Do you remember how you first heard this story?
This one with “wise men from the East” coming to worship the newborn King?
For me, it was the Christmas pageant.
Any Christmas pageant, or almost any: While the arrival of magi is not featured in every pageant, it’s woven into a lot of cultural expectations about how we – American Christians and many others – tell and dramatize “the Christmas story”.
It wasn’t until late high school or early adulthood that I really understood that, in the Bible, this story is told separately, by an entirely different gospel writer, than the story about the manger and the shepherds and the angels.
And that blurring of the lines to put the coming of the magi into our cultural Christmas story may be a good thing, in many ways, since the story of the strangers, the magi “from the East”, bridges and brings together the theology of the birth of Jesus and the mission of Jesus without requiring us to read any dense academic teaching tomes.
The theological astonishment of the birth of Jesus is that God becomes a completely ordinary human person – just like us to the point of having an umbilical cord and belly button and needing a place to sleep – and that the whole divine being takes up residence in an ordinary neighborhood of God’s people to grow up slowly like an ordinary kid.
And by having Jerusalem’s scholars tell the magi that the Messiah is born in ordinary little Bethlehem, an otherwise insignificant suburb (probably exurb, at the time), Matthew shows us that without having to explain the theology.
We get the mission of Jesus part – the revelation of God’s presence, reality, and love to the entire world– because it just obvious in the story that the travelers, the magi, are so very not from around here.
They aren’t from God’s chosen people. They’re from the hand-wavy “East”, a place full of folks who worship different gods in different ways. And yet they are drawn – personally drawn, by a star that turns up right in the middle of their astronomical studies – drawn to find: to seek, to see, and to worship the one God, Creator of all, in the middle of God’s ordinary people.
The official church holiday of Epiphany – tomorrow, on our calendars – uses this story of the travelers from afar to turn our attention for a season to how God is revealed in the ordinary world. And to the people everywhere, at any time, who are looking to find God, meet God, experience and know God. Especially the people who don’t already know all the traditional stories and habits and rituals of our God.
Which brings us back to the Christmas pageant. Because while a lot of traditional Christmas pageants are designed by and for people who already know the story and the traditions, for many of us who either grew up in the church, or have “helped” with a “children’s program”, the Christmas pageant could be our first experience of telling the story of God. Of showing the wonder of God, the divinity right in the middle of our ordinariness, so that other people – even travelers, wanderers, seekers – can see it.
Some of us – raise your hand if it’s you – have put cloths on our heads and sticks in our hands and represented the shepherds who first went to see the newborn Jesus.
Some of us have been the sheep and lambs, the donkeys or cows or other animals who show us that all creatures have a role in welcoming the God of all creation.
Or were angels, whose job was to tell the glory of God, or at least show that glory with tinsel halos.
Or were Mary, the mother of God, Joseph the father and protector… or the infant Jesus himself.
And some of us might have been robed in “exotic” old church vestments and represented the wise men, the magi, the travelers from the East.
But how many of you – us – were the star?
The star of the Christmas pageant, wearing tinsel or lame, and perhaps perching on a ladder to guide those travelers to the waiting divine little King?
I never played that role.
In fact, I never even knew that role was possible until I came to Trinity, and found it featured in some preschool Christmas pageants, and I believe one of our church pageants on Christmas Eve.
And I was… star-struck.
Because that’s the role I would have wanted.
And it’s the role I think Jesus might invite any of us – or all of us – to play.
After all, he does eventually tell his followers that you are the light of the world. And to let your light shine before others, so that they may see the good work you do and give glory to your Father in heaven.
That’s the job of the star in today’s story. To shine in such a way as to lead others to see and praise the glory of God.
And Jesus invites us – any of us who are drawn to Jesus, who are adopted into the family of God – to shine. To be the star.
There are, after all, a lot of people in the world now who are looking for God; trying to travel toward the presence of God, like those Eastern seekers long ago.
And many of these seekers, questing for where God is found in the world are “not from around here” – who are “foreign” to the traditions, and Sunday morning habits, and assumptions of the church.
People God is calling, who just need someone, or something, to light a way for them.
Who need a star.
And you, or I, might be that star.
A glimpse of new light in a familiar scene, a light that beckons and invites adventure – not with a loudspeaker and a spotlight, but with wonder and hope and joy.
I know some of us here right now find wonder and hope and joy in short supply in our everyday lives. But together, we have a treasure chest of story and prayer and music holding the joy, faith, and wonder of those who have gone before us, or who travel with us now, to guide us to God’s home.
And if those stories we share seem distant from the daily news headlines or the weary routines of “back to normal”, we can still tap into that hope and trust, marvel and delight, and carry it with us to hold next to, or against, the troubled news and weariness of the world around us.
Carry it with us, so that perhaps without knowing it, we leak a bit of joy, hope, awe, and belovedness to the people around us, the people longing and searching for those drops of promise, the travelers looking for a clue to the next stop on their journey to the heart of God.
however strong or fragile your personal connection to God feels right now, you can, and I can, shine with a strong or gentle, twinkling or trustworthy “light”.
Shine, in the midst of everything ordinary or extraordinary, when we tap into the stories we love, the communion that nudges a little peace into our hearts, the faithful relationships here, and the love and strength that God is always trying to fuel and feed us with
You, and I, individually and together, already hold God’s light.
We have been invited, for a minute or a lifetime, to be the star.
Star of wonder, invitation, hope, and joy.
So let it shine.
