Fairhaven UMC

The Prophet Isaiah’s words feel especially heavy, visceral for us during a western Pennsylvania winter, I think. You know, we’re living in a pitch-dark land, right? I feel like we’re home for two hours after this before we’re in pitch darkness. We get just a few hours of clear sky a week. Christmas cheer, the busyness of the season, the high points of winter, unfortunately front-loaded, have completely faded at this point.

We’re in the long part of winter, the intractable piece, where it feels like the sun just barely gets over the horizon and then drops back down. So it might feel a little bit disconnected to hear Matthew’s gospel text this morning that takes place on the beach. You can picture the image of Jesus and these first disciples. Some date palms swaying, the light pebbly sand, the water gently lapping on the shore against the tied up boats.

You’ve got the sunrise. James and John are just silhouettes against the morning sky. Yeah. And this is this really appealing image.

Almost feels like a tropical paradise, very different than what we have right now. And we can envision the sounds of these men sloshing through the surf, boats slicing through the waves, these four future disciples throwing their nets on a peaceful morning. I think that’s a mistaken image, at least an incomplete image. Because we picture fishermen in our context as doing something for fun.

It’s leisure. We picture them going out to relax on the water while the rest of the world is asleep. But these are men at work. This is their job site, these fishermen.

And they’re doing this work to provide for their families. They’re commercial fishermen. So forget the palm trees and the sea spray. Drop the idea that anybody’s on a casual stroll on the beach to watch the sun come up.

These guys are at work. Five in the morning on the job. And envision what that’s really like. There’s a cold wind.

You can’t escape the smell of seaweed and wet wood mixed with the smell of dying tilapia flopping in the boat. And every man’s hands out there are chafed and blistery from throwing ropes over and over and over again. No. And this is, as Isaiah puts it, a land of deep shadow.

And so envision what that’s really like. The people of Galilee are an occupied people. They’re just keeping their heads down. They’re trying to make a living under the boot of the Roman Empire that just marches violently and carelessly through their cities.

There’s massacres all the time. The king’s a tyrant. This is a shadow over the land that isn’t just emotional, isn’t just spiritual. It’s killing people.

It’s creating orphans. And maybe we can feel that shadow in our land, in our world. Right? And so all this said, this is not a leisurely day on the lake. This is not like going to Presque Isle.

It’s not like going to North Park Lake. This is hard labor in a hard place. And that’s where Jesus shows up to meet the disciples. Not the synagogue, not the temple, not the market square.

He goes and sees them at work. And so we meet Jesus this morning, walking through all this bustle on the lakeshore, all of this mourning work. And he has just returned from his 40-day temptation in the desert, which we get back to in Lent, strangely. But the Holy Spirit had sent him out immediately after his baptism by John in the Jordan, and he’s tempted in the desert for 40 days.

And after this great trial, he’s proven his ability to resist Satan at all costs, but And so he chooses now to begin his ministry in the world. So he moves away from his hometown of Nazareth because the prophets never heard in his hometown, right? And he decides he’s going to begin a new chapter in the lakeside town of Capernaum. And so that’s where we are today. And what’s happening here is the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

He transitions from being this Nazarene carpenter to a preacher across the region of Galilee. And he’s no longer the guy that he was in his hometown. One chapter has closed, a new chapter has begun, and he’s no longer the guy that he was in his hometown. And the time has started for something new.

And he has this simple message that he proclaims everywhere that he goes, and he says, Repent. The kingdom of heaven has come near. A better translation, the one you heard Flo read from the CEB this morning, is, Change your hearts and lives. Here comes the kingdom of heaven.

And Jesus’ message is clear: God is doing something right now. And He’s doing it here, He’s doing it among you, He’s doing it in this place. Amen. This isn’t just a far-off, abstract prediction.

So shape up or face the consequences. And this is why I think the change your hearts and lives language is so much better than repent. We understand repentance to be like apologizing. But repentance is, there’s a word metanoia in Greek, which is not about apology.

It’s not even a call to recognize, to name the sins you’ve committed. It means turn around. It means to become radically different than how you were, to go in a different direction. So don’t just fiddle on the edge of things.

