Epiphany of the Lord
January 6, 2019
Matthew 2:1-12
My 4
year old was a wise man in the children’s Christmas Eve service this year, so
to prepare we read a book about wise men. I pulled out the one I had as a kid
called “The Secret of the Star.” It ends, “Then silently, with singing hearts
and wondrous news to bear, they journeyed to their own home lands to tell the
people there about the Prince of Peace God sent to save people everywhere!” And
it got me thinking, what happened after? Surely the wise men told people, like
the shepherds did. We know “all were amazed at what the shepherds told them.”
What about the wise men? Surely they told family, friends, and fellow travelers
on the road. Surely their lives were different, too. After all, they went “home
by another way.” They had met the living Christ and were changed by the
encounter. Another children’s book about the wise men that came out last year,
“Home by Another Way,” describes the star as the “tug they had been waiting for
all their lives” and how they knew all their previous learning and studies
didn’t matter anymore. They’d been changed after following the star. They’d
been changed after meeting Jesus. But what happened after? The Bible doesn’t
tell us. It continues on with Jesus’ story, not the wise men’s. Yet, surely
life didn’t return to normal when they got back home, or did it? Was it like
New Year’s resolutions that only last for a couple months? Or was it truly
life-changing?
There’s
an old saying that you can never go home again. The first example of this in
print is a book by Thomas Wolfe called “You Can’t Go Home Again” that was
published in 1940.[1]
The main character is an author who wrote a successful novel about his
hometown. When he returns to that town, he is not welcomed, because his family
and friends felt exposed by the book. He then travels to New York, then Paris,
then Berlin as Hitler is rising to power, and then back to America. You can’t
go home again because while you’ve been away, home has changed, and you have
changed. When the wise men returned home, what did they find? They’d been gone
probably a couple years on this trip to follow the star wherever it led. Had
they been presumed dead? Had their house been sold? Was someone else using
their equipment for reading the stars? Did their pets remember them? Did their
homes remember them? And were they remembered as eccentric old coots or a
little more fondly? I know it’s all speculation. But my point is that the wise
men changed on their journey to and from Bethlehem. And their homes in the East
changed, too. What kind of new normal did they find? Did they go back to
studying the stars? Or did they predate Paul in telling people about Jesus?
What happened after they went home by another way?
It
astonishes me that I have been home from Nicaragua for 12 years now. Many of
you know that I served there with a mission agency for over a year before going
to seminary and it was, in fact, from Nicaragua, that God called me to seminary.
Me being here begins with God calling me to Nicaragua, following a different
star. It was similar in some ways to the wise men, leaving home and country for
God only knew how long. Packing up and saying goodbye. Arriving in a strange
land where I’d never been before, met at the airport by people I’d never met before.
Adjusting to a new life, new culture, new food. It was funny, my husband said
something the other day that triggered a memory from Nicaragua that I had never
told him before, and he’s heard just about everything. I even took him to
Nicaragua 9 years ago to meet the people I served with and the family I lived
with and to see the schools where I taught and the buses I rode. I lived,
taught, and served in Nicaragua for 13 months, and then God sent me home. Home
by another way, even. Home with rheumatoid arthritis. Home so sick that I
barely remember that first month back in North Carolina. Home, and applying to
seminary, something to which I had previously said No. Home, and not teaching.
Home, and not working in a school. I was significantly changed when I returned
home. And home was changed, too. My mom and stepdad had been empty-nesters for
4 months. My middle sister was married and moved out and my youngest sister had
started her first semester of college. Some stores had closed and others had
opened. A road had been widened. New houses had been built. Home wasn’t the
same, either.
