"Reading the Signs"
Sermon Transcript for January 2, 2005
Scripture Reading: Matthew 2:1-2
By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
Today’s sermon message is about “Reading the Signs”. Now I have to confess to you that we picked this topic a few weeks ago—this title anyway—and so we had no idea as we chose that topic what news events would be effecting us as this time to deliver the message was upon us. We had no idea of this enormous tragedy that has taken tens of thousands of lives. And like most people this week, I watched the news in utter disbelief. I tried to grasp the enormity of this thing that happened in another part of the world. And I have to admit, I asked the Lord the same sort of questions I know a lot of you were probably asking. Why? When will this sort of thing happen to us? Why do we seem to escape so much? And, Lord, are these signs of the times?
You know, as a student of the Bible at a time like this I can’t help but remember the words of Jesus when He told us there would be days like this. In the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 13, Jesus is sitting on the Mount of Olives with a couple of the Apostles. They are looking over at the Temple there across the Kidron Valley and the Apostles say, “Tell us, Jesus, when these things will happen and what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?” He’d been telling them about the end times. And Jesus said to them, “Watch out that no one deceives you. Many will come in my name claiming I am He and will deceive many. And when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen. But the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation; kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places and famines. But these are just the beginnings of the birth pains. You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to local counsels and flogged at the synagogues. And on account of me, you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to that.”
Now these words of Jesus are recorded in two other gospels so they are meant for us to take them seriously. And I think we should. But, I don’t think that we should obsess over such things, as some tend to do. So remember Jesus’ words. What he says, “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes and famine, don’t be alarmed. These things will happen.” In my lifetime, I have observed that there is something that I’ve tended to call the “Lore of Armageddon”. There is this fascination that people have with fear of the unknown and in particular this fear of this great cataclysmic event that affects us all that none of us can do anything about and don’t know when it’s going to happen. But we seem to obsess over it just the same. I don’t know about you, but I noticed this week that on TV there were countless programs on the educational channels, my particular favorite, about the end of the world. And you know, it didn’t happen again!
It’s interesting how fascinated we are with things we can’t control. I think it is because we humans are accustomed to being in control of things. However, things routinely occur that remind us that we are not in control or can we ever hope to be--at least for a little while. But then we get full of ourselves and we think we are in control again. Now I personally don’t believe that God brings catastrophes to show us up or to straighten us out. I don’t think God causes these things to happen. I think that God has responded to His gift to us of a free will by allowing us, for better or worse, to be in control of anything we want to try to be in control of. The consequence is if we give no control over to God, then we have to accept what comes. Things happen; bad things happen in a world where people are in control! Bad things would still happen if we put God entirely in control because there was a fault line under the sea that moved. Things like that happen. The problem is that when something as big as a tsunami wave comes and we realize we can’t control it, we immediately blame God. We always lay the blame on God when things happen that we can’t control. And the truth of the matter is, if we would do just the opposite and allow God to control as many things in our lives as He would like to, we would probably be far better equipped to deal with the things that happen that are way beyond our control.
If you accept this way of Kingdom thinking, it’s going to be hard. But this is the Kingdom of God that Jesus spoke of. And it’s more about our mindset, especially at times like these, than anything. If we are going to think like “Kingdom of God” people, then catastrophes will come and what we witness about God won’t be the catastrophe but the response. The response will say more about the people of God and the Kingdom of God than the tragedy. For example, in this present crisis we see that our hands can become the hands of God, our feet the feet of God, our words, the word of God. This is a time when we need to urge the church to be the church! And to remember that when Jesus told us to love our neighbor, He was thinking of a really big neighborhood that includes our beloved on the other side of the world. And I want to tell you friends that the church is being the church because I stopped reading the news past the headlines. I’ve been reading. And I don’t want to sound like an advocate for the Internet, but I have to say that when you have access to that much and that great a variety of information, it’s a lot easier to get truth. So I urge you to read your news or get your news in a variety of ways because you would be astonished by the things you see. Church-related staffers and doctors and nurses and truck drivers and mechanics and engineers and carpenters, they are on their way right now to the Pacific Rim even as we speak to lend a hand. In other words, the church is responding to the tsunami wave with the faith of those who live and believe. So that when people are tempted to say, “Where is God in this enormous tragedy?” they will see God coming like a tidal wave of love in the form of Christians, people of God from around the world. God wasn’t in the devastating destruction; God is in the response.
And we need to be reminded this morning that there are smaller disasters happening even in our own community. They may be a smaller scale compared to this enormous tragedy on the other side of the world, but there are people around us who are being swept out to sea. Their lives are out of control. They’ve been hit by tidal waves of depression or sickness, of unemployment and poverty. They’ve been hit and hurt even by people of God who have said the wrong things at the wrong time. And what they need now is a reverse current, a tidal wave of love and compassion. And it’s the very heart and soul of the church, who is Jesus. They are looking right now for you to help them in His name. They are looking for love.
Now we read the passage about the Magi so I want to close by looking at this story of the Magi again and considering what it might say to us about how people of God read the signs. The picture that I’ve had on the screen a few times was the only one that I was satisfied with. It was the picture of a fresco that showed the Magi coming to Jesus. And it showed them coming to a house (thank you Madelyn) and it’s a little hard to see but I wanted you to see this picture because we’ve always assumed that there was just three because there are three gifts. But the truth is we don’t know how many Magi there were. There may have been forty. And we know that because of the passage that we read they came to the house. And so we know that Jesus may have been as much as two years old by the time they come. By the time they had come to Him, Mary and Joseph had set up a house there in Bethlehem and were planning to stay for a while.
