wise sages

 

SERMOIN PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY RINGWOOD EAST

FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY

(January 6^th, 1991)

 

 

READINGS

 

Isaiah 60: 1-6

Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14

Ephesians 3: 1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

 

Just over a year ago, at Christmas, I spoke of the journey of the magi, both the poem of TS Eliot and the biblical, mythological sages who came to view the newborn Christ-child. They came bearing their gifts, from their own riches, of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Two weeks ago, at Christmas, I spoke in passing of the drummer boy, the simple song of a simple child, who comes only with the gift of his rhythm, the gift of his music. I spoke, too, of the children of Ethiopia who are too weak even to come, but who merely die, experiencing no hope, and only the love of help-less and hope-less parents.

Every now and again outside some church or another I find that tacky sign “wise men still seek Jesus.” Always in the male phrasing, and always with the sure and confident sense that if wise men have sought Jesus, and I have sought Jesus, then I too am a wise man – or woman – or person.

The trouble is that we miss so much of the wisdom of those wise sages who travelled to find the newborn king. We see them, perhaps, as the biblical storytellers wanted us to see them, as symbols of the reaching of the Christ story out into the Gentile world. But too often we try to see them also as early converts – as prototypes of those who would encounter Christ in his church and receive him. Perhaps they were – but the Bible does not tell us that.

What it does tell us is of the coming of other cultures to encounter something of mystery and awe in the birth of a God-child, a God in a smelly manger. It tells us of those who sought the Absolute in their own religion, perhaps the Zoroastrianism strong in the Persian region at the time, coming to seek and acknowledge the Absolute in this uncanny and mysterious birth.

The TS Eliot version takes us one step further, to the mysterious relationship between the child born in a manger, because his mother was rejected from the inns, and the man who died on a cross because his gospel of love was rejected by the leaders of his day.

Unfortunately, too little of our religion or our society today is prepared, as the sages were, to reach out and touch and explore the Absolute. Just as in Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the “trains to catch and bills to pay” become an obstacle to love between a father and his son. The routine grind of daily existence in all its littleness prevents us from pausing long enough to “consider the works of God’s hand,” to consider the magnificence of creation, or even to consider the precariousness of human existence and the misery of much human experience.

We push on too fast, too afraid, as many philosophers would remind us, to touch the Absolute.

But the wise sages of the Epiphany did.

Much of our religious practice is similarly too fast, too shallow. At one level I want to praise attempts to re-form and re-present our worship, if such attempts are designed more clearly to present the divine drama, the drama of human relationship to God.

It is certainly my belief that good modern liturgists have sought to do that, and have done so by going far back beyond the comparatively modern forms of the Book of Common Prayer and the Latin Mass, back to the rites of the ancient Church, the Church as it began to recognise the miraculous magnificence of the Christ-event.

But if we modernise our worship merely to be “relevant,” if we throw out mystery and drama merely in an attempt to present a form of lowest common denominator religiosity, then we have strayed far from the mystery and the drama of the wise sages who came, bewildered, to see the Absolute, incarnate in a Jewish baby in a not too hygienic manger.

For four years now I have been telling religious instruction children, Bible in Schools children, 11 and 12 year olds, that our god is that which is greatest in our life. That our money, or our sexuality, or our sport, or our religion will be our God if it claims first place in our life. That God is, in the Anselmian definition, “that than which no greater can be conceived.” That God is The Thing that is so big we can think of nothing bigger.

The wise sages knew that. Yet they followed a star, and came to see a lowborn, newborn baby in the City of David, Bethlehem. These sages whose search was a journey into the Absolute came and worshipped a baby, a defenceless and vulnerable child.

For ultimately God recognises that “that than which no greater can be conceived” is all a bit of a mouthful. That the Absolute is, in the end, too great for us to grasp, too frightening for us, aware as we are of our own shortfallings, to turn to.

So the wise sages came, and recognised in Jesus, the fruit of Mary’s womb, the dwelling amongst us of the Absolute, but in utter simplicity and vulnerability.

And they worshipped.

Then they went away again. Mystified, puzzled. But – hopefully like us – prepared to muse and to mumble about the mystery they had encountered:

where meek souls will receive him, still

the dear Christ enters in.