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The Implications of the Star
A sermon by Dr. Jesse
Fletcher
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
The Third Sunday of Advent, December 16, 2007
I'm going to be taking our
text from the second chapter of Matthew. Parts of a well‑known story.
“Now, when Jesus was born
in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, there came wise men from
the east to Jerusalem saying ‘Where is he who is born king of the Jews for we
have seen his star in the east and come to worship him?’”
Reading on down to the 9th
verse, “When they heard the king, they departed and, lo, the star they saw in
the east went before them until it came and stood over where the young child
was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.”
Then a passage from the
Psalms, a familiar one, but one that continues to render a kind of awe in me
this time of year, the third verse of the 8th Psalm. “When I consider thy
heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, what is man but thou
aren't mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visited him?”
And then, the Gospel of
John, Chapter 1, verse 1. “In the beginning was the word, the word was with God,
the word was God, the same was in the beginning with God, all things were made
by him and without him, was not anything made that was made.”
May God bless the reading
of his word.
One of the things about
technology that I think I really enjoy is having the access to the Internet ‑‑
whoever invented it, by the way – and that through the work of software
engineers, we have some great “tools,” as my grandson calls them, of programs
such as the search engines that let us reach out into all forms of knowledge,
all matter of material wherever it might be, and bring it right to our door,
right to our fingertips and to our eyes. It's so easy.
Google is my favorite, and
I say that primarily because there's something about Google that rings in your
ear, you know. And especially because Google has something called Google Earth,
and if you've not used Google Earth, then you've missed a great blessing. This
is a program where you can actually bring up our globe and look at it from many
miles out, 15,000 miles out, 5,000 miles out, 1700 miles out, 150 miles out,
whatever you want to zero in on. And, not surprisingly, this week, I focused on
the holy land, and especially the route between Baghdad and Bethlehem and tried
to imagine the voyage of the Magi.
Undoubtedly, we call them
the three kings and we don't even know there were three of them, but because of
the three gifts, we tend to extrapolate that. In fact, they were men who
studied the stars. They were probably at that point more like astrologers
trying to figure out what influenced the stars and constellations and what time
of the year you were born had to do with who you turned out to be and how you
made your decisions, et cetera.
They were also the
forerunners of the scientists of that era and our era. They were keeping very
careful records of what they saw. They observed the night skies over and over
again, and they knew the differences from season to season. They could look at
the moon and see it as it moved across. They didn't see it as we did.
But just in my age, we've
gone from looking at the man in the moon, as I did as a boy, to men on the moon
as we've been able to do many years ago now, but still in a very brief time
span. These Magi had seen something in the heavens that really intrigued them,
and they made their journey. And ever since then, their successors, real life
scientists and believers and unbelievers alike have speculated about what might
have been the phenomenon that engaged them so.
And there are a number of
classic suggestions. Of course, there are those who say it was a meteorite and
many of us who watched shooting stars, sometimes like the first showers in
August, it's very small pieces, almost dust‑like flashing across the sky. This
last Thursday or Friday night we hit the peak of the Gemini showers that we
encounter as part of our annual pilgrimage. I didn't see it. We've seen mostly
clouds during this period of time.
Because of the brevity
that we could call the star of Bethlehem, some have said it was a meteorite.
Others have a strong case of comets. One of our Christmas hymns talks about the
star with a tail like a kite, which indicates that whoever was writing that had
come to believe that Halley's Comet, what many people believed for years, was
the star of Bethlehem.
As you look at Halley's
Comet and keep the records so many people have kept, especially the Chinese, you
realize it happens regularly and that wasn't one of the years it did happen. I
remember my father telling me as a boy when we would visit his home place where
he used to stand with his grandfather as a nine‑year‑old and look at up Halley's
Comet.
That 1910 visitation was
beyond belief and the detail was something else, and the awe of it must have
been something else. I had the wonderful, wonderful privilege of standing
beside my dad when he saw it for the second time in 1986 a couple months before
he died. And I thought it would be nice if I could see it twice. It comes again
in 2061, and while that challenge is the most optimistic of my estimates of my
longevity, it is something to shoot for. But for a lot of reasons, comets have
been largely ruled out in our day and time.
