January 6, 2013 – Matthew 2:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
The Tea Kettle Sermon
Epiphany of our Lord – January 6, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Before I get started this morning, I just need to get this kettle on.
[Put a kettle on to boil, maybe on a hotplate]. There.
In his delightful book Life among the Lutherans, Garrison Keillor writes this about the magi:
Of all the characters [in the Christmas story],
they’re the only ones who probably weren’t Jewish but rather gentile.
He also they might be Lutheran because they brought myrrh which, he says, everyone know is
a sort of casserole made from macaroni and hamburger [: myrhh].
So before they started on their long trek, Keillor figures that one of the magi’s wives said,
Here, take this myrrh. They’ll be hungry. And make sure you bring back the dish.
(quoted in John Buchanan, “Editor’s Desk,” Christian Century, Dec. 26/12, p. 3)
We all think we know this story, but every time we read it,
I have to remind myself that I don’t really know it and that it’s hard to hear “fresh.”
I always need to remember there weren’t necessary three of them (the story never says so).
And I always need to remember that they definitely weren’t kings.
They were magi, from the East: Keillor is right:
they were probably the only non-Jews in the Christmas story.
They’re probably Zoroastrians, from what we would call Iran or Iraq today.
But more importantly, they’re astrologers.
Astrology was a highly regarded science in Matthew’s day,
despite the fact that the Old Testament takes a dim view of it.
It was a highly regarded science, and the Zoroastrians were considered most adept at it.
Today, in this story, the scientists come to Jesus.
If we ask why Matthew is telling us this rather strange story – I mean,
there is nothing else in the New Testament like it, and it only appears in Matthew –
the bottom line, I think, is that in this story, Matthew is telling us that
right from the beginning, God’s grace in Jesus is for all people.
Matthew is telling us that in Jesus God will reach out to all people, even non-Jews from the East.
This story is about the reach of grace.
Even here, at the beginning, Jesus is bringing outsiders inside. (Ibid.)
Jesus is gathering them around him, along with the Jews Mary and Joseph.
It’s just the beginning of a story that by its end will create inclusive community of
“Samaritan adulterers, immoral prostitutes, greasy tax collectors, on the take
despised Roman soldiers, and ostracized lepers.”
(Kathryn Huey at http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/weekly-seeds/where-is-the-child.html)
Like you they are a motley bunch: like our manger scene today,
which includes an older Jewish man, a young Jewish girl, a Jewish shepherd, a sheep of
no apparent religious denomination, and three Zoroastrians,
you have come from many places and many traditions.
But you have found your way here to worship Jesus, and to bring him your gifts for
the sake of his loving mission to bless this world and every person in it.
Why does Matthew tell this story?
To show that Jesus is the one who gathers all to his table to live in communion.
This morning we have, in miniature, a little foreshadowing of what God intends for all creation:
the dissolving of the distinctions between people of different ethnicities,
along with all the harm that has brought into the world,
and all the harm it continues to bring.
This is the great gift and the great good news that this story brings us this morning:
In Jesus,
God is breaking down the barriers that keep us human beings from loving one another.
One of the great barriers emerging between people these days is what seems to be an
almost insuperable barrier: the barrier between people of science and people of religion.
More and more, one seems to be asked these days to believe either in science or religion,
as if these were two mutually exclusive alternatives.
And I know this is on your minds, because when I collected all those really hard questions that
you wrote down for me last fall, among them was this one:
How can we reconcile our faith with science.
I think one of the great gifts of this story in Matthew today is that it can help us think about that.
I mean, here we have scientists coming to Jesus by way of . . . science.
Here we have highly regarded scientists, who studied and watched the night skies,
come to Jesus . . . and worship him.
Among all the outsiders who could have been included by Jesus here at
the beginning of the story,
I find it wondrous that the ones Matthew tells us about are scientists.
The magi look to the stars . . . and find Jesus.
Most Christians – or at least most of us here – have, I think,
some sort of sympathy with this story.
We intuit what that what the story suggests is true.
That the wonder of creation will reflect the wonder of the creator.
That the more you study it, the more you will marvel.
That its beauty reflects the beauty of the maker.
When I worked in a small neighbourhood hardware store while going to university,
the owner Peter and I would daily entertain an old Romanian fellow who
lived across the alley from us.