Don’t just apologize for what you’ve done. Change your life. Change who you are completely. And so this is the message that Jesus has started proclaiming.

We don’t know how long he’s been doing this at this point, but he’s still a really minor character on the Galilean landscape. You know, just like Pittsburgh, they have preachers that wander around on the street corners. Jesus is still just one of those people. But we meet him this morning, walking along the Sea of Galilee as a new chapter begins.

So first he sees Simon, Peter, and Andrew, and they’re fishing from the shoreline. They’re casting their nets into the choppy sea. And he says, come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people. And they drop their nets immediately.

These tools that have been their livelihood for the entirety of their adult lives, Amen. and probably before that, they drop their nets and they go immediately. They follow Jesus up the beach. And now these guys are a group of three, Jesus and these other two, and they continue along the shoreline.

And soon they spot James and John, and they’re not on the shoreline. They’re out on their father’s boat a couple yards out into the sea. And again, Jesus calls out to them, follow me. And they’re out on the shoreline.

That’s it. And he doesn’t try to pitch them on anything. He doesn’t give them a plan or a job opportunity. He doesn’t promise them the secrets of the universe.

But still, they just respond to this simple invitation. And they drop their nets. They climb out of the boat. They wade to shore.

And they set out on this journey to somewhere with this guy. And without so much as a see-you-later to their own dad, he just stands bewildered in Okay. the boat, what’s he going to do now? What are they going to do now? Nobody knows but Jesus, but they’ve decided to go. And I think the most glaring question that grips any of us as we read this story is a really basic one, and that is, why did they go? because at least as Matthew tells it, they’ve not seen a miracle.

Why? They’ve not seen any kind of wondrous sign. They’ve not even heard Jesus preach. They’ve not interviewed Jesus to see what he’s got in mind. And they’re not like John the Baptist.

These guys are fishermen. They’ve not been actively waiting for the Messiah, pouring over prophecy, seeing if he’s going to show up. And yet without a moment’s thought, without a moment of debate, they just leave behind everything. No, they’re not.

Their family, their friends, the livelihood that keeps food on their tables, a roof over their heads. They drop it and follow this man they’ve never met. Why would they do that? Why would they do that? Well, Matthew tells us that the Jesus ministry as he moves away from Nazareth into Capernaum, which is this land of Zebulun and Naphtali on a road by the sea, the same place that Isaiah talked about, he says that this is a fulfillment of prophecy. And Matthew tells us that the people in this very land live in the dark.

And Jesus’ arrival marks the coming of this brilliant light that just shines upon everybody there, that slices through this shadow of death that they lived in. And I don’t think that these fishermen knew Isaiah’s prophecy by heart. They did not have all this stuff memorized. They were not looking for the Messiah.

They didn’t see Jesus and go, aha, just like Isaiah chapter 9, that’s the guy. They didn’t do that. But I think they did feel something shift when they saw Jesus. They felt this disruption.

life under the Roman Empire, well, really in any empire, is just painfully predictable. Right? With a few exceptions, there aren’t many. You know your place in the world. You know your fate.

And these four fishermen, they know what each passing day is going to bring for them. They’re going to fish. They’re going to eat. They’re going to sleep.

They’re going to wake up and do it again. And a couple times a year, they’re going to pay their taxes. Repeat. Repeat.

From adolescence to old age when they can’t do it anymore, their life is going to look the same every day. And their fathers pass this life on to them. They’ll pass it on to their sons. There’s nowhere to go.

It’s a closed cycle. It’s a limited horizon. And the shadow that hangs over them and over their land is not just this darkness of oppression and occupation. It is that.

But there’s this deep spiritual stagnation too. There’s this feeling that this life that they have, that’s all there is. Nothing really ever changes. That’s it.

And Jesus, when he arrives on the lakeshore here… offers this straightforward call that they come and follow him, that disrupts that stagnation.

This is something completely different. They’ve never seen anything like this before. Come and follow me, he says, and I will show you how to fish for people. What does that mean? They just sit there wondering, what does that mean? But it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter what it means. They don’t figure it out. Their feet are already moving. It was compelling.

