January 7, 2024, Who Saw the Star?, Matthew 2:1-12 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ January 7, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to this sermon, click the link below. The text is below the recording.

When I was a little girl, we lived in St. Louis, and one of our favorite day trips was to Grant’s Farm. This is a large estate belonging to the Anheuser Busch family. Horse-loving kids looked forward to seeing the Clydesdale stables. The grown-ups looked forward to the free beer. But the best part was a long train ride that meandered through the grounds. There were exotic animals and woods and meadows, and at one point that was always the most exciting, no matter how many times I experienced it, rounding a bend, all of a sudden the manor house came into view. I am sure that my child’s-eye view magnified its glory, but to me it was like a sudden glimpse of some magic world, a most splendid appearance, and it never failed to surprise and delight me even though I always knew it was coming.

That is what the word epiphany means: it means an appearance, the splendid appearance of something wonderful. In the Bible, the Epiphany is the sudden, unexpected appearance of God Himself in the world of our experience, and what we celebrate today as the Epiphany is exactly what happened when the star appeared over Bethlehem and announced the sudden, wonderful appearance of our God, a baby boy born in a stable – but also the Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

But not everyone sees an epiphany the same way. The way we see an epiphany depends on whether we’re paying attention; it depends on how preoccupied we are with ourselves and our expectations and our assumptions. In the gospel reading today, the story of the coming of the Magi, we see very different views of the same glorious epiphany.

First there was King Herod. The Magi came to consult him about the appearance of the star, because he was the King, but Herod was so preoccupied with the exercise of his power and the maintenance of his control, that he could only see the news as a threat. He was troubled by it – and that seems kind of like an understatement – because he was a powerful and ruthless man, and a paranoid man. Faced with the splendid vision of the star that heralded the birth of a new king, all he could think or feel was fear. The news of a coming king was not good news to a man who would stick at nothing to hold onto his throne – even murder members of his own family.

And so all Jerusalem was troubled along with him, not because of the epiphany, but because they knew their man Herod. They knew their king well enough to know that the appearance of this star was going to bring them suffering of some sort – and they were right to be troubled. When Herod failed to learn the location of the newborn king from the Magi, he ordered his soldiers to kill all the boys under two years old. Because the response of the powers of this world to a vision that threatens their power is rage, and it is always the innocents of the world who suffer for it.

The priests and the scribes saw the epiphany in another light when Herod consulted them about the star. Sure, they said, sure, we know all about that. And they told Herod about the prophecies that had foretold the star. And they told Herod where the birth was supposed to take place. Their whole lives had been dedicated to the study of the law and the prophets. They concerned themselves with seeing things unfold as they they expected them to unfold. They were the experts: students of the law, and keepers of the word, and they were faithful to their duties. They recognized the coming of the star and what it portended; they knew it all, chapter and verse; but they didn’t seem to see it with any wonder or joy or astonishment.

But then there were the magi. We call them kings, but they were really more like a mixture of priest and scientist and astrologer, all rolled into one. It’s worth noticing how it was that the epiphany came to them. Five hundred years before the magi set out to follow the star, Judah was invaded and conquered by the Babylonians. The Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, carried off some of the best and the brightest of the Jews into exile, and one of those captives was a young Jew named Daniel. You know him as the faithful man who was thrown into the lion’s den. In his exile, Daniel gained a reputation as a wise and learned man, and he became chief among the wise men in Nebuchadnezzar’s court. We can assume that when Daniel was exiled, he carried with him the scrolls of the prophets, the writings that told about the people who walked in darkness and the great light they would see; the writings that told about the birth of a child who would be called “Wonderful counselor” and “mighty God.” Those scrolls found a place in that far country among the writings studied by the wise men among the Babylonians and Persians, and many, many years later, when the wise men of our story saw the star that appeared in the night sky, they heard the voice of those Hebrew prophets; and they were filled with wonder, and astonishment, and joy, and they set out on a long and slow and dangerous journey of hundreds of miles to an unknown land, to find the king who had been born for the blessing of all the nations. Of the many people in this story who saw the Epiphany of the star in the sky over Bethlehem, marking the place where the infant king lay, it was the Magi, heathens and strangers from a distant country, who were the ones to rejoice with exceedingly great joy at its appearance.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany – Epiphany with a capital “E,” but God hasn’t stopped showing up. In the middle of our busy or boring or chaotic or violent world, God still shows up, suddenly and gloriously sometimes, and other times quietly and gently, and still other time urgently and insistently. He shows up in the stories of Scripture, or in the face of a stranger; in the words of a poet, or maybe in the overwhelming beauty of a night sky. He shows up in dark places where he is least expected. He reveals himself to people we wouldn’t have chosen, if it were left up to us. There are so many different epiphanies in this world because God is still concerned with making himself known to his children – with making himself a home in our midst – with being the God who is with us.

God always shows up, but we don’t always see his appearing. We’re not always paying attention. It is very easy to be so full of our own preoccupations or assumptions or priorities or ambitions that we fail to see him. It is very easy to be so devoted to our own certainties that we refuse to see him.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and in our family we have a tradition of making resolutions for the coming year. I think a lot of people do that. They resolve to lose 15 pounds, or they resolve to read more books, or they resolve to do more volunteer work – they resolve to be better people in various ways. Thinking about the coming year, what I desire most for all of us here is that we will be able to see God in all his appearings, that we will recognize him in all our epiphanies – and that when we see him we will rejoice with exceedingly great joy like those wise men from a far country. +