We’ve come through the holidays as we called it, or the holy days.  And we also could recognize again today Christmas if you would like.  Follow the Serbian calendar of the Serbian Orthodox Church and today is not Epiphany, which Nancy mentioned earlier, but Christmas.  How to measure twelve days from December 25^th to January 6^th, that’s how we come up with Epiphany.  The twelve days of Christmas actually started that way.  Well, whether you call it Epiphany or Christmas, it is a day to recognize as the first Sunday, the first weekend of worship for this year.   

Epiphany means the manifestation of a deity.  It can be in a very general sense; but the Christian faith has focused upon manifestation of the deity to a star where the magi came to visit and follow that star to get to that visit.  It’s an important role in that way.  Some churches recognize it more or less.  The first service the choir sang about the tiny baby being here, as that’s where we are still looking at ourselves.  Now the magi are the good guys but there is also, unfortunately, a devil that we need to bring in and it’s King Herod.  And that is mentioned in the Scripture also.  Only Matthew carries this account and Matthew, in a moment as we read it and hear it, will tell us again of a story of a star that was in the sky that they followed from the East, east of Israel and Jerusalem.  We need not know how far; we do not know the actual location.  In truth we don’t even know whether there were three only or more than three magi.  They weren’t kings like the song says but magi, wise men, wise men from the East who follow the star.  That’s where the “Walk to Jerusalem” piece that Nancy mentioned earlier is so timely because we will start our walk to Jerusalem from the west going to the east; but the magi beat us there. 

We are going to hear the second chapter of Matthew today.  Listen for some clues about how we have also taken the story and merged it with the Nativity.  The Nativity scene that we have out in the lobby, in fact, does the very same thing.  There are a couple of things:  One, it does not happen on the night of the birth.  Listen for that clue in this account of Matthew.  “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea during the time of King Herod, magi from the East came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where is the One who was born King of the Jews?  We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.’  When King Herod heard this, he was disturbed and all Jerusalem with him.  When he had called together all the people’s Chief Priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born.  ‘In Bethlehem, in Judea,’ they replied.  ‘For this is what the prophet has written, “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.”’  Then Herod called the magi secretly, found out from them the exact time the star had appeared.  He sent them to Bethlehem and said, ‘Go, make a careful church for the child.  As soon as you find him, report to me so that I too may go and worship him.’”  (That’s a lie.)  “After they had heard the King, they went on their way.  And the star they had seen in the East went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.  When they saw the star, they were overjoyed.  On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother, Mary; and they bowed down and worshipped him.  Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, and of incense, and of myrrh.  And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.” 

The reason we say three magi is because of three gifts.  But notice, also, that they visited in a house.  It was at least a few days after the birth.  As we got that corrected then, but let’s back up and start off with those magi—astronomers/astrologers, they kind of were the thing in those days.  And they had read the stars in the sky and seen something that they interpreted would be the birth of a king.  A king of the Jews, in fact, they understood, even though they themselves were not Jews.  And they followed that star at night for their entire journey.  Have you ever been out at night to watch the stars?  Have you ever gone out with a telescope to watch the planets and such?  Around here in Franklin, it’s not too bad; downtown Indianapolis you look up and you don’t see much even on a very clear night.  But out in remote Alaska or Manitoba or North Dakota, where Joyce and I have traveled, it’s a beautiful thing to see at night.  Although, let me warn you, if you go to Alaska in the summer time, be prepared to watch those stars at about 2:00 a.m. in the morning because they don’t have much darkness in the summertime.  But over in Uganda, when I was there in August and September, there’s a twelve-hour day bright and twelve-hour at night.  And it was easy, away from the city, very little electricity in those places, and the stars were fantastic.  The array is so beautiful when you can see it in the clarity of a clear night with no moon to compete with that light. 

