The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Some years ago the actor, Tom Conti, performed a one man show retelling the story of Jesus through Joseph’s eyes. It included a version of the nativity story which highlights the problems of this morning’s gospel.
‘Three Wise Men – they come into a cave where there is a new born baby, an exhausted young mother and a father who is a drained emotional wreck.
And they say, ‘We have seen a star in the sky.’
‘So – it’s night!’
‘This star has lead us here that we might worship this child and bring him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.’
‘You couldn’t find a rattle?’
‘It is written in the stars that this new baby will be the King of all the Jews, as we said to Herod’
Herod! You said this to Herod?
Yes.
Herod King of the Jews?
Yes.
So you told the old king of the Jews that a new king of the Jews has been born – did you?
Yes.
And you call yourselves wise men?
The season of Epiphany is the time of manifestation – the word means a showing forth, a coming to light. It begins with the wise men but the wisdom of the wise men lets them down; they abandon the trajectory of the star to rely on their narrower vision – royal children must be found in palaces; so they go to Herod and set in motion events which will lead to a massacre of the children of Bethlehem. And they call themselves wise men. Though in this season of Epiphany we see the significance of Jesus beginning to be unveiled it is still possible to misunderstand and make tragic mistakes.
Now it might seem that the author of the epistle to the Ephesians has no such qualms about our ability to receive the manifestation of the mystery of Christ. He speaks as though what was kept hidden in the past has now been fully revealed. He speaks with what can sound like a kind of sectarian fervour; nobody knew this secret until now; it was kept secret for centuries past but now we know; we are the privileged recipients of God’s great mystery, which only we can tell you. Of course when we ask what this great secret is, the answer now can seem rather like old news – the kingdom of God is for everyone equally. We need a moment of imaginative insight to grasp the wonder of what is being said here – we need a comparison. We might perhaps think of something like the genome project – the research into identifying all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA. Imagine if a single group of scientists had worked on this for many years, ploughing into the project large amounts of money, time, effort and self sacrifice, in the expectation that in the end they would reap justifiable rewards for their labours; but then in the end someone takes their results and makes them available to everyone for free. So the laboratory of Judaism in which God seems to be developing his vision for humanity suddenly in Christianity is opened up to the whole world. It is not that Judaism didn’t anticipate its results being made available to all nations; our reading from Isaiah makes that clear. But what is anticipated is a kind of recognition and vindication of those who have given most to the project. In Christianity it is as though the project has produced unexpected results in the figure of Jesus Christ which few recognized or accepted; and yet these astonishing results are to be shared with everyone. And so today we celebrate the representatives of this universality in the three wise men – strangers from the non Jewish world the first to share in the universal vision.
And yet of course these strangers make a disastrous mistake and the universal project brings tragedy in its wake for the children of Bethlehem.
The purpose of God in its vast and varied scope includes bringing into order and harmony all the discordant forces which prevent humankind from living together in unity. And the task of the church is to demonstrate that the process has begun in its own corporate life. And yet it is clear from the gospels and the epistles that this was always an uphill struggle. Paul’s congregations are divided by wealth and poverty, gender, race, and differing spiritual priorities; the parables of Jesus often seem to refer to the difficulties that established believers have with new comers to the faith; with the often repeated principle that the last shall be first and the first last Jesus is constantly undermining our sense of what is owed to us, what is fair, what gives us our sense of place and identity.
We should pause for a moment and think about what establishes human identity. It seems to be based on distinctions and boundaries. My sense of who I am comes from language, manners, and appearance, prosperity and education, cultural expectations set up in the family in a particular time and place. And anything which differs from that, anything which challenges my learned assumptions, threatens my very identity. And it doesn’t take much to threaten that identity. If Christmas is a time for scattered members of a family to come together then it can also be a time for recognizing how much our lives have developed differently and how our desire for family unity can be threatened by the smallest things. And those kinds of divisions can also be played out in a church congregation where differences of educational or cultural or religious background can lead to constant flickers of division and misunderstanding and hurt – and yet we are called to be an example to the world – and I don’t have time to refer to the divisions in the Anglican communion!
So is this mystery of human unity really a hopeless ideal, even a delusion? Will my sense of self be in danger of disintegration the more universal my vision tries to be? Our Archbishop in his New Year’s message reminded us that ‘In a world where risk and suffering are everybody’s problem, the needs of our neighbours are the needs of the whole human family.’ His message reflects the universalist aspiration of Ephesians – the wise men from the east are as much part of the family as the shepherds down the road. But how do we make that aspiration real? That perhaps is our challenge for 2010 – to expand our sense of family to see how far we can go in developing a universal vision. And we may begin by seeking a new unity with those who are strangers to us here and then expand our horizons to those who are strangers in our street, in our work place, on the underground or in the photograph in a newspaper report from somewhere the other side of the world. For if we fail to follow where God is leading us, if we fail to open our eyes to a larger, wider vision of who we are, who we can be, then we may leave behind us a tragedy as the wise men left a tragedy for Bethlehem.