January 12, 2025, Bringing Home the Light, Matthew 2:1-12 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ January 12, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

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

If you walked down Prospect Street last week you probably saw quite a few Christmas trees sticking up out of the snow banks along the road. The colored lights on porches and trees and bushes have been taken down, or at least unplugged. We have arrived at the point, as we do every year, when we’re all ready to pack away the decorations and tidy up the house and get back to early bedtimes and regular schedules and plain food.

Even the magi, those mysterious visitors from the East, when they had traveled miles and miles to pay tribute to the newborn King, even they, after they had bowed down to the infant King and his mother, and given their kingly gifts, even they went back home again.

When they found the house where Mary and Joseph and Jesus were living, they were filled with exceedingly great joy. They fell on their faces before the tiny child and his mother Mary and they worshiped him as a true king, and they gave him the rich gifts they had brought with them, gold and frankincense and myrrh, gifts fit for a king.

It must have been a small, simple house because Mary and Joseph were nothing more than peasants, working-class people in temporary housing with a brand new baby. But from what Matthew tells us, the magi didn’t doubt for an instant that the tiny little boy they found in the lap of the young peasant woman was indeed the King whose birth they had seen in the stars. They fell on their faces before the infant Jesus and they gave him the rich gifts they had brought. But then they went back home.

And does it seem strange to you that they didn’t stay in Bethlehem? When they had made the long, dangerous journey through the wilderness to find this child and worship him, why then did they turn around and go back home? The magi followed the star for all those months to worship the King that was born to rule the whole world – not just a king to rule the Jews or overthrow Herod or squash the Roman Empire – because why would they care about that if they weren’t Jews – which they weren’t. They went home because the appearing of the star wasn’t the sign of some kind of local disruption of the powers that be. It was nothing less than God’s love come to dwell among us – all of us. God so loved the world – east and west, north and south, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile – that he sent Jesus. And when the Magi had worshiped the child-King, they brought that good news home.

And the question for us is, what happens when we go back home, back to life as usual after the holidays? What’s left of Christmas, when the tree is out in the snowbank, and the leftovers have been thrown out, and the wise men and camels are wrapped in tissue paper and put back in their boxes, and all the twinkling lights on our neighbors’ porches have gone dark?

We might have come to the end of the holidays this year feeling joyful. Or we might just be feeling relieved, or tired, or sad, or anxious, or nothing at all. Home looks pretty much like it always has done, as if Christmas had never even happened. It might feel some days like the futility of the world had had the last word after all, like the wildfires and wars and political scheming and old age and all the other Herod-powers of our time would always and forever rest secure on their thrones. The witness of the wise men is that the little child born in Bethlehem so long ago and so far away is still, and only, and always, the one true King, born to bring light and life and love into the darkness of our world, and to change it forever. But sometimes that is as hard to follow as a single star in the night sky.

On Christmas Eve, we ended our service the same way we always end our service. We turned off the lights, and we passed the flames of our little candles from person to person to person, until little by little the whole church was filled with light. The Herod-powers of the world don’t pay much attention to things that are small and quiet and helpless, but just as the little child in Mary’s lap grew up to be revealed as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, so we pass the little lights of God’s love in our lives from one person to another every day – the lights of kindness, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, truth, justice – and so, surely, the world will be filled and transformed by God’s glory and the Herods of this world will be cast down from their thrones at last. +