Sermon — January 5, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born…
Magi from the East came to Jerusalem, asking,
“Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?
(Matthew 2:1–2)
The carol “We three kings of Orient are” has always been one of my favorites. It is, at once, both familiar and strange. The tune was composed by an Episcopal priest for a Christmas pageant in New York, but it nevertheless somehow evokes the mysterious East, in the classic 19th-century Orientalist way. It was my favorite carol when I was a kid, which I guess is a prophecy of my later minor in Middle Eastern Studies. In our pageant, three of the ringers from the choir would dress up as the kings, and each one would sing one of the verses as they processed up the aisle. They were robed in rich and royal garments; but it was really just someone’s dad.
And that’s appropriate, because the Magi themselves are familiar and strange. We’re so used to them that we don’t often ask who they are. Why do they come to Bethlehem, soon after Jesus’ birth? Are they “kings,” or “wise men?” Are there three? What on earth is myrrh?
Of course, if you really want to know what the deal is with the mysterious travelers in our Gospel reading today, then I have to ask you the same thing I asked the mother of one of our Christmas pageant participants when she came to me with his question about these Three Kings: “How much does exactly he know about Zoroastrianism?” (Apparently they don’t teach that in pre-K any more.)
Most of what we say about the Magi comes from traditions we’ve built on top of what Matthew gives us in the text. They may well have been kings, but Matthew doesn’t tell us that. They certainly seem to have been wise, although that’s not really a translation, per se. Matthew simply writes that “Magi from the East came to Jerusalem.” And when I call them Magi, I’m not just being pretentious and saying some word in ancient Greek, although I count three classicists in the congregation, at least. Magi is used in Matthew’s ancient Greek, but it isn’t a Greek word. It’s a Persian word, borrowed into Greek, and it refers to a kind of priestly caste in the ancient Persian religion whose primary figure was the prophet Zoroaster, hence the preliminary question if you really want to understand the conclusion of the Christmas pageant—How much do you know about Zoroastrianism?
And if you answered, “not very much, Gregory,” then you’re on the right track! This was true in the ancient world as well. For the Greeks, Jews, and Romans, the Persians were an exotic people to the east. They were known for the splendor of their royal courts and the wisdom of their astronomers. And there were hints of something more, rumors that they had access to powers beyond what we knew—our words for magic and for mages, after all, simply come from these stories of what the “Magi” could do.
These Magi bring three royal gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh, and so we sometimes call them kings, and give them names, like Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior. They have the astronomical insight to read the stars like an ancient GPS, and so we call them wise. But in fact, we don’t know how many there were, or where they came from, or their names; we just know they were Magi from the east.
But as mysterious as the Magi are, there’s one thing we know for sure: They’re a symbol of God’s choice to love you and me; to extend the bounds of the family of God to include not just one chosen people, but the whole world. King Herod is worried about a rival king of the Jews, someone who’s going to threaten his control over his own people in his own place. But the Magi come from afar. They’re Gentiles. They’re the mysterious, foreign Someone Else evoked by the Victorian hymn. But the Magi are us, Gentiles drawn toward the God of the Jewish people; strangers and foreigners far away from home, but invited to share in the riches of God’s grace.
This morning, we have a double baptism, as we welcome two children into the family of God. Some of our congregation today came from just around the corner. Some of us have traveled from far to the East. But all of us come here, like the Magi, on our own paths. Some of us come with a deep knowledge of one religious tradition or another, which may or may not overlap with Christianity, any more than Judaism and Zoroastrianism overlapped, two thousand years ago. Some of us come because of our own experience; because we’ve seen something shining in our lives, and followed where it leads. Some of us are just here for a child, but all of us have arrived, along these long and varied roads, to bear witness to something, because we have been drawn here by love.
The Magi offer their symbolic gifts: a chest of gold fit for a king, the incense they would offer to a god, the myrrh with which a body was embalmed. And we come bearing our gifts, too, the humbler gifts we share with one another every day, in our communities or our families or our friendships. The gifts of music, and of art; of baking, and of humor; the quieter gifts of a listening ear, or a compassionate heart, all those things that blend into the holiest gift of love.
The Magi come bearing their gifts, and pay homage, and then they go home. They wouldn’t hear what the grown-up Jesus would teach. They wouldn’t see the wonders he would do. But they returned home transformed, nevertheless. They returned, Matthew tells us in a wonderful turn of phrase, “by another road.” (Matt. 2:12) Their journey isn’t “out-and-back,” from point A to point B and back to point A, on the same route. The way home follows a different road, one they’ve never walked on before.
And so will yours.
Maybe you’re just here for one baptism or the other. Maybe like the Magi you’ll return home, and never see this place again. But the child you see today will change your life, in a small way, or a big one, and already has, and the gifts you offer him or her will become even greater gifts for you.
Or perhaps you’re here because it’s a Sunday morning and this is what you do. But the path you take when you walk out these doors still won’t be the same as the one you walked home so many times before, because you aren’t the same as you were a week or a month ago, and the world is not the same, and even though the changes seem gradual, each one of us is being led somewhere new.
There’s a famous poem by T. S. Eliot about “The Journey of the Magi.” But it’s not that poem that comes to mind today, as I think about their travels from home far to the East along a road that leads back home, but by a different way; as I think about the long journeys that we all take through life, in communities and in companionship with the people we love; as I think how familiar and how strange the Magi can be. It’s a few lines from another of Eliot’s great poems, “Little Gidding.”
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling (he writes)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.