Rev. Thomas Pilgrim tells a story which caught my attention a few days ago.  He writes “It was a few days after Christmas.  A mother was busy cleaning up the den, putting everything away, taking the Christmas tree down.  Her son came in and saw her and said, “Mama, what are you doing?”  She said, “I’m putting all our Christmas stuff away.”  He asked in reply, “Why are you doing that?”  She answered, “So everything will be back to normal again.”  His response to that was, “Mama, I don’t want things to get back to normal again.”

  On this second Sunday after Christmas, we have the thought in our minds that Christmas is over, especially considering that we’ve greeted a new year since the Christ child arrived.  Soon, if not already, the refrigerated shelves which held Eggnog for so many weeks at the grocery store will be repacked with Cheez-Whiz and premade mashed potatoes.  Soon, if not already, Christmas trees will sadly be littering the roadsides, undecorated and waiting for the landfill.   Soon, if not already, we’ll be returning to a more usual schedule at work.  Soon, if not already, in-laws and relatives will be packing up their things and returning home.  And at some level, there may even be a relief in it all coming to an end.  There is, after all, a comfort in having things return to normal.  Things get back to a by-the-numbers routine.  We know what to expect.  We can anticipate what lies around the corner.

  But, sometimes, I think we rush away from it too quickly, do too good a job at cleaning up after Christmas.  We pack away the mystery of God becoming flesh.  We carry out to the trash gazing in wonder at the Christ along with the crumpled up wrapping paper.  We shove in the attic the idea that God can and will act in the most amazing and routine-upsetting ways right there alongside the lights and the ornaments.  We yield our hearts and our minds to a rationalism that’s been taught to us since we were children.  We return to that world where Mere science lays behind all quote-unquote mystery.  Knowing everything about anything is only the right experiment away.  We’re jaded by the idea of miracles.  We laugh uproariously at the whiff of anyone being cured by faith.  These things don’t happen, we think.  Not really.  Yet in our human wisdom, we’ve drained the mystery out of life.  We’ve divorced ourselves from the call of an invisible God who speaks to us by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We’ve hardened our hearts through the influences of a rather unholy trinity of logic, rationalism and empiricism. 

  And so, it’s fitting that here, as we wander away from the lights of Christmas back into the darkness of our own minds that we’re confronted with an alternative by Scripture.  “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”  We’ve called them Kings and numbered them a paltry three but Matthew’s text will have none of that.  Instead, Matthew tells us that these magi, these wise men come to Jerusalem having followed a star across the vast expanse of Asia.  And right there, we get a glimmer of the appropriate response to the mystery of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

  Now imagine just for one moment that you’re a bright, wise, well-off far-easterner.  You’ve got servants, families, responsibilities.  You’re running in whatever rat-race was being run back there in the first century and then, all of the sudden, a star appears.  Would your first instinct be to pack everything up including your wife and your children and head off to Jerusalem to greet a king?  Be truthful.  It probably wouldn’t.

  Not really.  After all, there are the camels to tend to, the children to get to their practices.  Plus, you’ve got to make an honest living after all.  No, we probably wouldn’t drop everything and begin wandering to the far reaches of the known world at the time.  We wouldn’t consider it…unless our hearts told us that this was no ordinary star nor was the king it announced no ordinary king.  We wouldn’t move an inch from our routine unless we knew in the depths of our souls that this star meant something else, something bigger than our everyday-normal-9-5 existence. Only then would we saddle up the camels, pack up our tents and our belongings and our frankincense, gold and myrrh and begin the arduous journey to Jerusalem.