Hello again.

In honour of joining Twitter, I'm re-opening this blog.  And since it's the feast of the Epiphany, I'm posting a sermon I never posted here because I never preached it.

It was an assignment for a class about the embeddedness of anti-Judaism in Christian theology and preaching.  It is so habitual and, quite frankly, lazy of Christian preachers to use "Jews" or Jewish characters in the Bible as examples of the other, the non-Christian, the culture and worldview that Jesus fought against or left behind.  This is, of course, sociologically impossible.  As a Jew, Jesus was just as Jewish as his Jewish audience, and shared with them the same culture and worldview.  This has become the focus of my research (maybe I'll post an excerpt or abstract of a paper later), but this sermon was the first place where I was really challenged to tackle it in a non-academic context consciously.  I do naturally, as a Jewish Christian, avoid explicit anti-Judaism and supersessionism when I preach, but those habits of thinking and theologizing hover in the background, even for me.

So here is the sermon.  The text is Matthew 2:1-12.  The particular anti-Jewish tendency in preaching this text is to vilify Herod and the Jerusalem Jews as those who got it wrong while praising the Gentile Magi as those who got it right.  It's hugely easy, and presents a challenge for the preacher to break out of that pattern.

The sermon was written as if it was to be preached to the church where I was a pastoral intern at the time, a moderately conservative Episcopal church.

The Epiphany

Today is the feast of the Epiphany, also known as the twelfth day of Christmas.  You will be glad to know we have dispensed with the lords-a-leaping and maids-a-milking.  And we couldn’t fit five gold rings for everyone into the church budget.  But today is the day Christians traditionally celebrate the arrival of the magi, and it may have been where the whole gift-giving thing started.  So, this church festival might be the root of the consumerism of Christmas.

And this is really both a shame and very ironic, because it obscures what Epiphany is about.  An “epiphany” is a revelation - and sometimes the word is still used in that sense in language today.  You might have an epiphany after spending all day on a problem at work, then finally coming home and going to bed.  Neuroscientists tell us that our sleeping brains often re-order data so that when we wake up, the problem is solved.   But according to our gospel passage today, there are other ways to receive epiphanies.

The magi saw a star in the east.  The language is imprecise here, and there are disagreements regarding exactly who the magi were, but there are two conclusions that seem to be pretty accurate: 1) the magi were astrologers, because they saw the star and drew meaning from it, and 2) they were Gentiles, both because they came “from the east” and because God’s Law outlawed astrology and other forms of predicting the future.  But nevertheless, they received an epiphany, a revelation, in God’s creation as they watched and tried to read the stars.

Isn’t that funny?  God uses astrology, something he has outlawed, as a way to get a hold of their attention.  But you might notice the star does not lead them straight to Jesus.  No, they know the “king of the Jews” has been born, but they are not sure where.  So once they get to Judea, they go to the current king, Herod, and ask about this new king.

And Herod - well - Herod gets a little freaked out.  This is not too surprising.  For one, Herod is not a legitimate king.  He doesn’t come from the historic royal line, and he isn’t really a Jew; he comes from an area to the east called Idumea, which was conquered and forcibly converted to Judaism about a hundred and fifty years before.  And we also know that Herod became paranoid in his old age, even going so far as to kill two of his sons and his favorite wife because he suspected they were plotting against him.  The third reason Herod is not entirely a legitimate king was because he held onto his power by being backed by the Romans.  The Jewish people hated the Romans and thought of them as Gentile oppressors, mostly because they were.  Roman justice in its provinces was notoriously violent, and Roman leaders had on more than one occasion tried to force the Jewish people to worship their gods.

So Herod is not happy at all to hear there is another king of the Jews.  For one, it means a threat to his own personal power.  And for another, this new king might become a rallying point and cause a rebellion against Rome, a rebellion that Herod knows will be put down brutally and violently.  And Herod also knows who the true king of the Jews is.  Remember what the text said: when Herod called together all the chief priests and scribes, he asks them where the Messiah was to be born.  The true, legitimate king of the Jews, one whose birth would be heralded by God with a star, is the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed one.

How did Herod know that?  Well, Herod obviously knew some of his Bible. 

“The LORD forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed, or lay my hand on him; for he is the anointed of the LORD.”

Do you know who said that? 

David said it after he had crept up behind King Saul and cut off a corner of his cloak.  You see, the LORD’s anointed, the messiah, is the king.  Even though David had already been anointed as the next king by that time, he still respected the status of Saul as the LORD’s anointed. 

So Herod had paid attention enough to that part of his Bible. By this time, the Messiah had taken on a special meaning, that of another king like David who would be the anointed one to drive the Gentiles out and save God’s people.  Maybe Herod concentrated on the bits about kings and ignored the rest of it, so he had to ask where the Messiah would be born.  We’re all a little guilty of that, aren’t we?  We listen to the readings that are interesting to us and don’t really pay attention to the other ones.  So Herod turns to the experts: the chief priests and scribes, people who study the Bible for a living.  And they tell him where the Messiah is to be born as it is written in the prophets, in this case, in the prophet Micah. 

