FOLLOWING A STAR – BEING LIGHT
Matthew 2:1-12

There are some years that have particular symbolic significance from the first tern of the calendar page on January 1.  Millennial years come to mind.  Our generation was only the second since the calendar dating system of the common era was introduced.  Where were you when 1999 rolled into the year 2000.  Remember the Y2K scares…that everything that relied on computer technology would be compromised because computers were not programmed properly to handle  a date that didn’t have 19 as the first two numbers?  That scare turned out to be pretty much of a dud but moving into a new millennium still felt like a hugely significant event.  Indeed, the first decade of the third millennium of the common era has been significant in important and devastating ways.    The year 1984 seemed to be a symbolically important year thanks to George Orwell.  But as we moved through it and beyond we realized it wasn’t the number at the top of the calendar that was significant but the forces that he described….forces which have as much to do with human complacency and the willingness to buy into the illusions which masquerade as truth as the forces that create the illusions and the lies in the first place.  They continue to threaten some of the most precious freedoms, insights and creative impulses and hopes that make us human.
Cosmologically speaking a new year is just the beginning of one more rotation of the earth around the sun….something that has gone on for billions of years.   There really is no starting point or stopping point.  But, for human creatures, time is more than the astrophysical forces at work.  For us time, whatever it is,  is the way we order the deep and primal longings of our lives.  Time is the dimension in which we live and grow in this life.  It is the framework on which we store the accumulated wisdom, regrets and achievements of the past and around which and within which we weave our hopeful imaginations to create new possibilities for the moments and years toward which we move.    Our cats, Ernie and Lena, do not seem to be much concerned about the past although they have internal some learnings and formed habits which seem to be unbreakable.  And they don’t as far as I can tell too anxious about the future.  They are creatures of the moment, savoring every comfortable lap, every meal, every spot of sun they discover for an afternoon nap.  But, for whatever reason we are different.  We can imagine a future and by imagining it and hoping for its goodness we are also able to help shape it in ways no other creatures can.  With such gifts come great responsibility.
Matthew tells a story of  first century intellectuals……we have no idea how many.  Matthew suggests three symbolic gifts but it could have been two or twenty people.  They looked up at the stars in the sky and thought they had discovered there a sign that something new was on the horizon. 
Matthew’s telling of this story is brilliant.  What he does in 12 verses is nothing short of amazing though it is easy for a modern reader to miss some of the rhetorical moves.   First, he borrows the light from Isaiah’s poem of hope to a people in exile.  The passage that Leslie read earlier…the poem that  told of  “God’s light is piercing the darkness.  It is illuminating what is and lighting the way to what is possible.  The light of the star is Matthew’s  first hint to us that what his magi are being led to has its origins in God’s liberating illuminating presence. 
The out-of-towners waltz into Jerusalem to seek guidance from the established authoritative sources of the day:  the religious and state authorities.  But the scene is almost comical because of the question that is asked of Herod.  “Where is the one who is born king of the Jews?” they ask Herod.  But who is Herod?  He is King of the Jews.  He has been appointed by Rome to keep the rebellious instincts of the native population in check and in the service of the Empire.  Oops.  No wonder Herod is hoping he can co-opt the foreign intellectuals into protecting his office and his power.  The religious scribes have some resources for interpreting the symbols of light and star.  But they are no longer  independent.  They’re working for Herod.  They have found being in bed with empire mutually beneficial and quite comfortable.  They will tell the king what they know but they will not challenge his decisions or his power.  So there is dramatic tension in this story that Matthew tells.  The future will be shaped, in part, by whether the wise ones simply do their duty and report back to the palace about what they have discovered so that any threatening newness can be quickly obliterated, or whether they will allow themselves to be guided by this Holy thing on the horizon that fits none of their familiar categories.  At the end of the story, when they come to the fork in the road and must choose….they take the road less traveled.
No one has captured the meaning of this ending as well as T.S. Eliot at the end of his poem, The Journey of the Magi:  “We returned to our places….But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation…” 
Matthew writes as one who already knows the whole Jesus story…birth, death, resurrection, and the new community that was born and the new way of life that was  revealed.  Matthew writes out of the conviction that this way is the only way forward that could really transform this world and unleash the possibilities for human life imbedded in us by our creator..  He tells a story of magi who have been changed by what they saw and experienced and begs us to be as open as they are to going forward in a different way, being led by the one born in Bethlehem.   We read this story,  not as ancient history but as Matthew’s interpretive telling of the meaning of Jesus birth….and the urgent plea for us to become less at ease with the self-serving agendas of the power structures….less accommodating to the illusions of empire that hide its real agendas.  For they are always….always…..concerned first and foremost with self-preservation and always ready and willing to snuff out things that are of God if they find them in conflict with their own insatiable drive for power.   
This is a profoundly true story that Matthew tells to invite every generation to do its own star following as those who have seen in the life of the child born in Bethlehem an alternative future.  It is a way shaped by the compassion and justice of Jesus and therefore will always be threatening to the status quo empires of wealth and power. 
I began this reflection with a comment that some years seem to have symbolic significance beyond simply the turn of a calendar page.  There are increasing numbers of people who see the year 2012 as one of those years.  Some, of course,  link it’s meaning to the fact that the 5,000 year old Mayan calendar ends in 2012.  You may have seen the cartoon of the ancient Mayan scribe holding the big stone wheel onto which the complex calendar has been carved and he says to his friend:  “I only had enough room to go up to 2012,” to which the friend replies, “Ha!  That’ll freak somebody out someday.”  As we move through the year you will probably see more and more apocalyptic, end-of-the-world references.  The comic strip Sally Forth currently has a story line built around a dialogue between husband and wife pondering what they would do IF the world was really coming to an end.  Most of this is just silliness.  But the fact is that some things should come to an end.  Everything that stands in the way of the basic human rights, dignity and nurture of body and soul should be dismantled.
Some see that this year….or at least this time in history…presents a crossroads for the future of life…human or otherwise…or at the very least a major fork in the road.  The choices that we make….environmentally, politically, economically, are going to have lasting effects of historical proportions.   Many, and I count myself among them, also see the hints of a spiritual awakening…a global, interfaith reformation that is recognizing just how limiting and dangerous many of the old dogmatic faux certainties have become.  So the question for each of us and all of us is how will we move into the future.  Can we imagine something different from this old dispensation, to use Eliot’s phrase?  Will we just assume that the way things are now, many of which are train wrecks waiting to happen, are the only possibilities?  We could take the lazy way, returning from our glimpse of God’s vision, make a report about it that can be delivered to the DC beltway crowd…of we can go another way:  actively searching for God’s light among all the darkness and confusion and decit, following the stars of hope and imagination and goodness and justice, and go into tomorrow another way?  This is not an abstract question.  We don’t gather on Sunday for a nice story and then return the same people we were before, living the same way, content with the same old lies and injustices.  The story of the magi and the story ask who we really are inside.  Are we primarily children of empire or children of God?  The question is real and urgent and what happens in the next decades depends on the answer and how it shapes us.
ON the back of your bulleting thsi moring is attached a star.  Take it off, and instead of singing a hymn we’ll have a chance to ponder how you intend to go into this new year.  Who are you?  What is the star that you or we are called to follow?  As we hear Mitchell sing the iconic song from Man from La Mancha, don’t overthink this.  Consider that the first fleeting thoughts that come to mind are the ones you need to pay attention to.  Write them down on your star and carry it with you.   Don’t worry about whether people think you are crazy.  The things of God never fit comfortably with the ambitions of empire…..but the things of God are the hope of the world. 

 
Mary Gaut
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