They’ve already dropped their nets. Jesus says, I will show you how to fish for people, and this would mark a transformation for them in their lives. Okay. It marks a transformation in what they do, and it marks a transformation in who they are.

It is this metanoia, this changing your hearts and lives that Jesus has been proclaiming. It’s them doing it. They have this opportunity, this offering for a radical and complete change in their lives. No one else was offering that.

And they follow Jesus because he offers them this really captivating mystery, an unknown future that lies in this possibility. They can become something new. And that’s more compelling to them, more captivating than the security of just staying the same day in, day out, nothing to look forward to. This is what life is.

the mystery of something different is more compelling than staying the same. And so I wonder, is that true for you? What would you prefer? The security of staying the same or the mystery of something different with Jesus? Because who knows? Think about this. Jesus might have walked past a dozen other boats before he got to Peter and Andrew. He might have called out to some other fishermen who looked up, thought about it, and looked back down, pretended they didn’t hear Jesus or just waved him off.

Right? It’s safer in that shadow than getting into the light. But we, I think, have a instinctive understanding of this, don’t we, about living in shadow. We know what that’s like. About a life that’s a closed cycle where we just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

There’s nothing on the horizon. And that’s not just the deep freeze that kept us in our house the past week, switching from one pair of sweatpants to the next day’s pair of sweatpants. This is a spiritual climate thing. It’s a spiritual thing.

It’s what our world feels like, what our souls often feel like. We have our nets that we take care of day in and day out. We try to hold things together. We try to survive.

We get nearsighted. And like some of these other fishermen probably, we stare so hard at these nets we’re mending in our hands, the bills, the schedules, the family stuff, the worries that we have. We miss that Jesus is over here waving at us from the shore saying, come, I have something else for you. And as we’re bogged down in all this stagnant routine, we can easily forget that life is supposed to be something else, something more than this.

We stop believing that we were made for anything besides just keeping that boat floating. But there’s Jesus on the shore, shining like this light in the darkness that’s gotten dangerously comfortable for us, this darkness. And he’s issuing an invitation to you. But of course, you can decide to keep your head down if you want.

But whenever he calls this first set of disciples, notice how he does it. He doesn’t hand them a set of instructions. He doesn’t give them a printed copy of the Beatitudes to memorize. He doesn’t give Simon and Andrew one of those little comic book tracks to hand out to people about the good news of Jesus as part of this fishing thing.

He doesn’t say, go and convince people. He says, follow me and I’ll show you how to fish for people. And he is inviting them to undergo this transformation. He’s inviting them to this turning towards something mysterious and new.

They were once in the shadow and now they’re invited to radiate his light into the world. And I think this is what we often miss anytime we talk about evangelism, which isn’t very often. We think that evangelism is handing out these little packets or saying the right thing to people to convince them to try Jesus. Right? We think it’s this task where we have to drag people to church and hope that they stay.

But in this story, we see here that fishing isn’t a chore that they’re assigned, that they have to do. It’s a result of change that starts inside of them. Jesus is saying, come with me and I will change you so radically. I’ll give you all of this light that you won’t be able to help but shine that on to people.

And it will catch them the way that my light caught you. And the invitation here from Jesus is not to become like a salesperson for God. The invitation is to become living proof that there’s more than the drudgery of the life that we have in the shadows, where nothing, where nobody could ever be any different than they are already. And think about what that means for us.

To accept that Jesus gives us this invitation means refusing to accept that just stagnation Amen. is the final word, that sameness is how things are going to be. It means refusing to believe that our lives, this church, this community, this country are finished growing. And it means dropping these heavy nets that we cling to, the nets that mean this is just how things are, this is what we do, this is how we’re always going to do it, and instead step towards the light that has shown up.

Right? And it’s choosing to know that God wants more for you personally than what this world can give you, what you can achieve on your own. And whenever we allow ourselves to be changed like that, to be turned by this mystery, we start to have that light. We don’t have to sell Jesus to people because our lives become that gospel. That’s how a net works.

It just catches what’s around. It doesn’t persuade each fish to come jump in the net. People are drawn to the light. People are drawn to hope.

