090104 Seeking Jesus
Have you met them - men or women who are firmly convinced they can make a good cup of tea out of yesterday's tea bags? She carefully picks up yesterday's tea bag from the saucer, boils the water, adds it to the pot - and hopes. If you like slightly stained hot water to drink, save your tea bags and use them again. But we have to be careful in our tea bag culture. When we come to church on Sunday mornings the lectionary readings can become like tea bags. They dangle in the fluids of our lives for an hour, and then we put them to one side as if they were exhausted, spent. Yet there are some readings, like the ones for Epiphany we read today, that come back every year. What can I say about them? I ask myself. And being of the tea bag culture I imagine one use has squeezed the life out of them. Not so. We can use these lessons again and again. It is not always useful to search for the new with a microscope to find what has never been said before. My task is to tell you the old story, the familiar story, so you will hear it again with pleasure and hope; it is like meeting an old friend, saying the things together you have always said. My task is to tell you this morning the old story of the wise men. We've heard it before; it's often been dangled in the fluids of our lives, we sing Christmas carols about it, the wise men ride their camels across our Christmas cards. And I talk to you again about it because it is not a tea bag:
Wise men, seeking Jesus, travelled from afar, Guided on their journey by a beauteous star.
Wise men, seeking Jesus, travelled from afar. That's how it goes for 95% of our thinking on the wise men. We contemplate the travels and adventures of the three kings. We recall the old traditions: one old, one young, one black. Perhaps we hear in our heads the music of Amahl and the Night Visitors, or remember other stories which tell of their passing and the urgent quest that drives them. Perhaps we think of TS Eliot's Journey of the Magi:
A cold coming we had of it
Just the worst time of the year
for a journey, and such a long journey
the ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
Where they came from we do not know. Some, who have delved deeply into the Hebrew Scriptures, make a connection with the curious story of Balaam who recognised the power and significance of Moses and believe they are a construct from the promises of the Hebrew Scriptures. But Bible Study doesn't hold a candle to the power of these three Kings of the Orient to ride their way into our hearts and imaginations. We understand about overseas trips. We like to go abroad, and believe we are not proper until we've had our overseas experience. We understand about following the star. Packing up we understand. Filling the car with petrol we understand, or going to the airport. We know where to pull in for a cup of tea or how to put up with the airline snack. We even wait patiently in Wellington Airport for hours on end. We know how to look out the windows and how to enjoy the sight of our destination: someone to meet us. We can travel in company with the wise men; we can journey with them across rivers and streams, from oasis to oasis. Those wise men seeking Jesus have stamina and skill to get there - and get there they do. Wise men on their journey.
Wise men seeking Jesus travelled from afar. Most travel stories are told from the point of view of the traveller. The stories ring with adventure, of weariness and roguery, of courage; the scenery seen, and the people met: often stubborn, somewhat uncouth; noisy eaters with no manners. There's a few who find a deeper meaning in the story: Travelled from afar, from some other place. You know we don't like foreigners. The Japanese and Chinese are everywhere. NZ doesn't belong to NZers any more. We have often stayed in a family cottage at Tekapo and I find Japanese looking at the Church of the Good Shepherd with the same kind of baffled misunderstanding or commercial inscrutability that they use to look at ridiculous, artificial wool sheep in the tourist shops. They are at Whakapapa day after day. Swiss and Germans are walking the Northern Circuit and the Tongariro Crossing crowding out Kiwis. Foreigners are here spreading themselves out upon our seats, our gear, taking over our parks, our beauties, our place. I listen to chief executives talking on radio or TV: they talk with American or Australian accents. NZers are not running NZ any more. It seems to me the reason they aren't back home in their own country is they must be second class; so why do we have to have the second-best here? Wise men from afar. Can any wise men come from overseas? It's all there in Matthew. These know-all foreigners come asking stupid questions: where is he that is born king of the Jews? Irritation and annoyance is plain in the voice of the Jewish experts. Blasted foreigners! Why can't they leave us alone? Herod, at least, had the good sense not to run round after them. He sent the foreign know-all's off to Bethlehem. Foreigners are never very welcome, But it's also disturbing to experience hostility, stares and catcalls, to be on the receiving end of the cold shoulder. Wise men seeking Jesus travelled from afar, and they got what all interfering foreigners get: dislike, reminders they did not belong, and were not very welcome. It was clearly made known to them that the king of the Jews was not their business. Isolated and lonely, they left Jerusalem, knowing full well they did not and would not belong. Wise men from afar, going home.
