WISE Mai] STILL FCLLG! A STAR John M. Buchanan
Matthew 2:1-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Decmeber 25, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

Unlike Easter Sunday, the preacher's task on Christmas Day feels a little
ambiguous, The event commemorated on December 25 has been thoroughly celebrated in
the anticipating. One of the psychological realities with which all of us must come
to terms is the letdown of Christmas Day. We began so long ago, it seems, We
lighted our Advent wreaths, and decorated our special spaces, and listened to the
magnificent cadences of George Frederick Handel, and secreted gifts to their appointed
hiding places, and sang the carols, A good measure of the joy is the anticipating.
And some time in the middle o£ Ciuristmas morning each of us feels a tinge of regret
that it is escaping so quickly. We want to slow it down, and savor and embrace the

precious minutes,

By eleven o'clock we are already on the down side of the feast. You may be
interested in the fact that your staff discussed the schedule for this morning very
seriously. We were interested to learn that a sister Church in Pittsburgh cancelled
all ordinary Sunday activities in favor of one worship service at 12:15, in order
to give its families more time to enjoy the morning, But after discussing the
matter we concluded that whatever happens in our homes on Christmas morning happens
well before eleven o'clock: that for some , at least, the festivities crest some-
where around 7:30,

In any event, as I thought about the task of preaching at eleven on Christmas
Morning: as I tried to anticipate the mood of the hardy souls who might be here, it
occurred to me that the story of the Wise Men provides an appropriate metaphor,
They traveled a long way to get where they were going. When they arrived what
they encountered, I have always imagined, was not at all what they expected, And I
propose to make their familiar story the framework for our thinking together this
morning,

Thomas Hardy wrote a poem one time under the title, God's Funeral. In the
poem a spectator is watching a grim funeral procession. The dead form of God is
being carried and Hardy describes the mourners as "lined on the brows, scoop-eyed
and bent..."' A certain few, however, stand off from this mournful scenario and the
poet hears them say...

"See you upon the horizon that small light -
Swelling somewhat?"

That rather dramatic image evokes for me the experience of these strange
characters known as Wise Men, We know very little about them actually, Magi comes
from the Greek word Magus, Babylonian astrologers who were students of the stars,
observing, calculating ard predicting future events on the basis of what they saw,
They saw something that no one else did. And incredibly they saddled up their
camels and rode off through the desert to find it, Again, we know nothing about
their journey. We don't know now many times they considered turning back, how they
must have argued about it, how one of them perhaps kept complaining about what the
other two had gotten him into. For the record we don't even know how many there
were, The noun is plural in the text: they brought three gifts: and so tradition
has made them three in number. But more to the point, for our purposes this morning,
is the assertion that whoever they were, and however many they were, they saw a
star and followed it to the place it led,

- 2? -

Whac a com-doua it must have bean when they arrived at that dark, dirty
stable in the obscure village of Bethlehem, They fell down ang worshiped the
child, St. Matthew ceaports, They presented their elegant gifts of goid, frark-
incense and myrrh to the baby, [uc I wonder what they were thinking ebcut when
their expectation of a royai child confronted the manger, feeding box fsr the live~
stock, and the unmarried adolescent mother, aud the nondescript cargetiter father,
And as if that weren’t enough they had to find another way home and sneak out of
town at night in order to avoid an ominous entanglement with a petty tyrant by the
name of Herod,

What a comedown. The first dimension of this remarkable story that I want to
hold up this morning, however, is that these men, whoever they were, out of the
ordinariness of the everyday world, saw the star, a vision if you will, a compelling
dream, and were just foolhardy and courageous enough to follow it,

Tennyson picked up on that idea in these lines:

“He wakes desires you never may forget:
He shows you stars you never saw before:
He makes you share with him forevermore
The burden of the world's divine regret,"
(Leonard W, Mann, Stars You Never Saw Before, p.5)

So Christmas, it seems to me, shows us "stars we never saw before" ~ and calls
us to follow: a vision cf a new humanity suddenly graced with the stamp of God's
love: a new world where peace is practiced and not just discussed: a better place
where kindness and generosity and forgiveness actually replace arrogance and selfish-
ness and hurtfulness: a new vision of our own humanity, if you will, now ennobled by
the birth of God's Son as one of us; a future open with possibility in which no
dream is too ambitious to dream, no star too bright to follow,

The antithesis is to live without a vision: to be so immersed in the ordinary
that no grand cause ever tugs at the heart, no passionate love ever causes tears to
flow, The dead weight of daily life can do that te us, Leonard Mann writes about
a woman: “Fourscore years this life she led: in the morning she arose, and at night
went to bed,"

The trouble with visions, and following stars is that we are likely to be
surprised at the results, The trouble with idealists, someone has observed, is
that they don't often like the places their ideals take them or the things their
ideals ask them to uo Every one of us knows exactly what that means: we know how
the Magi felt when the star led them out into a dry desert and a long journey
pointing toward a destination they would not have chosen.

