A mad path

Epiphany 2008
(Isaiah 60: 1-6; Ps 72; Ephesians 3: 1-12; Matthew 2: 1-12)


This is a story of leaving home, walking a mad path, and being changed.

The infant Messiah had been foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures. These “wise men” were astrologers, magicians. They didn’t come to find the Messiah through the orthodox and correct ways. Their magic, their outlandish spirituality, led them West from what we now call Iraq. They shouldn’t have been there in Palestine. It was a mad thing they did, to leave their homes where they were known, to follow nothing more solid than a star.

What strange paths have we walked, how many detours from the “acceptable” and “decent” path have we taken? How many side trips have we been on in our own lives? The Gospel seems to say it doesn’t matter. They question is not “where have you been?”, but rather “what do you seek?” God has a way of using any path to call us home.

The wise men come to Jerusalem, expecting that if something big is going to happen then it will of course happen in the Big Apple. And in the Big Apple they almost step on a snake, Herod the paranoid King. The air was full of threats as the wise men bowed with Eastern courtesy to the old jackal on the throne. Polite things were said while Herod pondered how to use the chumps from out of town and the wise men recognized a slimy tyrant from long experience and schemed how to get away from him with their heads still on their bodies.

We walk our journey in a world which does not value our path, which usually ignores us or even schemes to use us. It is a great gift that following Jesus is no longer looked on as a sane and normal thing, something any good person does. The way of the Gospel is a mad path that trusts a promise and a crucified Lord. How do we walk this path through the world and keep our souls intact?

The star still lay ahead, the star which had the power to not only shine but to beckon and guide. Not turned aside by fear, the pilgrims arrive. They find—what? What they expected, what they thought their lives of wisdom and mysticism had earned them? Or did they find something or someone utterly different, so different that they are themselves transformed?

They were transformed. They became people who listened to God in their dreams. They became people who were willing to go home “by another road.” There’s no returning on the same paths and returning to their old life, “among an alien people clutching their gods” as the poet said. The journey itself, as well as the One awaiting them in an unexpected place, transformed them forever.

They are us.

Tradition crowned the wise men and assigned them the mystic number three “kings of Orient are” and gave their skins all the colors of the peoples of the earth. One old myth says that they were actually the three sons of Noah, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, raised from the dead to represent all humanity’s journey to Bethlehem’s shed. The church school students declared them the Three Wise Women who would have arrived earlier than the men because they would have stopped to ask for directions. But the point is we have surrounded the mystic pilgrims with poetry and art and story and song because they are us. The doors of welcome are flung wide. We are all invited to the blazing wonder of God among us. But we each walk our own pilgrim path. No one can say that our journey is not correct. The Beloved of God blesses the path. Perhaps the Beloved, the Christ is the journey and the path, the star and the restless longing all at once. That’s how we recognize him when we finally arrive. And we arrive to be changed, to become a new people who listen to God in dreams and who are willing to take “another road.”