Wise men travel from afar seeking Jesus. By looking at the journey in a mirror you become aware of the way the three kings were strangers and foreigners; and all of a sudden you put this 2nd story in a mirror and reverse it once again - and in the reflection you see an even deeper truth. Jesus is the stranger, and a King, too, for that matter. And it is right that all the world should come, king of all creation; born humanly, in a stable where created life mingles together. The story is not about journey, not even about being different and not belonging. The story is about the Christ child, Jesus who is called Immanuel. We learn this child is not for Jews alone, nor even for one kind of person, but for the old, the young, for travellers and for stay at homes, for those of other races and colours. It's a story of the sovereign who receives gifts from his subjects: ability and wealth and power (gold); hope, trust and joy (fragrance of frankincense); the myrrh of fear, death, and bitterness. Somehow it seems right: Wise men, seeking Jesus, travelled from afar, Guided on their journey by a beauteous star. It's all there, the old story of God who comes into the world, to be its sovereign and ruler, and to claim the hearts and minds of all people so that they will gladly worship and pay their homage. Seeking Jesus is the story to be in, seeking Jesus.
On this first Sunday of 2009 it becomes clear that the various ways of reading the story of the wise men are the same ways we have of reading the story of our own lives. Most of us see our life as a journey: we think of the wisdom and skills we gained. We find ourselves marching from village to village, from one marker to the next. Almost too rapidly, our life journeys from school to work, from singleness to partnership, from parent to grandparent, from school to work, then into retirement, from learning French to forgetting what we are going to say next. Our lives are a journey and we traverse great distances, from Pole to Pole we go: from birth to death, with many wonderful, amusing, forbidding and curious things in between. This new 2009 pushes us further into the journey. We cannot tell what will be around the next bend, whether the way will be up or down, whether the scenery will be shrouded in mists or clearly visible. Wise women and men travel. They go on this journey accepting it, following the stars that guide and call, and reaching their destinations as best they can. We are travellers; we are on the road. Accept that and life will be easier and more honest. We are travellers.
95% of us will be happy enough to understand life as a journey. But there are a few who find themselves strangers and foreigners. They find themselves out of their homeland. You may have met them. You see them pausing and pondering; they ask half-basic, half-stupid questions to try to find out answers. They don't seem quite to know what ordinary words mean, and they get things wrong or back to front. Strangers and foreigners point to the fact that here we have no abiding city. We look for, and we belong to another place. Curiously it is the sceptics and questioners who best demonstrate our homelessness and rootlessness. With the intent look of Japanese they minutely pore over everything, doubting its price, its value, its usefulness, its connection. They are aliens, reminding us that travellers are not at home. Be friends to such strangers and foreigners, for none of us are at home. This 2009 remember the world is not ours, we pass through it. All of us are strangers; none of us have any rights here. It is proper to tread gently, we should go about quietly in what we do. Deeper than journeying comes the realisation this is not our home. We are simply passing through, on our way, strangers and foreigners. We are travellers from afar.
Then sharply you see it, once more. The story of our lives is not the story of our lives at all, but the story of God who includes us, makes us welcome, and invites us in. Who we are and what we do is of no great significance, yet somehow it is drawn into the story of Jesus It is his story and we are not only welcome in it, we add colour and texture to it. Pious words have smudged the simplicity of the Christ-centred life. We made it hard and sacrificial, perverted and narrow when it is actually simple. The Christ-centred life recognises that our days and years become valuable when we walk into the stable and let God's presence in the Christ-child there be the central thing. This 2009 we might be able to come nearer and let the story of Jesus, the old story, be the one that surrounds us and blesses our lives. We often think we are good enough to enfold God's story. The true way, the only way is to let God's story enfold what we do and who we are. The central story, the first and the final story is the story of God in Christ. Wise ones, seeking Jesus.