08 January 2012

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What in the world is Matthew up to, telling this story about the magi? Trying to burnish, to polish up Jesus’ reputation? Heaven knows it needs some shining up after the way Matthew has thoroughly tarnished Jesus’ pedigree in the chapter previous to this morning’s reading. I mean really Matthew, you begin your Gospel by outlining Jesus’ ancestry in a very, very peculiar way. Proper genealogy of the times is confined to a listing of one’s forefathers – and I do mean fore fathers. Women were next to nobodies and really didn’t count much as ancestors; but Matthew, you choose not only to include some women in Jesus’ ancestry, but women who not even the most ardent feminist is going to be all that thrilled about.

Not too many generations into this genealogy Matthew has constructed we hear that Jesus is descended, among others, from one Tamar – about whom you most assuredly did not hear in Sunday School, she not being tops on anyone’s list of Holy Women. The story goes that Tamar tarted herself up – played the whore at the side of the road – and seduced her father-in-law – yes, her father-in-law – seduced him into impregnating her. Jesus’ pedigree is not improved upon any when Matthew a little later drags one Rahab into the family line. To make a long story short, Rahab is remembered in scripture as a foreign prostitute – albeit one with a heart of gold – who hid Israelite spies in her chamber above the city walls. Then there’s Ruth; if you know the whole story of Ruth, you know that she proved to be a bit of an accomplished seductress herself – but what’s worse is that she was a Moabite – a questionable people whose ancestry was traced back to a particularly sordid encounter between Lot and one of his daughters. (If you want to know more about that encounter, ask me later, but for now let’s just say there are reasons that story hasn’t been included in the Sunday School curriculum either.) And if that all those charming ancestors weren’t bad enough, we hear that Jesus, though descended from King David, is so by one Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah – and if that sounds adulterous in your ears, you’re right, it was. And the icing on the genealogical cake of course is that Mary is pregnant, but not by Joseph to whom she in engaged. Sounds a bit like a telenovela doesn’t it? And whoever said Scripture isn’t . . . . . . . . interesting? Truth be told, it’s one big soap opera.

And then Matthew has to bring in the magi. Now, the word magi is the plural form of magos, and though tradition and various translators have tried to pretty things up by saying the magi were kings or wise-men from the east, the word magos is not nearly so benign. A magos was a sorcerer, one who practiced magic (and you can hear that our English word magic comes from mangos/magi) – and it is not insignifcant that a magos was someone highly suspect to those in and of Jesus’ time and culture. So -- it is eye-brow-raisingly scandalous Mary (and apparently Mary, unchaperoned) would let these magicians (and males not related to her), these practitioners of the dark arts, into her home. One is known by the company one keeps, after all, and the religious authorities of Jesus’ time had decreed that anyone who had anything whatsoever to do with magicians ought to be put to death. And that Jesus should be adored by these pagan witch-doctors, that Jesus should receive gifts from such as these – well, Jesus’ lineage was bad enough – and this most certainly does nothing to make Jesus look better. This is just the sort of laundry one does not hang out in public for everyone to behold – it’s the sort of stuff one keeps in the closet – way, way, way back in the closet. But no, Matthew has to drag it all out into the open.

An alternative to celebrating this Sunday as the Epiphany of Our Lord is to remember the Baptism of Our Lord. In Matthew’s Gospel the story of Jesus’ baptism comes on the heels of the sordid genealogy we just heard, on the heels of the story about Jesus and his mother consorting with sorcerers. And with those things fresh in our ears, we hear that after Jesus has been baptized, as he is coming out of the water, “immediately the heavens were ripped apart” and that “the Spirit of God descended upon him.” Now, given the tarnished reputation with which Jesus has come to the water, one might reasonably expect perhaps something like a lighting bolt might come down and strike this character – or at least a voice from above saying, “You’re going to have to work very hard buster to clean yourself up.” But instead, we hear that “the Spirit of God” descended upon Jesus “like a dove.” Like a dove – a symbol of peace. And the voice that did come from heaven – well it couldn’t be more of a surprise – not an accusing, condemning voice, but a voice that declares, “this one,” the one descended from a whole lot of scandal, from a whole lot of garbage, this one who has been in the company of some disreputable characters, “this one is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” How unusual. How irregular. How so very not-very-religious of God.

In Matthew, the genealogy and the story of the magi are a prelude to the story of the baptism of Jesus, and together with the baptism of our Lord tell us that in Jesus – whom we confess to be God from God – in Jesus, God chooses to enter into the sordid messiness of history, into the sordid messiness of our own particular histories. In Jesus, rather than standing apart in places immaculate, God chooses to be born out of scandal, to be born into scandal. In Jesus, God does not turn away from “those people” who are foreign to the ways of right religion, but wills to draw to the side of Very God from Very God those who are about as ungodly a bunch as anyone could imagine.

And it is into this story that we ourselves are brought when we are baptized into Christ Jesus. In our own baptism, God says to us, “I don’t care where you’ve come from. I don’t care about the messes of your life. I don’t care about the dirty laundry. I don’t care about what’s hidden in your closets. Rather, what I care about,” says God, “is that you hear and know that you are my beloved daughter, you are my beloved son. With you I am well pleased.”

But let us remember this: this baptism is not of our own doing – even as the journey of the magi was not their own doing. There were led by a star – a star of God’s own making. They were drawn to the side of Jesus, brought by a star, even as we were brought or came to the font not of our own doing  – but by God’s Spirit working through parents and other external means. And baptized into Jesus, each of you has received the promise given to Jesus when the voice sounded from heaven and said, “You are my own child, my beloved, and in you I am well pleased.”

And that is why that font is so important in our lives – for there, with the water, God has spoken to each of you and by name, and has said: “I don’t care about the messiness of your past or present, and as for the messes you will yet make in the future, you are mine, my beloved, and nothing, absolutely nothing you can do will ever make me go away. Not ever."

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.