Materials

Searching For A Star #3



Star Gazing
Matthew 2:1-10
R. Todd Bouldin


Well, if you are not feeling the rush of Christmas by now, you probably won’t be feeling it this year. So many gifts still to buy, so many cards to stamp, so many of those “personal” newsletters still to write, and so many events to attend. And the traffic is horrible. Parking spaces are nowhere to be found. And in the midst of all of this, we are supposed to get reflective enough to welcome our Savior again into our world. You may have told yourself, “This year, I am cutting back. I’m going to have the shopping done on time. The presents are going to be wrapped, mailed and delivered by this Sunday. The tree will be up, the house will be decorated, and we’ll get to the airport on time this year.” And now Christmas is a week away, and it isn’t happening. The question is how you will do all of this and still welcome the interruption of the Christ child?

Prayer

The family rises early on Christmas morning to greet the day and to enjoy that most perfect of holidays. The ham and the trimmings are all ready in the refrigerator, the coffee is percolating, the presents lie perfectly wrapped under the tree, and the lights of the Christmas tree light up the room with a warm glow. It feels like it’s going to be a good day. It’s been a rough year with this family. Dad has been working a lot, and Mom is pulled in a thousand directions. Things have been cold and tense lately, but they hope that the holidays will give them some needed rest and time together.

Mom and Dad get the children up and tell them Santa has come to see these good boys and girls. They were more nice than naughty this year. The family has little left over every month after the mortgage and the bills, but they were so determined that this year will be the perfect Christmas that they ran up the credit card so they could buy gifts for the kids and for each other. This year, everyone will get what they want. Dad is getting an IPOD, Mom is getting a new couch and chair, and the children are getting Xbox, a Nano, and a King Kong action figure. Mom is worried that they spent too much money on Christmas this year, but anything to make it a perfect day in a year of so much imperfection.

The children race to the tree, still barely awake, and unwrap their gifts. Little David opens the Xbox, and immediately he begins to pout then cry, “I wanted a Playstation, not an Xbox.” Little Laura opens a box to find a King Kong action figure, and she throws it to the ground demanding that she have a Malibu Barbie instead. Lest we think of this action as reserved only for the children, Dad opens his IPOD, and he says nothing, but he secretly wishes it was the one with the video player. Mom’s gift wasn’t delivered on time for Christmas, so today she will smile and act as though it doesn’t bother her to watch the others opening their gifts. Then she goes to the kitchen to finish the Christmas lunch, and dad and the kids leave her alone as she creates every dish they love. It’s a lot of work, but it’s ok if it will make it a perfect day. After two hours of preparation, Dad yells from the chair where he is watching television, “When is lunch going to be finished? You shouldn’t have cooked so much. You can’t ever do anything on time.” Tears roll down Mom’s cheeks as she sets the table, and she wonders why they can’t just enjoy one day that is good. Why does everyone have to be so dissatisfied, always wanting something else. The kids are yelling at each other, the Xbox requires a battery that they don’t have, Dad is hungry, and Mom is wondering how their perfect day of Christmas cheer turned so quickly into a day of disappointment and dissatisfaction. Whatever happened to peace, joy and glad tidings to all?

No matter where you find yourself in life today, you will feel the yearning again this year for Christmas to be more than it turns out to be. It may be the frustration with the traffic and the lines, or it may be that this year you will celebrate Christmas alone for the first time, or you may just not have the money to give what you would like. Family divisions, marriage problems, and the feelings of loneliness emerge at Christmas like no other time of the year. Psychologists tell us that Christmas is one of the most difficult holidays for many people because the songs we sing and the fantasies we build around Christmas set up expectations that Christmas will be something that it most likely won’t be. There is an unfulfilled yearning that creeps into our souls at Christmas, brought on by our fanciful dreams, and the dread that Christmas won’t quite live up to those dreams. Despite the fact that Christmas often disappoints us, we yearn for it to bring us peace and joy in all of the places where we are unfulfilled. This year, we tell ourselves, we will find true love, or a peaceful family, or we will receive all that we’ve been wanting.

A week away from Christmas, you can actually decide now to have a different experience of Christmas this year. Rather than ignoring the yearnings or working frantically to satisfy them, you can let the yearnings lead you to Jesus Christ. Feeling those deep yearnings is the best way to get ready for the birth of Jesus.

Some will try to numb the old yearnings with alcohol, or shopping, or the delight of children or grandchildren, but the promises and hopes of the season will keep poking through. You won’t be able to escape the yearnings that accompany the season. At some point, all of us will stop to wonder about things like peace on earth, joy to the world, and whatever happened to glad tidings to all. But regardless of how much we yearn, we still will allow ourselves to dream Christmas dreams. It is just irresistible at this season to hope all over again.

