is the one, the only one, who has the right to hold everyone accountable for what they’ve done with the lives God has given them.  Jesus judges with unconditional love and the goal is forgiveness.  All those who put they’re primary loyalty in him will find forgiveness, peace.

While Peter was saying this, the Holy Spirit came upon Cornelius and his household just as the Spirit had done on Pentecost in Jerusalem on Jesus’ Jewish followers.  All people were now definitely included in God’s people.  The presence of the Holy Spirit was the validation that what Peter was proclaiming about Jesus was historically real.  

This Jesus stuff wasn’t just a matter of spirituality or personal belief or psychosis.  What God is up to in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth is as much a part of reality as the ground under our feet.  The reason I am still in the ministry, the reason I am still a Christian is that I know this proclamation of Jesus is the Truth and it is real history.  I know this because I’ve been in the presence of God in the midst of God’s people and the relationship with himself that Jesus has brought me into.  I pray the same for you.  God is real.  The love of God is real.  Come to Jesus and take up his way.  It’s the way to find healing and freedom from spiritual oppression.  He is the way to peace.  Amen.

 

How to Greet a King

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Matthew 2:1-20

I think it’s probably a “cost-me-a-quarter” question to ask you Canadians “How does one greet His Majesty King Charles III?”.  Being raised in the US, that wasn’t something I was schooled on.  Anyway, to greet King Charles, you know the drill, women slightly curtsy, men slightly bow the head, shake hands only if the King extends his hand first, speak if spoken to, and address him as “Your Majesty” at first and “Sir” works after that.  That’s pretty simple.  

Even so, there are plenty of YouTube videos of American Presidents and First Ladies breaking protocol when greeting the royals and they wind up looking like school children who know they’ve done something wrong but not quite sure what it was – even Michele Obama who accidently by instinct put her arm around Queen Elizabeth as if she were simply a dear old lady.  Oops!  The funniest gaffs were during Trump’s first visit to the queen.  He’s tall and she was short.  It seemed like he took every opportunity to step in front or walk in front of her.  Duh!  Even in common peoples’ etiquette it’s ladies first.  I guess he just wanted centerstage in every photo. 

Well, the point here is that there are proper ways to greet people such as kings, queens, presidents, people of professional position, neighbours, parents, siblings, friends, and so one.   Proper ways which demonstrate respect for the person but more so for the position they are in and the authority inherit in it.  And I think this is part of the reason which Matthew goes about showing us how the three wise men and Herod and the chief priests and scribes all react to Jesus, the king of the Jews, how they greet him or refuse to do so.

Looking at the sitting king of the Jews, Herod the Great.  Herod wasn’t actually a Jew.  He was an Idumaean appointed by Rome to be King of Judea.  He was the greatest builder among the Jewish kings besides King Solomon.  Herod built ornate palaces for himself inclusive of ballrooms.  He greatly enlarged and embellished the Mediterranean port, Caesarea Maritima, just to impress Caesar Augustus who made it the Roman capital for the area.  He decorated the Jerusalem Temple with fancy stones and lots of gold, lots of gold.  Herod was also insanely jealous about his power so much so that he killed several of his children and many rabbis because he perceived them as threats.  

Well, as you would expect from a megalomaniac, there was a whole lot of disrespect in how Herod attempted to greet Jesus.  His jealousy led him to slaughter innocent children around the town of Bethlehem two and younger in hopes of destroying the Messiah sent by God to save his people.  Herod loved power so much he would even stand in God’s way to keep it to the extent of killing innocent children.  (Sounds like what happened with USAID.)  Attempted assassination, that’s some greeting.  

Concentrating too much on Herod would keep us from paying due attention to some folks in this story who are a lot like us good church going people.  Matthew has a message concerning the spiritual blindness of the religious authorities of Jesus’ day.   He makes his point by showing that three star-gazing Persian kings can long for, search for, and recognize Jesus as the Messiah and pay the respect due to the One who would be the saviour of the world.  All the while, the people to whom this King Jesus was sent, the ones who knew what the Scriptures said, the ones who should have been expectantly awaiting this king – these people, the religious authorities appear to be willing to conspire and betray their saviour into the hands of those who would just as soon see him dead.  

