January 6, 2019 | Rev. Gary Nicolosi
Few figures in the Bible capture our imagination as much as theMagi. We don’t know who they were or where they came from, sothey remain shrouded in mystery. We know only what the Bible tells us: they left the security of their home to follow a star. Unsure of where they were going or what they would find, and refusing to take refuge in the conventional wisdom of the day, they journeyed toward an unknown horizon.
What made them do it?
In his book The Adventures of Living, the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier suggests that life is a one way-street in which we mustbe continually moving forward. “The spiritual life,” he writes, “consists only in a series of new births. There must be newflowerings, new prophets, new adventures – always new adventures – if the heart…is to go on beating.”
The Magi moved in the only direction they could move – forward. They were spiritual seekers who moved beyond the conventional religion of the day into a new way of being. They understood that there is always more to learn than we know; more to be discovered than we experience. In following a star, they found God where they least expected to find him – in a feed box for animals.
God was discovered not in the palaces of kings or in the temples of gods or in the academies of philosophers, but in a child born of Jewish peasants in a third rate province of the Roman Empire.
God is where you least expect to find him.
In the Bible the Magi are called “wise men”. What made them “wise” was not their possession of truth but their pursuit of it.Because they sensed there was “something less” in their own selves, they searched for “something more” in life.
Here lies the difference between the Magi and the religious leaders consulted by Herod. For these priests and scribes, the scriptures were a self-contained, closed system of knowledge. The scriptures interpreted the world, but the world was of little value in interpreting the scriptures. There was never a need to engage in dialogue with the world. Whatever could not be fitted into a rigid religious system was simply dismissed as untrue or irrelevant.
And that’s the problem. If truth is self-contained, then there is no more truth to be found. There is nothing more we can learn. There are no more questions we can ask. If truth is only to be possessed and never pursued, then our knowledge becomes a dead weight rather than a breath of life. When we claim to have all truth, we stop acting human and start acting like God. When that happens, we may, like the religious leaders, find ourselves dismissing the God we ought to worship.
That’s the paradox of this gospel story: the religious leaders whoknew their Bible did not worship the God who came among them, but the Magi who knew no such Bible did him homage. Those who have the Bible and are steeped in deep roots of tradition are not always the ones to give God honor.
The Magi, who took truth seriously, knew they did not have all the truth, so they journeyed and searched for the truth wherever it was to be found. Because they journeyed, they discovered more than they could ever have imagined. Because they searched, they found God where they least expected to find him.
Augustus Toplady was one of the leaders of the Great Awakening in 18th century Britain. We know him best as the author of that popular hymn Rock of Ages. He was in many ways a heartwarming Christian, but not always. By his own account his religion was cold and lifeless until, at the age of 16, he attended a prayer meeting in rural Ireland. An illiterate layman, James Morris, preached on drawing closer to God through Christ. Later in life, Toplady wrote of that day:
“By the grace of God under the ministry of that dear messengerand under that sermon, I was, I trust, brought nigh by the blood of Christ in August 1756. Strange that I, who had for so long sat under the means of grace in England, should be brought near toGod in an obscure part of Ireland amidst a handful of God’speople met together in a barn, and under the ministry of one whocould hardly spell his name.”
God is where we least expect to find him.
Commentators today classify many in our culture as “spiritual but not religious” and some even suggest that the general population is becoming “spiritual but secular.” There is no doubt that mainlineProtestant Christianity is a diminishing influence in our culture. And yet, there are other kinds of non-traditional Christianity that are growing in this country, and even the Roman Catholic Church is managing to hold its own despite enormous scandals, sexual and otherwise. There are even a significant number of people who have left organized religion entirely who still feel that spiritual instinct deep within them. These are the seekers in search of“something more” – not something cold and abstract and dogmatic and legalistic, but warm and welcoming, life-giving andinviting. They don’t want a religion of rules and regulations, butthey do seek a relationship with God, a sense of self-worth and a reason for being. Theirs is a quest for transcendence, because whether they are aware of it or not, the search to find our true selves in relationship to someone or something greater than us is a quest for God.
Western culture is a bundle of contradictions. We have everything we need to be happy, but many of us are unhappy. We are filled with things but unfulfilled as persons. We have our possessions but feel like we are living in a vacuum. Despite our prosperity, we feel poor in spirit. There are the aches of the human heart, the sighs and curses of living, the loneliness of so many.
The 19th century German philosopher Schopenhauer was walking down the street one day wondering why he was born at all. He accidentally bumped into a pedestrian who indignantlyremarked, “Who do you think you are?” To which Schopenhauer replied, “I wish I knew.”
How many of us are like Schopenhauer: we don’t know who weare or where we are going in life? We have the resources for authentic living but no purpose to living. We have the best of intentions but no direction. We have career goals but no life goals. We want love, but we look in all the wrong places. We settle for Plan B when we could have Plan A. The truth is: many of us arerunning on empty, and we don’t even know it.
But life doesn’t have to be that way – not for any of us. We can view our living – from life to death – as a journey in our relationship with God. Each of us is called, like the Magi, to leave our securities behind and follow a star. Like most journeys it is filled with adventure and moments that will stretch us to become more than we ever thought possible. Embarking on the journey will challenge us to explore the tough questions that make life meaningful.
It was the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Longeran who opened his seminal work Insight by observing that when a dog has nothing to do, it goes to sleep; when a human being has nothing to do, he or she may ask a question.
Asking questions is part of being human. Rather than fear questions, we are to welcome them – because through questions God may be giving us some new insight into himself or his universe. Admittedly, asking questions can increase our anxiety, disturb our complacency, and challenge our certainties. We may even find ourselves at a point in our journey where we must decide whether to pull back in fear or move forward in faith. But if we are to be more like the Magi than the religious leaders, if we are to follow the star and not remain in our self-enclosed world, then the only way to move is forward.
God is where you least expect to find him.
In a book I return to again and again, Margaret Craven’s I Heardthe Owl Call My Name, a young priest is assigned to a remote First Nations village in northern British Columbia. One incident has the priest encounter a rather disgruntled and cynical teacher who is quite dissatisfied with the primitive living conditions in the village. As the teacher meets the priest for the first time and duly complains about conditions, the story continues:
“There was one more thing the teacher felt it his duty to inform thevicar. The vicar might as well know right now that as for himself, he was an atheist; he considered Christianity a calamity. He believed that any man who professed it must be incredibly naïve. The young vicar grinned and agreed. There were two kinds of naiveté, he said, quoting Schweitzer. One not even aware of the problems, and another which has knocked on all the doors of knowledge and knows man can explain little, and is still willing tofollow his convictions into the unknown. ‘This takes courage’ he said, and he thanked the teacher and returned to the vicarage.”
Courage – to follow a star takes courage – to move into a futurethat is God’s, not ours. It means stepping out from where we areto where God leads. It means pursing truth openly without possessing truth defensively. It means having the faith to overcome fear, knowing that our faith ultimately rests neither on an inerrant Bible nor an infallible Church but in a faithful, loving God.
The Magi began by following a star and they ended by worshiping a baby. May God give us the courage to follow the star in our own lives, and so come to worship where we least expect to find him.
Dr. Gary Nicolosi January 6, 2018
Text – Matthew 2:1-12 Epiphany Sunday, C