Well Worth the Journey

That we are in the midst of celebrating Advent that is part of the symbolic meaning of the wreath and the candles that are over there. This is our final weekend of Advent, and I just want to read our scripture for today. This is from Matthew 2: "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.' When King Herod heard this, he was disturbed, and all of Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all of the people's chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 'In Bethlehem in Judea,' they replied, 'for this is what the prophet has written: But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.' Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, 'Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me so that I too may go and worship him.' After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star that they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

Let's pray. Dear heavenly father, first of all, we thank you for the privilege of being able to read your scriptures out loud. We thank you that we have them and that we can learn from them. I pray that as we go into this time of listening to your word, you would open our hearts, that we would be willing to listen to what you might have to say to us and willing to learn from you today. We thank you for this opportunity to be together and for this wonderful season to celebrate your tremendous love that became flesh. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you, Val, so much for reading our scripture this morning. Good morning, everyone! Thank you. My name is Mark; I'm also one of the pastors here, and I want to welcome you. It's great to have folks from the venue with us. If you're joining us online or watching on some sort of screen somewhere, you are very welcome as well. This is the last Sunday of 2014, and we're so glad you're with us. As Val mentioned, we've been observing Advent, and for me, the theme of this last month has been kind of stressed to blessed. Maybe you can relate to this because, if I'm being honest, I think every weekend in December, because it's December and there are all sorts of things going on and extra stuff that we pile on into our lives, I've arrived here somewhat hurried, pressured, preoccupied, and stressed.

Then I'd be greeted by incredible music, wonderful messages, and the beauty of this room—the lights and the color and the snowy trees—and it would all wash over me, and I would just kind of relax. Yes, this is what Christmas is supposed to feel like. I don't know if any of you felt that same experience that I did during this last month, but I am so grateful for all of those who made it possible: the people that sing and play instruments, René speaking, the ushers, greeters, children's ministry workers, people working in the office, and people making sure your notes are there, parking, and making sure the campus is clean and in working order. Everyone that makes this happen, it all comes together in such a beautiful way, so we can just thank everyone who lent their hand, their heart, their strength, and their gifts.

But before this all goes back into the box later this week, we're going to stretch the Advent season just a little bit past its traditional ending date because I want to address really one key question: What happened immediately after Advent? Advent is the first coming of Christ to this earth. Well, what happened in the days, weeks, and months that followed? Did anyone notice? Did anyone care? How did various types of people respond? Because that's really the crux of the passage that we're looking at today in Matthew 2.

One of the groups in this story, the Magi, in some ways, you know, they are the heroes of the story. In some way, they care; they notice. In fact, they're willing to go on a journey that takes them far from their home in order to search out this newborn king. There's a lot of intrigue that follows the Magi—a lot of folklore that has been built up over the years. There is far more we don't know about them than what we actually do know. We don't really know their names; we don't really exactly know where they came from. There's lots of guesses. We don't know how many there actually were. But again, to illustrate the type of confusion that has emerged over the centuries, we thought we would prove this by asking some of the children last week what they knew about the wise men. This was a lot of fun.

Check this out: "Yes, those wise guys, they gave presents to baby Jesus. Boys, man, um, they actually got carried by horses, and they gave baby Jesus my freaking—wait, frankincense and gold." "Three, two, three, probably in the desert. Yeah, pretty much in the desert somewhere, not in America. Probably take forever to get there. Yeah, I forget Africa. You'd be like super tired, and you won't have any water because you're like in the desert." "First India, it's well far away, I think. I'm not that sure." "Malachi and Mateo, well, two of them I know their names, and the other ones, the bosses are—I call them stinky and pinky. And bosses are put the stinky pinky part because I don't know the other two names." "Colby, Matthew, Garrett." They did a pretty good job when you come to think of it.

All right, so which name did that one kid get right? Stinky, pinky, and Balthazar? Which one was the correct one? Anyone? None of them were. Balthazar's a made-up name as well because, again, there's a lot that we don't know about them. But here's one thing we do know: they were determined to search out and find the newborn Christ. They were convinced that he was well worth the journey. That's what we're going to turn to today. You can open up your Bible to Matthew 2; we're looking at verses 1 through 12. If you don't have a Bible, you can grab one of the ones in the seat rack in front of you or look at the notes that are in your bulletin or pull it up on your phone, however you care to do that.

