This morning we read the last of the Christmas lessons, the visit of the Magi; today is, after all, is the official end of Christmastide—the Feast of the Epiphany. Today, when a couple have a baby, say a little boy, friends and family members all ask the same series of questions: how tall, what weight, and what have you decided to name him? When Jesus was born, probably somewhere around 4 B.C., things were a bit different. Jesus was, after all, born in a barn or a cave and laid in a feeding trough; obviously this birth did not take place in the most hygienic of surrounding.
Our popular Christmas carols and legions of greeting cards tend to compress events into a single, seamless event; if truth be told we really have not a single clue about the sequence of events: how long had Mary and Joseph been in Bethlehem, how long after Jesus’ birth did the excited, jabbering, smelly shepherds intrude on the young family’s privacy; or at what point did the Magi find their way from Persia (modern day Iran) to Jerusalem, and finally to the little village of Bethlehem. We cannot answer these questions, and, perhaps, the answers aren’t really important.
Magi, like the shepherds, found their way to Bethlehem; they were not Kings in fact, rather they were Wiseman, astrologers who advised kings based on their knowledge of the stars and the motions of the heavens. It was this knowledge that enabled them to find their way to the manger. They did not have the advantage of hearing the news from the Holy angels; they had to find their own way, just as you and I do today.
Have you ever heard anyone complain that things today just aren’t the way they were in the “good ole days”? Maybe you have thought nostalgically about the day when pews were filled for worship and Sunday Schools were bursting at the seams, the days when no store was ever open on Sunday and youth sporting events wouldn’t dare intrude on Sunday morning church time. Those days are long gone; gone are the days when the prevailing culture supported the practice of religious faith. Today many retail establishments require employees to be able to work Sundays as these stores are open seven days a week and some never close. Families miss church, and children miss Sunday School because of a sporting event in another city. More than a few people have told me that Sundays are the only day they have to sleep in, do chores, cut the grass, or shop for groceries. Many people no longer believe that going to church is a necessary or important part of their lives.
Perhaps the learning we need to take away today is this. The Feast of the Epiphany is about the revealing to a dark world the light of the savior; like the magi, each of us must find our own way to Bethlehem, unaided by the long-vanished props and supports which the society of yesteryear provided. T.S. Elliot in his famous poem concludes the poem with these words:
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation
We entered the Holy season of Advent/Christmas with joy and anticipation; we leave it now, maybe, like Elliot’s Magi, with a sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction, for if we have made the journey to Bethlehem and basked in the glow of divine light, we are, or by rights should be, dissatisfied with the world we see around us, and determined to do something, anything, to change things, to use our ill-at-ease-ness as an impetus to have our celebration of our savior’s birth mean something. May these recent days anchor our souls and ground our being s in the eternal truths of our Creator.