This story does not come as welcome news to those who claim to be experts at the rituals of religion and at knowing the Scriptures.  We would think that in Matthew’s day the chief priests and scribes, the experts in things pertaining to God, that they would welcome the birth of the Messiah as good news and be excited and awed about it and want to go and see him themselves and worship him.  You’d think that they would want to greet him properly.  No.  These authorities who held the power of religion, they were remarkably ambivalent.  THEY DIDN’T CARE!  They were content to simply be the experts who enjoyed the “blessing” of growing wealthy from the big business of Temple religion.  

The chief priests and scribes greeted their king from afar by using their gift of knowing the scriptures to betray the one God sent to save them.  Herod asked them a question and they answered it with their expert opinion; no more, no less, even quoted Scripture and all the little boys aged two and under born in Bethlehem got massacred.  Political power and religious power make for a terribly evil duo especially when wealth is involved.  The way North American Evangelicalism courts Authoritarianism should concern us.

As I mentioned earlier Matthew is making a point by these three wise men being the ones to properly greet this baby Jesus, born king of the Jews yet Lord and Saviour of the world.  They were non-Jews, but they knew the God of the Jews was up to something huge.  They didn’t know the Jewish scriptures.  They knew the stars.  They were three stargazers from Persia otherwise known as Assyria, a historical enemy of the Jewish people.  Yes, they are a foreshadowing of the salvation of Gentiles through Jesus.  They are powerful men in their land.  Tradition says they were kings.  

These three men were astrologers.  They studied the stars and looked for meaning in their patterns.  We would be remiss simply to compare them to the roadside psychics and astrologers today.  Rather, it would be better to compare them to the premiere scientists of our day – people like James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble.  Maxwell gave us Field Theory and Electromagnetism; radio and wireless technology would not be available to us without him.  Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe in that everything is related and relative to the speed of light.  Hubble discovered that there are more galaxies in the universe than the Milky Way and was more or less the inventor of extragalactic astronomy as we call it.  He also discovered that all galaxies in the universe are accelerating away from each other rather than decreasing in speed and collapsing in on itself.  Without this counter-intuitive acceleration which apparently did not begin until 5 billion years ago our universe would no longer exist.   

Similarly, our three wise men in Matthew saw something in the heavens which indicated a revolutionary upheaval in the way we understand our existence.  It is likely, they saw a supernova, a star dying a massively explosive death that feeds the surrounding area of its galaxy with the material to form new stars and the heavier elements that form planets and indeed carbon-based life forms such as ourselves.  They saw a star dying that would bring forth new life elsewhere.  This reminds me of Jesus saying about himself, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24).  Could the heavens indeed have been telling of the glory of the Lord?  Yes, they were...and three astrologer/scientists not Bible experts saw it and followed it. 

Following a stellar sign of the cross-formed way of life of the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus the Messiah, these three wise men had a vision to follow, a vision that would lead them into the presence of the Lord of the universe where they would simply just bow down and worship him and give to him of themselves.  We must ask ourselves. What star are we following, if at all?  Where is the star that will lead us to a deeper commitment of worshipping our Lord and Savior with our whole lives?  Are we following Jesus in his way of life, the cross-formed way of life?  The way of laying down our lives for him and loving each other as he has loved us each, loving the world as God has loved it, sacrificially and unconditionally.  Are we daily bringing the lives God has given us each to Jesus worshipfully, prayerfully?  Are we taking time to sit in his presence in wonder and awe?

Jesus says, “Come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.  My yolk is easy and my burden is light.”   Most of us I’m sure know what it is to have our burdens lifted by the Lord.  We know the Peace that he has to give.  We wouldn’t continue to come here if we didn’t.  The proper way to come here and greet King Jesus is with burdens in hand, ready to give to him that he may give us his peace.

5 billion years ago something beyond our comprehension happened that kept the force of gravity from causing the universe to collapse back in on itself...the love and will and plan of the Trinity for his creation maybe?  Roughly 2,000 years ago by the Incarnation of God the Son as the man Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit according to the love of God the Father the Trinity acted to free his creation from spiritual dark gravity, self-destructive force of sin and death.  The question for us today is will we follow our Lord who died a supernova-like death to bring about the New Creation?  Will we pick up our crosses and walk the way of the cross following Jesus which is the only proper way to greet this particular king?  Amen.