At the outset here, I want to thank a pastor and author named Mark Buchanan. I read his sermon on this passage a couple of days ago and it gave me a launch pad for some of my thoughts, so I want to give credit to Mark for that. Before we dive into the journey of the Magi, I want you to think first of all about your own faith journey—about whatever it is you believe or maybe don't believe about Jesus. How did you arrive to where you are today? Now, some of you are thinking, 'Well, I actually arrived here as quite a surprise to me. It's somewhat of a fluke that you're even in this room here because you just came to the Santa Cruz area to visit friends or family. They didn't tell you they were going to drag you to church this morning. You were perhaps too polite to make a fuss, and so here you are.' I just want to say welcome. We hope that you get something out of it.

Some of you are here because you have a hunch that Jesus might actually matter to your life. There's a longing; there's a tug on your heart, and you keep coming back because you're intrigued. You want to discover just a little bit more about him. Others of you, you're here because one day Jesus just showed up in your life. He surprised you even though you weren't looking for him, and your life has never been the same. That's why you're here today. That's my experience. I started going to church as a young boy before I can even remember, not because it was my idea, but because my parents said, 'Get in the car; we're going to church.' And so that's what we did.

If I'm being honest, as a boy, if it was left up to me, I probably would have decided to stay home. But every Sunday, we got in the car, we drove to church, which was located over in Santa Cruz. When we would park in the parking lot, the last thing my father would do was hand me and my brother Paul a quarter to put in the offering in our Sunday school class. They didn't have any check-in system or anything; it was just like, 'We'll see you after church,' and off we would go along with our cousins, and they'd have their quarters from my uncle. Sometimes we would actually go to Sunday school, and sometimes we would just walk right past Sunday school, and we'd walk and we'd walk all the way down Morrissey to Soquel Avenue and Water Street. There was a Rexall drug store; I can't remember which street it was on. There's a Rexall drug store, and we would spend our quarters that were intended for the offering on candy.

Some of you, I know this is breaking your heart to know that I was that evil. Anyone else do something even you stole God's money and spent it on something else? Huh? Come on now, we're in church. My point is I was not innately spiritual. Okay? In fact, this is an example of just how pious my brother and I were. This is what we would do: we would get back to the car, and my parents would say, 'Well, how was Sunday school today?' And we'd be like, 'Hmm, it was really good. You could buy a lot of candy with a quarter back then.' And we'd say, 'You know, they keep giving us candy, so let's just keep coming back.' That's why Paul and I had to become pastors, because God always gets the last laugh.

There's a little boy in the first service sitting there just going, 'Yeah, I'm going to do that too.' He had five bucks. But you know, there's a twist in this story because at nine years old, some of you've heard me talk about this before, I'm minding my own business. I'm sitting in church one day; two girls I know are getting baptized, and then all of a sudden, bing! I have this epiphany: the baptism, the picture of new birth in Christ. I get it! I want it! For the first time in my memory, I know that I'm being called to follow Jesus, and that explains why I'm here today.

Some of you can relate to that because, again, you weren't looking; you weren't trying. Jesus just showed up in your life, and here you are. I think it went that way for the shepherds. In fact, they were sitting out night after night; it was just an ordinary night. You know, they weren't looking for anything other than to have the same amount of sheep in the morning that they had in the nighttime. They're looking for a warm fire; they're looking for maybe a funny story or a joke that hasn't already been told, or they're thinking about when they might be able to see their wives and their children again. Then suddenly, kaboom! There's an angel right in their face, and moments later, this angel is joined by the whole host of heaven—thousands of angels! Heaven lands on them, and they didn't even ask for it. They weren't looking, but within moments, they're traipsing off to find the baby in a manger. Moments later, they're on their knees worshiping the Savior of the world, and some of you can relate to that, and that's just a huge blessing.

But it doesn't always go that way for everyone. Some people search, they strain, they are restless, they are curious, and they are desperate to know the truth about God, but he seems beyond the horizon, outside of their grasp. Maybe it's just the nature of their personality; they're just almost inquisitive to a fault or never satisfied. Or maybe it's the circumstances of their family upbringing or when and where they were born. But the gospel did not land in their lap, and so God gives them a passion to seek him and find him. The Magi, that's the kind of people they were, and maybe just maybe you're like one of those people too.