We did read from the prophet Isaiah today as well, but he comes in later.  You see, this little passage from Matthew is crammed to the brim with allusions to, and quotes from, Israel’s scripture, what we call the Old Testament.  Since there was no New Testament yet, this was the only Bible that existed.  And here is another way to experience an epiphany: through the Bible.  The magi saw the star, but they needed more.  They needed the Bible as well, the written record of God’s interaction with God’s people, especially through the prophets.

So, back to Herod.  Remember, Herod is a paranoid old man, but he’s also a savvy politician.  So after talking to his experts, he secretly sends for the magi to find out precisely when the star appeared.  By talking to the magi secretly, he can find out for himself, and only for himself, how old this “king of the Jews” is, and how realistic the political threat is.  If word gets out that the Messiah is here now, maybe a grown man already anointed by a priest somewhere, then there is a serious issue on Herod’s hands.  There is a very good possibility that an armed revolt will take place.  Several, in fact, already had.

Herod finds out from the magi that this “king of the Jews” is likely just a baby.  This is alright.  No one who is ready now  to pick up their sword and try to fight Rome is going to follow a baby into battle.  There’s time.  So Herod sends the magi on and says, hey, once you find this king of the Jews, come back at tell me exactly where he is so I can go pay him homage too.  And the magi go off.

And they find the house, and the baby and Mary his mother, and they fall down and pay homage.  This, by the way, is an old fashioned word which means to reverence and declare loyalty to a king.  And after the magi have acknowledged the baby as a king, they give him gifts worthy of a king. 

Especially at this Christmas season, we like to think about “the baby Jesus.”  As the song “away in a manger” says, “The little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.”  We have a cute manger scene with the adoring parents, shepherds, and the magi of today’s story, all crowded around the perfect little baby Jesus. 

But this story of Matthew does not depict a peaceful manger scene.  The birth of this baby excites the paranoia of a violent tyrant.  The “little Lord Jesus” is a threat to the most powerful man in the land.  It does not take much imagination to guess that Mary was startled by the appearance of these foreign astrologers who declared that her son was a king and gave him gifts, but I wonder, was she afraid too?  Herod’s reputation was known.  If her baby was a king, then he was also a danger, a threat to the established power order.  Mary might have seen the armed revolt coming the same as Herod did.  

We should not forget that “the little Lord Jesus” is the Lord Jesus.  He is king, he is ruler.  He is threatening and carries with him shadows of violence.  Herod, the representative king of Rome is threatened by his birth, and it will be Rome that eventually orders Jesus’ death and executes him.

I once worked with a pastor named Rob who was given the topic “God is all-powerful” to preach on in December, during Advent.  He focused his sermon on Jesus on the cross, because he felt that there was the place that God’s power was really shown.  You should have seen the comment cards that were dropped in the offering after that morning.  People complained that Rob had ruined their Christmas by preaching about Jesus’ death.  They said how horrible to bring up death when we want to hear about the baby Jesus!

You know what?  These people were all good, sincere Christians, but they had missed the last place of the epiphany of the magi.  The epiphany was complete in the presence of Jesus himself: the magi declared that he was a king, that he was worthy of ruling and of having power and wealth.  You cannot talk about Jesus’s birth without talking about his kingship.  Luke’s narrative is just as political, if not even more so, than Matthew’s. 

And you cannot really talk about Jesus being a king without talking about his death.  This story of the magi is the last time Jesus is ever treated like a king until the Roman soldiers mock him with a purple cloak and a crown of thorns and cry “Hail, king of the Jews!”  Some scholars believe that this birth narrative in the gospel of Matthew is purposely foreshadowing Jesus’ death.  Jesus was not a king who lived in luxury and who dripped gold like Herod, nor was he a king who had incense burned in his honor, like Caesar.  He was not a king who even had somewhere to lay his head. 

And if anything, that makes Jesus more threatening.  Because he insists that this is what a king looks like.  It looks like a man beaten raw, mocked, spit on, and nailed to a cross. 

Matthew’s gospel contains the Sermon on the Mount, which I once heard summarized as “you’re dead, and you don’t count, and everyone else is more important than you.”

Can you live like that? 

I don’t know about you, but I can’t. 

This is the amazing epiphany: that Jesus is a king and that his way of being king is one of self-emptying and service.  The epiphany of Jesus tears down our own self-importance and our own power-hungry selfishness.  And it forces us to look for the magi in our world; for the ones who are doing everything wrong and yet, against all our expectations, they find the king, and maybe they lead us to him. 

I do challenge you today, and I challenge me too: who is getting it all wrong?  Who is threatening our self-importance?  Who is threatening the careful balance of power we have collected for ourselves?

On this day, the feast of the Epiphany of our Lord, first and foremost, Jesus is.  But Jesus may have sent magi into your life and into my life who are offering us epiphanies as well.  May we see the epiphany of the Lord Jesus wherever he may appear: in his presence, in scripture, and in the one who is getting everything wrong.

Amen.