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The Road Best Traveled

Ephesians 3:1-12 Matthew 2:1-15

January 6, 2019 of the Lord Dr. Edwin Gray Hurley

Next to the other Story about the Shepherds in their fields, and the Easter Story of the Resurrection, this account of the Wise Men and their journey from the East following a star that leads them to the Christ Child, is among the best known and most widely loved stories in the Bible. It is a story that makes its way far beyond the church walls, and out into the broader world and culture.

Throughout December we see messages on Christmas Cards like, “Wise Folk Seek Him Still,” with pictures of three distinguished foreigners in rich apparel traveling on camels. We get our gift giving tradition from the costly gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh they offer the Infant Messiah. We assume there were three kings, I guess because there were three gifts given, although Scripture nowhere tells us there were three, or that they were kings. An ancient Armenian tradition even names them as Balthasar of Arabia, Melchior of Persian and Gaspar of India. Yet, all we really know is that they were wise and that they traveled along way to worship and honor the infant King.

We conflate the story poetically and liberally to show everyone arriving together at the manger on , although according to the Bible, the Shepherds are the ones who appear that night in Luke’s account, and the Wise Men appear as Mary and Joseph and the baby are in a house in some considerable time later in Matthew’s account - maybe even a year or two later. Nevertheless at Christmas we tend to bring it altogether at the manger.

The Church historically though celebrates the arrival of the Wise Men on this Sunday known as the Day of Epiphany, January 6, the 12th Day of Christmas. The Season of Light just after the darkest day of the year, December 21. We are today at the end of the Season of Christmas, which is why the Wreath and Chrismon are still here and all lit up. Now we enter the Season of Epiphany, celebrating the spreading of this great gift God has sent us to all the world. Epiphany means manifestation or revealing. The journey of the Wise Men lifts up the manifestation of Christ to all the world.

As Paul tells us in Titus, “The grace of God has dawned upon the world with healing for all humankind,” and in Ephesians, “The mystery was made known to me by revelation… by the Spirit: that the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.”

Bethlehem, you see, is not the end of the journey, but the beginning. Epiphany, the 12th day of Christmas is not the end of the journey but the beginning, as we go forth to share the Good News of Jesus with all the world as Cody Watson is doing heading out for India today. Epiphany is our call to evangelism, to show by our actions, and tell by our words, the truth of the 2

Gospel and invite all, everyone, to embrace the Savior, and follow Him along the journey of their lives.

Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, these wonderful seasons have the common metaphor of a “journey.” The Shepherds make a short journey to Bethlehem to see for themselves and worship. The Wise men make a long journey to Bethlehem to see for themselves and worship. And we make a journey, from wherever we are, with whatever we are dealing, to come see for ourselves and worship, and then “Go tell it on the mountain!”

All our lives are a journey. We are never fixed, inert, and immovable. If we are active, we are changing. Always we are moving. We are either growing or dying. Every seven years our body generates a totally different set of cells. The old ones have died off, new ones have come. Always we are journeying, on a particular road, traveling from here to there, one day to the next, one age, one season, to the next. An old fisherman in Maine was once asked by a visitor, “Have you lived in this village all your life?” He responded, “Not yet!” Life is a journey and we select a road to travel along the way. As Robert Frost said,

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

The message today in this New Year is this -get on and stay on the Road Best Traveled, which is the road of faith. We live by faith and not by sight!

Journeys, roads, these are all metaphors for how we travel throughout our lives. The Wise men make some wise decisions about the journey they travel, following first the guiding of a new star in the sky that leads them, at first they think, to Jerusalem. It would be a natural place for them to find the Messiah King being that Jerusalem is the Capital of Israel and Herod, the King of the Jews being a good person… but Herod is not a good person!

They have no trouble getting in to meet him; after all they are a pretty impressive traveling party. Hearing their question and their story, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” Herod, who is the King of the Jews, and fearful of a rival king, huddles and consults his chief priests and scribes, who tell him, yes there is a little passage in Micah that talks about a ruler coming and being born in nearby Bethlehem. So Herod, instead of sending an army to get rid of this rival king, decides on a cheaper less obtrusive approach. He sends these Wise Men with his blessing, under the ruse of finding the child and then “Bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”

The star leads them on to Bethlehem. There they find and worship the new King, the Messiah. Next day, the star is no longer shining in the sky, but they get another message, this one in a dream warning them of Herod’s evil intentions and telling them not return to him. So “they left for their own country by another road.”

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That is the message for us - travel by another road, a new and better road, from this Day of Epiphany on into this New Year.

It is the same message Joseph receives, also in a dream, warning him to take the child and his mother on another road and flee to Egypt because of Herod’s evil intentions. Intentions Herod diabolically carries out in that dark follow-up story of Christmas, the slaughter of all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or younger.

