Seeking Him Who First Sought Us
Sermon by Cynthia A.
Jarvis
January 6, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Micah 5:2-5a
Matthew 2:1-12
“When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising,
until it stopped over the place where the child was.”
By and large the Bible has no use for astrologers. In a particularly pointed outburst, Isaiah says of Babylon:
Stand fast in your enchantments, and your many sorceries, with which you have labored from your youth; perhaps you may be able to succeed, perhaps you may
inspire terror. You are wearied with your many consultations; let those who study the heavens stand up and save you, those who gaze at the stars, and at
each new moon predict what shall befall you. See, they are like stubble, the fire consumes them; they cannot deliver themselves from the power of the flame.
No coal for warming oneself is this, no fire to sit before!
Or consider the words of Job as he attempts to eliminate the possible causes of his affliction: “If I have looked at the sun when it shone, or the moon
moving in splendor, and my heart has been secretly enticed, and my mouth has kissed my hand; this also would be an iniquity to be punished by the judges,
for I should have been false to God above.”
Likewise Paul warns the Colossians to stay away from those who observe festivals and new moons. (Never mind that my horoscope presciently read yesterday:
“Yes, those post Christmas sales look tempting but do you really need what they are hawking? The best gift you can give yourself now is a balanced budget,
so keep walking.”) “These are only a shadow of what is to come,” Paul writes, “but the substance belongs to Christ.” In each instance Scripture is clear
that the human propensity to consult the stars and new moons for a revelation of life’s meaning and direction both misunderstands the purpose of these
heavenly bodies within creation and tempts the human mind to worship the stars rather than the One who created them.
“The only exception which calls for notice,” wrote Karl Barth nervously, “is the remarkable one of the story of the wise men from the East, of whom it is
said uncritically that they had seen in their country the star of the new born king of Israel and had come to worship Him, and that this star had in some
way led them until finally it stood still over the place where the little child was.”
Barth’s concern, in concert with Isaiah and Job and Paul, was that we might take this story as warrant to look to the stars for our destiny and miss the
manger by a mile…or by nine miles to be exact. For in Barth’s time those who believed God to be revealed in the stars and so in nature (the red robin as an
omen…the fallen leaf as a sign) were also taken in by the claims of Hitler to be God’s true revelation. Ignorant or unaware or indifferent concerning the
scandalously specific light of Christ that rules merely human surmise about God out of order, German Christians had only their wits by which to test the
spirits: If God could speak through a star, then why not through Adolf Hitler? Therefore Barth quickly adds in a volume written during the height of World
War II: “This [exception] does not mean that [Matthew] justifies the action of the Magi or gives an invitation or even permission to imitate it…The
exception to the rule only confirms that it is not the normal function of stars to give such signs.”
Nevertheless, we must do business with this exception to the rule on Epiphany, on the twelfth night after Christmas when the church celebrates the
manifestation of God’s presence to the gentiles and so to the likes of most of us in this sanctuary. That the church also reads the story of Jesus’ baptism
on the first Sunday of the New Year reminds us obliquely of the fact that, unlike our Jewish brothers and sisters, we come to him by water rather than by
our blood relations. One cannot be born a Christian! We respond to his gracious claim upon our lives in the waters of baptism: by God’s initiative acted out
in a river or around a font as the community claimed by grace welcomes us home.
Therefore the star compels us to ask a question of ourselves that never need be asked of the people who are God’s by inheritance. To wit: what in the world
has led you to belong to this God, to quit belief in all others and go the extra nine miles to Bethlehem that you might bow down and worship him? What
appeared in your life or occurred to your mind or took hold of your heart to lead you to his manger? I do believe that the story of the magi has something
to tell us about the coincidence of our seeking God in the known world and our being found of God before the mystery of Christ’s birth.
In the coincidence of their seeking and their being found of God, the wise men have led us, precisely us, time and again, to Bethlehem just as Matthew
intended. Even though Matthew laces his gospel with links to Old Testament texts for the sake of his own people, he knows the end of the story…knows the
risen Christ will send the disciples out to baptize all nations: to baptize gentiles. Hence he begins his gospel with astrologers from Persia, with gentiles
like us who had no earthly reason to set out on a journey whose end would be the worship of a child born king of the Jews.
