Happy New Year to all of you! I’m well into my 19th year as your rector, and I want to thank you for that great privilege and honor. This is a wonderful parish, and that is because of all of you. I love you all!
There is something intangible yet very real that comes from a long pastorate. For instance, it’s a joyful thing to baptize an infant, and then to see that infant grow and mature and 12 or so years later to present him or her for confirmation; then to see that child continue to grow and eventually graduate from high school and to go on from there to college or some other vocation. It’s fun to officiate at the weddings of those young people I presented for confirmation.
You’ve gotten comfortable with me over the years. Yes, there are those who would like for me to be a little more progressive and those who would like for me to be a little more conservative, but it is what it is, and we have come to love each other in spite of our differences. A parish is a family of sorts, and a long pastorate facilitates that reality. It’s a comfortable situation. I feel fairly comfortable as your rector, and I sense the feeling is fairly mutual. You might say that I am in my “comfort zone” as your rector.
Last year, when I was involved in Western Louisiana’s search for a bishop, I was suddenly thrust out of my comfort zone. I was scrutinized by a whole host of people whom I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. There was not a level of trust that I had taken for granted back home. They had to get to know me quickly and I them. I had to look at the Church from a different perspective, and to answer lots of questions in a way that would reveal who I am and what I believed to people who had no prior context of how I relate to people who agree or disagree with me. It was challenging and it definitely took me out of my comfort zone!
I think, in retrospect, that that was a good thing for me to experience. It’s good to get out of one’s comfort zone. It causes a person to grow and I think I did grow through that process.
The magi are a good example of people who were willing to get out of their comfort zones. They were astrologers, who watched the stars and searched for meaning in the movements of the heavens. They noticed a new phenomenon in the heavens, an unusually bright star, and they surmised that that star signified the birth of a king. This king obviously wasn’t just an ordinary king of some distant kingdom, but a king who had significance for their own lives. They were not content simply knowing this was happening. They had to witness this new king. In fact, they had to worship him.
So they left their homes and set out for a long journey following that star wherever it would lead them. It brought them to the little kingdom of Israel. They went to the capital city, Jerusalem. They were important enough in their own right, and obviously men of means, to be granted an audience with the reigning King Herod. They inquired of this king where a King of the Jews would be born. Herod had his scribes search the scriptures, and they discovered there were prophecies that such a king would be born in Bethlehem. The magi went to Bethlehem and there they found the object of their search, the baby Jesus. St. Matthew tells us that they worshiped him, and offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh—the gold signifying his kingship, the frankincense his divinity and the myrrh the sacrifice he would make for the sins of all people for all time.
The Church has traditionally seen in this visit of the magi a revelation, or epiphany, at the very beginning of Jesus’ earthly life that Jesus was not to be just the Messiah of the Jews, but the Savior of the world. Only twelve verses in Matthew deal with the visit of the magi, so very little is known from scripture about them. We know they came from the East, that they brought three gifts, and that they were not Jewish; they were Gentiles. St. Paul, in his Letter to the Ephesians some 50 years later, would write that the Gentiles are “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” We know they met with Herod, found the Christ child in Bethlehem, worshipped him, gave their gifts, and departed by another way. That’s all we know from scripture.
Tradition has filled in some of the gaps. We don’t know from scripture how many of them there were, but because they brought three gifts, it eventually came to be believed that there was one magus per gift. Because their visit revealed that Jesus is the Savior of the world, the three magi came to be believed to be representative of all of humanity. Thus, one was thought to be old, one young, and one middle aged. One was black, one brown, and one white. Nothing in the Bible would tell us these things. They grew out of the understanding that the visit of the magi manifested the universal mission of Jesus.
These magi represent the search for ultimate meaning that exists in all of us, in every human being. They were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to find that meaning, giving every moment and a good deal of their wealth, to that pursuit. They were willing to leave the comfort of their homes and their own people, facing the hardships of travel and personal danger, to find the Lord of Life.
Is your and my religion that important to us? How much are we willing to sacrifice for our relationship with God in Christ? Are we willing to do what it takes to avail ourselves of the grace God wants so much to give us? Life in Christ is all about grace, God’s favor unmerited and undeserved, but it does call for a response from each one of us, and that response is to be all or nothing. Episcopalians tend to be rather nonchalant about their faith. After all, we don’t want to be accused of being fanatics. We like to keep things in proper perspective.
The magi call us to get out of our comfort zones, to do everything necessary to find Christ and worship him. In this New Year that would be the best resolution you and I could make, by the grace of God.