But because Joseph listens to God’s message that comes in the dream, and Joseph acts upon God’s message – gets up, sets out, and journeys with Mary and the Child to Egypt, where they live for a time until Herod has died. They are spared and God’s plan continues to unfold.

On the front of today’s bulletin is artist Luc Olizier Merson’s “Repose on the ” depicting Mary and Jesus resting between the paws of an Egyptian Sphinx, symbolizing the mysteries and paradoxes of life which the Sphinx represents, together with the gift of salvation and revelation of life’s mysteries which God’s gift of Jesus the Messiah, the Christ represents.

I mentioned this painting on Christmas Eve, and lo and behold, our friend Dr. Carol Smith, who worships with us, afterward gave me a that was in her purse of this very painting.

Life is often hard and harsh. There is the slaughter of innocents. There are the tragic deaths of church kids on their way to Disney World. There is the mystery of the Sphinx. Yet, there is the message of the Christ. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in Birmingham at the funeral for the four little girls, “At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments…. Life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us.”i

I As you travel the journey of your life on a new road in 2019, trusting that God walks with you, I call you - First, PAY ATTENTION TO GOD’S SIGNS. God will get his message across to you one way or another if you are open, if you are paying attention. God will send you his signs. That is where faith comes in. We have to trust that God is there, walking with us, willing and ready, eager, to get his message across to us. He was able to get through to foreign star gazers, he was able to get through to a poor carpenter and his wife, and he can get through to you.

So pay attention to the signs God gives you. Sometimes they are unusual, exotic, and miraculous. Most often I think they are quite ordinary. The counsel of a friend, a meal that come at just the right time, a card signed by many friends, a passage of scripture that seems to have your name on it as addressed directly to you; words of a prayer that break through and soar to the heart of Heaven. Open your ears, your mind, and your heart in 2019 to God’s signs.

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II Then Second, FOLLOW GOD’S SIGNS. When God gives you a message, a sign, and you have a hunch, act on what God is showing you. For the Wise Men, Joseph and Mary and the Child, it meant getting up and going on a long hard journey. It meant traveling to a distant land with different customs. Just think, if either the Wise Men or the Holy Family had resisted God, refused to act on what God showed them, the whole story would have come to a tragic end with Herod and his soldiers.

Faith means trusting God for the signs and taking steps in response. God does not generally show us but one step at a time. Like headlights on our cars at night, we do not see all the way home but only to the next horizon. Keep following God’s signs when he shows them to you, and he will bring you home.

III Then Third, SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THIS NEW THING GOD HAS DONE IN JESUS CHRIST. Here is one where I, as such a creature of habit, have to struggle. God leads us in new directions, to new situations, and new ways of sharing the Good News of a Savior.

The 48th and 49th chapters of Isaiah speak of this,

“Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, I am the Lord your God who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go.”ii

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”iii

Paraphrase – it is not enough to just huddle up in your little Presbyterian group club. Get message out to the neighborhood and the whole world.

How is God calling you to share the Good News? Who needs to hear of the Savior from you? What new direction is God sending you in 2019? Are you paying attention to God’s signs and then going as God tells you and sharing the great story? Will you in this next season, this New Year? Are you growing in your love for the people God has given you to love?

W.H. Auden wrote a long poem, in 1941, shortly after the death of his mother that he called “For the Time Being – A Christmas Oratorio.” In it he retells the familiar Christmas Story of the Shepherds, the Wise men, the Holy Family, and then sets it in the world of his time, 1941believing that, as scholar Alan Jacobs writes,

“Art, community, erotic love, politics, and psychology - had been fundamentally altered by a single event: the entry of God into human history, what Christians call the incarnation. The Christ child, as every character agrees in the poem Auden would write, changes everything. And that radical disruption of the 5

world, and therefore of all that human beings typically think about the world, needed to be accounted for.”iv

Auden ends the poem in the next to last section with a description of life after Christmas.

“Well so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes, Some have got broken- and carrying them up to the attic. The and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, And the children got ready for school. There are enough Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week- Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot, Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully – To love all of our relatives, and in general Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed To do more than entertain it as an agreeable Possibility.”v

That is our natural inclination. But then, in the very last section, Auden calls us nevertheless to follow, follow Jesus, with this great invitation:

He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life. Love Him in the World of the Flesh; And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.”vi

Follow him my friends, in 2019. His is the Road Best Traveled!

Prayer,

“Eternal God, You call us to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”vii

i Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, “Eulogy for the Martyred Children”, p.222 6

ii Is 48:17 iii Is. 49:6, 7 iv Alan Jacobs, in his introduction to For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio by W.H. Auden v W. H. Auden, Religious Drama I For the Time Being, p.66 vi Auden, Ibid, p. 68 vii Book of Common Worship, p. 501