Scripture can be found here…
Imagine leaving your home to embark on a thousand-mile journey by camel, all because of an astronomical phenomenon.
We are spending time with some Zoroastrian priests this morning, the Magi. They were natives of Persia (present-day Iran), whose religious practices involved aligning themselves with their god Asha (whose name means “truth”) by way of good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. Other core tenets of their faith included the belief in a messiah; practicing generosity/ charity, in order to bring happiness to the world; the spiritual equality of men and women; and being good for the of sake goodness, and not in hopes of a reward.
And before we go any further, we traditionally have assumed there were three of them, because they brought three gifts. But the text doesn’t specify how many magi, beyond using the plural to refer to them (so, there were more than one). In addition, the text doesn’t specify how many are men and how many are women. It’s likely there were both in the party.
The stargazing of the Magi leads them to take this long and perilous journey, which lands them in a bit of an awkward situation. Imagine, going to the king, and saying, We understand your replacement has been born! Mazel Tov! And having the king reply, well, isn’t that interesting, and go off in a panic to consult with his own batch of wise ones, whose best guess is, Probably Bethlehem?
Notice that not only was King Herod frightened, but the whole town with him. That’s never good. Fearful leaders are dangerous. The people of Jerusalem knew that a fearful king was likely to lash out at everyone.
So they go. And the gospel presents us with one of the essential things about Jesus’ mission while he is still a small child: Jesus’ message is, and will always be, more inclusive than we are comfortable with. The blessed community Jesus comes to found will always welcome those whom others have tried to exclude. There is room for magi.
Now, imagine taking the harder route home, because you were given a dream that the way of peace, and safety, and protecting a child and his family was the right way to go.
Sometimes we are called to take another way home. Sometimes that means we are being invited on an adventure. Sometimes it means we are being encouraged to what the Magi might call “good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.” Sometimes it means we must leave behind what was comfortable for what will be a challenge.
One of my favorite things about the end of the year is reading those lists everyone compiles of what they consider the best movies, TV shows, and books. One of my favorite books of 2021 is a gentle yet revolutionary memoir/ meditation on being an Indigenous woman in this land by Kaitlin Curtice. It’s called Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God. For much of her life Curtice felt somewhat disconnected from her Indigenous roots. But that changed as she entered adulthood, embraced her life as a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, and became more deeply aware of those roots while on a hike one cold January day. She writes,
I currently live on land traditionally inhabited by the Muscogee Creek and Cherokee peoples. If you hike at various places throughout Georgia, you’ll see tiny signs along the trails pointing to the original peoples who spent generations on the land. And in the grace that only land can give, she has held me, a Potawatomi woman, and has reminded me of who I am…
…While hiking with my partner, Travis, and our two sons on that cold January day, I had an epiphany, that moment when the lens of my life zoomed out and I saw, truly, for the first time, what Potawatomi people once experienced—a history of forced removal from Indiana into Kansas with the Trail of Death. In that moment I was reminded of the women who walked, nursing their babies along the way (some 660 miles), just as I stood there nursing my one-year-old son in the middle of a wooded area, the trees breathing over and around us. There, standing over crinkled wet leaves, I suddenly understood what it meant to be Potawatomi. Growing up we said, “We are Potawatomi,” but these words did not carry weight in our lives.
We didn’t name ourselves as Indigenous people or as citizens of a nation, living into our resilience. But that changed as I got older, and I have more fully come to understand that I am Indigenous. I belong to the land, as others belong to the land. I felt the weight of my entire body center down in my feet, as if my steps were slow motion, engaging the pulse of the earth with every movement. I suddenly understood that ancestors sometimes come to us in the oddest ways, and Mystery speaks to us when we are least expecting it. There, with one son by my side and one at my breast, I knew that the journey ahead of me would be different from the one behind me—that is how epiphanies work, after all.
The journey ahead would be different than the one behind… that is how epiphanies work. The moments of “aha!” (or sometimes, “oh no”). For Kaitlin Curtice, her epiphany was both sobering and exciting: in hearing the whisper of the Mystery, the Spirit (which, for her, was also the voice of her ancestors), she was reminded of a past infused with pain, and invited to a future rooted in that past and verdant with possibility, with hope.
For the magi, the road home was a road of care for others, of doing no harm, of doing right, not for a reward, but simply, because it was right. Their road was also a way of hope.
And so we end where we began. On the first Sunday in Advent we lit the candle of hope. A friend remarked, somewhere around December 15th, that the candle of hope is the one that burns the longest—look. It’s still burning. As we embark on a New Year we are invited to live into that hope, just as the Magi did. It might take us on an unexpected path. But it will always take us home.
Thanks be to God. Amen.