Magi In The City: A Tale of Epiphany

Matthew 2:1-12

Samuel walked into my office adjacent to the sanctuary, a little bit down. The city was adorned to the hilt with Christmas regalia on every light post, in every store window, and on every house. Christmas festivals with seasonal choirs of school children were mysteriously popping out of thin air. Even the most bah-humbugiest, the grinchiest, the most gotta-see-it-to-believe it people I knew- they were all caught up in the season.

Even Mr. Hooey, the 85 year old curmudgeon up at the end of our street whose rare contributions to public conversation were limited to complaints about the dangerous loitering of neighborhood boys (who were in reality as good as gold and were only discussing whose front yard would host the next touch football scrimmage). Yes, even crusty old Mr. Hooey stopped me in the middle of walking the dog one morning to say how great the Douglas Fir and Holly wreath with pomegranates looked on our front door. It seemed that everyone in town, including the neighborhood grouch, was excited.

Everyone except Samuel.

“I just can’t seem to get into the spirit of the season,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked as pastorally as possible.

“Well it doesn’t seem like anybody thinks Christmas is really about Christ and so I just don’t get the point. It’s about store advertisements and mall Santa Clauses and crowded roads and people cursing each other over parking spaces and completing last minute deadlines before the office shuts down ‘til January. Maybe we’d be better off just skipping this commercial Christmas thing, have a simple church service and then start celebrating New Year’s; take a little trip to a warm beach to relax and then just get on with it.”

“Get on with what?”

“You know, get on with the next thing in life - the next year, the next work deadline, the next day of school for the kids, the next tax period, the next trip to the grocery store or the gas station.”

“Tell me,” I probed. “What do you think would have to happen in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit?”

The frustration dammed up in Samuel erupted: “It would take an act of God for me to get into the Christmas spirit!”

“Sam, I… I don’t mean to get all theological and deep,” I tried to say as humbly as possible “but, technically speaking…”

“Stop. I know where you’re going. You’re going to say: Christmas is an act of God. Yes, I get that. I understand what Christmas is supposed to be all about. But it isn’t about that really. At least it doesn’t seem to be about that at all from where I’m standing.”

I called on the all the resources of all my theological experience and training. “Maybe, in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit you need to find God somewhere in all that stuff going on out there that seems to have nothing to do with God.”

“Huh?”

“Do you remember the journey of the three Magi?” I asked. “I always liked the T. S. Eliot poem about it because it starts out talking about how daunting the journey was: ‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey…’ You can really feel it. The camel drivers threatened to leave if they didn’t get more pay for the trip, and the townspeople were hostile in villages they passed through, and tavern keepers were thieves, and there was a lack of fire and adequate shelter in the desert.[i] Think of the doubts and longing for family and luxury back home, and…and no room service!

“Then, near the end of their journey, there were false leads about where the baby was actually lying and Herod Antipas tried to trick them into participating in his appalling political intrigues. So much clutter, distraction, obfuscation, misinformation, disinformation. It’s incredible that they found Jesus at all. But what a fantastic revelation they had, despite all their tribulation.

“They were gentiles, after all, who theologically represented all gentiles. They followed the light of that star until they arrived at the location of the Jewish messiah and in the very moment of their epiphany- of their revelation, of finding that infant- Jesus became the messiah of Jews and gentiles alike. Maybe your experience is an updated version of their experience. It’s everybody’s faith journey. It’s everybody’s epiphany.”

“You’re right, you know,” Samuel replied somberly. “I can’t find God anywhere in any of these Christmas preparations and hooplah. Even my kid’s choir recital here at church seemed to be more of an opportunity for the parents to ooh and aah than a worship event.”

As the pastor, that last comment smarted a bit so I retorted rather crisply, “Not to be cliché about it but you really should go look for the baby Jesus. Start now. If you find Jesus, you’ll find God too.”

Samuel was undeterred. “But I thought God is coming to us - as Jesus. That’s part of the whole problem. I keep expecting God to show up and it just doesn’t happen. The FedEx guy shows up. The power bill shows up. The lawn crew shows up to clean up the leaves that show up on the grass. Why hasn’t God showed up?”

