Tag: Magi

Epiphany and Covenant Service 2025: The Magi (Matthew 2:1-12)

This is a revised version of a sermon I preached six years ago but which is not on the blog. The text that follows is how I preached it in 2019 and does not exactly conform to the video, because I paraphrased and added some material:

Matthew 2:1-12

Rumour has it that the Nativity Play was cancelled at Parliament this Christmas.

Why? Apparently, they couldn’t find three wise men.

OK, that’s a silly Internet joke I saw during the festive season, along with the cartoon where three wise women bring practical gifts such as a casserole instead of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

But I love the story of the Magi, and with Covenant Sunday falling this year on Epiphany, the feast where the wider Christian Church throughout the world and down through history celebrates the appearing of the Messiah to the Gentiles, we have a story that also says much to the Covenant theme of commitment to Christ.

Here, then, are three aspects of the Magi and their coming that speak to the question of our commitment to Christ.

Firstly, the Magi were Gentiles.

Yes, I know that’s stating the obvious, but it’s important. Matthew is the most Jewish of all the four Gospels, but no Jew comes to worship the infant Christ in his Gospel, only the Magi from the east – perhaps modern-day Iraq.

The Magi represent all that is wrong in spiritual practice in the eyes of faithful Jews. They were astrologers, and astrology began in ancient Babylon. When Israel was taken captive to Babylon, astrology was a common habit of the surrounding culture. In the parts of Isaiah that relate to that part of Israel’s history, astrology is condemned and ridiculed. It is not the way to find truth and purpose in life. For the Jew, that could only be found by following the one true God – as it should for us, too, and which incidentally is why no Christian should devote time to their horoscope.

It is these unsound, unclean people that come in the highly Jewish Gospel according to Matthew and worship the infant Christ. Matthew is telling us that the Gospel, while originating with the Jews, is for the whole world. It’s no coincidence that Matthew ends his Gospel with the so-called Great Commission, where the risen Jesus sends his followers to the whole world with the call to discipleship.

Therefore the first challenge I want to bring from the story of the Magi this morning to us on Covenant Sunday is our call to be bearers of the Gospel to all people, including those who are not remotely like us. Who are the people who to us are unclean or unsound? Who are the people whose lifestyles we would instinctively condemn? Christ lived and died for them, too. Who are the people with whom we would not naturally associate, the people we wouldn’t mix with at a social gathering? Again, Christ lived and died for them.

I’ve noticed that one of the most contentious issues among residents of Byfleet has to do with what happens when travellers come and pitch up on land in the village. I understand some of that reaction, given the mess they often leave and the inconvenience they cause. But one of the great areas of numerical growth in Christianity in the UK these days is among travellers and gypsies. Largely, the Gospel was originally taken to them by our Pentecostal friends. Now there are indigenous gypsy congregations and Christian conventions. We might not want to have too much to do with them. But God loves them and has reached out to them through other Christians.

So I’d like us to consider this Covenant Sunday whether there are any people we might naturally think are unsavoury, but who need God’s love in Christ to be shown to them. Does anyone occur to you?

Secondly, the Magi decided to go.

The Magi go on their long and arduous journey, and when the biblical scholars tell them and Herod that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, they are still the only ones who go. Those who apparently know their Scriptures do nothing.

Christian commitment involves hearing the call of God and doing something about it. This the Magi demonstrate in spades. They don’t even know the Scriptures, but they follow the call as they have heard it the best they can. The strange sign of the star, the biblical reference from the prophet Micah to Bethlehem, and finally the warning in the dream not to return to Herod. In all these ways they show the characteristic of true disciples: they hear and they go.

I sometimes fear that we in the modern church are rather like the biblical scholars whom Herod called. We have heard and read the Christian message over and over again down years and decades, but do we always allow it to have a challenging or transforming effect on us? Do we hear the Bible read and then move on? Do we just read it and then close it?

I may have told you before the story of the Argentinean pastor who preached on the same text every week for a year.

‘Pastor, when you are you going to preach on something different?’ asked one church member.

‘When you start obeying this passage,’ replied the pastor.

Something like that can be our problem. We are fed a diet of weekly sermons, we think we know the Bible and our faith quite well, but how much have we let it change us?