People are drawn to those who live like they’ve seen something big that has changed their world. People notice that. They get caught in it. They get caught up in it.

They see it. They want to know. And so the question for us on this cold day is not, you know, who can we recruit? That’s not evangelism. The question is deeper.

The question is scarier. Are we willing to get out of the boat, the place that’s been safe, that’s been familiar for decades, whatever that means for you? Are you willing to let go of routine, the safety of knowing exactly how tomorrow’s going to go forever in exchange for this unknown journey that Jesus could call you to do something totally different tomorrow? Are you willing to let Jesus change your heart, your life so completely that you become a different kind of person? Yeah. Because that’s the choice that Andrew and Simon face. That’s the choice that James and John face.

They look at their father. They look at the boat. They look at these endless days of a predictable future. And then they look at Jesus.

And they realize that one of these paths is safe. They know it. They like it. But the other path is alive.

dangerous, maybe, but alive. And these everyday fishermen become fishers of people. They travel places they never could have imagined. They proclaim good news.

Right? They heal disease. They cast out demons. They even face down death itself and win. Jesus calls you not just to go with him, but to become something different because you have gone with him.

Your net is in your hands right now. We’ve all got our nets. Maybe your grip’s tightened on that net as you’ve heard this story. but Jesus stands on the beach.

He calls you. Will you drop that net and follow him wherever he goes? In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Looking back, I’m not sure how my dad persuaded me to do this, but I got up three or four hours before I normally would on a school day, and I was in third grade. This was a Wednesday morning at the beginning of May, and it was cold. We forget how cold May and June can be, but it was cold. And I threw on my jacket, I threw on a pair of socks that would soon be soaked in the dew, and we headed to the Slippery Rock University quad, the Science Quad, boarded by the Science Building, the Library, and the Dining Hall.

And we were going to go see a rare astronomical event that I did not understand at all. And that was the 2003 solar transit of Mercury, which I’m sure none of you remember. I had a telescope that was mine, a telescope of my own, a red one I’d gotten for Christmas that year. But my parents’ house is surrounded by woods on three sides, including to the east, where I would need a clear line of sight to be able to view the star at its rising, so to speak.

And realistically, we’d also need some professional help. First of all, we are planning to look straight at the rising sun, which is not something you want to do through a regular telescope if you want to keep your eyeballs. And second, Mercury is tiny, right? The smallest planet. It’s not at all easy to find, and as it passed over the sun, it would be a tiny speck.

Just one one hundred and sixtieth the diameter of the sun. So we got there to the university about twenty minutes before sunrise. And after patiently sitting through an explanation of what we were going to see, we waited our turn to look through the university’s big telescopes, much larger than mine at home, as big around as a coffee can, these reflector scopes with a solar filter made of mylar on the end. The material they make helium balloons out of also is a great solar filter if you ever want to look at the sun through binoculars or whatever.

And these telescopes were amazing, just so much better than mine. They were beeping, ticking, humming. They were the automatic ones that track things in the sky. And I finally got to get to my turn to look up at the telescope, and we saw what we’d come to see, which was either entirely underwhelming or amazing, depending on your point of view.

If you weren’t interested in it, whatever, right? It’s just a dot on the sun. Okay. It’s next to unnoticeable, even if you have the best equipment. It’s like the opposite of a show-stopping solar eclipse that you have to stop and look and see what’s going on.

You have to want to see this. But if you do…

It’s miraculous. Because that tiny little rocky planet had aligned perfectly in the sky between me and the sun, 55 million miles away, and it had this little teeny sharp shadow. rising against the sun and traveling over it for the next couple hours. And so over the next hour, I would peek through that telescope periodically as Mercury made its way, and then I put on some dry socks and I went to school.

And it was a really fascinating experience, and maybe because it’s such an obscure occurrence. You have to really be looking. You have to want to see this happening. You have to painstakingly calculate the paths of the Earth, the Sun, and the planets, And if you even want to know when it’s going to happen, and then you have to have the right tools to see it.

