Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Shakespeare observes, "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." Herod's head lay uneasy. His original claim to the crown, as king of the Jews, was dubious. The common people hated him, considered him a foreigner. It was common knowledge that Herod was not a true sovereign but a disgusting puppet - Rome yanked all his strings. He was Caesar's toady in Palestine. Herod was powerful and paranoid - a dangerous combination. He saw enemies around every corner, had two of his own sons murdered because he thought they were plotting to usurp his throne. So when these "magi" (astrologers, wise men, magicians, sorcerers - not kings - but wealthy, important people nonetheless) - when they arrived, from Persia or Babylon, with tales of a guiding star, and began inquiring around Jerusalem where the new heir to the Jewish throne had been born, so they could go kowtow before him, Herod went ballistic. It was very much in character for Herod, with murder in his heart, to try to trick the visitors into finding out for him where this rival king was. When the wise men wised up and skipped town, after seeing the baby, leaving Palestine by a different trade route, it was very much in character for Herod to order every young male in the Bethlehem to be killed. Just to be sure. The slaughter's not recorded in secular histories, but it fits very well what we know of Herod the Great. There are several ways to talk about the Wise Men. We could emphasize the conflict of kingships: Herod's way of being king, and Jesus' way. The way of power verses the way of love. That contrast shows up quite clearly, here at the beginning of Jesus' life, in the contrast between King Herod and King Jesus. And it shows up again near the end when Jesus is facing Pilate, and Pilate perceives him as being uncooperative and asks him, "Don't you know I have the power to send you to the electric chair." And Jesus puts him down: "You wouldn't have any power at all if God hadn't given it to you." Different kinds of power. Pilate has the soldiers nail a sign on the cross above Jesus' head saying, "King of the Jews." We don't know quite what he meant by that, but he refused to change it. Different kinds of kings.

Or we could talk about the trusting obedience of the Wise Men, following that star, doggedly, wherever it led. They didn't ask a lot of questions, didn't talk much about it, they just did it. The panel of religious experts Herod hastily assembled in Jerusalem knew a lot more than the Wise Men about where Messiah was to be born. (They had the "book-learnin'" on the subject.) "In Bethlehem," they told Herod. But none of them (as far as we know) got off his backside to go and see for himself. (It would not have been far. Bethlehem, today, is like a suburb of Jerusalem.) But the Wise Men went, and the shepherds came. The Word either becomes flesh, or it becomes words. It either gets under our skin, becomes part and parcel of us, activate us, or it becomes something to talk about, to talk to death, perhaps…as Herod's experts apparently did. They were hearers of the word, but not doers.

This week I heard a wonderful definition of Christian love: Christian love is sharing God's generosity with one's neighbors. I like that, because it's simple and easy to remember, but also because it identifies God as the source of our love, and (most of all) because it emphasizes doing not feeling. God's generosity (his extravagant love)has been revealed to us not in feelings but in actions - most notably in God's act, which we memorialize today at this communion table: his voluntary and sacrificial dying (an act, not a feeling). And when we rise from the table, in Christian love, we share God's generosity, that extravagant love, with our neighbors - in actions, not feelings. Love is something we do.

Let's remember mainly today that the Wise Men were gentiles, non-Jews. One commentator calls them "Gentiles in the extreme." In fact, they were pagans in Jewish eyes. They worshipped the stars, and practiced magic and sorcery. Certainly they did not worship the one true God, Yahweh. Yet, already, even at the time of our Lord's birth, the Word about God in Christ was leaking out of Judaism and into the wider, Gentile world. Soon it would do so in an enormous way. Soon the old wine skin of Judaism would burst by the expansive power of Christianity's new wine, and the Gospel would spill over into all the world. John Wesley called the Wise Men "the first fruits of the Gentiles." This "one who is born King of the Jews" has a way of breaking down the walls that divide people.

The most outlandish promise God made to the nomad, Abraham, two thousand years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, was not that he would have a land of his own, nor that he would bear a son in his old age, but that his descendents would be a blessing to all the world. Things just didn't work that way in Abraham's days. The world was an unknown place, full of unknown peoples. Gods were proprietary. Yahweh belonged to the Jews, Baal to the Canaanites, Zeus to the Greeks, Jupiter to the Romans, and so forth. But Christ would break down the dividing walls, unifying all the world, and making the God of Abraham the God of millions. Abraham did become a blessing to all nations - through Jesus.

We talk a lot of talk today about inclusion. And most of it is right minded. We must take care to include in our businesses, and our schools, and our churches, and our neighborhoods, people who do not fit the stereotype. We need to do that for our own sakes, as well as for theirs. (Exclusivity always hurts the excluder more than it hurts the excluded. We don't grow in a world of clones, where everyone is just like us.) But the difficulties of inclusion are often understated. Fact is, it is easier to deal with people who talk like us, and look like us, and share our history and values…easier and less threatening. And that comfort level is hard to overcome. I grew up in a day when black people and white people in America hardly ever associated. It wasn't racial hatred, at least not in my home and among my friends. We didn't belong to the Klan, or ride around in pick up trucks with shot guns. I don't think it was even a sense of white superiority, although there probably was some of that, unspoken but there. More than anything, it was the threat of massive change that made cowards of us. So much was built on segregation. So much depended on it. To live a different way, it seemed, would be thoroughly disruptive. How did it happen that people were shaken loose from that comfortable, fearful inertia? Some of the impetus came from politics and the courts, some from the courageous insistence of black people themselves, and (in case we forget) a very significant impetus came from religion. Black pastors not only leading their own people toward freedom, but reaching out to white pastors, and to the white community in the name of Jesus. And finding a common tie there. "If anyone says he loves God and hates his neighbor, he is a liar," we were reminded. "In Christ there is no East or West…." And we knew it was true.

We still have racial barriers to get over. And barriers of differing nationalities, and ethnicities, and languages, and educational levels, and genders. And there is a growing divide between those who believe in God and those who do not. Christ can bridge the gap - even to the unbelievers. It's a small world, smaller than it ever was. And we're all on this planet together. Let Christ introduce you to your neighbor. Communion brings us together and makes us all one. Nothing, not any one of our differences nor all of them put together, can separate us from each other when we understand that Christ died for us (for all of us) while we were yet sinners…" As the good people we pretend to be we are divided by many distinctions, but as sinners we are all desperately one. When we understand that, Christ heals us - and heals our differences.