Yet along come the Magi and for all their learning in other areas they are simple when it comes to matters of faith. God shows them what to do, and off they go.

I believe that sometimes it’s the newer and spiritually younger Christians who come along, get hold of something basic about the faith, and run with it in ways that really the experienced Christians might have done.

One example of this would be the Addlestone (now Runnymede) Food Bank. The person who had the vision for this was a middle-aged woman who had only recently found faith through an Alpha Course, but she quickly grasped that following Jesus meant caring about the poor. Her professional background was as a stockbroker. She was used to managing accounts containing many millions of pounds. She used her managerial and entrepreneurial skills in the service of God’s kingdom to sell the vision of the food bank to the churches, to start it up, organise, and run it, before being snapped up by the Trussell Trust for a national rôle with them. As I say, she was young in the faith, but she heard the voice of God and ran with it.

What more might we do if we allowed ourselves to be that bit less jaded about all the things we have heard over and over again in the Scriptures and in the preaching of the word?

More specifically, is there one particular thing where you know God has been giving you a little poke for a long time? Wouldn’t the Covenant Service be a great time finally to say ‘yes’ to him, ‘I’ll do it’?

Thirdly and finally, the Magi decided to give.

So yes, here we’re onto the gold, frankincense and myrrh. Not a casserole dish in sight.

The popular idea is that gold is for a king, frankincense for a priest, and myrrh to mark death. It’s very appealing, it fits with what comes later in Jesus’ ministry, but Matthew makes no such connections. This interpretation first arose in the second century AD, courtesy of the church leader Irenaeus.

As the New Testament scholar Dr Ian Paul says [in the article linked above],

In the narrative, they are simply extravagant gifts fit for the true ‘king of the Jews’.

And it’s as simple as that. The ‘king of the Jews’ who will come to be seen in Matthew as the king of all creation is worthy of extravagant giving. The gifts presented are worth a lot of money and come on the back of the immense giving of time and energy the magi have put in to come this great distance and pay homage to Jesus.

I wonder whether as experienced Christians our whole approach to giving becomes jaded. The giving of our time and energy can feel no different from a job or from involvement in a social activity or a hobby. The giving of our money can seem like little more than a subscription to a favourite cause, like just another standing order or direct debit from our current account.

Does it take the passion of newer Christians to get us in touch again with what giving could be for disciples of Jesus? Younger Christians are often passionate and inelegant in their worship and their giving. We may look down on their uncouth offering. We may give them a withering look or damn them with faint praise. We may do something similar not just with new Christians but with new churches.

But rather than resort to dressing up cynicism in spiritual language, we might better ask how the giving aspect of our own discipleship might be freshened up. Maybe in our spiritual lives we are tired and worn out. So perhaps that means we need a renewed encounter with Jesus himself.

And surely the God of love and mercy wants to refresh our dry Christian lives. He would love to give us a new vision of his Son through the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives. He would love to bring us to the feet of Jesus again. For there we encounter the One whose whole existence is of self-giving love. He loved us enough to give up heaven for human life – and humble, poor, obscure human life at that. He loved us enough to walk the way of the Cross so that our woundedness might be healed, our sins forgiven, and the power of dark forces broken. He loves us even now so much that he longs to give eternal life and spiritual gifts and blessings.

Yes, when we encounter God the Giver in Jesus Christ, we shall surely be inspired into a renewal of our own giving.

What I’d like to note as we conclude is that in twelve short verses where Matthew tells the story vividly but concisely, the Magi who leave by dodging Herod are men who have been changed from how they were at the beginning of the account. They arrived through the dubious offices of astrology. But they left, having listened to Scripture, having met Jesus, and having listened to God in a dream.

So are we open on this Covenant Sunday to being changed, too? Who are our Gentiles who need the Good News? Are we just sermon-tasters of theoretical Bible students, or are we like the Magi ‘going’ – that is, putting what we have heard into action? And have we encountered Jesus the Giver, who stirs up the extravagant giving of our hearts?

Friends, we too need to be changed. May we be open this Covenant Service and this New Year to the transforming power of Christ through his Holy Spirit.