If you’ve ever thought about it though, and if you walked out purposely to see the stars and could not see them at all, not because of clouds, not because of city lights or the moon, but they just weren’t there.  Wouldn’t that be unsettling?  It would be even more unsettling to expect the sun to come up at a certain time in the morning and not have it happen.  I came across a science fiction story and the planet somewhere else in our universe, a fictional place, but they had more than one sun.  There were about six different suns that rotated in different positions.  So they constantly, at one time or another, their day’s length, the rotation of the planet, there was never any darkness.  There was always a sun in the sky, sometimes two or three.  Except, about every 4,000 years the rotation situation of the sun and even those moons had them all set on the same day.  The people had never experienced darkness and they went insane literally.  They destroyed their civilization.  They burned their cities to have light.  It was a wild and a crazy time and they found out in their own history it had happened before.  But there was not a long enough period of time; no one had the history to remember it.   

That type of a deep fear is something that would shake us to our foundation.  In fact, in Job 9:7 it says, “He (Yahweh) speaks to the sun and it does not shine.  He seals off the light of the stars.”   If the magi could not have seen that star, they would have had no way to guide them, no place to go.  But they did see a star in their eyes that was in the sky.  And with the joy and the fear of traveling, yes there is a mix of both.  Joyce and I like to travel.  The joy and anticipation of putting together a plan and getting things together, the anticipation of new places, meeting people, the experiences, sights, and sounds, it is invigorating.  That’s why we travel.  I’ll tell you one brief story about going to Alaska.  You can see it on the map; you get a detailed map of the Kenai Peninsula.  It’s where most people travel.  There’s a main highway and then there is this spur that goes off.  And at the very end of that little spur, that road, there is a little town called Hope.  And that’s where the road ends.  So that’s where the phrase comes, “There’s nothing beyond hope.”  There really isn’t; it’s the end of the road.  But that’s where you, with adventure, get out there and find things like that.  That’s the joy of traveling.   

But then there is the fear of traveling.  The fear of traveling that comes with the unknown, the unknown that can be frightening, discouraging, disheartening.  It’s the unknown illness or the possibility of an accident.  No matter how much you try to prepare for that way, Francis Bacon said that one of the greatest fears of all mankind is the fear of death.  Children start off by being fearful of the dark.  And that translates into the fear of death.  And that fear is part of a journey because we aren’t talking about traveling just to Alaska or North Dakota.  We’re talking about life as a metaphor and as a journey.  Children have a lot of fears and a variety of ways.  I found a report that said in 1960, these were the lists of the fears that children had.  It’s almost my childhood.  Animals, being in a dark room, high places, strangers, and a lot of noises--those were the top five.  Now thirty years later they did a similar survey and these were the five fears of children in 1990.  Notice the difference—divorce, nuclear war, cancer, pollution, being mugged.  What a sad change that is.   

Fear is a reality of life though.  We call it phobia.  By the way, if you want to do some fun research, do that on a search engine and find, put in phobias, and see the index list that one person has put together.  Did you know that there is a fear called “ouranophobia” or “uranophobia”, that’s the fear of heaven?  I don’t know where that would come from?  But these two people should never get together in the same room.  There’s “peladophobia”.   Pardon my pronunciation.  If I pronounced it correctly it means a fear of baldness and bald people.  Sorry.  Then there is the other part of the group and that’s “chaetophobia”.  That’s a fear of hairy people.  And I suppose those two people together; somebody is going to be unhappy all of the time.  And then one that is most appropriate for this is “calyprophobia”, fear of obscure meaning.  That’s what you get when you look at the phobia list.   

What we do know about that tells us also that we can have awareness that we can sometimes be very quick in our response about how to deal with fears, particularly for children.  There’s a little boy who, his mother was asking him to go get some food out of their pantry.  Now this wasn’t just a closet in the kitchen.  It was an old house and the pantry was actually down in the basement in a corner where they didn’t have any electricity.  It was dark and kind of damp.  And his mother said, “Johnny, I want you to go down and get two cans of tomato soup.”  “Mom, I’m afraid of the dark.”  She said, “Oh, you don’t have to be afraid of the dark.  Jesus is with you always.  Jesus will be there in that dark pantry.  Don’t worry about it.”  “Okay.”  So he goes down, fearful still, and he gets to the edge of the pantry area and he doesn’t go any farther; but he says, “Jesus, if you are in there, bring out two cans of soup.”   