No one had ever seen this in the history of humanity before. Until 1631, you know, 1600 years after the Magi, after the telescope was invented. And obviously this had been happening for millions and millions and millions of years, but no one ever knew. And since then, barely anybody’s seen it because who has the equipment, who has the interests to go see this miraculous thing? But I got to see it because I’d heard about it.

I knew who could help me see it, and I got up well before the sun when the opportunity arose to go see this thing. Right. So this Epiphany Sunday, as we hear the story of the three wise men, I think about that morning. Our traditions, our songs for the season tend to focus on the three men, though we don’t know there’s three of them, as wealthy kings that are bringing expensive gifts from afar to Jesus.

The most important part about them is that they are simply people who have been paying attention. The Magi aren’t kings at all, despite the song. The Magi are an educated class in the Parthian Empire, which is centered on Persia, hundreds of miles to Judea’s east. They’re across the desert.

And they’re kind of high-tech pagans. They’re this fusion of scientists and priests. Before science was invented, science and religion were kind of rolled together. And they were priests of an ancient religion called Zoroastrianism.

It’s got a lot of similarities with Christianity. And they’re not hanging out in royal palaces. Again, they’re not kings. They’re not comfortable.

They’re not content. They’re not apathetic like King Herod. No, these are active seekers of what God is doing. While the rest of the world is sleeping through the early hours of some Wednesday morning, while the political and religious leaders in Jerusalem are fixated on their own interests, these outsiders, they’re not Jews, they’re not even Judeans, are out getting their socks wet in the morning dew.

They’re looking for this tiny movement in the massive sky. and they have been searching, they have been waiting for a star at its rising, which is a better way to translate a star in the east, a star at its rising. This event has been promised for generations to Israel, and yet it would be nearly invisible to anyone who’s not already looking for it, watching the movement of the heavens and of history to see it finally happen. And so when it comes, when this star shows up in the sky, the magi are ready.

They notice, and they know, as scientists often do, the delicate workings of God’s creation. And so they know where are celestial objects supposed to be? When are they supposed to be there? And so whenever something new shows up, it sticks out in a way that it wouldn’t if you weren’t watching. It defies the orderly, cyclical nature of the skies. You know, usually the stars, the planets travel in very predictable patterns.

You can predict them thousands of years in the future. That’s why Stonehenge still lines up with the solstice and everything. But this star doesn’t line up with anything because it’s different. It’s new.

It’s unpredictable. And that makes it special. Of course it would signify something unprecedented happening. And so they follow it.

They head a thousand miles west to Jerusalem. And when they get to Jerusalem, these foreign dignitaries, they seek out the king’s court. If a new king is being born, after all, you would think that the one to know about it would be the current king. Not Herod.

The Magi tell him, We saw his star at its rising, the new king of the Jews. Not Herod. They announce that they’ve come to bow down before this newborn king. And even though it’s likely taken the Magi weeks or more to arrive, this is a long distance again.

After they saw that star, they got on horseback, they traveled across the entire Middle East from edge to edge. This is all news to him. Nobody around Herod has noticed the star. But these guys had noticed.

Those who were supposed to have been looking for it all along are completely unaware. And we find that Herod is troubled at this news. That’s the word that is used here, troubled. And an extra troubling element here, too, again, is the origin of these magi.

These guys are Persians. They’re not just Gentiles. They’re enemy Gentiles. They’re representatives of this empire that is Rome’s chief rival.

It’d be like if a Soviet delegation showed up in D.C. in the height of the Cold War and asked the president about something going on in Missouri and he hadn’t heard about it. That’s a major national security threat.

And what’s more, this ruler Herod, who publicly identifies as a faithful Jew, which he has to be if he’s going to be king here, he’s got to endear himself to his people, he’s supposed to know this stuff, but he has to ask. He has to ask the priests and the legal experts about the prophecy the Magi are referring to. He has no idea what they’re talking about. What star? What messiah? And this is striking.

We find that Herod is troubled, but Matthew tells us that everyone in Jerusalem was troubled with him. The star means the Messiah was born. That’s what it’s supposed to mean. And the prophet Micah says that Bethlehem will give birth to one who governs, one who will shepherd my people Israel, as the priests report to Herod.