... Young pcople make brave plans for a significant, exciting career, and dis-
cover that what they are really looking at is eight long years of hard work.

...No young man and young woman ever sat in my study Co talk about a wedding
who did not believe, and know, that their relationship was the most perfect, the
strongest, the most lasting, And for some it comes as somewhat of a surprise to
discover shortly thereafter that what they are looking at is hard work, and some
frustrations, and a little conflict, and persistent challenges to one's ego and the
necessity of disciplined love,

-~3-

..- Young minis‘ers, par-Ltularly, erupt from Seminary with a vision of the
church as the serva..t of the world, God's chosen people, heven for the homeless,
reconciler of the iest, advocate of the cppressed; only to discover that what
they're looking at is the untow2.i¢ tesk of talking o.1 cvoste¢s into re.encing
enough money to fix the boiler, and mediating the conflict between Mrs. Smith and
Mrs, cones ahout altar flovers.

In all of life, the inertia of the ordinary weighs against any star we con-
template following. The Magi, no doubt, were sorely tempted to stay at home, But
the visionaries - the Christmis people - the truly wise men and women ~ will always
be found following stars,

Alistair Cooke has written 4 very interesting book about six remarkable men
of our age - one of whom is Bertrand Russell. He recalls Lord Russell's credo -
actually borrowed from George Bernard Shaw:

"This is the true joy in Life, the being used for a purpose
recognised by yourself as a mighty one: the being thoroughly
worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap: the being a
force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of
ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not
devote itself to making you happy." (Six Men, p,172)

That's first, Wise Men follow their star, The second dimension of the story
which is of interest this moraing is that somchow they had the capacity, in the
first place, to see the star. There was something of the Child in the Wise Men,
Against every dictate of adult common sense they insisted that there was more going
on up there than what was meeting the eye, They were open to awe, wonder: instead
of calculating they worshiped: instead of organizing a discussion group to investi-
gate the astrological ramifications of the new star - they saw in it God's
mysterious hand,

that is becoming a persistent motif in any analysis of the contemporary mind.
We are obsessed with the laboratory. We ~ not the scientists, but the laymen ~-
have convinced ourselves that whatever reality there is can be weighed, measured
and reduced to an equation by a technician in a white coat,

Religion has taken its Lumps in this context, We have thought as rationally
about our faith as it is possible to think, We have studied and researched and
investigated: even the Nativity has come under the careful scrutiny of scholarly
research, For many, the logical result is a religion now cleansed of everything
irrational which often mears ali the wonder and mystery and awe are gone,

Andrew Gr.zley wrote a fascinating article on the Entertainment Page of the
Sunday Times se-7val wevuss ago cntitled "When Religion Cast Off Wonder, Hollywood
Seized Tt.” (Wew York Times, 11-27-77)

With no litcle sarcasm Grecley wrote: "Consider the embarassment of the
churches, They have demythelogized the Christmas story and abandoned angels, Now
Columbia pictures arrives on the scene at the holiday season with a full-compliment
of angel-like creatures complete with blinding lights and celestial melody,,.
(Close Encounters),

~ 4 -
vu) ..¥You can demythologize wonder out of your sacred books but you can't
demythologize the hunger for the worderful out of the human personality, or at
least those who have tried it Lave wt saze1etad,"

There is, I would submit, great wisdom in the silent contemplation of the
Christmas story: the intentional laying aside of our critical facuities and the
total wamersion in this drana which is as old and as wise as the ages, ‘There is
wisdom in the soaring beauty cf "Lallelujah - the Lord God omnipotent reigneth":
there is wisdom in the reds and sreens and the light of small candles, There is
deep wisdom and fundamental reality in the sense that we are loved wich an ever~
lasting Leve,

My proposition this morning is quite simple. It is in two parts ~
Christmas beckons us te a pilgrimage, following a vision.
Christmas points to a new light in the heavens,

It may be summarized in one sentence, "Wise Men and Women still follow
a star,"

Amen,

Father, for this glad morning we give thanks, For all that is good and
human and kind about this day, we praise You, Help us to see the star and give
us, through the year, faith to follow where it leads. Through Jesus Christ
our Lord.

Amen,