Ephesians 3:1-12 

There is a story by O. Henry entitled “The Gift of the Magi.”  A young couple is too poor to buy each other Christmas gifts.  The wife cuts off her cherished, long, beautiful hair to sell it to a wig maker for money to buy her husband a chain for his heirloom pocket watch.  Meanwhile, he has pawned his watch to buy her a set of combs for her long, beautiful hair.  That’s ironic.

The Bible is full of irony.  Biblical history is consistently ironic.  Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery.  Joseph becomes Secretary of Agriculture in Egypt, and they have to come begging to him for food to survive.  Joseph says to his brothers, “Even though you intended to do me harm, God intended it for good.” 

The basic story of the Bible is ironic: a group of powerless slaves become the spiritual leaders of western civilization.

The one whom his followers believe to be the Jewish messiah who would restore Israel to its position of world dominance and glory instead institutes a new spiritual movement in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile. 

The book of Ephesians calls it a mystery, the mystery that the Gentiles have become members of the same body of sharers in the promise of Jesus Christ.  This is “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.”

We might even say that to believe in God means believing that life and history are ironic.  When we are weak, we are strong.  When we think we are strong, we are often really weak.  To believe in God means to recognize that we are not in control of history.  We are not in control of much of our own lives.

The more we push to get someone to love us, the less likely it happens.  The more we focus on success rather than the mission to which we are called, the less likely we are to be successful.

Live a good, rich, meaningful life now, today, this very day, because we can’t control our future, none of us.

This is what humility means.  Humility isn’t putting ourselves down.  It is simply knowing that we are finally not in charge.  This is what prayer is – the acknowledgment that we are finally not in charge.

Faith is knowing that God is finally in charge, not us.  Faith is trusting the One who is really in charge.

In the remaining Sundays in worship, during the season of Epiphany, I want to address in six sermons hard questions in the faith that Christians and others struggle with in the twenty-first century.  The topics will range from how we approach the ambiguities of life and not knowing, what we can do with the Bible, other religions, what makes somebody Christian, the institutional church, and sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

Religion is the means we use to think about and act on the things in life we cannot know.  However, just because there are things about existence and life that we cannot know, it doesn’t mean those things are unimportant or don’t matter.  In fact, the realms about which we cannot have knowledge are some of the most important aspects of our lives.  Some of the ways we talk about these things are through stories, poems, memories from the past, speculations about the future, laws, reasoning and logic, hymns, rites, rituals, and silence.

I think some of our friends who are not active in church sometimes have mistaken impressions about what we believe and do as Christians.  They may think we are making claims that we may not be making.  They may think we believe things we may not believe the way they think we believe them.

Faith is how we live with the ambiguities of life.  There are questions we cannot answer absolutely.  Still, life compels us to think about them and talk about them and act on them.

Please invite a relative, friend, acquaintance, neighbor, co-worker – someone who would benefit from hearing these issues in Christianity addressed for the twenty-first century.  When you invite them, bring them to Worship with you.

They were magi, wise men from the east.  The history of the magi goes back six centuries before the birth of Christ.  They were a caste of priests in ancient Media, located in what today is northwestern Iran.  Some traditions say the modern Kurds are descendants of the magi.  They specialized in astrology and dream interpretation.

There are two kinds of magi: those who were scientific magi and others who were charlatans and magicians.  The magi in Matthew’s gospel were the scientific magi, astronomers.  So what are they doing in the story of Jesus’ birth?

They are there in the story, first and most importantly, because they are goyim, the Hebrew word that means “peoples of the nations of the world.”  In the first half of the Old Testament it is used to refer to all humanity, including the Israelites.  In the second half of the Old Testament it came to be used to mean the people of the nations other than Israel – to distinguish between the Israelites and everybody else.

The magi are in the nativity stories as a witness to the Christmas affirmation that Jesus was born for goyim in the fullest and original sense of that word, all the people of all the nations and cultures of the world.  In Jesus’ coming, the traditions, practices, stories, and teachings that divide humanity are transcended and overcome.

No more clean and unclean, no more ins and outs, no more special and ordinary.  All peoples are present at Jesus’ birth.

The birth announcement to the magi was the rising of a star.  They came looking for Jesus because they had “observed his star at its rising.”  They came to Christ by their own path.

Any path profoundly followed can lead to Christ.  Christ is present in the stars and rhythms of the universe.  Christ is present for all who would find him – even those who do not know his name.

The magi at Jesus’ birthplace are testimony to that movement of God that cannot be contained in neat and careful definitions found in church rule books or in official definitions of membership or in creeds.  Many paths lead to him.