I tried one last time. “Here’s the thing,” I pronounced bluntly and a little peeved. “The world is a bundle of complicated contradictions. If you want a simplistic life with superficial answers then you go ahead and live that way but don’t complain when such one dimensional faith lets you down. Alternatively, if you go meditate in the undisturbed solitude of some Himalayan mountain top, it may just rain on your well developed theories and high minded spiritual insights so that your thoughts just dissolve into a muddled mess like chalk drawings on a wet sidewalk.

“Think of the billions of molecules out there full of atoms, neutrons, electrons, protons. Stable and unstable. Unstable ones decaying into some other arrangement in order to become stable. Particles firing off randomly because of some microscopic chain reaction, pinging against your skin, your heart, your head, your brain, your consciousness. Ping. Ping. Ping.

“Your job is to find God in the middle of all that; not necessarily so that you can make sense of all those contradictions remorselessly pinging away at you or make them go away. They’re not going to go away. Go find God in order to liberate some little spark of divine truth within your consciousness, within your personal understanding of life that allows you to see beyond the material distractions so you can make something healthy and hopeful and joyous out of the human condition.

“Take the journey. Find Jesus: find the Father; find the Holy Spirit. Be the Magi, Sam. Be the Magi.”

Several days later I received an email from Samuel. He was still unsuccessful. “No sightings,” he wrote. “Have stared into every passing face at the mall, on the street, at a soup kitchen. No Jesus. No Father. No Holy Spirit. No nothin’. Seems like God would come out of seclusion at least once a year so those of us who believe could feel like we believe in something rather than nothing. Not asking for miracles, just some reassurance. Just a little sign maybe. God can do anything, right?!”

I immediately tapped out a response and fired my own set of pinging electrons through the wireless internet link. “Sam- Most of us get our images of God from what we learned in childhood rather than discerning things for ourselves as our brains develop, so I can understand how you might think God would magically appear at special times and leave little motivational tokens. God’s collection of inspirational sayings. But the Holy Trinity is not some kind of tooth fairy who shows up and leaves fifty cents under your pillow and the Bible isn’t a fortune cookie. Besides, Jesus is probably right under your very nose.”

During the week before Christmas, Samuel sent another email with an attached newspaper account of a car accident somewhere in a nearby county. His email said: “This guy found a Jesus, but it’s not the real Jesus. Still, it’s the popular Jesus.”

The article told of a man who was delivering his teenage nephew home after an evening basketball practice. As they cruised down the dark country road talking about the team’s chances for the upcoming season, they drove right past the side road to the farm where the boy lived without noticing. Still talking, they drove on another hundred yards and came up on an intersection before realizing where they were. Amid the boy’s shouts of surprise, the uncle slammed on the brakes, skidded, and crashed through a fence in the front yard of a house.

The car rumbled to a halt but not before it had forcefully intruded on a wooden nativity scene. Mary and Joseph got tossed callously aside and plastic donkeys and sheep were upended into very ungraceful poses. Worst of all, the baby Jesus bounced straight up in the air, out of his manger and landed face down on the windshield of the car, staring directly at the driver. The uncle was charged with failure to stop at an intersection and reckless endangerment of a minor.

At last it was Christmas Eve. We had a wild and joyous 5pm children’s service complete with traditional howls from impatient infants with water logged diapers. At 9pm, we had a solemn, candle light service of prayers and hymns and anthems- deeply spiritual and moving. Afterwards Samuel pulled me aside in one corner of the Narthex.

“I’ve been on a pilgrimage all week,” he whispered. “Been hitting every live nativity display in town.”

“Have you found the real Jesus?” I whispered back.

“Not yet. Most of them are really hokey. I mean some red haired guy with a pasted on beard trying to look like a Palestinian Jew named Joseph. And his blonde, lily-white trophy wife faking Mary, but fiddling with her tennis bracelet.”

“Maybe Mary played tennis,” I quipped.