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Sermon: Epiphany Meets The Covenant Service

Matthew 2:1-12

The Feast of Epiphany, when Christ was revealed to the Gentiles in the visit of the Magi, is one that sometimes gets overlooked in Methodist churches, because it frequently clashes with the annual Covenant Service. Today, I thought I would try combining the two. The Covenant Service is the time when we renew our commitment to Christ, and the Magi are a great example of that. They arrive in Jerusalem saying they have come to pay homage to the child born to be king of the Jews (verse 2) and when they finally get to the house where the child is, they get down on their knees and do exactly that (verse 11). This morning I want to highlight some of the elements in this story that make them into true worshippers that we can emulate in our way in our day.

Firstly, they were listeners. They were more attuned than anyone else in the story to what God was saying and doing. They are the least likely candidates for that, yet that is true of them. They are pagans, they are Gentiles. They are astrologers, following a practice condemned in the Old Testament in the prophecies of Isaiah. They come to the land of God’s chosen people, yet they are the ones who are keen to know the purposes of God and act on them. You might think that Herod would know the Scriptures, but he hasn’t a clue and he has to call in the experts. You might think that those experts, the chief priests and scribes of the people (verse 4), would know their Scriptures. Well, they do, and they quote them. But they do nothing about them.

In this respect, it is sad to say that too many of us in the church are like either Herod or the experts. Either we don’t know our Scriptures at all, or we know them but we don’t put them into practice. It is a scandal that many professing Christians only engage with the Bible in a Sunday morning service. They listen to it being read but never pick it off the shelf in the week. And even among those who do read the Bible frequently, it is too common an attitude to read it and forget it.

In other words, we are shamed by people with less knowledge about the faith than we ourselves have.

In my youth and early adulthood, a relative we used to visit often as a family was a woman we called ‘Auntie Rene’. She wasn’t really an auntie, but she was a relative: she was my Mum’s cousin. But rather than get into complicated discussions about what kind of a cousin that made her to my sister and me, we called her ‘Auntie’.

She had poor health. In 1969 she was given six months to live, but – despite smoking – she stretched that six months out to eighteen years, and she finally passed away in the Spring of 1987. Sometimes we wondered about where she stood on matters of faith, but when she died, someone (I think it might have been my sister) discovered that by her bedside was a Bible. She had been reading Jeremiah.

As we talked about this, we came to the conclusion that in her life Auntie Rene had responded to as much light as she had come across, whether that was the full Gospel of Jesus Christ or not.

I suggest to you that the Magi are a group of people who respond to as much light from God as they find. It starts with following the star, it continues with going to Bethlehem when they hear about Micah’s prophecy and it ends with their obedience to the dream that leads to them avoiding Herod on their way home.

Now if that’s the case, what excuse do we have – we who have had decades of Christian experience? Maybe we feel we don’t know much about our faith – well if that’s the case, can we like the Magi start by responding to what light we already do have?

And if we do have some Bible knowledge, then will we start putting it into practice, unlike the chief priests and scribes? Christian teaching and learning is not simply about filling our heads with knowledge, it’s about assimilating what God wants us to do and then getting on with it.

Now that leads to the second element I want us to consider about the Magi: they were pilgrims. In other words, they went on a journey, a spiritual journey. Based on what light they had received from observing the star, they left their homeland. Based on what light they received when they heard Micah’s ancient prophecy, they travelled from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Based on what light they received in their dream, they took a different route home. We would never have heard of them unless they had been willing to travel on a journey – that is, to be pilgrims.

Now surely the point about a pilgrim is that you travel somewhere with spiritual intentions, but in doing so you leave behind the familiarity of your home in order to arrive at somewhere unknown and in the process to encounter God. To go further in the spiritual life as a pilgrim requires getting off our familiar home territory to go to new places.

And that’s the challenge. How many of us are willing to move away from the places where we feel safe and comfortable in order to draw closer to Jesus Christ? Isn’t one of the problems with the church the fact that too many of us just want to keep everything familiar and cosy? Jesus calls us to an adventure. He calls us to what the Methodist Church called a few years ago ‘Holiness and Risk’.

