Happy New Year! This week in worship, we wrap up the Christmas season with the celebration of Epiphany, looking at the story in Matthew 2:1-12 of Magi from the East coming to worship the baby Jesus. These foreigners symbolize the good news that God’s grace and love are for all people, not just a group of insiders. As Paul declares in Ephesians 3, God has made us all members of the same body and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.
Today’s Scripture readings are Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; and Matthew 2:1-12. The hymn of the day referenced at the end of the sermon is Rise, Shine, You People! by Ronald A. Klug. Finally, although it’s a different sermon, my 2019 Epiphany message covered a lot of these similar themes.
Here’s the livestream from Living Hope and the sermon podcast audio from Christ the King.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Merry Christmas! And yes, it is still Christmas – today is the 12th and final day of the Christmas season, so if you still have your tree up, you can take it down during the Packer game today.
As we wrap up the Christmas season, today’s Scripture readings invite us to take a step back and look at what all this means. Why do we spend so much time thousands of years later celebrating the birth of a baby in Bethlehem?
Well, obviously, we care because this child is more than just a baby. This baby Jesus is Immanuel, God who has come to be with us. Jesus comes to reveal God’s character to us. In our Christmas worship, we heard John’s gospel describe God’s light entering the world, the word made flesh, the light shining in the darkness. That’s the Christmas story.
But let’s zoom out: In the beginning, God created the world, then the world rebelled and turned away from God. You’ve heard these stories. Then the rest of the story of Scripture is God reaching out to the world, to us, in love. God looks at the brokenness of the world; God looks at all the suffering that comes when we humans refuse to live God’s way, when we insist on going our own way, and God decides to get involved.
And the way God intervenes is by selecting a family. If you read the first part of the Bible, it’s the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this family lineage that eventually grows into the Hebrew people and then into a nation, and God is involved in their story. They’re God’s chosen people. When they are enslaved in Egypt, God rescues them. When they wander in the wilderness, God leads them. When they rebel, God sends prophets to call them back.
And God has a purpose in choosing them. They’re set apart to be an example to the nations, a light for the world to see. God establishes a covenant where they will be God’s people and God will be their God. As God had told Abraham, “I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:2-3)
Sometimes, they fulfill that purpose, but even God’s chosen people are still human, so there’s a constant temptation to forget the purpose of God’s blessing and to turn inward, to worry about themselves instead of their neighbors. Instead of being an example of God’s goodness and love for the world, God’s people sometimes turn away from God and follow the ways of the world instead. We’d do the same thing in their place, right? They keep rebelling, but again, God never gives up, and eventually, God intervenes another way: God comes in person.
Out of that line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the family of David, Jesus is born to be God with us. But not just God with us, God with the world. Because God’s love is not just for one particular family, or nation, or race. God’s love is for the world. Christmas makes a difference for everyone, for all of creation.
In the first reading from Isaiah, when darkness covers the earth, the light of God appears. And first it’s one nation, God’s people Israel, but then Isaiah says, “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” (Isaiah 60:3) The vision Isaiah offers is of the wealth of the nations being submitted to God. Camels from foreign nations, from Midian and Ephah and Sheba. “They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.” (Isaiah 60:7)
The foreigners are invited to praise God too, because God’s light is not just for one in-group. And of course, as Matthew tells us, the wise men from the east, the Magi, are examples of this. God promised that one day the foreign nations would worship? Well, here they are. And they’ve got exactly the gifts promised, gold and frankincense, gifts of homage and tribute for a king. Myrrh has its own symbolism as a burial spice, an embalming oil, foreshadowing the death this king will offer for the world.
What God is doing at Christmas, what God is doing in Jesus, is for the whole world, for all people. Listen to the plea in the Psalm, a prayer answered in Jesus: “May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice…may he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor…may all kings fall down before him, all nations give him service.” (Psalm 72:1-4, 11)
The love of God revealed in Jesus Christ is not for any particular group of people. The reign of God with Jesus as king offers justice, deliverance, righteousness not just for a lucky few, but for everyone.
Paul writes on a similar theme in Ephesians to a church wrestling with who exactly is included in God’s love. Is there a benefit to being Jewish, to being descended from that first family God had chosen? That was a big issue for the early church. Jesus himself was Jewish. So were all his original disciples, but throughout the early church—and you can read about this in the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters—the circle keeps getting wider and wider. Every time a boundary is set, the Spirit leads God’s people to cross it.
The term for people who are not Jewish—people who were outsiders to God’s covenant—is “Gentiles.” Listen to what Paul writes: “In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” (Ephesians 3:5-6)
Paul’s known as the apostle to the Gentiles, because he keeps insisting on sharing God’s love with them, keeps insisting that they’re included in God’s promise too. And I say “Them” but I should say “us” because very few if any of us in this room are of Jewish descent. You and I are part of that expanded circle, grafted into God’s promise. It seems obvious to us that we are included, but it was a big step for some of Jesus’ early followers.
The apostle Peter had been one of the skeptics, one of the people leaning towards firm boundaries and having new converts become Jewish first, before being accepted into the church, but after God gives him a vision in Acts 10, listen to what Peter says: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all” (Acts 10:34-36) and as Peter’s talking, the Holy Spirit comes upon all who are listening, and verse 45 says, “The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles.”
So in this Epiphany story of wise men from the East visiting Jesus, there’s a whole lot going on. The gifts have symbolic meaning, there’s Herod’s whole story about how people with power react when threatened, there’s various prophecies being fulfilled, there’s a lesson about the kind of faith it takes to follow a star just for an opportunity to worship, and I’m sure there’s more we could explore.
But when we look at the divisions in the world around us, at the hate and the fear and the suspicion of people who look different or vote different or just don’t seem like us, we need this message of God’s love expanding. We need to hear that about foreigners being included, Gentiles coming to worship. And I say God’s love expanding, but really it’s human understanding of God’s love that is growing.
We need to hear that we are among those welcomed into God’s story, and we need the reminder that we’re not the last ones included either, because we face that temptation too.
We believe and proclaim that God’s love is for everyone, but looking around this room, I don’t see the whole diversity of God’s family reflected. And I don’t just mean in race or skin color, although that’s certainly part of it. A lot of us are from similar backgrounds, similar sexual orientations, similar musical tastes, similar income levels and even jobs.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the full picture of God’s kingdom. I’m not saying we should feel guilty for who we are, or try to recruit people as tokens of diversity so we feel better. But we should look at the boundaries we unintentionally put up. We should recognize and repent when we act as if we’re the center of God’s kingdom, or as if the body of Christ should mostly look like us.
Jesus himself throughout his ministry includes the outsiders, the least of these, the Samaritans and tax collectors. He gets in trouble for eating with the wrong people, the prostitutes and sinners. Jesus even shows up in communities like this, among us!
God’s light has entered the world, and the light is for all people. As we’ll sing in just a moment, “Christ the Lord has entered our human story.” So “Tell how the Spirit calls from ev’ry nation God’s new creation.”
Amen