Because, you know, the Magi, they didn't just endure the night; they welcomed it. They welcomed it because it gave them an opportunity to search the night sky and look to the stars in order to find clues about the God who made them. One night, they see this new star rise, and somehow they're able to connect the dots that will lead them to Jerusalem. Now, again, the Bible doesn't explain how this light appeared. There's all sorts of speculation. Some people think it was a comet or a convergence of planets; others think that it was God's glory manifesting itself. If you're a Bible person, the Shekinah glory that's talked about in the Old Testament. If you read the story in Matthew 2, you'll notice that the star appears, then it disappears, then it reappears, and it moves. So that kind of night for me blows a hole in the kind of natural phenomenon theory.

But whatever it was, the thing that's important here is that God uses that light like a tractor beam of his grace. He goes and he meets these guys where they are, according to their understanding, according to things that get their attention, in order to draw them to Christ. This is one of the reasons why I think Matthew's not making this up, because everywhere else you look in the Bible, the Bible is not real big on looking to the stars for answers about God. Yes, astrology is not something the Bible recommends. We have our scriptures to inform our lives, and so this is a bit of scandalous information that Matthew would not include unless it happened just like this. In his grace, God reaches out to them, and again they connect the dots and set out towards Jerusalem.

It raises the question: well, how do they know to go there? Well, my personal theory—actually, I didn't make this up, but the one that is convincing to me—is that it's because 600 years earlier, when Nebuchadnezzar sacks Jerusalem and he takes away the best and brightest among those people, there's a guy named Daniel. Daniel is a very bright guy, and after he survives the lion's den and proves himself to be very insightful, he can tell the king what his dreams mean and all this kind of stuff. He's appointed as head over this very special group—a group of philosophers, priests, scholars, astronomers—even what our English translation calls magicians in Daniel 2, but it's the same root for Magi. Maybe just maybe when Daniel was hauled off to Babylon, he took some of the Hebrew scriptures with him, and now that he's overseeing all these guys, he's like, 'You know, I noticed you guys have a real interest in the stars. Let me show you something that's really cool because in my scriptures, in what the book we would call Numbers 24:17, it says this: "A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel."'

And just maybe 600 years later, the descendants of those same guys go, 'Star, scepter, Israel,' and they pack up and they head to the west. They show up in Jerusalem asking what it says here at the beginning of chapter 2: 'Where is the one who's been born king of the Jews? We saw a star when it rose and have come to worship him.' Now, this is a miracle of God's grace right here that these guys would make it all the way to Jerusalem with what little they knew. And you've got to love their innocence because it's very unlikely that there were just three of them. The tradition has three because of the three gifts, but in those days, you didn't make a journey like that except in a large caravan. So there's dozens, perhaps hundreds of these guys. This is a spectacle when they're walking around the streets of Jerusalem going, 'Hey, where's the new king?' And they're getting responses like, 'We don't exactly know what you're talking about,' or perhaps even more likely, 'You better tone it down, guys, because there's a king here named Herod. He does not take kindly to anyone who would rival his kingship.'

What the Magi don't know is that by this time, Herod has already eliminated a number of threats, or at least perceived threats, because he was paranoid about his throne. By now, he's already killed his wife, three of his own biological sons, his uncle, his mother-in-law, who wasn't actually a threat; she just meddled in his affairs. No, I'm just kidding. It's a bad joke. Bad boy. Sorry, mom. But this is the kind of sociopath that Herod was. Herod was brilliant on some levels, and he rebuilt the temple. He created a shipping port in Caesarea where they had cement that cured underwater—all the stuff that he was also just a wicked sociopath. So these guys are just treading into dangerous territory when they start raising these questions, and Herod hears word of it. First, he calls in the chief priests and essentially the Bible scholars, the experts, and he says, 'So what does your Bible say about where the Messiah is to be born?'

Just on the face of reading it, it doesn't appear that they went, 'You know, give us a couple days, and we'll get back to you on that. Maybe a week or so, and we'll hit the books, and maybe we can dig something up.' No, it's like they're like, 'Duh, Bethlehem!' They chat; they quote chapter and verse out of Micah and go to the prophecy that says it's good. He's got to be born in Bethlehem. Got anything else for us? How about a fastball, Herod? Then apparently, they just go back to whatever they were doing. I don't know; they go back to bed, or they go back to work, or they go back to their studies. They go back to doing church, whatever they do. What they don't do is actually follow up for themselves. Bethlehem's only six miles away, and yet none of them seem to be bothered. Apparently, they've all got better things to do.