One of the more esoteric
notions has been the super nova. A super nova is what happens when an old star
gets to a point where it collapses in on itself and then explodes with a huge
light. Well, in the heavens about us and the distant heavens about us, you
could be looking at a spot and it's just as black as anything and then the next
night you look there and it's brighter than any of our planets, a super nova's
happened. You may remember the last one we had, we had real good records about,
in 1641.
But the Chinese have kept
records on that also. And we're not sure that there was a nova that could have
been seen or observed during that period. It's a lot of things. It suddenly
appears and moves, so it would move in a forward path and gradually fades away.
Neither of those items are spoken of in Matthew's passage. He's really more
concerned about fulfilled scripture. So a lot of people backed away from the
super nova.
If you Google up ‑‑
doesn't that have a ring to it, “Google up” ‑‑ you'll find that a lot of people
are still writing about it. And the favored answer now is the conjunction of
our largest planet and another sun: Jupiter in conjunction with a true star
Regulus, many times larger than our sun. When they get in conjunction, they
evidently put on a real show. Both mean king, by the way, in the ancient naming
process.
But Jupiter also has
another little trick that it pulls every now and then and that's because of its
speed and earth's speed around the sun, it can stand still and even move back in
a retrograde motion, and that would get most people's attention who were looking
at it. If you're just sitting there kissing some girl, you're probably not
going to pay any attention to it. Or I would have seen it a lot earlier, I feel
sure. A lot of people backed away from that.
The fact of the matter is,
I need to confess. I think it was a miracle. I think it was a unique event,
and I think it happened for that purpose, to fit those circumstances, to light
up that moment, and I don't believe it has to be any of these other things. I
believe it can be just the way God acted because, as we read in John 1:1, he
made it anyway. Why couldn't it be one of his moments of creation to mark that
glorious morning?
Now, one of the things
I've asked myself also is what difference would their perception of the heavens
make if they had our perception of the heavens given what we now know?
For them it was a canopy
wove across the sky at night. The constellation and the stars moved, the
planets changed their places, the moon was here and wasn't here and at different
phases. They were careful to observe this, but it was a panoramic play across
the sky over the center of the world, the center of the universe, earth itself.
We can't say that
anymore. We've seen shots from space as our own astronauts return of this blue
planet, this third rock from the sun. We know that we are a small body circling
a huge body from which we get our light. We now know because we've been able to
analyze all the elements of everything that is, including ourselves, that we're
star dust. Created by the elements of the nuclear effects of stars all over the
universe.
In fact, there's kind of a
cosmic Jacob's ladder now where you can look at our sun with its nine planets (I
still give Pluto its place, I'm a little old‑fashioned). Then you realize that
we are one of billions of suns in a galaxy. We call it the Milky Way. We'll
look up into the milky expanse and have enough background to realize we're
looking into the center of a spiral galaxy. We're on the edge and can look away
from it and the more darkened space from time to time, but we're part of that
galaxy.
The amazing thing is when
you look into the darker sky, for instance, just last night, if you happened to
be on a very, very late airliner following over snow storms, you could see
something like Cassiopeia with its pointer toward a dark smudge called
Andromeda. We have some smaller neighbors. That's in our neighborhood.
It takes 2.9 million years
to get here. God hadn't even created us into the mix of life when that started
toward us. At any given point, we could look at the heavens and realize we're
only seeing it the way it was, because we go out past galaxy after galaxy out
into the quasars and not going out immense, overwhelming distances, but we're
going back into our own history even as we look.
It's overwhelming and at
times you can get that feeling of being lost in space. I remember the immensity
of it almost overwhelming me one time. I had written a personal genealogy for
our family. It was a flashbulb going off in places where we wouldn't light up
the sky, it would look dark where we were flashing, we seemed to be so small and
so brief.
And it's one of the
reasons that the story of the star of Bethlehem has become so special to me.
Because contrary to being lost in space, it says we've been found in space.
That we have become a part of what God has been about all these years. He's
pulled us into the very orbit of his being and his love. What did the star
mean?
