Every Wednesday, we meet for worship together in the Chapel on the Hill. Sometimes students speak. Here is a sermon by one of them, Ben Fike, who is the preacher for the Maryneal, Texas Church of Christ. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Matthew 2:1-12 – Laying our Gifts Before the King
by Ben Fike
“The church has just entered the liturgical season of Epiphany one week ago today. The Feast of Epiphany in the Western tradition is associated with this story of the wise men coming to Jesus, the first gentiles who come to worship the child king. Today we join our sisters and brothers the world over in our hearing and proclaiming of this text in this season.
I can’t read this story without thinking of my mom’s collection of nativity sets. She probably just took them down a week or two ago, but during Christmas they’re all over the house. Just little miniature versions of the birth of Christ spread out all over every bookshelf and table. The raggedy looking shepherds, the docile ox and lamb, the surprisingly calm and serene looking Mary and Joseph, little baby Jesus, no crying he makes, asleep in the manger. Blonde, and looking quite Scandanavian. And of course the wise men, all exotic and strange with enormous headgear and camels and robes and big bushy beards, bearing gifts.
But although this popularized version of the nativity may fly some places, we know better don’t we? We know better than that naive conflation of Matthew and Luke’s gospels bringing together Shepherds and Wise Men and Livestock in an ad hoc, irresponsible kind of way. We know better, that this story of the wise men bowing down to Jesus is not serene and precious and cute. It is, in fact, subversive to the point that it will directly contribute to a vengeful and maniacal king massacring thousands of innocents to squelch the perceived threat of the child born King of the Jews these wise men have come to worship. And we know better homiletically than to cast ourselves as the distant floating observers looking down on the tiny scene as if Jesus were a insect and we were a bear.
No, WE know better than that. This is a story we must enter. This story is in someway our story.
And when we’re thinking about a point of entry, I like the wise men for this one. Jesus is a little too kingly, Mary is a little too passive, Herod is a little too evil, Joseph is a little too absent, but the wise men….Surely that’s US in this story! Their life has been a journey following after a star. To be the wise men is to venture out into the uncertainty of life.
To follow the mysterious star.
To enter into the adventure.
That’s got potential for us. It’s narrative. It’s a journey motif. It’s kind of post-modern (for any of us who still use that word). I like that about the wise men.
And furthermore, these men are scholars! Tracing ancient astronomical and astrological patterns. Tracking down the origins of ancient, foreign prophesies. That kind of precision begs for the experts, the specialists, the professors, the graduate students, scholars like us! I can’t help but feel a certain academic camaraderie here, can you? That’s us! In the story! The people of privilege. The elite class. Wealthy. Learned. The scholars.
Why else would Herod ask them for the EXACT TIME the star had appeared? That sounds like a question we might chase after: Parse these Greek verbs. Name the major players in the Protestant Reformation. Identify the primary differences between the three streams of The Stone Campbell Movement. We can pin-point, book/chapter/verse the translational faux pas in the NIV. We scoff at the naive pop-Lutheran reading of Romans, all rife with penal substitionary atonement theories, because we have come to know the James Thompsonian reading to be the truth.
The wise men. This is us! In the story! Traveling from our ivory towers in the East, prompted by astrological abnormalities and ancient prophecies, to visit the child king.
Of course, there is a slight problem with this reading. These wise men are clearly Gentiles. They are outside of the story. And not just outside, they’re way outside, off the map outside of the story. They only come crashing in for this one moment and then disappear into obscurity and speculation.
But maybe it’s not such a bad read for us, if we are the outsiders in this story. Because maybe you’ve had the same experience I have, you’ve taken all the classes and the seminars, you attend all the lectures, you have read all the books, you debate your classmates and your old friends and family, and you have no doubt that you are becoming quite brilliant, but yet you still wake up in the morning from time to time only to find that, in spite of it all, Jesus is more of a stranger to you than ever.
We know intellectually that Jesus says whatever you have done to the least of these you have done to me, but surely Jesus doesn’t know the least of these that we know! Otherwise he surely wouldn’t have said THAT!
Jesus is a stranger to us.
We can argue with great rhetorical flair about the special concern for the poor shown in the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, but we still can’t seem to find any words to say to the person without a High School education who comes to visit church.
Jesus is a stranger to us.
We could write a superior paper on sacramental ecclesiology in 1st Corinthians, but surely the church we worship with is not the body broken nor the blood poured out! How could they be? They don’t know anything yet! They’re so backwards in their thinking, steeped in legalism and fear, their theology is radically inconsistent, they constantly fight and whine like children. This is the body of Christ?
Then Jesus is a stranger to us.
We can observe the star in the sky. We can track its movements. We can note its undeniably compelling attraction. We can quantify its brightness. We can speculate as to its meaning. We can promulgate our theories about it and critique the theories of others,but until we journey across the desert in its pursuit, and we ask dangerous questions that strike fear in the face of the Powers, and we set out towards an unremarkable house among an unremarkable people that are even now occupied by the most powerful ruler the world has ever seen, what is it all for? Unless we have surrendered these things, our gifts and treasures – not to the tyrant, not to the empire – but to the child-King in his mother’s arms who is to be called “God is With Us.”
And even then, if we still find Christ a stranger, we must let him in.
We must feed her.
We must confess and reconcile with them.
We must lay ourselves at his feet in worship.
We are all, by nature of being at this school, an economically advantaged people. We are all, by nature of being in our respective graduate programs, already among the most educated people in the world. We are all, by nature of our calling, servants of Christ’s church in the world.
But if we’re going to serve Christ’s church in the mission of God in reconciling all of creation to Godself, we have got to get over ourselves and lay out our gifts and our treasures (which in this community are many) at the feet and in the service of “God is With Us.”
Amen.”
Dr. Mark W. Hamilton
Associate Professor of Old Testament and
Associate Dean
ACU Graduate School of Theology
Abilene, TX 79699
Editor, The Transforming Word