On Christmas mornings, while I was growing up, my dad had a saying that was repeated every year. After all the presents had been opened, dad would exclaim, with apparent relief, “Christmas has come and gone.” It was cute, but a terrible saying when you think about it. The real significance and joy of Christmas is something we want to carry all through the year. Hopefully it is not something that comes & then goes.

Yesterday, January 6th, was called the Festival of Epiphany. An “epiphany” is a sudden revelation of truth, an insight, or an appearance of God making Himself known. The 12th day after Christmas is when the church celebrates the arrival of the Magi to see Jesus. They symbolize God’s Epiphany, making Himself known even to all the people of Earth, not just the Hebrews.

The travels of those Magi, or Wise Men, contain an important message for us as we move out into this new year. For one thing, they followed the stars. They were astrologers, & believed the future could be predicted by the variations & conjunctions of heavenly bodies. Even today, many people lean on astrology, believing their destiny is fixed in the stars. It is a fatalism that says your future is fixed, set in concrete, immutably programmed by God for each of our lives. We’ve all heard it expressed by those who say they won’t get shot unless a bullet has their name on it. Others say it was God who took the life of a loved one. This past week Darrent Williams, a star player on the Denver Broncos, was murdered in a drive-by shooting. I heard his coach on TV say, “You never know why God wants to take somebody.”

We’ve heard of people who walk away from a fire or a car crash unhurt & say God saved them because God had things yet for them to do. Eva Peron once said, after a bomb was found on her plane & removed, “God won’t let you die five minutes before you’re supposed to.” It’s a common belief, but there is nothing in the Scripture to clearly substantiate such an idea.

The Bible has a more enlightened approach to destiny. God made us in His image & gave us dominion over the Earth, & He expects us to carry out His plans within the framework of natural laws. God does not go around rescuing those who are especially favored, & discarding others. He reveals His truth to us through science, experience, insight and reason, & expects us to discover the His laws & act in harmony with them.

Another thing the story of the Wise Men teaches us is this: no matter how hard we try to follow the will of God, we get into trouble. The Wise Men were not all that wise. They headed for Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem and stumbled into King Herod. They were going in the right general direction, but they needed a course correction. There are a lot of reasons why bad things happen to good people. Often we don’t have enough knowledge, or we don’t have the fortitude to do what we know is right, or we interpret the data wrongly, or we collide head on with someone else’s plans. No matter how sincere we are, we get out of sync with God, and trouble follows.

You may remember the cowboy who was camping on the prairie. When it came time to cook breakfast he had no firewood. Being a bright fellow, he decided to light the prairie grass & hold his skillet over the flame. A wind came up, so he moved along with the fire, holding the skillet over it. This worked fine, except when his eggs were finally cooked he was 3 miles away from his coffee.

The winds of the world blow upon us, the fire moves away, & we often end up a long way from where we intended to be. The Wise Men stirred up a hornet’s nest in Jerusalem. Herod, a half-Jew himself, was proud to be King of the Jews. He built great buildings & public works to honor himself. He had the support of Rome as long as he kept the peace & collected the taxes. He did this with a heavy, murderous hand, and when these visiting dignitaries said there was a new king to rival Herod, it did not set well. Herod resolved to eliminate this rival, just as he had a number of others, including his own wife & son.

This brings home a fundamental point for us. We either have to worship Jesus or get rid of him. There is not room for two kings in our lives. Of course we’re not violent people like Herod. Sometimes getting rid of Jesus simply means to ignore him. Another good way is to call Jesus a good man, the best example, a prophet and teacher, & let it go at that. However, when we elect to worship him, we find the opposition raises it ugly head. Like the Wise Men we plan the best we can with the knowledge we have, we act on our plans, and we trust God for the outcome. Then when trouble comes we are like Charlie Brown, slinking off the ball field after a huge loss, & muttering, “I don’t understand it. We were so sincere!”

We don’t always understand why there is so much evil, but with the Wise Men we discover that God brings good out of trouble. One of the Bible’s most famous stories is about Joseph, whose brothers sold him into Egyptian slavery. There Joseph became second only to the Pharaoh in authority, & there came a day when Joseph was able to save his own family & countless others from starvation. When he confronted his brothers they were certain he would put them to death. Instead Joseph said, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20)

That kind of thing is a mystery. We don’t understand it, but by faith we accept it. As we head into this new year it is filled with unpredictability. We have no way of predicting what events will befall us in the months ahead. But faith affirms that even though, like the Wise Men, we stumble into evil Herods, God is going to bring good out of it. God used the evil Herod to set them on the right course. Herod called in the teachers of the law & found out that the biblical prophecy said where the Messiah was to be born. The Word of God redirected them to go to Bethlehem.