Well, certainly it was the
pointer for the wise men, and played into Herod's terrible atrocities. Most
likely Herod was taking a leap out of the notebook of ancient Roman history
because in 63 BC, an earlier Roman king did the same thing when an oracle had
predicted that a babe had been born nearby who would replace him, so he had all
the children killed in that particular area and time frame and here is Herod
doing the same thing.
Well, Matthew, including
this otherwise huge downer that nobody else touched, it was because he was so
intent on citing some of the fulfilled scriptures of the Old Testament about the
coming Messiah. It was the pointer, but I think it was more. The reason I read
John 1:1 to you was to me it was a symbol of the king of kings, the Lord of
Lords. This star represented the creation, if you will, of which he was
author. He was part of it, he was there, and he brought the there to now. And
that's where it starts for me.
That's where I begin to
get a sense of comfort. That's where the wonder and awe of space, which can
also leave you with a sense of cold lostness in space, begin to change into the
God of space and the God of all time who comes in Christ to say, “Here's where
it is. Right here.” And all of the rest of this is just part of the perception
of it.
And I began to see the
idea that God in Christ, God Emmanuel, if you will, brings us into a sense of
not space time, but of God's moments. You know, we tend to almost look at the
stars sometimes as a spaceship that brought Jesus here from a distant place, or
we think of heaven as getting further and further away. The further out we can
see, and the further things are.
Well, the fact of the
matter is, increasingly we're wondering if it isn't all just right here,
already. Maybe the reason Gabriel can appear like that to Zacharias and to
Mary, maybe the reason Jesus could be here in the room and suddenly be gone.
Maybe the reason Paul could talk about how we see through a glass darkly because
there's a sense that God is revealing that he's here. Here's where God is
revealing himself to us in Jesus Christ.
And that gives me a warm
feeling. For instance, that makes eternal life much closer, more immediate and
more possible. I know the physicists are playing in string theory and alternate
and parallel universes. They're playing with a whole notion of other realities
being here limited by only our sight and understanding, but for me, it gets to
be a simple, spiritual truth. God is with us. And we are with him. And in
Christ, we are reconciled to him. It began with that baby. It began in that
moment.
I have a friend, former
roommate at Texas A&M, I call him Buddy. He has a very distinguished name
because he was the lead attorney with probably the largest of the law firms in
Houston area, represented clients whose names you would readily recognize, and
recently retired, but he retired because, above all, he wants to give himself to
studying Christian truth.
He teaches a men's Sunday
school class at a Presbyterian church in Houston and spends all kinds of time
getting ready for it. He sends me papers and this last week he sent me one. In
it he was telling a story about his days in the law firm when he used to leave
the firm and walk downtown to the courthouse or someplace he was supposed to be,
and he would walk by a construction project.
And he said, one day as he
walked by that project, he noticed that a string of graffiti had appeared. As
he got closer because it was colorful he looked and it said, “Jesus is the
answer.” And being a Christian, he pondered that and tried to figured out
exactly what the graffiti artist was trying to say, and he began to wonder how
other people would see it, and for several days he went through this exercise
and then about a week later, he noticed somebody had added more graffiti. Right
under the statement “Jesus is the answer,” somebody had written, equally
decorative and colorful, “what is the question?” As a lawyer, he would realize
questions frame answers. Questions precede answers. What was the question?
Well, at that time I quit
reading, so I don't know what Buddy meant, because I had my answer. I had been
pondering the question all the time I was getting ready for this morning. And I
found the question in Psalms. “What is man? That thou art mindful of him? The
son of man thou visiteth him?”
I saw Jesus as the answer
to that question. God loves us. God's brought us into his place. And because
Jesus is the answer, all of a sudden we can go back in time and realize what a
beautiful moment that was under that star bright, that white, royal, shining
star.
That babe, that simple
scene in that manger. Try to get ahold of the idea of God incarnate. God
becoming one of us to let us know he's here, he cares about us, we can be with
him. We're not just flashes of light. This is the beginning, and there's a
beyond -- thanks to what we learned on that beautiful morning.
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