Recognizing and Representing Magi

Text: Matthew 2:1-12

It felt like a long holiday season this year, eh? Some took the week before Christmas off, and many the first week of the New Year. Commuter gridlock has been eased on the roads for nearly 3 weeks, and many offices and business ran at a softer pace. Media first-stringers took holiday, and their back-ups gave the impression that there was less news, and wrote it badly: on CBC radio, 3 stories in a row repeated the same phrases:


Eyewitnesses say…. … authorities are investigating.

As I recall all the Epiphany sermons I’ve offered over the years, I fear I’ve often sounded like a third-string news presenter. We hear the too-familiar tale of Magi. Sometimes we dwell on the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Other years we speculate on their origins in Persia, Babylon, Arabia, India, or China. Perhaps we wonder at the astrology and astronomy of the star, or Herod’s political tyranny.

So I asked: how will we re-cognize and re-present the story of the Magi this year? How will our cognitive abilities construe the characters this time? How will we find context, meaning and purpose in the story? Will it seem to be a ‘slow news day’ just because we are lazy in hearing and in presenting the gospel again? You can blame the preacher – but we do all share the responsibility of what we make of the word we are given.

A century ago, we were imperial in our Protestant movement. We had launched the ‘Twentieth Century Fund’ to ‘win the world to Christ in this century’ through great new missionary organizations. We knew how to preach the Magi: those kings of the Orient would come to Jesus and submit, offering their material and spiritual gifts to our cause.

Half a century ago, we liberal Protestants were cautious, in a climate of secularization, to win the approval of the new elites of the enlightened social welfare state. We would ‘live love’, and ‘anonymous gospel’, ‘the mystery of the rock’, the ‘courage to be’. Our Magi were the scientists, the experts, who through reason could validate our Jesus.

Today, how will we re-cognize and re-present the Magi – and pay homage to Jesus? There is a new ‘turn to religion’ in philosophy and politics, but we are in a pluralistic world with other religions, cultures and ideology. What will we make of the story, construe it again, and bear witness to it with our children and with our neighbours?

I do not think that 3 wise guys showed up in Bethlehem in fact. I read the story, and see that the magi are not necessarily 3, not necessarily wise, not necessarily men. I learn that their names of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar were invented 500 years after Jesus as Babylonian, Persian and Arabian scholars, according to Alexandrian priests. There is no surveillance video of the manger, and investigative journalists can prove nothing.

However, I know that the story is true and meaningful. Even as I am mocking our imperialism of a century ago, and deriding our attempts to be rational 50 years ago, ruefully I anticipate how posterity will judge us. And yet, the power and influence of this mythic story has always reached beyond parochial contemporary limits. People in every age find something in it about the wider significance of a baby Jesus. Thank God.

Before he became Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger engaged in a forum with Jurgen Habermas on “The Dialectics of Secularization”. As Germans looking back a century and a half century, the prelate and the political philosopher acknowledged the work that they have to do in recognition and representation, to maintain discourse and civil society lest we pay the price again of losing common norms, for lack of common sources.

Ratzinger appealed in that January 2004 debate to ‘that which holds the world together’. Habermas warned that in pluralistic society, religion risks reduction to the therapeutic. Neither bought the American Rawls’ criterion that religious folks have to translate our faith into the language of a melting-pot of rational enlightened secularism. Both knew that we nevertheless have to make sense to our neighbours, even in our own terms.

Think of the challenge of recognizing and representing the Magi in terms of a spotlight, or of a camera. A century ago, imperialists grabbed control of the spotlight and the camera, pointed it at ourselves. Half a century ago, secular elites controlled the spotlight and camera, and we begged to be noticed, even if they aimed and framed the light. Now, we recognize many spotlights and cameras, offering many angles on reality.

The United Church study on ‘whole world ecumenism’ was called ‘Mending the World’ from a Hasidic rabbi who said that every morning God gets up, and says to Godself, ‘where does my world need mending today’. It’s up to us to wake up and as how we can help today with mending the world. Our creed says the Spirit ‘works in us and others’. We are invited into conversations and partnerships, with other spotlights and cameras.


I’ve reminded you before of the power of ‘reaction shots’ in film. Close-ups of the look of terror on a face in reaction to a villain or disaster can be far more powerful than the best special effects direct shot of that villain or disaster. That’s the power of witness – of being an eyewitness, of directing others’ recognition by your reaction to the thing that matters, that you are trying to represent or communicate.

I reminded you of the 1977 movie “Close Encounters of Third Kind” and the little boy who was not afraid, but delighted to go off with the new alien friends – and came back safe and sound! I should also have mentioned “ET”, the 1982 film that built on the befriending of aliens by kids. Some of the grownups were curious – but more were scared or angry in the face of the unknown. Which character would you rather be?

I don’t think that ‘Close Encounters’ or ‘ET’ are factual. But I know that they are true and meaningful. They presented us with a cast of characters with whom we could identify, and from whom we could distinguish ourselves. They were exploring the boundaries and limits of mid-20th century rational scientism, and new pluralism. They equipped us with a way of recognizing and representing a changing world. Thank God.

Who are the Magi for us, here, now? We live in a world of the Other. Everybody around us is different, by ethnicity, race, and religion. Faces and languages and customs vary in our own neighbourhood. How will they react to us – or we to them?

We could act like Herod, and the chief leaders in Jerusalem. They liked the status quo and had a lot to lose by any alternative spotlight or camera. When they heard of the Magi, they were scared. They were mad. They could recognize some truth in the location of Bethlehem – but not the meaning of the event.

We could act like the Magi, the Other – or we could received the wisdom of the Magi. They had great gifts to offer. Mary accepted them. Children are open to it, like the children in Close Encounters and ET. Why would be act like Herod and the leaders, or the scared and angry adults, zenophobes confronted with the Other?

The word ‘homage’ survives in our modern bible NRSV translation. What is homage? A century ago, we would say it was submission – the Magi become Christians. Half a century ago, we would say it was validation – the Magi legitimated Jesus. Now, I’d say it was relationship of sharing, mutuality, respect. An artist will cover another’s song, or reference their style, in an ‘homage’ to the other artist. Homage to Jesus? It’s up to you!

Where will you point your spotlight and camera this year? Where will we together shine our light and frame our pictures of the world? Is it all about us? God forbid! Who else is shining light on issues of ecological disaster, or of poverty? What kinds of partnerships are possible with others to get on with mending the world? After a decade of homeless shelter at the church with Mosaic interfaith out of the Cold – what’s next?

What will your reaction shots look like this year? As a witness, how will you convey to others a sense of how you recognize and represent the Other, the Magi? How will you offer homage to Jesus? If we’re just a bunch of grumpy scared grownups, that will not be out best choice. How about acting like children, open to good news? God forbid we end up once again, like the third stringers on holiday newscasts:

Eyewitnesses say…. … authorities are investigating.

Don’t leave it up to those blessed as eyewitnesses with extraordinary religious experience, or to the ‘authorities’. It’s up to you to recognize and represent the Magi, and to offer homage to Jesus. I’m looking forward to where you aim your spotlights and cameras, and to your reaction shots, looking like people who believe in a good God and a good creation, and approach their day and their neighbours that way!

I closed, again, with a bit of Martin Buber, and a familiar commissioning:

We cannot avoid
Using power
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world
So let us,
cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully

May you see the face of Christ
In everyone you meet
And may everyone you meet
See the face of Christ in you

Go in peace, and may you find peace
Go in love, and may you share love
Go with God, for God will surely go with you!