I said at the beginning this story is really about how people will respond to the news about this newborn king, and there's a number of ironies in the story. The first irony is this: the people farthest from the truth are often the most hungry to discover it. Maybe you've seen this or observed this because you can look around the world, and if you don't know that God is pursuing you, if you don't know that God has taken the initiative to reach you, you may not know that through no fault of your own, but there's something in the human heart that wants to pursue God and reach him. Some of those ways are desperate and might involve just rigorous ritual or strict rules or depriving oneself in very severe ways as if to prove to this God that it's beyond my reach. Somehow this will impress you. Sometimes it takes even dark and insidious forms where people will kidnap and kill and maim in the name of God. They're far from the truth, but they have a passion to discover it, even a passion that becomes twisted.

But on the other hand, the other irony is this: the people closest to the truth are sometimes the least motivated to act on it. This is where the story becomes a little too close for comfort for me because, you know what? I'm a lot more like the chief priests and the Bible scholars than the Magi in this story. In fact, this story really serves up a caution to any of us who would consider ourselves biblically informed because knowledge is great, but if that knowledge doesn't lead us to worship, look good is it? I mean, I think about my own situation. Yeah, I go to three services every single weekend. This church is my second home. Right over in my office, there are hundreds of books about Jesus at my fingertips. I've got more English translations of my Bible than I can count, and Hebrew and Greek and great theologians all on my computer. Like you, I can go into the internet, and there is a universe of biblical Christian knowledge available to us like at no other time in history. But let's not fool ourselves: knowledge and worship do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Knowledge is great; we should pursue it, but it does not automatically lead to worship. That's one of the sad ironies of this story. The Magi knew so little, and yet they acted on the truth that they had, and it led them to Jesus. Well, if there are folks in this story that have little but will do much with it, there are others that have a lot in the way of knowledge and will do next to nothing with it. There's one other type of person in this story—there's Herod. And Herod, oh, he's interested in the truth. Herod's even got people who will get the truth for him, and he will act on it—not to worship, though, but to defy it, to try to rebel against it, to try to squash it. Again, this is ironic, but Herod actually gets two things right in this story.

Herod is absolutely right when, first of all, he knows that Jesus is worth searching for. Look what he says to the Magi: he says, 'Go,' this is verses 7 and 8, 'Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me so that I too may go and worship him.' Now, of course, he's lying. He's not going to worship Jesus; he's not going to bring him any gifts. If he brings a gift, it's going to be long and shiny and razor sharp. But this is still great advice. It might seem odd for me for you to hear me saying you should take Herod's advice here, but you really should. This is a great application: go and search carefully for the child. That's really the sermon in a nutshell because when you do, guess what? You're going to be able to report to others what he's like so that they might worship him also. Great application of the story: go and search.

And then there's another thing that Herod gets just absolutely correct here, which is this: there's only room for one king. He's right in his reign here. And maybe because he's a king, he knows that Jesus is either your Lord or your rival. Because of this, Herod doesn't try to mess around. He doesn't try to form some sort of committee of leadership in his life. He knows it's either me or him; it can't be both. But I think for us, as people who grow up in a democratic society and we're used to separation of powers and president and Supreme Court and Congress and stuff, I think that we're tempted to try to construct that in our own minds. Like, 'Okay, Jesus, you can be president, but you know, I'm still, you know, in the Senate or a speaker of the house or whatever I am. So, you know, you can rule so long as you rule in the way that I like, or else I might have to vote you out of office or veto that little amendment right there.'

I mean, I'm stunned at how easily we pick and choose what areas of Jesus we invite to rule and what areas we push him away in our lifestyle choices, our priorities, our ethics. I'm stunned, but not really, because I do this myself all the time. Because you know why I do this? You know why you do this? Because Herod is in us. And so there is this ongoing battle for who will rule over our hearts and our lives, and every day that battle exists because we're not so much different than Herod. Oh, I'm sure by a matter of degrees we are different, but at the root, we understand that only one king can sit on the throne.

