First Baptist Church on Littleton Common    

A Subversive Star

Matthew 2:1-12

I thought I saw a pink flamingo inside the manger scene, standing right there with the sheep.

I could have sworn I saw Wally the Green Monster there as well, standing right next to one of the shepherds.  

I thought I saw SpiderMan crawling around, clinging to the roof of the manger.

I could have sworn I saw Mr. Potato Head inside the manger, standing in the dirt, next to Joseph.

An outrageous idea?  A silly suggestion?  Yes it is outrageous to include cartoon characters or toys inside our nice and orderly nativity scenes. We certainly don’t want misfits where they don’t belong.   Gazing on our crèches, as well as watching our pageants have become routine and comforting.  It is a story that we know by heart and love to hear.  But the reality of the nativity story and the life of Christ is that it contains some pretty radical stuff, including an unexpected cast of characters, the outcasts and marginalized in society, whom proper religious folk might never have given a second glance or thought.    The characters in this story could have been plunked from the Island of Misfit toys; a baby, a teenage girl, shepherds, sheep, cattle, angels and now magi from the east.   Outrageous! 

Today we read and contemplate the Epiphany story, the appearance or manifestation of the magi from the East.  The magi were priests or learned men, or maybe astrologers who studied the skies and interpreted dreams, which made them pretty shady characters in the eyes of people of Israel.  They also were Gentiles, but they become the heroes this faith story.  This is a pretty subversive story.   Debra Blue makes this wild suggestion “I’ve been thinking maybe someone should start a small group of guerilla activists whose task it would be to plant shocking figures in manger scenes. They could work both inside private homes as well as in the most visible places. Suburban housewives will shriek to find Batman figures on the roof of the manger on their mantle. Churches will be horrified to find Barbies and plastic dinosaurs on their altars. But people will pay attention. They will look twice. They may even stop their car. They (may)even get out when they see a garden troll or a pink flamingo or a big plastic Homer Simpson leaning over the baby Jesus on the Cathedral lawn. I actually wonder if I’m not the first to come up with that idea. It might have been some guerilla group that first placed the wise men in the manger scenes.” [1]

Matthew was part of that first outrageous guerilla group and he was sending a radical, rebellious inclusive message to those who were trying to restrict the faith from any outsiders.   Jesus Christ modeled for us an outrageous, subversive and radical faith that welcomed prostitutes, lepers, tax collectors, women, people with physical disabilities & emotional illnesses, and Samaritans.   In other words he welcomed those whom other people categorized as the least, the lost, and the outcasts of society.  Throughout the centuries, we Christians have tried to make the faith orderly, proper and respectable, with all kinds of creeds, rules and bylaws, but Jesus was living and loving in a radical and unpredictable way.   We see another manifestation of that love in the Epiphany story. 

This story is found only in the Gospel of Matthew.   The birth stories of Jesus are only found in the first two chapters of Luke and the first two chapters of Matthew.  Matthew is the only one that contains the story of the magi, their journey and their visit to Jesus.

About two years after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, when Herod the Great was ruling over Judea, which has been recorded by historians such as Josephus, a group of traveling priests or astrologers from Persia, now known as Iran, arrived in Jerusalem.  Herod was a powerful and fanatical king.   He was a paranoid, fearful and jealous of anyone being more popular or more powerful than he, and throughout his reign he had numerous people killed:  his wife, her grandfather, her brother and her mother.  He had ten wives and had some of his own sons killed, and he was known to cut off the ears of a priest, making him unfit to continue working in the temple.   It is no wonder that the arrival of the travelers from the East, who were inquiring about a new born Messiah or King, would throw Herod into his suspicious and mad state.  Their inquiries would have been very threatening to him and it would have pushed the leaders and people there, right to the edge of fear and anxiety, because they never knew for sure what Herod might do next.  This was not a good sign. 

