7 January 2007

Matthew 2:1-12

This reading from Matthew is familiar. Too familiar perhaps. It’s a story well-told. We hear it and our minds race to Christmas cards that we’ve received showing three elegantly clad kings on camels with a small city in the background with a bright star shining overhead. But let’s think seriously about this scripture for a moment. It’s one that deserves some attention.

We tend to conflate the two stories of Christmas, putting together Luke’s version of the angels’ appearance to the shepherds and with Matthew’s tale of the wise men coming to pay homage to the newborn king. Each story has a separate viewpoint and a separate lesson to tell.

Luke, for instance, brings the message of Jesus first and foremost to the poorest of the poor. Luke’s angels bypass the ruling hierarchy and the religious leaders of the day and go to the lowest members of the society at the time. God is concerned for the poor, Luke says. God comes for everyone, including and especially for those who are usually excluded.

Matthew has a different bent. Not that Matthew says that God came to earth only for the rich and powerful. Far from it. It would be wrong to state that Jesus’ concern for the poor is ever far from present in any stories about him.

But Matthew has a particular audience to think about. Matthew’s gospel, the scholars have reckoned, was written at the end of the 1st century. This is after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the occupying Roman forces.

There had been a great conflict throughout the first century between James and Paul. James and his followers wanted to keep the message of Christ for the Jews. James would have kept the followers of Jesus good practicing Jews.

By contrast, Paul felt that the message of Jesus was for a wider audience. He wanted to take the message beyond Jerusalem and Judea. He is famous for traveling to the Gentiles with this message of God’s love, redemption and grace through Jesus Christ.

This conflict did not end with the death of James and Paul around the year 60 either. In fact, some think the argument may have intensified.

Then in the year 72 the Temple was destroyed and the Jews were dispersed throughout the empire. Jerusalem was no longer the center of the worship of the Jewish faith. The synagogue took on more importance. And the earliest forms of Christianity followed along and through necessity spread into Gentile lands.

But in the meantime, Paul’s disciples continued to spread the gospel in Gentile lands also. And it was for these dispersed Jews and Gentile Christians that Matthew’s gospel was written.

And how does Matthew tell the story of Jesus’ birth? By bringing in outsiders—Gentiles—to worship the newborn baby. Matthew is putting his stamp of approval on non-Jews. By bringing in these visitors from outside Judea, Matthew is letting his original readers, as well as us, know that there is a wide world out there and God’s love is for all.

These days we’re hearing a lot about all of the world’s religions. Interreligious dialogue is occurring at many levels and we’re becoming accustomed to hearing more and more about Islam, Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the other various religions that people on earth follow. In fact, when we became a congregation of The Center of Progressive Christianity, one of the 8 points we discussed was that “By calling ourselves progressive, we mean we are Christians who...Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the way to God's realm, and acknowledge that their ways are true for them, as our ways are true for us.”

The ones whom we remember today—the so-called Wise Men from the East—were not Christian and in fact, likely never became part of The Way or the earliest forms of the Christian church. But they worshipped the Jews’ God as found in a small baby born on earth almost 2000 years ago.

Matthew reminds us that there are other ways to worship God through this passage this morning. We are not alone in our worship of God. The way we worship the Almighty One may vary, in fact what we call the Holy One varies. But we worship the One who created us and loves us.

Unfortunately, lately, other religions have been getting a bad name. With the rise of Christian fundamentalism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, we are finding ourselves in the midst of a clash between these two religions. We’ve also seen signs of anti-Semitism and a linking of our culture with the Christian faith.

We are off course and moving away from Matthew’s gospel if we are to claim God as our own and try to keep God away from other faiths. God is bigger than one faith’s truth can contain. As humans, we have to recognize our limitations, which includes our faith’s limitations. This does not mean that we abandon our own Christian faith. God is revealed to us through the one named Jesus who was born in the tiny little town of Bethlehem. The same one that the Wise Men came seeking, following the star.