Materials

Searching For A Star #1


A New Star Rising
Matthew 2:1-2
by R. Todd Bouldin


Advent is the beginning of the Christian year, a four week period in which we join the angels, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men who left behind the busyness and ordinariness of life to welcome the birth of our Savior. For the next three weeks until Christmas I will be preaching from the account given to us by the Gospel of Matthew. Luke’s Gospel also tells this Christmas story, but it is Matthew who uniquely tells us that wise men came journeying towards a new star rising in the East, seeking to find the answer to their life’s search.

Prayer

Matthew begins his gospel by telling us about Abraham, who left his home in the Ur of the Chaldees to journey to the Promised Land. From Canaan, the descendants of Abraham journeyed to Egypt under Jacob’s leadership. And from Egypt the children of Israel eventually journeyed back to the Promised Land. But from there they were taken to Babylon, but when Babylon fell to Persia, the Jews journeyed back home again. There is a whole lot of wandering around in the Old Testament. For Matthew, that is just chapter one of the Gospel story. Chapter 2 is the journey of some ordinary people, angels and wise men to Bethlehem. It is as if to say that the Gospel is a story of a search, and people have been journeying and searching for a long time.

When we reach chapter two of Matthew, we find some Gentile wise men also on a search. By grafting the story of the wise men into his otherwise very Jewish story, Matthew is making it clear that searching for something is a universal passion, something that people from East and West, Jew and Gentile, all pursue. All of us are searching for something that will give meaning to our lives, something that will make our lives count, something that orders life around things that are real, authentic and true.

Matthew could just as well have introduced the story of my life, or your life, into this second chapter. We also have done a lot of wandering around in search of something. We left home to go to college, and we left college to begin work, all in search of a life. Then we left one job for another or one city for another, or even one country for another. All of this was in search of a better life. We leave the apartment for the house; we leave the house for a bigger house; then we even go from the house back to the apartment because we didn’t need all of that house. We go from one girlfriend or boyfriend to another, or sometimes even one spouse to another, thinking that true love and happiness will be found in the next place. Sometimes we even trade one church community for another, always searching for the perfect church where all of our needs and demands will be met. But no matter whether you stay at home or if you journey somewhere else, if you remain with the predictable or wander to the unpredictable, nothing ever really stays the same. One of the reasons is that our constant search for something keeps life in a state of flux.

No matter how good things are, there is something buried deep within us that will never rest content with how things are. Especially not when we know they could be better. We take incredible risks, venturing out into an unknown future, all in the hope that we may find what we’re looking for, sometimes even when we don’t know what that future is. Sometimes we venture out then discover that the thing or place we’ve found isn’t what we truly want. We may then search for a way back to the predictable or secure place, or search for another alternative ahead of us. All of this moving, searching and journeying because we only have one life, and we don’t want to settle for a life that is less than it can be.

Rarely do we search alone. Most of us searching seek out help from someone to guide us into a better future. We seek help from our families or friends, we read self-help books, we watch Oprah or Dr. Phil, or we explore our options. We may think that children will bring us the future we so want. Others of us may look to their education, to their employer, or to another religion to help them. Some of us may even turn to “church” to help with this search.

So Matthew brings us into a story of people who are journeying and searching, and that’s the way it always has been. We’ve always been desperate for a little help along the way.

The ancients, not unlike some in our time, turned to the stars as their guide to the future. They believed that the changing positions of the stars in the sky revealed what was about to happen on the earth. This was true for the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Persians, and the Chinese. One star catalogue was found in China that was developed about 1400 years before the birth of Christ, with specific information about stars, meteors, comets and novas. They recorded that there are 800 stars in the sky, and all 800 stars are guides to us as we journey through the universe and through our lives. Today we know that there are billions of stars. Eight hundred is enough stars to try to discern, but billions surely will leave us quite confused.

Stars don’t work for most of us anymore, though I dare say that some of us have spent more time reading our horoscope than reading Scripture to determine our way. But for most of us, we now rely more on information than on stars. We can’t get enough of it either. We are bombarded with news, with trivia, with images, and with pop up ads. We get information from telephone wires, sound waves, television cables, satellites and of course the Internet. Sometimes we even read books (joke). We get information from the next door neighbor, from the person in the next office, and the guy on his cell phone in the airplane seat next to you who won’t stop talking. We are on information overload, and it won’t quit coming.

