Nine Miles Off

Matthew 2:1-2
January 6, 2008
Rev. Dr. Judith Kaye Jones

The season is ending, as it always does, with the fading of carols, the dimming of colored lights and tinsel, the disappearance of the gaily colored wrappings that so lately held the promise of joy. Slowly we will put them away, some of us more slowly than others, those things that represent, year after year, the birth announcement of God with Us, Immanuel, come to earth to save us. And into the absence of all the preparation trappings, in the suddenly open and empty sky, missing the shimmer of angels in flight, we see—the star. The season draws to its close, ending as it always does in the burst of divine radiance from that silent, far-off star, ending in the unimaginable majesty of a poor newborn child lying in straw, imaging God, ending in the wail of new life, promising everything, hoping everything, risking everything, ending—so that it can begin all over again. Today is the Sunday we call Epiphany, the Sunday we traditionally celebrate the feast of the Magi, the arrival of those mysterious visitors from the East who traveled untold miles through mountains and deserts, seeking the fulfillment of the prophecy that a new kind of royalty was being born into the world, a new kind of power, a new kind of rule. And we envision them, as we have for several weeks, arriving in the shimmer of silken robes and the jingling of harness, swaying above the slow, careful feet of camels, dismounting outside a shelter for beasts, rustling to their knees in that homely stable, laying out their gifts and worshiping the unlikely manifestation of divine kingship that lay so humbly on his bed of straw. But as Vince reminded us in his eloquent Epiphany invitation via email this week, The origin of the word "Epiphany" has nothing to do with Christmas itself, or gift-giving. Rather, it comes from the Greek word meaning "manifestation"; and when we refer to January 6th as "Epiphany," we are marking the occasion on which the church has historically commemorated the manifestation of Jesus to the magi kings who came to pay him homage.

We have already talked about the Magi—we have talked about who they were, and where they probably came from, about their numbers and their gifts and the meaning of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And we have talked about ourselves as the Magi people, summoned to lay our gifts in the straw of poverty and humility. We see them as an essential part of the Christmas story, yet do we ever ask ourselves, did they truly understand what they found in that stable, and how did they feel about it when they found it. Why did they think there would be something worth all the struggle and discomfort of a long journey in that small, dusty town in an occupied country? What is Matthew trying to tell us about the manifestation of Jesus in this story of the mysterious Magi from the east?

To begin, they came from the East. The Assyrians had come from the East. The Babylonians came from the East. The Persians came from the East. They all came, the conquerors of old, ravaging, pillaging, killing and plundering, carrying off their booty and their slaves, leveling the towns and cities, destroying farms, destroying the temple of Yahweh, destroying everything in their path until not but a tenth were left in the land, until Israel, her Shepherd King, and the promise of the Messiah were nothing but an old, old story to be told and retold around campfires and hearth-fires and whispered about in the quiet, fearful voices of a yet-again conquered people. From these palaces of earthly power and might, then, palaces that dwarfed the residence of the mad king Herod, came these magi, astrologers, wise men, following a star and a prophecy. But why? Scholars have found that ancient sources refer to prophecies that the kings of the earth will come from Judea. Can you imagine it, those people from the great, ancient civilizations, looking on their maps and seeing tiny Judea, suffering remnant of a once small and prosperous country unique only in its devotion to a single God of justice. Seeing that insignificant speck and somehow experiencing the conviction that one day, one day, all the earth would look to Judea and tremble before the King who would therein arise. So they came, these messengers of the might of ancient principalities, these sages, to find him, because the prophecy would not apparently leave them alone. It troubled their dreams, it distracted their learned, intellectual discourse—it would not allow them to know any peace until they mounted their camels and rode off in search of a dream, and they came, these sages in search, from the East.

