3 Magi, 2 Kings, 1 Star

By Lyndon Marcotte, Sermons Online

Epiphany A, B, C
Matthew 2:1-12

My earliest memories of the nativity were life size plastic characters with light bulbs inside that stood in a gigantic wooden manger that my grandfather built and put out in the front yard every Christmas. I remember the wise men most because they were the tallest figures in the scene and taller than me. The funny thing is that in reality the wise men were not in the manger scene at all. They came later. How much later is up for speculation. Most scholars believe it could have been as much as two years later before they arrived in search of the newborn king, although we celebrate Epiphany as the 12^th day of Christmas when the Magi are believed to have appeared.

Our Christmas traditions are really a mix of different cultural traditions that have been borrowed and adapted many times over many years. It’s funny how just this last year a couple new holiday movies have changed my kids’ ideas about some things about Christmas, including how many reindeer there really are and that Santa Claus has jet engines on his sleigh.

We know that Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25^th.  It’s a day that’s been set aside to commemorate his birth. It was actually a compromise by the church in the middle ages. After fighting the pagan customs and holiday observances to no avail, the church decided if you can’t beat em, join em. So they chose to observe the birth of Jesus during the same time as the pagan festivals. If you can’t stop them, maybe they can tone them down a little and redirect their revelry to more wholesome causes. The irony is that for all the fuss about keeping Christ in Christmas it really should be about putting Christ in Christmas.

You see living the Christian life isn’t about maintaining this pristine, pure doctrine and way of life, letting nothing common or ordinary ever defile it. It’s about taking all of life, as messy and ugly as it may be at times, and infusing it with the presence of Christ.

Last week we discovered how shepherds were among the most unlikely and untrustworthy people to be trusted as messengers in days when Jesus was born. These Magi from the east are no more religious or saintly than they were.

Despite the Christmas carols that we sing, Magi weren’t really kings at all. The only kings in this story are Herod, king of the Jews, and Christ the King. Magi were not necessarily wise either. It’s a really polite and civil description that comes from the time of King James and the translation of the Bible that he commissioned. In fact the Magi were actually astrologers. No, not astronomers like scientists that we think of today. They were astrologers, fortune tellers. Not unlike those who write horoscopes today and tell you all about what your sign is and what that means. Magi observed the stars and used them as a guide for signs.

One particular night however when they were studying the heavens as they did on every other night, they noticed an unusual star that appeared in the sky and shone brighter than all the other stars. It was so sudden and different that they were certain that it meant something very significant. They believed that a great King had been born, and they left home and livelihood to go west in search of him.

When they came to Jerusalem, the capital of this foreign land, looking for the king, they were sent to King Herod, a jealous, power hungry, paranoid ruler of a subjugated people. This was actually a province of Rome and under Roman rule, but in order to keep the peace and prevent a revolt the Romans used local rulers to keep a resemblance of local government and authority to keep the peace, as long as the taxes were paid on schedule. He is a tyrant who lords over those he rules rather than serving them. He is not a ruler who “shepherds” God’s people.

By contrast, the infant king Jesus is helpless and vulnerable, a ruler whose power is hidden in humility. The wise men in Matthew 2 are the chief priests and the scribes who function as Herod’s key advisors. Learned in the scriptures, they possess academic knowledge that both Herod and the magi lack. But what good does it do them? It does not lead them to their Messiah but causes them to become involved in a plot to kill him.

The magi are examples for who follow Christ today. They are depicted as persons who:

• who do as they are instructed,
• who seek no honor for themselves, and
• who gladly humble themselves, kneeling even before a woman and a child.

Clearly, they fit the image of servants better than that of kings.

The gifts they gave are symbolic of who this baby would become:

• Gold for a King to reign over His Father’s kingdom
• Frankincense for a Priest to teach a higher law & intercede with God for us
• Myrrh for a Savior who would die for the sins of mankind

We must welcome this Christ-child into our lives as our King, our Intercessor, and our Savior.

The church’s observance of epiphany should not be a triumphal occasion for those who have seen the light to celebrate their privileged status over others. The lessons of epiphany encourage humble admission that God’s glory is often manifested where we least expect it.

We’ll Work Till Jesus Comes

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Proper 28A/Ordinary 33A/Pentecost +22
Matthew 25:14-30

The Bible has been misused and taken out of context for a very long time. Jesus Himself often had to correct misunderstandings about Old Testament scriptures. Hopefully, it has been misused mostly out of ignorance and not from ill-intention. I certainly have made mistakes over the years in how I looked a particular passage and now view some things differently than I did when I first started preaching. However, some people intentionally and maliciously twist scripture to fit their own agendas.

This particular passage is one of the more commonly abused passages in the Gospels. It has become quite popular with preachers of the “prosperity Gospel.” You know, the tv preachers who say God wants all Christians to be millionaires, to inherent their “divine destiny,” “name-it-and-claim-it,” etc. Of course the path to achieving that success begins with a donation to their tv ministry and signing up for their audio message of the month club.