This reminds us to keep the Bible close at hand as we go into the misty future. When I was a child my grandparents spent winters in Florida, and told me about visiting the Bok Singing Tower with its lovely gardens. On that famous tower with its carillon of bells there is this inscription: “I come here to find myself. It is so easy to get lost in the world.”

The Bible is a place close at hand where we can go to find ourselves. It was written by people of faith who speak to us for God, & interpret history with eyes that see God’s presence in our daily affairs. Like the Wise Men studying the movement of the stars, you & I have got to study the Bible to get our directions and our course adjustments.

This mystery of God’s guidance keeps popping up in our lives. Was it coincidence that this newborn child arrived at the exact time those stars lined up for the Magi? The astronomical event that brought them to Bethlehem could have been predicted centuries before & centuries afterward. Did God plan all that in the beginning when He set the stars in their courses, & plan Mary’s delivery to coincide with it? It’s enough to blow your mind!

The author & pilot Richard Bach tells an incident in his book Nothing By Chance. He was barnstorming in the Midwest in 1966 with an antique biplane. Only 8 of them had been built, back in 1929. He loaned the plane to a friend in a small rural community of Wisconsin, & his friend upended the craft coming in for a landing. The repair looked hopeless because the parts were so rare. They were able to fix everything except one wing strut. Just then a man came up & asked if he could help. Bach answered sarcastically, “Sure, do you happen to have an inter-wing strut for a 1929 Detroit-Parks Speedster, model P-2A?”

The man walked over to his hanger, & came back with the part. The author writes, “The odds against our breaking the biplane in a little town that happened to be home to a man with a 40 year old part to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the event happened; the odds that we’d push the plane right next to his hanger, within ten feet of the part we needed; the odds were so high that coincidence was a foolish answer.”

We have all had mysterious events in our lives we could not explain. Skeptics spin the mathematical probabilities of such things. We Xns prefer to say there are laws at work that our limited knowledge has not yet identified. There is orderliness behind the apparent disorder. There is a living Presence we call The Holy Spirit going before us, & giving guidance that goes beyond any conscious decisions of ours. He cares for us; He guides us, and before long we begin to gain this incomparable assurance that our destiny is safe with Him.

What happened next was the surefire application of God’s guiding hand. Matthew says it simply, vs. 12, AND HAVING BEEN WARNED IN A DREAM NOT TO GO BACK TO HEROD, THEY RETURNED TO THEIR COUNTRY BY ANOTHER ROUTE.

I’m sure we all could report nudging we receive from an “inner voice.” We have to be somewhat careful to check our inner voices against Scripture & filter them through our process of reason. It could be our mother’s voice, not God’s’ or the voice of our own desire. But God does speak to our soul when we read the Bible, when we meditate & pray, when we are inspired by wisdom or beauty. Today we don’t trust dreams, but obviously God used that means also when people believed in dreams. God suits His method to each of us. It is very personal, but God will guide. And we will do well to follow that guidance in the year ahead, even through it means a different road home, a change in direction, a new road map for our lives.

There are so many things to hold us back from such boldness. I recall a story out of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a fire had burned for years in the coal mines, & destroyed the economy of the town. The question was whether the town should be abandoned. The town council voted to leave that decision up to each resident. The reporters were interviewing a woman who said, “I can’t leave here. I’ve been here since I was married, 28 years, & raised my 3 children here. My heart & soul in is this town.”

The love of the familiar held her there, nostalgia for the past. To say, “my heart & soul is in this town” meant her highest loyalty was to a place. Even though the earth was burning under her, she could not pull roots & move out to new adventures & to a new life.

We live in a world that is burning out of control & we had better place our heart & soul elsewhere. The Wise Men left the only world that was familiar to them, with no guarantees. But they discovered, what we will be finding in the months ahead. That when you give up something for God He replaces it with something better.

What better way to launch the New Year than by taking into our lives the symbols of Christ’s life given for the world. Perhaps the prayer we ask will have more meaning than usual. “Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here and on these gifts of bread and wine. Make them be the body and blood of Christ so we might be for the world the body of Christ… By your Spirit makes us one with Christ, one with each other and one in ministry to all the world until your will is fully accomplished. Amen.”

Sermon delived by Rev. Stan Brown on January 7, 2007.