One of the most impressive things about the human being is our capacity to dream, and to yearn. We just keep thinking that over the horizon is the star that is going to be the one we are waiting for, the one that will save us from another year of searching, the one star that will allow us finally rest because we’ve found something that we can truly adore, something that will again fill us with awe, something that will allow us experience a perfect day. Finding something to worship and adore is among our better dreams, and is at the core of many of our Christmas yearnings.

Perhaps you feel that I’m being too cynical this morning. You expect this Christmas to be a great one. Your grandchildren will come to visit, or you will celebrate your first Christmas together as a married couple, or you will experience the holiday for the first time with your newborn child. It may not be on Christmas Day, but a few months into your marriage you will rise to discover one morning that you have married a human being who is limited in their ability to love you perfectly. You may look into the eyes of your newborn with awe and wonder on Christmas Day, but it won’t be long until you realize that this child was not conceived by the Holy Spirit. Did it even take six months to lose your adoration for a new job, or a new house, or your new church? We can adore anything for a few months, but then we realize that nothing human can satisfy our desire to know, experience and love more.

So, if your Christmas does seem like the perfect day, just know that it is just a glimpse of the adoration your heart is created to experience. And if Christmas doesn’t meet your expectations, and you feel a great yearning for something more, just know that it is a yearning that can lead you to the place where all yearnings cease. Our satisfaction and our yearnings can both lead us to adore our Savior this Christmas. The rock band U2 sing a song on their latest CD called Yahweh:

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

If you’ve been wishing on a star, follow the star that leads you to the place where your heart is finally at home and you find all that you’ve been longing to adore. Your heart is created to adore and worship Jesus Christ. Until you have woken to the presence of Jesus Christ here on earth with us, none of your other relationships will seem right. The holidays will only be disappointing. It is too much to ask of another person, or of any day of the year, to make our lives right. Only God can make your life right and satisfy your deepest yearnings. The irony is that once we have directed our yearnings toward Him, we are then able to enjoy our relationships and experience each day rightly and with joy. That is because we are not trying to suck the life out of them, or trying to make them satisfy our longings. We can receive the people in our lives, and the day we are given, as gifts. Nothing will be right until we resolve this yearning to find God who is Emmanuel, God with us. “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”

We know that when Jesus was born, there was a great expectancy that a new king would be born who would make the world right again. The Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus wrote about the common belief that someone was being born who would weave the nations into a universal empire. The Jewish historian Josephus claimed that Messianic expectations were running high among the Jews when Jesus was born. The classical poet Virgil described in his Messianic Ecologue a golden era that a new king would bring to all of the earth. So Romans, Greeks, Jews and writers from Persia and Asia were all hoping that somewhere, somehow a new Savior King would be born, if only he could be found.

Among those searching for this One who would set the world right again were some wise men from the East who had been following a Star and made it as far as Jerusalem before they got lost. We don’t know much about these wise men, but they probably came from Persia and belonged to a class of philosopher-kings called Magi who were very educated and skilled in astronomy. Day after day, they followed the stars, all which were in their normal patterns. If a new star were to arise, that would mean something incredible had happened. It would mean that God had broken into the world and sent a new star.

Jews had spent some time in Persia after their exile in Babylon, and so perhaps these wise men knew the Hebrew Scripture from Isaiah 60, which says, “Arise, shine, for your light has come. And the glory of the Lord has risen among you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” So perhaps it is not surprising to see wise men travel from the East to follow a star in search of a newborn king. It is easy to believe, not because of the history and some of the assumptions I just shared with you, but because we still are looking for the same thing. We have chased a lot of stars too, but they all seem just like another rotation around the same old patterns of hope, disappointment, promises and disillusionment. Christmas will end up not meeting our expectations again this year. Our marriages will still be in trouble, the children will still be disappointed, or we still will be alone when we wake on the 26th. We will be frustrated with ourselves for believing that Christmas was ever going to meet all of our hopes and dreams. Maybe next year we won’t hope so much. But you will. The Christmas longings never go away. We still will find ourselves asking, “Where is He? Where is the Savior?”

The only way that you will find what you are searching for is to let your yearning lead you to worship. So don’t let these next few days slip away from you and wake up to yearnings with no place to go. Join these wise men in bending your knees before the Babe of Bethlehem, the King of the Jews, the Savior of the world. As you worship, you will begin to see what before you could only imagine. As you bow your knees before this God presence, this Emmanuel, you will be doing what your heart was created to do, and you will finally feel a peace and great joy that no relationship or holiday can ever bring you. Bring him everything you have, even if it’s not much in your opinion, and bow your knees in his presence, the One who is your heart’s desire.

Christina Rossetti said it well in her Christmas song, “What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part; Yet what I can, I give him: I give him my heart.”



December 18, 2005

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