Births in the Middle

“Births in the Middle”

Matthew 2:1-12

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

Epiphany Sunday

January 2, 2011

In this church year of Matthew, recall what we have set up as the context into which Matthew penned his gospel. Matthew wrote to the community of Messianic Jews – Jews who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah – who had moved to Antioch , about three hundred miles north of Jerusalem , after the catastrophic destruction of the Great Temple there by the Romans in A.D. 70. Remember that for the Jews, the Temple had been the orienting center of their lives and the place where they believed that God lived on earth. But now, in the time of Matthew’s writing, the Temple lay in ruins, its priests have been massacred, and the Jews are dislocated and disoriented. What were they to do in the light of this great calamity? How could they enter into the great change that now was being visited on them in a way that would lead to renewed life and hope?

That is a question, I would think, that would make all our ears perk up for, as often is said, change is a constant of life. Not all change is monumental or vexing. And some change happens naturally as a part of everyday living. But there are some situations and circumstances that come to us that challenge us, scare us, puzzle us, threaten to undo us. How do we face and engage significant change in our lives?

Matthew wrote his gospel to that Jewish community in Antioch as a guide by which the people might navigate their way through the maze of great change in their lives. It is in the canon of scripture because it also can be a guide for us. Last week we read the story of Joseph’s obedience to God’s message via an angel messenger not to divorce Mary even though she was pregnant and not by him. Such obedience was costly to Joseph for there were social, cultural, and religious rules about what to do in such a situation. To contravene those rules would bring shame to Joseph’s name, would make him an outcast, and thus would lead to an uncertain future. But Joseph trusted the “still, small voice” he had heard in his dream and decided in favor of Mary. By including this story in his gospel – it is found only in Matthew – Matthew intended to say to his readers, “Do not let your fears close you off to what you sense God is asking you to do. Do not let social or religious expectations negate God’s call to you. And do not think you can have everything figured out in advance before saying yes to God, because you can’t.”

We said last week that we are to pay attention to the “Joseph places” in our lives where changes are being required or asked of us. Like the Jews whose Temple was destroyed, we sometimes face changes we did not seek or desire. Other times the possibility of change comes, daunting as it is, so that our lives may be renewed or freed or in some manner saved. But change, whenever and however it comes, comes with a cost and the question is whether or not we are willing to pay the price of passage. If we are, we can come through times of change, no matter how challenging, with equanimity, wisdom, and ennobling for whatever is next in our lives.

So give attention to how Matthew begins to lead his readers through their journey of change. (By the way, let me encourage you to allow yourself to let go of these gospel stories as literal reports of factual events and see them instead as stories borrowed, reworked, and crafted by the gospel writers from other stories of the time with which the readers would have been familiar. The gospel writers redeploy them as witnesses to God in Christ and the ways the early community experienced him, and thus many rich possibilities arise from the texts for readers of all times and places. The gospel writers are not interested so much in us getting the facts right. They want us to get the story right, the God story in which we are invited to enter and participate with its cadences of grace and love and hope.)

Matthew starts by saying that “…in the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, wise men, magi, from the East came to Jerusalem…” From the east – where the sun rises, where the new day begins, where dawn emerges after darkest night. The east was the direction the Temple priests had faced for the morning sacrifice. The east represents new beginnings, faith, rebirth. I think of Maya Angelou’s terrific poem at President Clinton’s inauguration when in her last stanza she declared,

Here on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and look out

And into your sister’s eyes, into

Your brother’s face…

And say simply

Very simply

With hope

Good morning.

Matthew is trying to convey that sense of things. Matthew means to say with the symbolism of visitors from the east that a new morning, with hope, can come to the world and to our lives. By the use of the imagery of wise men from the east, Matthew wanted to assure the devastated Jewish community that in the midst of their deep, dark mourning, light once again would shine on them in the grace and presence of Jesus the Christ.

