Think Again

Think Again

Matthew 2:1-12

Here are some things that you think are true, that you’ve absorbed as true, that you may have been taught which, simply are not true...

Van Gogh cut off his own ear and sent it to a woman he loved who didn’t love him. Nope! Historians believe that Paul Gaugin, another artist and Van Gogh’s friend, cut Van Gogh’s ear off with a fencing sword in a fight. The idea is that Van Gogh was covering for his friend and made up the tale that he did it to himself.

Bagpipes come from Scotland, right? Nope! They were created in the Middle East and made their way to Western Europe in the Middle Ages.

You can see the great wall of China from space, right? Maybe if they put lights on the whole thing but honestly, no, it cannot be seen from space. Ask an astronaut...

Humans and dinosaurs were close to existing in the same era. Nope! Humans and dinosaurs were separated by 64 million years.

Einstein failed math. Nope! He failed his entrance exam but he hammered every math test he ever took.

A goldfish only has a three second memory. Nope! Try 3 months. Clinically demonstrated in a lab...

Vikings wore helmets with horns on them. Nope! Those helmets were designed by a costume designer in the 1800’s for a production of one of Wagner’s pieces.

Chameleons change color to blend in to their environment. Nope! The color of chameleons communicates their mood, their aggression, their territoriality, and mating behaviors. They change colors to be noticed and taken seriously, not to be invisible.

Last, but not least, penguins are monogamous. Nope! Despite what you may have heard, penguins are, at best, seasonally monogamous. They stay with the same mate through pregnancy and birth and the early infancy. And then, the next year, all bets are off. (Can we ever look a penguin in the eye again?)

The truth is that if you hear something enough times, it starts to sound true. And, if what you’ve heard over and over again goes unchallenged long enough, well, we kind of assume that it must be true, right? Stephen Colbert calls this “truthiness”—when something just sounds true and therefore, it must be true. When you start to really notice this, it becomes a giant argument for speaking up and challenging the things that we just assume true. Or, it becomes the basis for what we experience today, when people of every ideology, carefully repeat the messages that they want us to believe, over and over again, knowing that if their messages are heard often enough and go unchallenged long enough, then they will win the day.

Of course, this is why the “echo chambers” that we are so often invited to occupy are so dangerous. If I only hear what I want to hear, what won’t disturb me or challenge me, what just makes me comfortable, then I will never have to have that nauseating experience of realizing that what I believed is, in fact, completely and totally wrong. If the bubble I occupy is impermeable enough, then I can just blissfully float along in my own little world. (In my own “Private Idaho” as the B-52’s used to sing!)

This is Epiphany Sunday, the day on which we remember how everyone’s assumptions about the birth of the Messiah and the nature of the Messiah were challenged to the core from the moment Jesus was born. An epiphany is a sudden insight, a revelation of a deeper truth, very often a realization that what I thought was true is, in fact, false.

As I pointed out to you for most of Advent and Christmas, no one’s expectations were accurate. Folks were looking for a warrior or a king. They got a baby. That lovely elderly couple had a son (go figure!) who became a central figure in the story that would unfold. The younger couple who were pregnant without being married became the mother and father of the “Prince of Peace.” The scene of the birth wasn’t a palace but a barn with a feed trough for a cradle. And, the honored, invited guests were smelly shepherds. The story is gritty and real. If God can become incarnate in that setting surrounded by those people, then God must really love us as we are and the world as it is.

The one consoling thought would have been, “Well, at least the Messiah came for us, the people of Israel, the people who had been God’s chosen people from the start.” There might have been shepherds and an unwed mother and a pregnant elderly woman but they were our shepherds and our unwed mother and our pregnant elderly woman. God was still our tribe’s God. God so loved Israel!

But remember, that’s not the message. The message isn’t that God so loved Israel that God became one of us. Rather, the message is that God so loved the world. This truth might be like the dawning moment that is there for the child who has been an only child for their whole life until the day that their little baby brother or sister comes home. You never feel quite as special again. You wait for just the right moment to ask your mother or father, “And when will this baby go back to the hospital?”

This is what lies at the heart of Epiphany. What the people of Israel believed with all their heart and soul and mind and strength was that God loved them because they were special. Of course, the truth is that everyone who has ever been loved sooner or later falls into this trap—believing that they are loved because they deserve it. Then, a while later, something triggers the memory of how you felt in the beginning when you realized that you were loved and all you felt was overwhelmed with gratitude. You were the luckiest person in the history of the world until slowly, over the years, you forgot that feeling altogether.

So, the epiphany truth is that God became incarnate, the Word became flesh because God loved the whole world. The evidence of this begins to be collected on the day when foreigners—the people whom everyone in Israel was convinced God could not love—began showing up. Gussy them up any way that you want—extra smart foreigners, royal foreigners, camel riding foreigners—they are not us and they, of all people, realize the truth that will elude the rest of us for a long time: that the Messiah has been born. Their only question is “Where?”

So, here’s a few things specific to this story that are not true. These were not kings. Magi were learned people, may some combo of astrologers and astronomers. They were not royalty.

There were not three of them. The text never specifies a number. (We probably arrived at three magi because they gave three gifts.) The text never tells us their names. They didn’t ride camels. They text just tells us that they arrived.

For allegedly wise people, they do something pretty naive and foolish: they ask the king where the newborn king has been born. Since kings are pretty famous for wanting to hold onto power, this is

a really bad idea. (Herod had already killed a few of his own children because he felt like they might be a threat.) Of course, the idea that someone can be really smart and stunningly naive about the ways of the world is just a fact, especially good hearted people who assume that good hearts are beating in the people standing in front of them.

After setting Herod off into a frenzy, the wise men proceed to Bethlehem, the place where the religious authorities said a newborn king would be born, “But, Herod, your royal highness, we can’t imagine this has actually taken place...” However, what’s driving the wise men isn’t the advice of highly educated religious folks. Nope, they are just following the same star that they’ve been following all along.

So, having acknowledged what we don’t know, we can remind ourselves of what is worth knowing. The wise men jeopardized their status in society by following a star. One way or another, this is still what faithful people have to do. We put ourselves out on a limb for someone. We willingly go down the rabbit hole to find out what needs to be discovered. We take a stand when it doesn’t seem like we have ghost of a chance at success. These foreigners get it. If you’ve going to task a risk and follow a star and seek this child, a lot of people are going to think you’ve lost your mind. To this day, if you want to have a faith that is alive, you’re going to have to take some risks on the basis of that faith.

What’s at the end of the wise men’s long journey is the sudden realization that they have arrived, not at the palace, but at the house where the newborn king resides. That’s right—house, not a palace, not a barn. Enough time has elapsed that Mary has settled in Bethlehem. Joseph is nowhere to be seen. (Maybe as a parent of a newborn, he was at Target, picking up supplies?). What the wise men realize, though, is that having followed a star all the way to where the star stopped, they were now in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time. Having risked being 100% wrong, they now know they are exactly where they are supposed to be—which occasionally is the reward for those willing to follow God’s lead.

Finally, they drop to their knees and worship this king. They offer up their gifts—gold for the boy who would grow up and could not care less about money; frankincense and myrrh—burial spices for the boy who would grow up and lay down his life. Then, after being warned by God in a dream, they head home. Perhaps, their epiphany was knowing that their lives would never be the same.

Take the epiphany to heart. God can work through anyone, even people who are different than us, even people we may have been taught to despise. In fact, sometimes it is the people who are different than us who can reveal to us the truth that we have missed. God puts those people right in front of us sometimes, living that greater truth in ways we can’t deny. And then, God whispers to us, “Okay, now...think again.”