From Generation to Generation: We Keep Seeking
Matthew 2:1-23
January 8, 2023
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: The Golden Pilgrimage by Carmelle Beaugelin
©A Sanctified Art LLC sanctifiedart.org
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/WkHcvI05gsA
It is a new year. The ball dropped in Times Square. The calendar has turned. We’re getting used to putting 2023 on the few physical checks that we write. And right on schedule, there’s yet another new Covid variant. It’s a new year and most of us are still seeking what we sought last year. Peace of heart and mind. A sense of meaning and purpose. Safety and maybe even happiness for ourselves and our loved ones. Justice in the world and shalom for all of creation.
It is a new year, but violence, brokenness, cruelty and prejudice are still status quo. Many of us have come to accept that. We don’t really expect any significant changes in that regard this year. Many of us are jaded or realistic, depending on how you frame it. But nevertheless, we would welcome change if it came. And some of us are still actively trying to be the change we wish to see. One way or another, most of us are still seeking
Fortunately for us, at the turning of the year, the church calendar offers the Feast of the Epiphany. The English word Epiphany comes from a Greek word which means appearing or revealing. What celebrate at Epiphany is the God who appears, the God who is revealed to the magi.
Epiphany does not mean “seeking”, but the story reminds us that sometimes God is found most particularly by those who seek.
The magi are the most obvious seekers in this story. They are the outsiders. They represent a different culture, a different language, a different religion, but they show up in Matthew’s gospel as some of the very first people to worship Jesus. As the Rev. Kathryn Matthews writes, “It's deeply moving to hear of these foreigners traveling a long, hard way because they had an inkling – just an inkling – of something very important unfolding in a distant land. Something inside them must have been restless, or upset, or hungry for understanding; despite the reputation of "the East" as the place of wisdom and learning, there was something they still needed to find.”[1]
The magi moved out of their comfort zone. Comfort zone used to be a buzz word, a way to challenge others or ourselves to take important risks. But it assumes a certain level of privilege. It takes for granted that we mostly get to live where we are comfortable and we can choose to move in and out of that place. When someone says to step out of the comfort zone, it’s a challenge we can accept or reject. The way this story is told, the magi apparently accepted it.
But often what moves us into uncomfortable zones is not something we choose. It might be an unexpected diagnosis, the loss of a job or vocation, fresh or long-term grief, retirement, an act of violence, chronic illness or the deterioration of a primary relationship. It is something that threatens us. Our choice may be to hunker down with what we’ve always done, what we’ve always known, or to seek a deeper understanding and risk changing everything.
The magi are seekers. But they are not the only ones.
Once he becomes aware of Jesus’ existence, King Herod also seeks him. Herod the Great was a fearful man. I mean both that he was afraid and that he created fear in others. He executed his favorite wife, his brother-in-law and two of his sons because he suspected they wanted his crown. He was so unpopular with his subjects that he thought they would celebrate when he died, so he left an order that on the day of his death, political prisoners throughout the land should be killed. That way, he thought he guaranteed that everyone would be in mourning. This order was not followed, by the way. [2]
Herod seeks the baby Jesus, not to worship him, but to kill him. Every Christmas, we hear Luke’s story about Jesus’ birth, but Matthew’s story is much more stark. In Matthew’s version, no shepherds come to wonder at this baby, and no heavenly choir sings. “It is set in the turbulence and terror of a violent history. Tyrants kill children and families flee in the middle of the night.”[3]
The magi seek with courage and openness and respond with worship and wonder. Herod seeks with fear and rage and attempts to control and destroy that which he finds threatening.
Mary and Joseph are also seekers. They move into the uncomfortable zone by circumstances they did not choose. They seek safety in the place where their ancestors had been enslaved. Perhaps that is evidence that things do change. The foreign, former enemy country is now safer than their homeland. And even after Herod dies, even when it seems safe to return home, they learn that Herod’s son is ruling in Judea, so they re-route again, this time to Nazareth in Galilee.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the family fleeing Bethlehem in a hurry. The baby is crying, Mary is exhausted. Joseph’s heart beats faster every time he sees a soldier. After a complicated, difficult journey, they find some kind of refuge in Egypt which lasts for a while. But as happens to migrants today, they want to go home or the host country decides they are no longer welcome and then they move and move again, always looking for safety and peace, just a clear space in which to live.
What we see here is a God entering human life with those who suffer and are afraid, with those whose lives and very existence are shaped by people with power who have little concern for the consequences of their actions. This is the deep grief, heartbreak and terror into which Jesus was born and still arrives.
This world in which, Jesus was born, is the one in which we are still seeking. We read this story as seekers ourselves, looking for peace of heart and mind. A sense of meaning and purpose. Safety and maybe even happiness for ourselves and our loved ones. Justice in the world and shalom for all of creation.
How do we seek? With openness and courage, wonder and hope? Or with fear and attempts to control, grasping the little power we think have?
We often say that we seek to find where God is at work in the world so that we can join that work. Sometimes I find it hard to do that. It is hard to see an overarching purpose or the universe bending toward justice in the mist of my to-do lists and deadlines. But I wonder – what if we put this another way? What if, instead of asking where is God at work, we might say “where is beauty?” I wonder if we might ask that in a way that leads us to practice looking for beauty regularly.
Sure I mean we might practice attending to the beauty in sunrise or sunset or snow falling. But also, to see the beauty of a child or adult learning to read or a teenager finding their voice or a hungry person being fed or the beauty of an ordered home or a tidy desk (I’m told that’s a thing for some people.)
I wonder if we could press this further, once we have some practice, maybe we might compare our task lists, our routines to see if our daily and weekly priorities align with giving attention to that which is beautiful? And if they don’t, perhaps we will choose to re-align them.
At the end of their seeking, the magi respond to Jesus with wonder and awe. I’m hoping to revive a sense of that for myself this year. I’m helped by the writing of Cole Arthur Riley. Let me share with you some of her thoughts from a chapter on Wonder in her book, This Here Flesh.
She writes, “I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually. I sit in the clearing . . .listening to the song of the barn swallows mix with the sound of cars speeding by. I watch the milk current through me tea and the little leaves dance free from their pouch. I linger in my mirror and don’t look away. . . . Awe is not a lens through which to see the world, but our sole path to seeing. Any other lens is not a lens but a veil. And I’ve come to believe that our beholding – seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment – is no small form of salvation.[4]
She goes on, “When I speak of wonder, I mean the practice of beholding the beautiful. Beholding the majestic – the snow-capped Himalayas, the sun setting on the seas – but also the perfectly mundane – that soap bubble reflecting your kitchen, the oxidized underbelly of that stainless steel pain. More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the common place. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop.”
Near the end of the chapter, she includes a few more sentences which I’m going to be mulling over and working on for a while. She writes, “To be a human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection and its creation It is a challenge to believe that this right is ours.”[5]
To be made in God’s image, she says, is to attend to beauty, to protect it and create it.
In the year that lies ahead of us, may we seek the good – love and justice, peace, and safety for ourselves and all of creation. May we seek with openness and courage, even that which might irrevocably change us. And in our seeking, may we attend to beauty and practice wonder. Thanks be to God.
[1] http://www.ucc.org/weekly_seeds_consumed_by_the_fire_of_a_star
[2] R. Alan Culpepper, in Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 1, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 167
[3] R. Alan Culpepper, Feasting on the Word, p. 169
[4] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, (New York: Convergent Books, 2022), p 31
[5]Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 40