But the people are upset about it. They’re troubled that this might potentially come to pass. You would think they’d be thrilled the Messiah is here. But they like things the way that they are when it gets down to it.

Even if they don’t say it, that’s what their actions reveal. Sure, Herod’s not a great king. He’s not particularly righteous. He likes to massacre people.

He’s kind of oppressive. But if you stick on the right side of Herod, you’re in good shape. But, But the Messiah, who knows what to expect, he’s going to rule with justice, the prophets say. And justice might be a little destabilizing.

And yet, even after the Magi bring Herod’s attention to the birth of the Christ, it is striking how lazy he is. Herod remains alongside the entire political and religious establishment. You would think if someone came to tell you, hey, I’ve traveled a thousand miles to go see this newborn king, that he might go see him himself. This is a major threat.

Herod acknowledges that it’s a major threat. He’s very worried about it, but he doesn’t even get up. Matthew’s Gospel indicates again that all of Jerusalem has been made aware of this star. This leaks out fast.

Everybody’s troubled. But apparently no one feels compelled to actually go check it out, except for the Magi. And I don’t know if you know your biblical geography very well, so I looked it up to make sure. So Herod’s scribes pull out the prophet’s writings.

They point to a map. They say, oh, this guy’s going to be born in Bethlehem. They know the precise coordinates of what God is doing. And yet they refuse to move.

They don’t go. Why? Well, I don’t think it’s only laziness. They’re falling into a trap that’s built into religion that threatens all of us. They have the perfect theology.

They have all the knowledge they need. They have the correct rituals. But they are much more interested in knowing about God than knowing God. About God, but not meeting him face to face.

They’re content to know about the Messiah, to be right about the Messiah, to know all the prophecies without ever actually taking the opportunity to meet the guy when he shows up. A map and a Bible are safe to hold. They don’t threaten you. A Messiah who’s alive might change your life a little bit.

And so they settle for the correct answer for the knowledge they have in Jerusalem. They stay safe in their heads and their books rather than risking their hearts by traveling to Bethlehem. And again, here’s that geographical piece. You might think, based on this information, that it would be a real trek for them to get to Bethlehem.

Maybe it’s really far. Maybe that’s why Herod doesn’t get on the road and go. No. Bethlehem is six miles away.

six miles they would have to travel. They could walk it in a day, but they stay home. The Magi, on the other hand, actually start walking. They follow the star, it reappears over Bethlehem, and they get going.

And the people that the Messiah has come to who have been awaiting his coming for generations are either just ambivalent or hostile. Their faith and theology are right. They understand it in their heads, but they are completely captive to their own inertia. It is these priests from a different religion, a pagan religion, from a country across the whole wide desert, who insist upon going to bow down before this kid.

What’s six more miles when you’ve already walked a thousand? And it’s important to understand again just how outrageous it is that the Magi are the ones going. These are Gentiles and not just any Gentiles. They practice astrology. They practice fortune-telling.

All this stuff is forbidden for Jews. And not only that, these are also exactly the tools that have brought them to the Messiah. They’re doing things they’re not supposed to do, and God still used it to pull them towards Jesus. And so it’s them who goes.

They set off from Jerusalem. They’re guided straight to Joseph and Mary’s house. And so these bold magi arrive at Jesus’ home, and they are there to do nothing but worship him and bring him gifts. God has picked up a pen to write a new chapter of salvation, and he starts up right where he left off.

At first, long ago, he was working with Israel. God brought Israel to the promised land, first through Abraham, a wanderer from over there by Persia. And then he led them out of the exodus in Egypt into Israel. And finally brings his people back from exile in Babylon, again, right by Persia.

And now it is foreigners who come from this foreign land where the people were once exiled who have come to meet God face to face in a way that those who should know better don’t want to do. For the first time in history, Jerusalem doesn’t get it, but Babylon gets it. Jerusalem, the faithful people of God don’t really know what God’s doing, but these Babylonian Gentiles know that there’s something that has to be sought out here. For centuries, the road to the east was a one-way road that you traveled when you were defeated.