The magi were stargazers, astrologers and dream interpreters.  This was a common interest in those days and they would keep detailed records of their research and charting of the skies.  This group of magi apparently saw a star that really got their attention.  Something about it, maybe it was brighter or bigger, grabbed their attention and they decided to travel westward to follow it in a search for understanding.   The star was pretty revealing, as it lead them to places and people who would help bring clarity to their searching.  They did not understand what it meant and somewhere they heard or decided that it heralded the arrival of a new King.  So being either very daring, or stupid or naïve, they entered Jerusalem and asked the current, crazed King, about the birth of a new and future King.   Herod, being the suspicious man that we was,  goes to the chief priests and elders of the law and asks him about this Messiah.  They tell him about Bethlehem and show him Micah 5:2, which Matthew alters a little in his story; 

“But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

For out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.” [2]

Herod, really paranoid now, calls the magi aside, and gathers more specific details about the timeline of this birth and tells them to “let him know what they find out so -  that he too can come and worship him.” 

Somehow, keeping their eye to the sky, they followed the brilliant, compelling star with the help of God, right to place where the child, not a baby was, and they are overjoyed.  They come to the house, not an inn or a barn, and they see the child with his mother and they bow down and worship him.  They present to him three gifts; gold, incense and myrrh, which is where we get the idea of there being three men.  Nowhere in the text, does it say how many magi there were, only that there were three gifts.     And then they are warned in a dream, not to go home by the same route and they return by another way.  

  The next ten verses in Matthew tell the rest of the story.  It is an unpleasant story.   We don’t include it very often in our storytelling, because it is so violent and reveals the abuse of power.  King Herod is angry that the magi have outwitted, outlasted and outplayed him.   Because of their earlier conversations about the timeline of Jesus’ birth, Herod determines that the child would be around the age of two, and has all the boys 2 years of age and under killed in that region, hoping he will eliminate the future King.   This particular slaughter is not recorded anywhere else in history; however it seems likely that Herod would have ordered this action. Because Joseph had also been warned in a dream, he and his family escape to Egypt.  Matthew then quotes another Hebrew prophet:

“What was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:  "A voice is heard in Ramah,
 weeping and great mourning,   Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more." [3]

Power is threatened by radical love.   The clash of power versus compassion for the marginalized - will continue throughout the life of Jesus.  A brilliant star illuminates the darkness, and it uncovers and reveals the dangers and abuses of power.  It is a subversive star whose name is Jesus Christ, and his life should bring clarity to all of us willing to live and love unconditionally.

We are called to love as Jesus loved and to love all of those who live “outside the gate” of society.   Hebrews 13 gives us an image of what might have been a town dump  - a place where the bodies of the sacrificed animals would have been dumped with other kinds of garbage.   It is also the place where criminals were crucified.  Hebrews 13: 12-13 says “Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.  Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp and bear the abuse that he endured.”  

Orlando Costas said; “Jesus died outside the gate, and in so doing changed the place of salvation and clarified the meaning of mission.  Salvation is not at ticket to a privileged spot in God’s universe, but rather freedom for service”. [4]  

Jesus changed the place of salvation, which used to be inside the temple and he brought it outside the gate.  I thought I saw Jesus outside the gate.  

I thought I saw Jesus washing the feet of a homeless man, sitting on the streets of Boston.

I thought I saw Jesus holding the hand of a mother whose child lay dying of a shot gun wound.

I know I saw Jesus inside a burned out church in Kenya and I am sure I saw him inside a Kenyan refugee camp.  I saw him there, with the orphaned and starving children, sitting on his lap. 

May we all remember not to be like the disciples, who in that moment wanted the homeless, the refugees, the children to get off of Jesus’ lap and out of his hands.  They wanted Jesus cleaned and straightened up and wanted the dirt and the blood, the sweat and the tears wiped off his robes.  Jesus had a response when He said: "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”  [5]

May we be a people who are willing to shine the compassionate love of Jesus Christ everywhere we go and to whomever we meet, because there are many who mourn and who sit outside the gate.  May 2008 be anything but business as usual.  

Amen.

Rev. Deborah J. Blanchard