“Cut it out. Anyway there’s a couple more that end just after midnight tonight and I’m going to check them out now.”

“Be the Magi, Sam,” I said in parting. He gave me a silent, blank look.

The next day my cell phone rang and ruing the fact that I had left it on during the one day of the year that I thought I really deserved some peace and quiet, I flipped it open to hear Samuel’s exuberant voice.

“I found him! I found Jesus!”

“The real Jesus?” I queried.

“Yep, the real Jesus! Oh he wasn’t there in body or anything like that, but he was there just the same. I could tell.”

It turned out that just before midnight, Samuel had driven up to a little church in the middle of the city that had become dwarfed by years of growth from the surrounding commercial property. There was a small array of people clumped together in the foggy, cool night as traffic noises broke in from the street.

“It was really kind of strange,” Samuel related. “Thought it was going to be a total waste of time. People just standing around talking, not even paying attention to the nativity scene- not taking it seriously. I wondered why they even bothered to come out. At least the Mary and Joseph were kind of realistic. Mary was probably about 16, dark hair, pimples. Joseph looked about 19 or 20, long hair, scraggly, three day old beard. Then there were these dwarf livestock. Couple of cows the size of Golden Retrievers and a miniature goat and a donkey same size as the cow. A shepherd with a golf towel wrapped around his head and cinched up with what looked like a nylon dog collar was holding the donkey and off to one side three guys with gold painted plastic crowns and burgundy tablecloths draped over their shoulders stood by a short camel that kept belching. I think one of them is a big shot local banker.

“And little kids who were clearly up too late for their age kept crossing the parking lot to the church and coming back with cookies and hot chocolate. There was a small, really smoky fire burning in one of those brass fire bowls straight of a catalogue. A loud speaker screwed to the side of the plywood stall suddenly started barking out the Christmas narrative while the actors mimed their parts. Right in the middle of the whole thing a fire truck screams down the street interrupting everything and I thought I’d had it. I was done. This wasn’t the real thing and the real Jesus just wasn’t going to show up this year.

“But before I could turn to go, I noticed some little tow head boy, maybe seven or eight, cut right across the path of the Magi and the camel. He was holding a Styrofoam cup of cider awkwardly away from his body so it wouldn’t spill and smiling- really proud of himself for having the cider. Didn’t even notice the Magi or the action in the nativity scene. His mom waved at him to hush and he smiled even bigger and gave her the thumbs up.

“I don’t know what happened, but right then I realized Jesus was there. It was like a light went off. All those people just doing their thing with that nativity play going on right under their noses. Just going about their business, not taking anything seriously except mundane achievements and creature comforts like getting some cider and a cookie. And tragedy screaming down the street like a fire truck, tearing a hole right through the whole holy moment.”

“Did you have an epiphany?” I interjected.

“Yeah, whatever,” Samuel blurted back. “It was that kid and his goofy grin. It was like Jesus was in his smile. All this distracting stuff was going on, all these particles pinging around, and Jesus was smack in the middle of it in a smile. And if Jesus was in a smile then he had to be happy that we were all there just doing what we were doing. No judgment of our distractedness. Just gladness about our participation in the moment.

“The thing is, God doesn’t just show up once a year to do a magic trick. Listen, you want my advice? You’ve got to tackle that journey the Magi took because it’s the participating that makes Jesus real; that’s where God becomes real to us. The minute that kid smiled, I realized the nativity play wasn’t just the actors and the narrator. It was them and everybody else standing there plus the miniature animals and the folks pumping gas at the filling station next door and the tired woman at the bus stop who just wanted to go home.

“I guess it really was one of those epiphanies. Well, gotta go. The wife’s got a fever but still wants a roaring fire in the fireplace and the kids want help putting toys together and the dog needs a walk and the in-laws will be here in an hour. But it’s all good.”

“You liberated the truth that was in you all along,” I confirmed.
“Yeah,” said Samuel. “It’s the truth alright.”



[i] Thomas Stearns Elliot, Journey of the Magi.