Children have their way of dealing with fear.  Adults have others.  We push it to the back; we look strong; we try to overcome it.  But the truth is, that we all have those fears that touch us.  It wasn’t a fear at the moment, but it was a relief when I was writing this on Monday, I felt like a couple of years ago when I was preparing with Joyce to go to British Columbia to do some hiking in the Canadian Rockies and I had sort of an indigestion problem.  I called the doctor and he says check it out.  Well, as it turned out, you may know the story, that through a series of tests they found a blockage, did a stent.  And the doctor said, “If you had of gone to Canada and had been climbing in the Rockies, most assuredly you would have had a massive heart attack in a remote area and probably would have died.”  Did I feel fearful of that at that point?  No, I had a stent in my heart and that had taken away that fear.  But the reality is something that we all live with.  We do not know what tomorrow will bring.  When I was writing this on Monday, I could not be 100% guaranteed that I would be the one giving the message for today.  Who knows whether you live that long or something else could happen, an accident or illness?  Who knows about tomorrow? 

When the magi’s struck out, they didn’t know.  They trusted; they had faith in something greater than themselves.  That’s what we are to be about as Christians and as this church of Grace United Methodist.  This is a new year—2008--there will be a lot of things that will happen in the next 360 some days.  Grace always steps out in faith.  We have plans in some way, but we have the unknown.  If you haven’t been down in Fellowship Hall, the unknown happened last week when a water sprinkler pipe burst and the surprise of a water puddle in the hallway back there. 

We can have these predictions, though.  Now I’m going to step out, not too far, on a limb.  These are the predictions I have for Grace United Methodist—that we will cover new territory this year that will have both surprises that will be joyful and fearful.  There will be triumph and disappointment.  I told you I wasn’t going too far out on a limb.  We’ll look back at the end of the year and we will measure this year by both the joy and the fears, the measurement of what we experience.  That’s how we calculate and measure the year.  There will be people maybe even here today that won’t be here a year from now.  Maybe they’ll move on to some other location and their journey of life will be in another town or church.  Or they may move on to the next life in that journey.  Who of us can tell for sure?  No one, not one of us.  But we move forward anyway because that’s what the magi did. They struck out to gain what they believed what God was calling them to do.  That’s based upon faith, faith and trust in God that God was going before them, that if a star, in their case in the sky, but also beginning to see a star in their eyes.  Not the romantic star that we think about but the star of Jesus, the Christ.  For them an infant born and they find in a house, but for us, not just the infant born, but the Christ, Jesus who forgave us, died upon the cross for us.  Even when we fall, we are lifted up so that we can get “back on the saddle” as you would say onto this journey of life to continue to walk toward Jerusalem. 

2008 will be a joyful, happy, fearful year and we need both.  We need the joy to build us in the anticipation and the hope and the trust of what is yet to be.  But we need a little fear mixed in otherwise we might think too much of ourselves.  We need the fear to pull us closer to Christ in this walk.   

The prophet Isaiah says in Chapter 6, Verses 1-2, “Arise and shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.  See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the people, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you.”  The prophet is trying to give us a word of encouragement that we are on a journey, individually and together.  We are on a journey as brothers and sisters in Christ and as a church, a journey following a star, a star in the sky that becomes the star in our eyes, a star that will guide us on our journey. 

In a moment, we will share together the consecration and giving of the alms of the bread and the drink for communion.  It’s an age-old tradition in the life of the church and it has some meaning that we will always repeat.  It’s based upon when Jesus said, “Each time you take and eat of this, do so in remembrance of me.”  Jesus said that, to remember what He did with His disciples then.  Also to offer, through confession, that we are forgiven of our sins and communion is the outward sign of that forgiveness.  An additional meaning for today is to let communion be a feel of guidance for our journey together, that indeed through communion, Jesus is offering to be with us truly in the meal itself, in the presence of these alms, in the offering of them, and the hope and the trust that as we journey together, that we will have truly the star of Jesus Christ in our eyes and in our hearts.   

Let’s join together for a word of prayer, “Simply put, gracious God, the outward signs of bread and drink, the outward signs of the word of the Scripture are intended to give us inner hope to deal with our fears, yes, to give us joy and hope and promise, yes, and above all to give us Jesus, the Christ, as Lord and Savior to be in our hearts and our minds on our journey of life.  In Christ name we pray, Amen.” 

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