It's a story about men who
studied the stars. We don't know how many there were, or what their names were,
or what they were like.
The legends have supplied
many of those answers and given the men names, numbers, and even thrones, but
in Matthew's story they are nameless, numberless, and throne-less.
If they hadn't done anything
but study the stars we probably would never have heard of them. But the story
goes on to say that they noticed a particular star.
When they saw this star they
stopped studying and began travelling. They left their comfortable homes and
turned westward
toward the unpredictable
dangers of the desert.
T. S. Eliot has one of them
saying; “A cold coming we had of it,
just the worst time of the
year for a journey, and such a long journey: the ways deep, and the weather
sharp, the very dead of winter.”
Much of that long journey was
made without the benefit of the star. They saw it in the east, shining over
their homeland, and they saw it again as they left the palace of Herod. But in
between they were without it much of the way. The star guided them in the
general direction of Israel, but then it seemed to desert them and leave them
on their own.
Isn’t that the way it happens
with us? We have our moments of seeing and knowing, when the star of clarity
and certainty goes before us, and then nothing, everything seems to go blank.
I remember one terrifying
night when I was ten years old, and had stayed out late, playing with friends
on the other side of town.
Drumheller, Alberta, was a
tough, rough mining town, and in order to get home I had to walk by the beer
parlors, the billiard halls, the bowling alleys, the movie theatres, the dance
halls: all the places I had been brought up to believe were dens of iniquity.
The only comfort on the way
was the presence of streetlights.
When I got under a street
light I strolled as if I had all the time in the world. Then I dashed off like
a championship runner to the next light.
And I’ve often thought that
life is like that, making our way from one light to the next, with darkness the
rest of the way.
That’s what the Wise Men did.
They traveled from one sighting of the star to the next. They didn’t see it
constantly. They had to travel long distances without it.
What can we learn from the
Wise Men and their star?
First, we learn that life is
a journey.
Life isn’t rooted-ness, and
it isn’t settled-ness. Perhaps this is why the greatest writers have depicted
life as a pilgrimage, a movement from one place to another. From Chaucer to
Michener, from Dante to Eliot, it’s the same in every age.
This is the theme of a book
called Blue Highways. It begins when the author is released from his college
teaching responsibilities,
and sets out with a little
over four hundred dollars and an old Ford van, to see the country, and to do it
by following only the smaller roads, the ones colored blue on the Highway maps.
The journey takes him into
many of the smaller towns and unknown rural areas of the country – and brings
him into contact with some “real people”. The reader begins to envy the author
for seeing so much.
Then one realizes that all of
life is the same way: It’s a journey, where one sees and learns things.
Eventually, one sees that the
important stance in life, is openness.
It’s realizing that life is a
gift and that those persons who receive most are poised to receive.
This is the way it was with
the Wise Men: they followed the star that appeared in the sky. They were open
and ready to be led. They knew that life is an adventure, and those see most
who are most ready to follow.
The second thing that we
learn from the Wise Men is that Faith is what we exercise in times of darkness.
Faith is for the times of the journey when we can’t see the star.
The Wise Men traveled long
miles of their journey in the dark: the star got them started on their journey,
and it returned when the journey was at its climax, but in between, it appeared
to leave them.
It was there all the time,
but they couldn’t see it. They had to journey onward in the direction it had
given them, but without its immediate aid.
This too is true to life,
isn’t it? We spend a lot of our journeys in the dark. We see the star shining
over a certain school, and we go there, not knowing what lies beyond for us. We
see it shining again over a job, a career, or a profession, and we go in that
direction, not knowing/ any more than that.
Again and again in life,
we’ve a moment of great luminosity, when everything becomes clear and we feel
affirmed in our choices: then the light gives way to great stretches of
darkness, with only the memory of the light to guide us. The star doesn’t shine
brightly at all times. When it doesn’t we must walk by faith, and by hope in
its shining again. We can’t expect it to shine for us all the time.
One more thing we learn from
the Wise Men: at the end of the journey is Christ.
Though the journey was often
clouded in darkness, the Wise Men found Christ at the end. And there was no
question about the journey being worth it.
That’s good news to those who
are in a darkened phase of their life’s journey. When you’ve lost the star,
hold on: you’ll come out on the other end of the darkness, and there will be
light you cannot now believe.
That’s the good news in a
nutshell: Jesus at the end of our struggles, and his being there makes the
journey different.
Knowing he’s there, we can
endure our seasons of darkness.
Knowing he’s there, we can
make it through the hardships.
Knowing he’s there, we can
survive even loss and death.
That is what faith is all
about. Through the darkness and the struggles, past the pitfalls and the
valleys, he is there. And that is what sustains us on our journeys.
Let us pray:
May our faith be as daring as dreams;
may our hopes be as bright as Bethlehem’s star; and may the coming of Christ find
in our hearts both a welcome and a home.
Amen
Dr. John Sullivan
Former Officer, Canada
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