And they were nine miles off. Instead of going to Bethlehem, still more insignificant speck inside the insignificant speck of Judea, they go to Jerusalem. Jerusalem—the once proud capital, rebuilt and rebuilt after each successive conquest and desecration, now laboring under the brutal heel of the Roman occupation. They go to the king who rules by the sufferance of the Romans, the mad and brutal tyrant who made even the Romans turn away in horror and disgust. They go where it makes sense to go. If you are looking for power, power as they understood it, then you go to the powers and great halls where power resides. Jerusalem might be only a shadow of her former glory, capital of a remnant of the former Promised Land of God, but it is the best Judea currently had to offer. So that is where they went. And when they got there, they come in response to the prophecies of Isaiah 60. "Rise, shine, for your light has come." Third Isaiah wrote these glorious words to a people who had returned from the East, from the bitter captivity and defeat, released by the Persian King Cyrus to go home and rebuild. Imagine their feelings—most of them had probably been born in Babylon, or had gone there as small children. Now they are sent out on the road to rebuild a decimated country, inhabited by strangers, sent back to set the stones on top of broken and burnt foundations, plant seeds in empty and ruined fields, stumbling out of the east to an empty and ghost-ridden Jerusalem. "Rise, shine," the poet demands, "for your light has come..." He anticipates that Jerusalem will become a center for trade, a hub of new economy, "Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn." In this and other Messianic prophecies, the wise men know they are to go to Jerusalem, that they are to take rare spices, gold and frankincense and myrrh, and that they are to find the new king of all peace and prosperity.
The story tells us that Herod, appalled that his worst nightmare is coming true, demands reassurance from his own scholars. Why have these representatives of past conquest and superiority come to his home looking for some king other than himself? Can’t you hear him demanding reassurance, tell me they are wrong, tell me this prophecy doesn't mean what they think it means. His own sages then tell him something that does not reassure him at all. They tell him that the Magi are using the wrong text. Isaiah 60 has misled them into thinking that Jerusalem, ancient seat of the majesty and glory of Israel will rise and become again a prosperous, even richer and more powerful center of global economy. You really want to be looking at Micah 5:2-4: "But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in travail has brought forth; then the rest of his brethren shall return to the people of Israel. And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth."

Not in Jerusalem, then—not in the capital city with its memories of power and privilege, with its bustle and greed and ambition, not in the already crumbling palace of earthly tyranny, not there, but in Bethlehem, in that small and insignificant little town whose only claim to fame was that once, long ago, a shepherd boy named David who was born there was anointed King. The Magi are nine miles off. They have made the mistake probably every one would make, they have followed their wisdom and logic and intellectual learning and sought the manifestation of divine power in the seat of power. But they are nine miles off. God has been made manifest to the human family, not within the walls of a palace, but in the rude shelter of a stable. And they have to go, they have to travel that last nine miles and humble themselves before the peasant king, because they are driven there by God as witnesses to the new order. God who sends the Word into their hearts: True power is not to be found in wealth or majesty. God is not manifested by the trappings of kingship. The reason those kingly treasures must be laid in the straw beside their noble knees is simple: You are not merely acknowledging that this child is the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. You are proclaiming him as the Lord of the Earth, the promised one who will simply turn the world upside down. Everything you think you know and understand about the way life is and the way the world works, everything you think you know about power and might and hope and peace—everything you think you know about who you are and who you are called to be—everything must go down into that straw.

Think for a moment what these witnesses to God made manifest must give up! Gold! It is as dross. Precious spices—years of their lives spent in travel—poof! Nothing at all. The greatest sacrifice they must make is nothing less than themselves. They will, once they have knelt in the straw before God with us, they will have to reorient themselves, rethink everything they understand about living and the meaning of life itself. They will have to become new creations because of a baby born in straw, lying in straw, a child of poverty and humility yet whose coming commands the brightest star.

Poet T.S. Eliot wrote a poem describing the powerful sense of loss that he felt these sages from the East must have felt when they confronted what they had truly found in that manger place.


'The Journey of the Magi'

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

-- T. S. Eliot

We will not end on that note, however. Eliot's Magi found the death of all their assurances and understanding, and they find it bitter. But remember the line— "I would do it again." Even knowing what the sacrifice would be, what the journey would reveal, even though he knew the unsettling new truth that would forever rob him of the complacency and comfort of the status quo, even though he knew that he would have to endure the pangs of new birth himself as he was reborn in a new understanding of God, even so, he would go again, kneel again, worship again, give himself up—again.

There is room for us, too, in the straw at that manger bed. The question is, once we have found our way there, are we ready to kneel down and worship him? Knowing what will happen to us when we do? Are we ready?