There was a belief at the time that Matthew wrote that all people received at their birth the gift of a star that served them as a guiding spirit, similar to the way some people today believe that each of us has a guardian angel or spirit with us. Matthew played on that belief by describing how a special star led the wise men to Joseph’s home where the special Child could be found, the Christ-child. Despite the Christmas story most often depicted in pageants and plays, Mary and Joseph, in Matthew’s version, lived in relative comfort in their home in Bethlehem . They did not wander, looking for a place to have their baby, they did not take refuge in a barn or a stable, and they did not lay their newborn in a manger. The furniture of Jesus’ birth was not the focus of Matthew’s story. He wanted to buttress the belief of those displaced Jews in Antioch who had come to believe that Jesus was the Christ of God that their faith and trust had not been misplaced.

Matthew then says that the wise men from the east came bearing gifts. These gifts of which Matthew wrote were not random gifts. Each of them was a poignant and powerful reference to the Great Temple . Frankincense and myrrh had been the primary components of the most important Temple liturgical rituals and were as valuable as the gold of which the Temple ’s vessels and chalices were made.

Do you see what Matthew is doing? With these precious gifts, Matthew symbolically transfers the essential elements of the old physical Temple to Jesus – the Christ, Messiah, and exemplar of the new, inner temple. Matthew meant to convey the good news to those Messianic Jews facing great change in their lives that God lives not in a Holy of Holies of a temple built with stones accessible only to a high priest. Rather, Jesus the Christ is, as it were, the new temple and so everyone has access to God through Jesus the Christ wherever they are.

They may be dispersed, dispirited, and disoriented, but Matthew wanted that early church in Antioch to know that the One in whom they had put their trust had been granted God’s blessing and power and so even if there is, as a later hymnwriter was to put it, “change and decay in all around I see; Thou who changest not abides with thee.” There are concrete steps through change that Matthew pours as his gospel continues to unfold but, here, at the beginning, he wanted the members of the Antiochian community, and us, to know that the Christ – the presence and care of God – abides with us as we face great changes in our lives.

So, a word about how Matthew’s story might work itself into our lives. First is the image of the star. As intimated earlier, a star is a metaphor for a spirit that guides us. The word disaster literally means “dis-star” which means to be separated from one’s star, from one’s inner guidance. We face disaster when we are separated from our deep, inner, eternal wisdom where God speaks to us. We need, through worship and prayer, contemplation and wakefulness, and however else we do it to be open to and to cultivate the divine wisdom that seeks us out.

New inspiration and paths that eventually can come with change rarely are welcomed at first, but we ignore them to our peril. We often meet significant change in our lives with a sense of foreboding, discomfort, and resistance, sometimes from without, sometimes from within, and sometimes both. Herod, for instance, was determined in his effort to eradicate the threat of change that Jesus posed. He wanted to protect his own power and privilege. Similarly, our fears and ego often want little to do with a changed or changing life in us and so they will seek to stop or to stifle change in us. Too threatening. Our fears seek to sabotage change by telling us we better not or that the change will not work out or by getting us to obsess about what other people might say of us if we follow where we sense we are being led to go. Will we still be who we are if we permit ourselves to see in a new way, behave in a new way, relate in a new way? If we allow ourselves to be undone, will be ever be put back together again?

Every significant change that comes to us brings with it an opportunity to be born anew, born again. These new births in the middle of our lives – and by that I do not mean only middle age but anytime between our first breath and our last – these new births can make us more human, not less. They come to us in the middle of our ordinary lives, where we are. Few of us escape forever events and circumstances that cause what we thought to be a settled life to shimmy or shudder, to crumble, to be turned upside down, to fall apart, or to become chaotic beyond our imagining.

But always, Matthew means to say to that Jewish community of long ago and to us today, in times of change and new birth there will “from the east” come magi bearing gifts for us. We do not know what form these metaphorical magi will take or what gifts they will bring, but they will be the gifts we need. Maybe there will be the gold of an “aha moment” of understanding or the frankincense of a piece of your past finally resolved or the myrrh of forgiveness that clears away what was in order to make possible what can be. Whatever they are, the gifts will be epiphanies that reveal the presence, sufficiency, and care of the Christ of God for you in whom we live and move and have our being and who, in every change, faithful will remain.

Amen.

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