They like to use a text like this to prove that God wants us to be wealthy. The implication is that if you’re not, something is wrong with your faith. They want you to read this passage literally and take away from it that God wants us all to do well with our 401k’s and stock options. If that were the case, we don’t need pastors. We need financial planners and hedge fund managers. We don’t need sermons. We need seminars on how to manage your money.

Too many people see God as a divine slot machine. “If I put X in, pull the religious lever correctly, I will get Y out.”  Many people see Christianity as one big transaction. “If I’m a good person, God will love me and take me to heaven when I die.”

Whenever Moses went up the mountain and stayed gone too long, the people took to their own devices and made it up as they went along. After Jesus ascended and left the Church behind, some people decided to follow the Israelites example. While we may not be worshipping golden calves these days, we have taken to worshipping personalities, power, and money, even in the church, especially in the church.

This is another parable in a series of those that Jesus told that talks about the kingdom of heaven. “The kingdom of heaven is like…” Jesus is trying to prepare the Church for his physical absence from them. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus left by a faith community that had begun to question whether would Jesus return, when He would return, and how. Most of them were written even after A.D. 70 when the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. These were bleak times for this community, and they turned to the words of Jesus for comfort and hope.

When they heard the parable again after Jesus had left, they heard it differently. “Like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them… After a long time the master of those servants returned…” They knew who the Master was when they heard this parable retold in Jesus’ absence.

In the parable of the 10 virgins waiting for the bridegroom, we were told to be vigilant in watching and waiting for His return, even though He tarry. Keep on watching, keep on waiting.  Be on watch for the kingdom to appear in every moment.  In this parable we are told what we are to be about while we are waiting, what kind of business we should be engaged in. We are not to dig a hole and hide our treasure. We are not to find a safe little place to hide, hold hands, and sing kum-ba-ya till Jesus comes. We are supposed to be about our Father’s business, just like Jesus.

The real currency of life is not money. The real currency of our lives is time. We must be careful how we spend it. We must wisely spend our lives in our Father’s business, even though Christ tarry in His coming. We should not become lazy. We should not be fearful. We should live to please ourselves, but we should love God and love one another. Use everything we have: our time, our bodies, the strength of our hands, the skill of our minds… use them all for God’s glory.

Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our life.” It’s what we do in the little insignificant moments that matters, not just on those really big important moments where everyone is watching. What are you doing with the life God gave you? Are you just going to wring your hands in despair? Are you going to spend it on your own pleasures, going from one to another trying to find happiness? Are you going to use your life to glorify the God who gave it to you and to love the people God has placed in your life? That’s the real question.

Jesus is coming. Jesus is always coming and is always here. He comes to us each and everyday in big and small ways. Jesus comes in our acts of kindness and words of love. As we spend our lives on behalf of others, Christ comes to us and to those we love in those moments, and we get a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.

Water, Wind, & Fire

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Pentecost A
John 7:37-39, Acts 2:1-21

In the text we read that Jesus promised the Spirit would come after Him. The outpouring of the Spirit happened on what is known as the Day of Pentecost, some 50 days after the resurrection, which we observe this Sunday. Sadly, this day often goes unnoticed in many churches. To be sure there is plenty of bad theology out there regarding the Holy Spirit and the whole subject can be confusing, but the knee jerk reaction not to talk about it is just as bad if not worse. We need to understand what the Bible actually says about it. As simply as I can put it, the Spirit is the living Christ at work in our lives. There are three symbols of the Spirit in these texts that reveal the work of the living Christ in us.

First we read that the Spirit is like water.

We should not overlook that Jesus stood up and said these words on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. Given the terrible drought that we are experiencing across the South, we might consider holding a Feast of Tabernacles ourselves.

You see, it was tradition during this feast that they would put up booths or tents as a reminder of their journey through the wilderness during the exodus and how God was faithful to deliver them from Egypt. As part of that observance they would gather palm branches and make a leaf canopy over the altar. Every day of the feast the priest would gather water from the pool of Siloam and carry it to the altar in procession with trumpets blowing then pour the water in a bowl next to the altar and pour wine in an another bowl on the other side. Thanksgiving prayers were offered for the water God gave Moses when he struck the rock and for the rain that has sustained them since. They also prayed for rain for the next year and a fruitful harvest. This was the biggest feast of the Jewish year and this was the culmination of that feast on the last day when people are praying for rain that Jesus stands up and says, “If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink, whoever believes in Me.”

In dry desert communities water is life. Likewise, the Spirit gives life and sustains us through the desert places in our lives. For those worshippers at the feast they knew all too well the struggles of survival, finding water, drawing it several times a day to keep your family and livestock alive, like the Samaritan woman at the well. They reacted much like she did at first when she He heard the offer of this “living water.” A lot of Christians think grace must be too good to be true, because they keep trying to do something to earn God’s love and forgiveness. It seems like the cross just wasn’t enough. They need to feel as though they’ve earned it. Jesus is offering living water to quench our spiritual thrists, yet so many feel compelled to attach strings to this offer that Jesus never did.

