Jan 4, 2026
My friends, I speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When I was a junior in high school, I worked as a page in the Iowa State Senate. Some of the people I worked most closely with were the “doorkeepers” – retired men and women whose main jobs were to admit people into and out of the Senate chamber and to pass messages between people inside and outside the chamber in the era before cell phones, email, and texting.
One of the doorkeepers was Sven. Sven had come to America in the 1950s from Denmark – and he still had the accent to prove it. It took me a good two weeks before I could consistently understand him. I don’t remember what he’d done for a living, but Sven was a quiet, mild-mannered guy. The last person you’d ever suspect of living an interesting life.
One day, Sven was gone, and some of us pages asked about him. Oh, we were told, Sven’s at the synagogue. You may know this story: during World War II, the Danish Resistance learned that the Germans were going to send Denmark’s 8,000 Jews to the concentration camps. So one night they evacuated 7,500 of them by boat to Sweden – and Sven had been part of that effort. He was at the synagogue telling the story and the part he played in it. If I had been looking for someone to give me a first-hand account of this story, it would never have occurred to me to ask Sven. His story was a revelation from an unexpected source that helped me see with fresh eyes.
Maybe something similar has happened to you – hearing a story about something from the unlikeliest of sources that give you a new perspective. And that’s what happens in the story of the magi today. We learn that God speaks to all peoples in ways that make sense to them – that resonate in their culture – and that when we fail to listen to what God is saying to other people, we miss out on seeing God revealed in the world.
Matthew’s Gospel begins by tracing Jesus’ family tree back to the heavy hitters of Judaism. David. Ruth. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But now, in Chapter 2, these magi enter the story. And they are as far from the titans of Jewish history as you can get. They’re not even the royalty that they’re often portrayed to be. They’re pagan astrologers, who claim that the stars give them wisdom and insight.
Having followed one particular moving star for what must have been thousands of miles – and days upon days – the magi arrive in Jerusalem and ask where they might find the “King of the Jews”. And so Herod and his sidekicks call together the chief priests and the scribes – the experts in the Jewish Law – to ask where the Messiah is supposed to be born.
Imagine being in this group of the religious elite. Herod has come because some astrologers from the far east have followed a star and want to know where the Messiah will be born. I imagine they choked on their lunch. We are the experts, they must be thinking. How could the Lord God – who has claimed Israel to be his chosen people – possibly have anything to do with these Gentiles? With these pagans, who claim that God is speaking to them using divination and sorcery that the Law the Lord God gave expressly forbids? There’s no way these religious elites would have thought these magi to be a reliable source for anything.
In the end, the chief priests and scribes give the magi the answer they’re looking for. To go to Bethlehem. But they clearly don’t take the magi seriously. They don’t go along to Bethlehem to find out for themselves. They don’t realize the shocking truth – that even though these magi were pagans, God chose to reveal God’s self to them. They fail to see their own story – of being a people whom God led through the wilderness by the fire and the cloud – in the magi’s being led by a moving, supernatural sign. They fail to think that God could be speaking to unexpected people in unexpected ways – and so they miss out on the revelation of the Christ Child. They miss out on the Incarnation. They miss out on the most important thing they might ever experience. In their hubris, those who knew the most failed to act when it mattered most.
The reality is that God speaks to each culture using its own signs and languages. The universal God enters into specific moments of human history in an infinite number of ways. That is a bedrock philosophy of the Reformation – ever since Martin Luther translated the Bible from Latin into German, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote the first Book of Common Prayer – moving the language of worship from Latin to English. New words. New voices. The same God.
And because God speaks the same Good News differently to each culture, then different cultures can learn about God from each other. Just as the chief priests and the scribes could have learned from the new thing God was saying to the Magi, so we might hear God saying new and vital things to us through others. We might hear God revealing God’s self to us through unexpected voices.
During this season of Epiphany – which continues through Ash Wednesday – our Gospel stories focus on moments where Jesus’ divinity is revealed to those around him. Revealed in unexpected ways.
And so this Epiphany season, we’ll practice listening for God in unexpected voices. We’ll be reading different translations of Scripture. We’ll be using eucharistic prayers from different parts of the Anglican Communion. Unlike the chief priests and scribes, we need to hear and embrace the voice of God in others. Because each time God speaks a message of love and hope into the world, we find ourselves in the story of the magi over again. Will we resist with hostility because it isn’t the reliable source we expect and miss out? Or will we listen and be startled to see with fresh eyes Jesus revealing himself to us once again?
Amen.