What We're Looking For

Matthew 2:1-12

What do you see when you look at the stars?

Maybe you see images: connect-the-dots drawings of people and creatures and symbols. Maybe you see history as astronomers do: the years, decades, or even centuries it takes for that light to travel from the star we see to our eyes on earth. Maybe you see a tool for navigation or a deep well of wonder and beauty.
Maybe you don’t see stars at all, because the local electric light gets in the way. Or because you forget to look up and out.

Thousands of years ago, it seems, a few committed star-gazers looked at the stars and saw a king. A king coming to rule a little one-horse territory in the vast Roman Empire, far from their own home and nation – a king they somehow find that they want to meet.

And they packed themselves up for a long, strange trip, headed for the capital of that little land in the middle of empire, only to discover that the king they were looking for wasn’t there. And that no one there was expecting a new king.

So after some hushed and hurried consultations, our star-gazers leave the capital city equipped with old prophecy and directions to Bethlehem. And when they get there, they see their star again. They see the star pointing them to one particular house and they are utterly overwhelmed by joy. They enter a perfectly ordinary house; with what probably appears to most to be a perfectly ordinary toddler – adorable when he’s asleep; dangerous the minute you take your eye off him – and they see, at last, The King.

They see – perhaps – the savior of the world. Or they see a kingship of real and lasting peace. Or glory and triumph. Or selflessness and sacrifice. All kingly qualities. The text doesn’t tell us just how they recognized this king, all the text says is that they took one look at this toddler and behaved as if he were a crowned and powerful king, kneeling down and offering royal gifts.

They looked at the stars and saw a king. They believed what they saw; they acted on it; and they found living, breathing, lively proof of God’s action and their own faith.

What we look for is often – so often – what we find.

I don’t know what Herod saw, in Jerusalem, when he looked at the stars. I don’t know if he looked at the stars at all, in fact. But Matthew makes it pretty clear that when the star-gazers asked Herod about finding a king, Herod saw a threat. He’s immediately frightened, and shares his terror with the whole capital city. Threat level red, Jerusalem. Be afraid!

Herod sees the threat to his own power, his own kingship, so clearly that he later sends out assassins to get rid of any child who might be this star-signaled king. Just in case.
Herod sees a threat, he acts on that belief, and he finds one - and eliminates it, he hopes.

What you find, so often, is exactly what you are looking for. What we see, mostly, is what we expect to see.

That’s a fact that’s on display on every cable news channel in our country. And it’s how we find – or create – the smart kid, and the sporty kid, in families, and across neighborhoods. This has a lot to do with whether we find strangers friendly or frightening.
We don’t always know what we’re expecting to see, and still we see what we expect.

Matthew tells this story of foreign star-gazers finding a king in the child Jesus to make a point about God’s action, and God’s revelation. He wants to teach us a new expectation – one that you and I have been taught for a long time, but is still not what we unconsciously expect.
He wants us to know and understand that in Christ, God is deliberately, generously, uninhibitedly pouring out God’s glory to outsiders and strangers. God is inviting the unfaithful to reveal the holy; inviting the stranger into the inner circle; revealing God’s very own self to the people least likely to understand.
And that it works.

This group of foreign star-gazers probably didn’t have any intention of looking for Israel’s promised Messiah. But they believed the night sky could tell them everything important that was happening in the world. So they saw a royal star appear. And they acted on it, and they saw God.

So often, we find what we are looking for, whether we know what we are looking for or not.

A few years ago, I was helping to run a Vacation Bible School, and we sent the kids home one day telling them to look for “God-sightings” wherever they went that day. The next day, we asked for reports.

One saw God in the loving way a friend put a band-aid on his boo-boo. Another marveled at the deep greenness of the leaves on a tree. A good third of the kids had seen God in a day at the swimming pool, one reporting after another. And at least one saw God in a grape popsicle.

I was skeptical about the popsicle, myself. And of some of those swimming pool reports. I saw – at first – a pile on of random kid-likes.
But why not a popsicle?

You’re not going to find God if you’re not looking, if you’re not open to God-sightings. But if you are looking for God, are open to God-sightings, why couldn’t the sticky refreshment of a grape popsicle be a revelation of God’s joy, or love?  Or God’s simple presence, incarnate with us in the world?

Some of us here see God at work in almost everything: the wonders and diversity of creation, the parking space that opens up at the front of a crowded lot, the blossoming of a friendship, the ending of a job, the death of a loved one, that particular song playing on the radio.

Some of us see random chance, hard work, loss and sorrow, or strong scientific fact in the same things.

None of us are wrong.

That’s all true.

But that star over Bethlehem, the star-gazers trekking west to find a king, and one small child in an ordinary house in one small town in the Roman Empire, all invite us to look for, and to see, the revelation of presence and glory, power and love, hope and grace that God is still pouring out on all the skeptical, unfaithful, inattentive world.

They invite us to look for and find the revelation of selfless love where we might be tempted to look for the dangers of change. To seek and see the majesty and miracles God displays where we’ve been taught to look for rational explanations. To choose to seek and see joy and wonder right along with common and everyday; to choose to look for love and hope even when we expect and find sorrow and pain.

God invites us all to be star gazers. To look for revelation, to act on what we see and what we seek, so that we, too, find the king born for us, the joy and hope and majesty God is pouring out for all the world to discover. Long ago and here and now.