This was the road of captives, of people who were displaced and exiled. You had to travel over to Babylon, to Persia, when you were being dragged away in chains from everything you loved. But now, that same road has taken on a completely new meaning. John the Baptist would proclaim in the years to come, using the promises of Isaiah, this road made clear in the desert.

And the flow of this traffic has reversed. And Babylon is no longer the destination of the prisoner, it’s the source of people who are pilgrims, who are seekers, who are looking for God. And these people who generations before burned Jerusalem to the ground are now the ones who come to worship the king. It’s this really scandalous reversal, this homecoming.

And I think it suggests that exile doesn’t end once Israel gets its borders back set up right, once they’re secure, once they have their own king. The exile is reversed only whenever the enemy finds their way home too. Right? And this star really points to a new thing unfolding. And it’s no coincidence that those who are far away saw it before the people up close.

God used the Magi’s wrong religion to lead them to the right king. And when the Magi finally arrive at this house in Bethlehem, they don’t just drop their presents and walk away. Matthew tells us they fall to their knees and honor Jesus. And this is the hinge of the whole story here, this worship.

These pagans who had spent months tracking stars, thousands of miles walking through the dust, they finally find the source of the light and they’re going to stand in it for a while. And notice too what happens next because they meet him and they change. After the Magi find Jesus, their plans are turned upside down. Their entire course of action is altered.

They were probably sincere about going back to Herod. They promised him they’d go back, they’d tell him what they found. But once they knelt before Jesus, something changed. Once you meet the king of kings, you lose the ability to take orders from a troubled tyrant king.

And so they refused to participate in Herod’s schemes. And his schemes are going to rapidly turn towards the massacre of all these innocent children that could threaten his kingship. They’re not going back. It is the Magi’s worship of the king that makes obedience to this false king impossible.

Okay. They’re only going to have one king. And this reminds us that epiphany, which just means seeing God, has a cost for us. If we meet God, if we encounter the word made flesh, we then just can’t go back and serve the empires, the tyrants, the kings.

the falsehoods of this world. You can’t follow the one who is going to rule and govern with justice and then stay on the good side of Herod. Think about those religious experts in Jerusalem, too. They had the knowledge.

They had the books. They had the religious credibility. And so they knew exactly where the incarnation of Jesus was going to happen. They had the map.

but the Magi are the ones that take the journey. We can be like that. We can know all the right words and information. We can study the Bible for decades and know it inside and out, quote it.

We can know all about Jesus and, We know right where God is supposed to be, but are we willing to go see him? Jerusalem stayed inside. They weren’t interested in taking a six-mile leisurely walk, but those from Babylon walked 1,006 miles. And so the question is given to us, where is salvation being birthed in our world right now? And that answer isn’t obvious. The Magi show us that we’re not going to find it if we’re not looking for it.

It can be shining in the sky, and we won’t know. But God hangs stars over our heads and pulls us if we want to go and if we are watching. Think about it, just the sky, right? Do you have any idea what’s going on in the night sky yesterday versus tomorrow? Do you have any idea, unless you see some Facebook post about a supermoon or a spot on the evening news about a lunar eclipse? You could have an eclipse every night this week and you wouldn’t know unless you were going out looking for it. We are not in the habit of openness, of anticipation, of observing.

On that morning in May at SRU, I saw that tiny little dot on the sun. It was nearly unnoticeable. It was invisible to anyone heading to work or school at that hour. but it changed my Wednesday.

It changed my life’s memories because I sought it out. I stepped up to the lens. Salvation happens like that. You gotta look for it.

You gotta step up to the lens on some random Wednesday. It’s not gonna be on some fancy, dramatic, holy day every time and see what God is doing. salvation is being birthed among us right now. God’s doing things right now.

In neighborhoods we overlook, in people we’d rather avoid, in the movements of grace that are easy to not see at all. And so if we stick around in the comfort of our little palaces, if we stay in the heart of Jerusalem, we’re never going to see the stars that call to us about what God is doing. And so the question is, Are you looking? God appears to those who are brave enough to slip out before sunrise, patient enough to wait for the light, and courageous enough then to let the light lead them home on a different path. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.