The summer I
was eighteen, I went on a 21-day course at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School. I had just decided to take a leave of absence
from college, even though I was doing well academically. But, you see, that was part of my difficulty. Doing well in school a given, and had been ever
since I arrived at kindergarten already knowing how to read. I’d skipped second grade. My high school awarded me various academic
honors. I’d received early admission to my
first choice of colleges, and after a rocky freshman year I’d made the Dean’s
list as a sophomore. If I’d wanted any
of these things I might have been proud of them, but I hadn’t. It was just what came naturally to me.
People called
me “smart,” but I didn’t feel smart. They
people applauded my academic success, but it wasn’t anything I wanted. I didn’t
know what I wanted, or who I was, or what to do with my life, but I did know I
wasn’t going to learn the answers to these questions from a book or in a
classroom. Luckily, my parents understood
at least a little of this, and they packed me off to an outdoor education and
adventure program to sail around the coastal wilderness of Maine.
And there I got
to experience myself in a way I never had before. I’d grown up the third of four boys. In fourteen years of school I’d always been
the youngest person in my class, usually by a wide margin. But on the Outward Bound course I was with
other kids my own age—many of them were younger than me. And while they were still in high school, or
had just graduated, I’d already completed two years of college. To them I wasn’t the smart kid; I was the
strong one, the capable and mature one.
I found, for the first time in my life, to my complete surprise, that I
was a leader.
We often
think of ourselves as molded into a set shape by the unchanging “givens” of our
lives. Our ethnic background and genetic
makeup, our cultural traditions and national and religious identities, the
circumstances of our families of origin and early life experiences, make us who
we are. So do the choices we have made,
and the habits we have picked up, not to mention the mysterious ingrained
qualities of temperament and those involuntary feelings and thoughts and
behaviors that we sum up with the term “human nature.” We put all those “givens” together in a
story, a story we tell ourselves and others about us, and that is who we are.
But the gift
that Christmas brings us is a new given.
It is given, not by the history of the past or the circumstances of the present
but by the grace of God. Christmas begins
a new story of what it means to be human, a story of what we are destined to
become in Jesus Christ. One of the ways that the New Testament talks about
the impact of this new story on our lives is to say that it is like finding out
we were adopted. To really accept the gift of the coming of
Christ into the world is like learning that what we thought was given, about ourselves
and our place in the world, is incorrect
at the most fundamental level. We aren’t
who we thought we were, because, really, we were adopted. We are God’s adopted children.
When a new
and unexpected story overtakes the one we take for granted it can be an
unsettling, even a frightening experience.
In the gospel of Matthew, when the wise men from the East appear, asking
to see the newborn king of the Jews, Herod is afraid. He is afraid because, without even knowing
it, these foreigners have stirred up a ghost that he has worked his whole life
to put to rest. For Herod, the old hope
of a new king of Israel, from the royal line of David, was a quaint legend for
old women and country rubes. His game
was Roman imperial politics and the rule of terror, and he’d played it well
enough to hold on to power for close to forty years. He’s murdered all his rivals, and outlived
the others, and he’s ready to pass on his throne to his sons were ready to succeed
him on, and now, these outlandish messengers appear with their dangerous fairy
tale.
And “all
Jerusalem,” says the gospel, is frightened with him. Because Herod is not the kind of person you
wanted to be around when he gets upset, but also because this is news they’d long
ago decided they would never hear. The chief
priests and the scribes know very well that Herod is not from the lineage of
David, is not even ethnically a Jew. They
know how deeply he is hated and feared by the common people of the land, but they
have learned how to stay on his good side, and have done very well for
themselves on his patronage and his cozy relationship with Rome. They have their given role, soothing the
people’s seething unrest, and placating Herod’s tendency to violent outbursts
of repression. And now the arrival of
the Magi threatens to upset this fragile peace.
I think the
author of Matthew knew exactly what he was doing, weaving all these political
implications into his story. It’s how he
sets the stage for the conflict that will center on the ministry of Jesus and
culminate in his death. But this story
also lifts the curtain on a new revelation of God, one that calls age-old “givens”
of religion into question. Because Matthew,
of all the gospel authors, is the most explicit in grounding his story in the Scriptures.
He quotes the Hebrew Bible at every
opportunity, showing how the details of Jesus’ life fulfill the sayings of the prophets. We have an example of this in today’s Gospel
lesson, when the scribes quote the book of Micah to tell Herod that the Messiah
is to be born in Bethlehem.
But the biblical
knowledge of the scribes wouldn’t have mattered if the Magi hadn’t come. And the Magi are not scholars of the Hebrew
scriptures. They are Zoroastrian priests
and astrologers from the country we now call Iran. They have not come because of reading the
scrolls of the prophets, but find their way into the story following a star. From a thousand miles away, across great
deserts and rivers and mountain ranges, across the frontiers of warring
empires, the Magi saw God’s new sign. By
their esoteric wisdom, they knew it for what it was, and set out on the long and
dangerous journey. Carrying their
precious offerings, they followed the
glory of the star until it led them to the greater glory of the face of the Beloved
Son of God. They gazed for few moments
of wonder and adoration into that face, and then, just as mysteriously as they
came, they were gone.
But they are
in the story long enough to reveal something essential about Christmas. In the strange new light of their star, religion
can no longer be a power struggle over givens.
Who has the royal blood, who owns Jerusalem and the Temple, who controls
the interpretation of the Bible—the new given that is Christ is not concerned
with anything like that. Because Christmas
is the point of departure for a pilgrimage of grace, a journey following the call
of hope toward the face-to-face encounter with the glory of God.
The New
Testament is all about this journey, this grace-filled path that leads from
glory to glory. It reveals a new kind of person, says the Letter to the
Ephesians, living in a new kind of community, called the church. Many of us don’t
think about the church this way. We look
at it and see a whole lot of givens—lectionary texts and liturgical calendars, prayer
books and hymnals, old buildings of glass and wood and stone, committees and by-laws
and denominational structures—all of it stamping us into a mold of givens from
in the past. But all of these things are
really just accessories to the essential work of the church, the essential life
of Christian people, which is praise and thanksgiving for the unfolding blessings
of God. We gather to remember a story,
but it is God’s story that reveals who we really are, what we are becoming more and more— God’s own
adopted children. And of all the things in
this world that’s the only one that’s really a given.
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