Specifically, it is “living water” that gives life. There are places like the ocean or the Dead Sea that cannot sustain us because they are full of “dead water.” Meaning, fresh water flows into them, but it does not flow out.

“Dead water” is synonymous with “dead churches” and “dead Christians.” That sounds like an oxymoron, an impossibility. How can churches and Christians be dead? They are dead because they do not have the living water of the Spirit flowing in and out of their lives. We cannot soak up the grace of God continually and not share it with others. At the wedding at Cana and on the hillside feeding the multitudes the wine, the bread, and the fish did not run out as long as it was being given away. Jesus said that “streams of living water flow from within Him.” It is an inexhaustible supply of grace. If we want to experience the life-giving Spirit of the Christ, we have to give our lives away to the thirsty among us, sharing God’s love and grace with others. If we don’t, our well will run dry, our waters will stagnate, and we will wither.

In Acts 2 we find that the Spirit is like wind.

When the day had come for the promise of the Spirit to be realized, the disciples and other followers of Jesus were in Jerusalem gathered together in one place when, “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting,” Acts 2:2.

It’s really hard to try to explain the Holy Spirit to someone. How does all this work? What does it mean? Those can be hard questions to answer sometime, but the Spirit is like the wind. We don’t see the wind, but we see what the wind blows. We can tell where it’s coming from and feel where it’s going. When Jesus was trying to explain spiritual things to Nicodemus, a highly educated man, He said, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit,” John 3:8.

Still, you have to wonder why it’s not easier at times. There are times when you just wish God would write on the wall what you should do, because you just don’t know anymore. David Lose wrote:

The Holy Spirit does not come to solve our problems but to create them. Think about it: absent the coming of the Holy Spirit, the disciples could go back to their previous careers as fishermen. I can almost hearing James and John explaining, “Sure, it was a wild and crazy three-year-ride, and that Jesus sure was a heck of a guy, but maybe we needed to get that out of our system before we could settle down and take on Dad’s business.” Once the Spirit comes, however, that return to normalcy is no longer an option.

The Spirit is also the rushing wind that comes into our lives and shakes them up, moves us out of our comfort zones, and calls us to the great adventure of walking by faith and not by sight. It’s worth noting that the wind “filled the whole house.” That means that there is no place where it is not. That’s exactly like God. God isn’t impossible to find. God is impossible to avoid. God is everywhere. There is no place that God is not. So no matter wherever we are, God is with us. There is no place or no situation we may find ourselves in where God is not with us and able to see us through it.

Lastly, the Spirit is like fire.

Just like God provided a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness, the Spirit is the fire that lights our way.

It can be hard to understand what God is doing in our lives a lot of times, even on the good days. I’ve often told people that the hardest choices we have to make in life are not the choices between good and bad. Those are easy. We may not always want to do the right thing, but if we know this is good and the other is bad, we know what we should do even if we don’t want to do it. The really hard choices in life are between good and better. Those are the choices we have to pray hard about. We ask God to show us what He wants for our lives, because often we don’t know which way is best. In those moments we “lean not on our own understanding.” We trust God, seek His direction. What we are doing is asking for the Spirit to show us what to do, to help us find peace in the middle of a difficult time in our lives.

The Spirit is also like the “consuming fire” that burned on the mountain with Moses. It consumes everything in us that pollutes our character and dilutes our message. It convicts us, grips our hearts and turns them to God and to the least, the lost, and the lonely among us. Were it not for the conviction of the Spirit we might withdraw into ourselves and spend our lives only on our pleasures, but the Spirit of God compels us, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” It moves us out of selfishness and into selflessness. On the Day of Pentecost the tongues of fire consumed the pride and prejudice that threatened the first church and brought unity and peace between everyone gathered there.

Lastly, just as a fire burned over the tabernacle in the wilderness to remind the Israelites of God’s presence with them, the Spirit burns within us assuring us that God is with us. Church membership is no guarantee of a person’s character. There are just as many rascals inside the church as there are outside it. The one and only evidence that someone is following the living Christ is the Spirit that shines through their life.

The greatest evidence of the arrival of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost was unity among all the different Christians that were gathered there. When we are all following the Spirit, seeking God’s will and our neighbor’s interests above our own, there will be peace and unity in the fellowship. That’s the Church the world needs to see. One that is alive, healthy, and full of grace.

May the Spirit of the living Christ fill us with living water overflowing with His grace. May the Spirit of the resurrected Christ blow a fresh wind into our lives wakening us to His call. May the Spirit of the coming Christ light a fire within our hearts that may burn brightly with His love. Amen.