There are so many areas where our unwillingness to be pilgrims onto new, uncharted ground means that the church withers. It can be in the area of evangelism, where any small efforts we make are all based on the assumption that people want to come to where we feel comfortable, in a church service, rather than us being willing to go to where they feel safe.

It affects our general profile in the community. Only the other day I was having to explain why the regular ecumenical lunch time meeting of the Knaphill ministers happens in a pub, rather than in the Christian coffee shop in the village. We feel it’s important to be off home territory and visible in the wider world. But some Christians think that anything other than doing things with overtly Christian tools is somehow wrong. Back in the 1980s, the Christian musician Steve Taylor satirised this in a song called ‘Guilty by Association’ with lines such as, ‘You’ll only drink milk from a Christian cow.’

More generally, our unwillingness to get away from the safe and the predictable afflicts any possibility whatsoever that the church might innovate in a creative way. Perhaps you’ve been told what the seven last words of a dying church are? ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’

Real disciples of Jesus are willing to go on pilgrimage. They will leave home territory behind to venture somewhere new as part of their longer journey to the New Jerusalem. It goes right back in our heritage to Abram, when he was called to leave his homeland. It is there in the incarnation of Jesus, who left the glory of heaven. We see it here in the account of the Magi. Why, then, do we not see it much in the life of today’s church? Might the New Year and our renewal of the Covenant be the time when we finally take this part of our Christian inheritance seriously?

Thirdly and finally, the Magi were givers. We had a bit of fun with this at Knaphill during the Christingle service on Christmas Eve. Following a throwaway comment, we based the whole service on the theme of ‘Elf and Safety’. We retold the Christmas story in dramatic form, but every now and again an elf would appear and object that something broke ‘elf and safety’ rules. For example, the donkey should not have been allowed to cover so many miles in such a short time, and it should have had a tag on its ear.

When it came to the arrival of the Magi, another elf sprang out when they produced the gold, frankincense and myrrh. He wanted to know whether they had an import licence for these goods.

I think some of us have trouble with the gifts of the Magi. They are so expensive and extravagant. Surely they are beyond us? Or maybe we don’t want to be challenged. So we resort to ancient explanations that the gold symbolises Jesus’ kingship, the frankincense his priestly role and the myrrh his death. We do so, despite Matthew never claiming that meaning in the text and despite none of the major commentaries seriously entertaining that interpretation.

But perhaps the key to understanding this example of devotion is not the contents but the container, not the gifts but the treasure box. The Magi ‘[opened] their treasure-chests’ (verse 11), and I think that is the call to us. What are our treasure chests? What are the things we treasure – which might be money, possessions, talents or a whole lot of other things? Our treasures may well not be gold, frankincense or myrrh, but there are aspects of our lives that are inordinately precious to us, and the Christian disciple lays them down before Jesus as an act of worship and commitment.

I believe that is something well worth thinking about as we make our solemn vows again this year in the traditional words of the Covenant Prayer. Our treasures may not be just money, talents or possessions. They may be people, ambitions or dreams we have had for our lives. All these we bring to the feet of Christ and say, “Here is all that is most precious to me. I offer it to you. Use it as you will.”

That was what made the Magi different. Herod was desperate to clutch tightly onto what he considered to be rightly his. The chief priests and scribes had great intellectual gifts, but those talents were not offered to the true King of the Jews. They were just intellectual dilettantes, not servants of God’s kingdom.

There may be ways in which our churches are mixtures of mini-Herods, priests and scribes and Magi. We have little Herods who secretly find Jesus a threat to their whole way of life. We have priests and scribes who are full of religious knowledge but empty when it comes to practical obedience. But we also have Magi, people who may not be the likely suspects but who actually are more committed to Jesus Christ than anyone else in the neighbourhood.

But in truth, each one of us may be a mixture of the three. Sometimes we are antagonistic towards what Jesus wants of us. Sometimes we are apathetic. And sometimes – thankfully – we are as passionate for Christ as the Magi were.

Let us identify these different aspects of ourselves this morning, so that we may put aside our Herod tendencies and our priestly and scribal complacency, in order that we may renew our to listen for God’s will and obey it the best way we know how; to strike out on the pilgrim way, even if that means going far from what we would call home; and to offer our treasures in devotion at the feet of Christ.