Now how did the Magi respond to the signs that they saw? Well, they saw a star. But the truth is that they saw it long before it came into the sky because they had studied scripture. The Magi are considered, thought to be at least, possibly Jews who had stayed in Babylon. They’d been exiled with the others during the Babylonian exile but stayed there. And so they were familiar with the Old Testament scriptures and watching for the signs. They may have been eastern astrologers who collected all sorts of information from around the world and studied it and responded to the Old Testament scriptures that they’d had in their collection. Or they just might have been people inspired by God and drawn to seek Him. We don’t really know. But the truth is that we’ve seen these guys not only answering the call of the star, but they answered the call to look for the star. So that reading the signs is a lifetime endeavor. It’s not something that you do when they are blatantly in your face. So you might misinterpret them. And I daresay there will be some of that going on in these weeks ahead. Some will say that this terrible tragedy, this tidal wave is a sign. And maybe it is. But I would trust more the scholar, the theologian, the teacher who had studied scripture for a long time and had known intimately the word of God so that as they saw signs they knew whether it was time to pack up and follow the star. As this is what these wise men did. Perhaps that’s why they called them wise. They had the wisdom to know when to go and when not to. Then when the star did come into the heavens, well some scholars say it may have been an alignment of planets; it may have been a comet. I tend to think that if God can create the heavens and the earth, God can put a star wherever God wants to.
But whatever the case, when the sign was the one they were looking for, they loaded their camels, they loaded their elephants and whatever sort of animals they used, and they started on this journey. And we can assume the journey took them at least two years. We don’t know for sure. They came to this house where Jesus was. This was long after the time at the stable cave, long after the manger. And so perhaps they got word the baby had already been born. But it didn’t stop them; they kept going on their journey. We need to recognize that their journey included a lot of things. It wasn’t as though they just followed that star. There were a lot of affairs to take care of. No doubt they were writing messages and sending them with their brothers back and forth to their homelands. They were taking care of the staff and all of the animals and the people of this entourage that they were with on this journey. They had a lot of business to take care of. On a two-year journey, I’m sure they had to find food on a regular basis for themselves, their animals. They had to repair tents; they had to do all the sorts of things that go with day to day living. Even if it’s living on the road, their journey included a lot of things.
So the Magi were responding to the signs through their journey as much as they were upon their arrival. Now if they found Jesus, the King that they had anticipated, they must have been surprised. Do you ever wonder why they went to Harod first? They arrived in the vicinity of the place where the star was. And you know Jerusalem and Bethlehem aren’t that far apart. They went to the palace to inquire about this newborn king. Logically they went to the palace because that is what they expected. That’s where they thought they would find a newborn king. And what they found was a suspicious character who seemed to be interested in this newborn king. You might ask why do we think that Jesus was as much as two years old? Because Scripture tells us that after encountering the wise men, Harod ordered the deaths of children two-years old and younger in Bethlehem. And God must have spoken to them because they were told in a dream not to go back to Harod. But they did find this baby Jesus and even though He wasn’t what they were expecting—and granted, these were scholars who really knew the sign, they knew the Scriptures—but what they expected still wasn’t quite what they saw. Nevertheless, we are told that they bowed down and worshiped Him. They gave their gifts to Him. And I’m not sure what those gifts meant to Mary and Joseph. The song we sang at the start of the service told us some beautiful things about the meanings of those gifts, but most scholars, and I would tend to agree with them, believe that when Mary and Joseph were urged to leave Israel and go to Egypt as you heard in the song that was just sung, that it was probably these expensive gifts that paid their way. And once again, who knows that the kings or the wise men thought they were doing. But God used what they did exactly as God knew it needed to be.
So here are the lessons that I would like for us to learn from the Magi especially at a time like this:
The Magi were patient: The Magi patiently watched the signs.
The Magi stayed on their journey: Understanding that their journey was all about their day-to-day living as much as it was about their destination.
The Magi were prepared: When the sign was fulfilled in their midst, they worshipped and they offered gifts. They accepted readily what they had encountered. They were prepared. They were prepared with gifts. They were prepared with the Spirit willing to accept God’s will above and beyond their human logic.
So they worshipped who they found and allowed their gifts to serve God’s purposes in whatever form Mary and Joseph saw fit. Here is what we’ve learned from the Magi. This is how I hope we will live our lives together in this year to come--that we will be like them; that we will patiently watch the signs because we do believe that Jesus is coming again. And we do take Him at his word when He says that there are going to be some tribulations along the way. But let us be patient and stay on our course and continue to do every day what God has called us to do. And then let us be prepared for whatever God brings our way. And in faith respond in confidence that God will use what we bring in the best way possible. God has called us like the wise men of old to be exactly who we are, exactly the way we are, as a part of the body of Christ. And, therefore, we just have to say, “God, I’m ready. Here I am. I’m ready. Just say the word and I will do whatever you have asked me to do.” Because the church is still the church, God is still God. Amen.
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