But we are summoned by the wise men from the East as well because they were, in their day, like most of us are in our day, empiricists. Specialists in
medicine, religion, astronomy and astrology, they were highly educated men who reasoned their way to the truth. We might liken them today to a department of
theoretical physicists observing the probability field of the heavens by way of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Schrodinger’s quantum-mechanical
wave-function equations.
“We did not observe the star to be at Bethlehem” they might have said in an interview with the Science Times “because that happens to be where it
was; that is where it was because we made the observation.” What? If with the help of essayist John Barth we can come close to understanding the claim of
theoretical physics in relation to the magi (which likely we cannot!), the position of the star “is ‘merely’ a field of probabilities until someone observes
it, whereupon its ‘wave function collapses’ and it may be said to have a position,” may be said to stop and stay! That is to say, for the star to stop and
stay over Bethlehem, an observer is necessary…or as physicist John Wheeler expansively put it, “The observer is essential to the creation of the universe as
the universe is to the creation of the observer.” Or turned inside-out and read into our own lives, we seek God who seeks us seeking him: we are merely a
field of probabilities (lost in the cosmos) until sought by God we can exclaim, “I am found of thee.”
Two curious details in Matthew’s second chapter bolster such an understanding of the star’s significance to our own search: in spite of its brightness,
apparently no one other than the magi noticed the star, suggesting that they alone were in the world seeking the God who sought them seeking him. But
equally as curious is the fact that the star was not enough to get them all the way to Bethlehem. The wise men were led as far as Jerusalem by the star, but
clearly they arrived in need of a text to interpret its meaning.
Or put another way, the star that set them to seeking led them to the place of political and religious power, to the city of Herod and Hitler where these
three taken with portents in the sky comfortably could have stopped and stayed. But in fact this was not possible, because long beforehand they had been
compelled to quit the stars for a Savior: “We have observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.” Their seeking had been met by
the God who had moved them to seek him, seeking them. Therefore after they had been given a text from the prophet Micah (“And you, Bethlehem, in the land of
Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel”), they were bound for
Bethlehem, the star notwithstanding, to worship the Christ child.
Yet even more curious is the fact that the chief priests and scribes, whose text Micah was, did not saddle up their camels and head for Bethlehem too.
Clearly they knew their scriptures. But apparent in the story is their distinct lack of curiosity or longing or looking for the text’s meaning in the
world. Perhaps Micah’s meaning had been domesticated in favor of present power arrangements. In league with Herod the King, the chief priests and
scribes were in no hurry to look for another. And perhaps that is the rub that brings us full circle to the coincidence of our seeking God in the known
world and our being found of God before the mystery of Christ’s birth.
God knows we are looking for something to lend meaning and purpose to our days. God knows each of us can identify a host of events or persons or
predicaments that has landed us in the midst of Christ’s church. Even so, there are some of us here who are more prone to wish upon a star than hurry to his
stable. Likewise there are others of us conversant with the scriptures or the confessions or the theological traditions of the church but with little
interest in a faith that seeks understanding. The story of the star that led the magi only so far and the text that directed them all the way to the manger
holds in solution the coincidence of our seeking God and the mystery of the God who moves our souls to seek him seeking us: it is the coincidence of our
asking and God’s address, the coincidence of our longing and the story Scripture tells, the coincidence of the hopes and fears of all the years met still in
him tonight.
“I have spent my life watching,” writes novelist and Christian Marilynne Robinson, “not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, which is
plainly before my eyes….With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and
this very fact should seize our attention….Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that
often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not
disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.””
“When they saw that the star had stopped,” Matthew tells us of the magi about to be visited by revelation, “they were overwhelmed with joy.” In this year
that is before us together, my friends, may you find yourselves overwhelmed with joy at the coincidence of being found of God who was long beforehand with
your soul in Christ, and who even now sends you by star and shepherds and angels and magi nine miles down the road to Bethlehem. Amen.
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