May that be the attitude of our hearts in a few minutes’ time, when we come to recite again the – truly – awesome words of the Covenant Prayer.

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Some Half-Baked Journalism About The Bethlehem Star And Jesus’ Date Of Birth

(Yes, I’m ditching the one-word post titles.)

There’s usually a story like this every December. This year, the Daily Telegraph reports that Australian astronomer Dave Reneke has calculated that Jesus was born on 17th June, 2 BC. I expect the science is all right, but what I do know is that the integration with the Bible – much vaunted in the article – is flawed.

Like Reneke, I don’t see this as undermining faith, but as boosting it – if only the theological side were right. It has long been suggested that the star the Magi followed was some kind of planetary conjunction, so to posit such an event between Venus and Jupiter in the night skies over Palestine at around the right time is nothing new.

My problem comes in making an assumption about dating Jesus’ birth from it. The article claims (without substantiation) that the best guesses for Jesus’ birth are in the 3 BC to 1 AD region. This surprised me, but perhaps scholarship has moved on from what I previously learnt, where a date nearer 6 BC was thought likely. However, the real fault is using the appearance of the star as a marker for the actual birth.

Why? Well, it’s interesting that Mr Reneke claims to work from Matthew’s Gospel, which tells the story of the Magi. He wrongly assumes they arrive (just like children’s nativity plays) at the time of the birth, along with the shepherds. You’ve seen the tableaux of a crowded manger scene, you know what I mean.

However, there is clear evidence in Matthew 2 that the Magi arrive later. First of all, in the Greek Jesus is no longer described as a baby but as a young child – a toddler, perhaps. Moreover, when Herod the Great hears about the birth of a new ‘King of the Jews’, his psychopathic order is to slaughter all boys in Bethlehem under the age of two. It fits with the thought that Jesus had not been born in the immediately preceding time to the Magi’s arrival.

Others add further evidence that I don’t find convincing. They point out that in Matthew, Jesus, Mary and Joseph are now living in a house, not at the back of an inn, as when he was born, according to Luke. This implies they have moved on to a home, probably belonging to one of Joseph’s relatives. This evidence is unnecessary and also flawed. As Kenneth Bailey pointed out many years ago, Luke doesn’t use the Greek word for ‘inn’ in chapter 2 of his Gospel – he uses that later, when he recounts the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The word in chapter 2 isn’t the normal one for ‘house’ either, but it is more likely meant to be that, given the importance of hospitality in the culture. It would have been unthinkable for Joseph’s family not to put up him and his pregnant wife, even if it meant sharing the space with the family animals. It then appears from Matthew 2 that they remain there for a considerable season after the birth, rather than moving in with the relatives from a commercial inn. I suspect the KJV translators were too enamoured with the coaching inns of their day, and it became a traditional English translation.

But either way, I am convinced Jesus was more like a toddler by the time the Magi arrived. Dave Reneke may put the conjunction at 17 June 2 BC, but that theologically presupposes a birth a year or two earlier than that. If the science is right, then my old 6 BC date is out of the window – although one would need to bear in mind what we know about the regularity of the Roman taxation census every fourteen years, so I’m not ready to ditch it completely yet.

The real problem with the findings and the reporting of the research is a failure of dialogue between science and theology. The last thing I would do is question Reneke’s credibility as an astronomer, and I have no problem whatsoever with his motives. However, a little conversation with a New Testament scholar would have got us away from sensational claims about finding Jesus’ date of birth. We know it wasn’t 25th December, but Reneke’s research brings us no nearer knowing the actual date.

Worse than this – and this is not Reneke’s fault – is a glaring example of dumbing-down in the Telegraph. It’s a newspaper that usually rails against such attitudes, but the article contains a terrible example of it. Paragraph 3 reads:

If the team is correct, it would mean Jesus was a Gemini, not a Capricorn as previously believed.

Oh, spare me. Not only does this pander to contemporary credulity about astrology, it also risks the popular idiocy of muddling astronomy and astrology. My father reads the Telegraph. He is a member of the British Astronomical Association. If he has seen this piece, he will suddenly find himself in need of medication for hypertension.

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