What
happened next? I continued down that same trajectory that God had started me
on. I applied to and visited seminaries. I worked from home for the mission
agency as an education consultant on a couple USAID projects. I started dating
my husband. I learned how to live with a
chronic disease and began the process of getting it under control. While we’re
not told the ‘what happens next’ for the wise men, that’s just as important as following
the star itself. After the aha moment, after the life-changing event, after
meeting Jesus, do you treat it as a new year’s resolution, 80% of which will fail
by the second week of February,[2]
or does life truly change? With some of these events, like a chronic disease,
life has no choice but to change. I donated over half my shoes because it hurt
too much to wear them. I bought my first SUV, because on bad days I couldn’t
get up out of a low riding car. In seminary, I didn’t carry a bookbag or a
shoulder bag. No, I wheeled around an office laptop carry-on suitcase and I
knew where all the elevators were. I didn’t park in the yellow parking lot most
of my classmates used, because it was a half mile walk from there. I parked in
the other yellow lot with the business and law students because from there I
could ride the shuttle to a stop much closer to the Divinity School. Life
changed drastically, because there was no choice about it.
Some
people meet Jesus and choose for it not to change their lives. They don’t want
to change. They’d rather stay in the darkness. They don’t want to take the risk
of being asked to give up home and hearth. Some of us have no choice but to
change. Jesus touches you, sets his hand on you, appears to you and it becomes
like the pearl of great price. Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a
merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went
away and sold everything he had and bought it.”[3]
What will you do when you find a pearl of great value? What have you done in
the past?
There
was a saying in seminary about letting the Bible read you, rather than you
reading the Bible. You can read about the wise men following the star and
think, hey, cool story. Wonder if it really happened. That doesn’t tell me
anything about how I should live today. Or, you can listen to this story in
sacred text about learned men up and leaving their homes to follow a star that
led them to Jesus, and then they went home by another way and the narrative of
the story follows Jesus. The books may have their picture on the cover, the
song title may be their name, “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” but this is all
really about Jesus. It’s not about us. What happens next, what we choose to do
after meeting Jesus is important. Because remember, we are part of God’s story.
It’s not that God is part of your story. Your story does not exist apart from
God. God knit you together in your mother’s womb, knew all the days of your
life when none of them existed, written in God’s book.[4]
Your story is part of God’s story. If there were to be a second book of Acts of
the Apostles, what would your role be? Would you be in the background like
Matthias, a follower holy enough to be chosen to replace Judas among the twelve
disciples yet about whom nothing else is known? Would you be like Barnabas who
sold his field and gave all the money to the disciples? Or would you be like
Ananias and Sapphira who sold a piece of property and kept back a majority of
the proceeds for themselves, only giving part of it to God’s work? Can you be
full of grace and power, like Stephen, the first martyr? Can you go where God
sends you? Can you share God’s love with the people God entrusts to you to
love?
These
last few questions, by the way, were how I got to Nicaragua. It was a bible
study on Acts, where we were encouraged for each section to write what we read
and what God said. God kept asking me these questions: Can you go? Can you do
this? Can you be like Stephen? And Paul? And Barnabas? And I finally got the
hint and said ok, God and began the process of discerning the particulars of
what God was calling me to do. The story of the wise men and the star often
gets flattened to sound like it wasn’t much of a discernment process. Yet in
the books, they consult with each other. They verify with each other that they
are reading this new star correctly. And they set off on a journey to see what
they find, not knowing where they’re going, just knowing they can’t imagine not going. It’s the opportunity of a
lifetime that they are not going to pass up. It’s the chance to be written into
God’s story. You, we, are already part of God’s story. Lisbon is part of God’s
story. What happens next? Is this the pearl of great price that is worth
everything? Are you willing to risk everything? Or are you going to walk on by?
And if you do decide it’s worth everything, what happens after that? You’ve
inherited the kingdom of God, now you have to live it. I’m still talking about
Nicaragua 12 years later. I don’t think about it as often as I used to, but I
still have artwork up in my house. I still have a picture on my wall of my
husband and me with my Nicaraguan family. I still pray for them and follow the
news out of there. And amazingly, I don’t think anyone’s gotten tired of me
talking about it. Because this is part of my story, which is part of God’s
story. We don’t ever get tired of talking about or telling God’s story. And I’m
sure the wise men didn’t, either.
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