And when we feel that we don’t get information, we are upset. Nothing makes us more frustrated than feeling left out of the loop of information we believe we were entitled to know. It’s one of the most common complaints in workplaces and in churches, and particularly with the government. “Nobody told me this was happening.” We feel this way because we live in a culture that has given us a sense of entitlement to know everything, about everything. We even get upset when we don’t know who Jen is dating, or when Brad and Angelie will marry, or whether Adam Brody or Mischa Barton are single. We want to know everything, and we expect to know it.

In such a world, information is power. With information and the power that comes from it, we think we can get what we are searching to find, but in the words of the rock band U2, we still haven’t found what we are looking for. If we had found it, we still wouldn’t be looking so feverishly.

Two thousand years ago, the wise men from the East had a lot less information than we do. But in the tradition of the ancients, they followed the light they had from the new rising star in the hopes of finding a new born king who would bring an end to their search. When they got lost, they stopped and asked directions in Jerusalem (women, notice that this is the second Christmas miracle – that three men stopped and asked for directions). As the story goes, the priests and the scribes in the city all knew where the Savior was to be born because it was written in the prophet Micah. But they were in Jerusalem, not Bethlehem. It was the foreigners who were coming to worship.

Isn’t that interesting? It is the outsiders, the Gentiles the wise men from the East, who are the ones searching diligently for something or someone to adore. And they follow the star until it led them to the manger of Bethlehem. The religious leaders knew where He was, but they stayed in Jerusalem because they were certain of their answers already. They didn’t believe that Jesus really could be the answer to their search. Their search was already over, and it was found in their religion and its rules. There wasn’t any room for God to do something new. In other words, the people who thought they knew all the truth that there is to know were the ones who missed the Savior. The ones who were searching for more truth than they knew were the ones who found Him.

Through a whole lot of Christmases, the church has been clearly announcing the birth of a Savior. It isn’t a secret. But we live in a time when people are still searching for hope and truth. Our society doubts whether we can really find truth and hope. We have come to trust in the search but not in its end. We believe in the ideals of hope and truth, but we doubt that anyone can ever find it. We believe that only the search through information can be trusted. The thinking goes like this, “Look in literature, or film, or politics. Look in your work, your relationships, or even your church. But just don’t claim that you found anything. The height of arrogance is to assume that you found something that makes other things untrue.”

When the wise men found Jesus, they stopped searching, and they finally bent their knees to adore the One that they had finally found. Maybe that is why we call them wise men. They didn’t just love wisdom. They knew how to embrace an answer when they found One. And when they found it, they did not analyze it. They did not research it. They worshiped it.

The church is not just one more self-help meeting. It is not just one more stop on the search for something more. We are not just passing out information that might be helpful. Neither do we claim to have all the answers. Here we claim that we do not know all the answers, but that the Answer has found us. We claim too that we are seekers, but we claim to have been found by the very One for whom we were searching. We can’t answer all the questions or take away all the mysteries. We do not claim to know all the truth there is to know, but we do claim that all truth will eventually lead us back to the truth we do know, Jesus Christ. The church does not have all the answers to all of the questions. That is not our mission. But we are clear about the Truth that we do have. We are clear that our longing always has been for God, and in the birth of Jesus Christ, God came searching for us.

The real question is not whether there is more truth than we have. The real question is whether we have worshiped before the Truth that we already know. When life seems chaotic, harsh and riddled with questions that we can’t easily answer, have we learned to hang on to the one thing of which we are sure? Have we accepted the love of Jesus Christ from which we can never be separated? If we have found Him, the search is over and we need not search for more.

We are told that the wise men were overwhelmed with joy when the star stopped, and the search came to an end. At first glance, it must not have looked like the right answer. But in this One they found the Wisdom of the Ages, and the search ended there in Bethlehem. Those who claim to have found the Savior should be so overcome with awe and joy to keep search for more. So perhaps the most shocking and the most truthful statement we can make in our times is that we’ve found what we’re looking for: The search is over! Come to the manger of Bethlehem! A Savior is born!



December 04, 2005

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