Well, what do we do? Because let's face it, we all try to hedge our bets here. We all fail in this area. We fall back on God's grace. We say, 'I don't have the want, Lord. You know I have this little mustard seed of faith, but I need so much more.' And I'm reminded that God meets us where we're at, that God draws us to himself. Even when we duck away into the darkness and get off the path and our sin gets the best of us, he pulls us back out into the light. He says, 'Come on, let's go,' and he brings us back into his presence where we behold the one true king. Maybe that happens in worship on a weekend for you, or it happens at times when you're praying by yourself, or you're just on a walk and you're thinking about him. But at various times, in various ways, he comes back into our lives and he reminds us that there is one true magnificent, lovely king who, when we encounter him, we just want to give him everything we have because he's worthy of it.

And that's what happened to these Magi. When they come, they just want to give him their best, and so they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. For centuries, Christians would draw out some significance here, and they would say, 'Well, the gold was because he's a king, and the frankincense is because he's divine, and frankincense was used in the worship services, and they gave him myrrh because he would die on the cross, and myrrh is used in the embalming process.' All of that is cool insights, but I doubt the Magi knew any of that. I think they just wanted to give him the best they had, and there's something wondrous about a gift that's simply given in love. Because after all, it's our hearts that God really desires.

I think I got a little bit of a glimpse of this Christmas morning. The first person awake in our house was my daughter, ten-year-old Anna, and she could not wait for the rest of us to get up. She kicked us all out of bed before the sun. She's so excited, but it wasn't because this year she was so excited about getting presents for herself. It was because she had, on the slide—we none of us knew this—but she had made and prepared a present for each one of us in the family. She was particularly excited about what she made for me, although it was pretty much like what she made for everyone else. I'm holding up this package, and she sits me down on the couch next to her, and she's just giggling and squealing like only a little ten-year-old girl can do. She's just so excited she could hardly stand it. 'Open, open, open it, daddy!' And I open it up, and I pull out what most would view as a pretty humble gift—just a piece of plywood that she found in the garage, I presume. She adorned it with all sorts of words and phrases like mine says, 'Father, family, dad, loved one.' And then by then, she's on my lap now, and she's pointing out all these different words: 'Loving, brave, handsome.' I liked that one; that was cool. Go on, Anna!

She even says, 'A father, a blessing unto this family.' She has as well placed Jesus in our hearts. She puts Ephesians 6:1-2: 'Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother.' She underlines 'father' but not 'mother.' That was cool; go on! But the one that got me, the one that just melted me—and she was just in sheer delight—this one right here: 'Like father, like daughter.' You see, this is hardly made out of gold or some precious element, but what is really valuable to a God that has everything? I mean, isn't every gift intrinsically humble? And isn't there something incredibly precious to the Father when his children just want to crawl up on his lap and say, 'Here, this is the best I have, and I just want you to have it'? In our cases, it's just our hearts. Everything else follows after that: busy asks us for our time, our resources at times, yeah, but it all flows from the heart.

So in this new year, if you're looking for something to kind of set your sights on, something that will make your life richer and deeper and more meaningful, go and make careful search of that child. Ask God to give you a hunger, a passion to seek him in greater ways. Ask him to give you a delight to be in his presence, an eagerness to run to him. Because let's face it, otherwise we're just kind of distracted. We plod through life and get ourselves all stressed out or give ourselves to things that are of varying importance. But there's nothing more important, nothing more bright, nothing more magnificent than the one true King who was born in a manger, who is Emmanuel, the God who is with us. When he ushers you into that place where you can see him through the eyes of faith, it will fill you with a sense of, like with the Magi, it filled them with a sense of courage. They would defy Herod in order to be faithful to the new, the true King, and they had such clarity after that they would be willing to change their course to go home by another way.

Sometimes that happens to us because when you're in the presence of the King, nothing and no one can come close to his glory. Amen? Amen.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, again we thank you for just the grace to be able to be here today, to gather together as your church. Lord, there will be many things waiting for us at home. There are burdens, griefs, some very, very deep and profound that are being carried in the hearts of people here today, or uncertainties about the future. But Lord, I pray that in this moment we would be able to trust you to be there for us in those circumstances, that we would simply push through all of that, that you would draw us by your Spirit to just want to kneel before you, to adore you, to see you through the eyes of faith. And Lord, I pray that our hearts would swell with love and delight and awe and wonder that would eclipse all those other things, that you would bless us in that way, and that you would, having blessed us and given us a taste of just soaking in your presence through worship, we just wouldn't be satisfied with things far less mundane or far less glorious, I should say. So God, we ask this now with hearts of gratitude and expectation, praying this in Jesus' name, and all God's people said, Amen.