Share It with the World

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

January 3, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

God whose love reaches to the highest heavens
how can we keep silent?
God whose righteousness stands like the tallest mountain
how can we keep silent?
God whose justice is deeper than any ocean
how can we keep silent?
God whose grace flows like a never-ending river
how can we keep silent?
How can we not proclaim your majesty
from generation to generation?
How can we not raise the lamp of your Salvation
for all the world to see?
God whose love reaches to the highest heavens
we praise your mighty name!

 

Matthew 2

The Magi Visit the Messiah

2 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi^[a] from the east came to Jerusalem ² and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

³ When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. ⁴ When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. ⁵ “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

⁶ “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
    are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
    who will shepherd my people Israel.’^[b]”

⁷ Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. ⁸ He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

⁹ After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰ When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. ¹¹ On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. ¹² And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

The Escape to Egypt

¹³ When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

¹⁴ So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, ¹⁵ where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”^[c]

¹⁶ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. ¹⁷ Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”^[d]

The Return to Nazareth

¹⁹ After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt ²⁰ and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”

²¹ So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, ²³ and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

A Message

“Share It with the World”

A friend recently shared with me these new funny lyrics to the tune of “We Three Kings”:

We three kings are six feet apart

We’ll purell before we depart

We’ve been tested, as suggested

Careful are we, and smart!

Oh…do our masks go with our gowns?

Do these face shields hide our crowns?

We’ve had plenty 2020

Still we head toward David’s town!

I share these because I think this captures rather well how a lot of us are feeling at the tail end of this holiday season. Now we observe Epiphany, the last day of the twelve days of Christmas, a landmark we pass every year. Just like how every single moment in the last year has been vastly different from previous years, this Epiphany is unlike any other we’ve celebrated before. We’re celebrating quarantined at home, and we’re passing this milestone in a time when, based on the current state of the world, maybe we need to hear these words now more than ever.

The highlighted characters of this story have incredibly pure hearts and noble intentions: the Magi. We don’t know exactly which country they’re from, though we have several compelling guesses, we don’t know their names, and we don’t even know for a fact that there were three of them, we only assume that because they supplied three gifts. What we do know is that God reached them with a sign that God knew they couldn’t ignore: a bright star. They spend, we deduce based on details supplied by the text, about two years tracking down the origin of this star and following it before they find their way to Palestine. They’ve narrowed the location down to a general area, but they need the help of local experts in order to proceed, so they find King Herod and ask him a question they had no idea he didn’t want to hear: where is the baby king?

Herod, whose intentions are extraordinarily warped by a lust for greed and power, calls in experts of his own, scribes and Pharisees, to crack open a book he’s never touched (the Bible). They read it for him, and use the words of the prophets to explain that the new king the Magi seek is likely in Bethlehem. Herod calls the Magi back and tells them, go ahead and find that new king…you know, so I can pay him homage, too (he says with his fingers crossed behind his back).

The Magi find Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and their hearts are filled with love and awe for the baby they sought, the baby king. They don’t need to be Palestinian like this family, or Jewish like them, in order to be washed in the Holy, and transformed by Christ. They go to sleep, and God warns them in their dreams not to trust Herod, so instead of going back to him like they said they would, they avoid him.

Herod goes ballistic. He has been disobeyed, his power has been questioned. Not only that, but there’s a little boy out there who’s power could threaten his, not only because he insists on having all of it, but because he’s terrified of anyone who could team up with a new king to stab him in the back (literally). He handles his fragile, toxic masculinity by putting a hit out on a toddler, and since he has absolutely no respect for life he has every boy under two years of age killed.

This is horrifying no matter how we look at it. But there’s also an important biblical question to ask here: when was the last time a tyrannical king wanted to kill all the baby boys so no one could take away his power? We might have to think about that for a minute, but Matthew’s predominantly Jewish audience would be shooting their hands in the air and saying “Oh! I know!” Pharaoh. In the book of Exodus, Moses’s mom and sister hide him in a basket in the Nile because Pharaoh demands the death of every Hebrew boy.

Here's why this is so important to me: cruelty isn’t new. It’s downright common. Killing is common. Violence is common. Snuffing out the voices and lives of those under you is common. It’s what we do in response to these common horrors that sets us apart.

We live in a power hungry world, where selfish tyrants (I’m not naming names, you can do that yourself) refuse to concede power to anyone else. We live in a world where love is sparce. We live in a world with a downright cavalier attitude toward life, where we won’t wear a mask to Wal Mart because we have “rights”, where immigrant children are imprisoned and abused in cages, where their moms undergo forced hysterectomies, where hoarding of wealth and resources leads to poverty and starvation, and where more than 300,000 lives have been lost to the coronavirus pandemic.

What are we going to do about those horrible things, and who are we going to be? Will we be Pharisees and Scribes, succumbing to the pressure of the status quo and trying to appease the cruel ones because if they go after a baby boy at least we’re safe today? Or will we be Magi with pure hearts, looking for Christ wherever we can find him and then going far out of our way to protect his fragile presence in our world?

Let us find that still small voice that represents God with us and then do all we can to support it and make it grow.

Amen.

I invite you to receive the benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in, from this time and forever more. And the people of God all say together: Amen!