George, a widower, would come in every morning for a cup of coffee and conversation.
One of my favourite things to do was to get him to talk about some girls he knew from
Raymore, a town neighbouring the one where he lived as a young man.
Ah, he would say, those girls from Raymore were hand-made.
In their beauty, I think, George saw reflected some of the beauty of their maker.
I think many of us have had this experience in one way or another.
Many scientists do, I think, but many don’t.
The thing is, that the more we discover scientifically, the less room it seems to leave for God.
We no longer need to posit that thunder must be the gods bowling.
Eclipses are not God’s way of frightening human beings but occur because of
the earth’s shadow moving across the moon.
The stars aren’t on tracks that God moves around the dome of the sky and
the sun and moon are not pulled across the sky by divine chariot.
God has often been invoked to explain gaps in our knowledge that
were not otherwise explainable.
Theologians have called this “the God of the gaps,” and have usually thought this
“god of the gaps” to be a mistake.
Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, wrote:
. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. [However,] We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know. (Letters and Papers from Prison, May 29, 1944)
These days, just about all natural phenomena can be explained without reference to God.
Everything except, maybe, the Big Bang which began everything.
But one day that, too, might receive a complete and natural scientific explanation.
In the story of the magi, even though it’s painfully obvious,
we shouldn’t overlook the most obvious point.
God came among us – and was born as – a person.
A person!
God is not most like a force of nature that fills in the causal gaps in our knowledge of
the way the world operates.
God is most like a person.
Indeed the fundamental Christian insight is that God, above all things,
is most like a loving community of three persons.
It is most helpful to speak of God’s actions in personal terms like willing or loving.
(J.B. Stump, “Cosmic Question: God in a World Explained by Science,” Christian Century, Dec. 26/12, p. 22)
I was reminded recently of a wonderful analogy I read long ago in a book by John Polkinghorne,
who is a physicist as well as an Anglican priest and theologian.
Consider, he says, the different explanations as to why a tea kettle is boiling, like this one here.
The physicist might explain it in the following way:
A closed electrical circuit meets with resistance in the element of the hotplate,
which conveys heat to the bottom of the kettle,
which in turn causes the water molecules in the kettle to move more and more rapidly, until eventually their motion becomes sufficient to push the vapour pressure of the
water higher than the atmospheric pressure and – ta da! – the water boils!
But another correct description of the situation is to say that the kettle is boiling because
I’ve invited someone over for tea.
This explanation is a personal one as to why the kettle is boiling.
If God is most like a person, then one way of exploring that personal aspect of reality is
in theological terms while allowing that others can explore the natural aspect of reality in
scientific terms.
If one way of explaining why the tea kettle is boiling is to say that I have put it on in order to
host someone for a cup of tea,
then one way of explaining creation is simply to say that
creation is an invitation to commune with the creator.
As J.B. Stump wrote recently in the Christian Century,
and this is something I think we all know,
Natural explanation does not exhaust reality. Chemists might give an exhaustive analysis of the elements and properties of an oil painting, or acoustic engineers might comprehensively describe the action of sound waves in a symphony hall. But if those descriptions were all that were given, we’d be missing the central point of [visual] art and music. . . . The central point of reality is a personal being who loves and sustains the world and who cannot be exhaustively described by science any more than art or music or love can be. (Ibid, p. 23)
This God, this three personed-God who is most like a loving community of three persons,
invites us in Jesus, along with the wise men, to create communities that reflect
the triune God’s harmonious, inclusive communion.
Communities of peace-making and justice-doing and manna-sharing.
Inclusive communities of mercy for the most vulnerable where all gifts are appreciated and
where all gift are used for the loving mission of God.
This God can speak through nature to reach out and embrace all people.
God will seemingly go to whatever length it takes to reach out, and embrace all people,
and invite them into motley communion around the one who binds everything
in earth and heaven within the bonds of his love,
outside of which there is no one and no thing.
Even the magi looked to the stars and found Christ.
Several years ago I led a funeral for a very highly regarded scientist,
the University of Manitoba’s great plant breeder, Baldur Stefansson.
He is famous the world over for transforming rape seed, which produced a low quality
industrial oil, into canola, which produces a highly edible oil.
Dr. Stefansson transformed not only the rape seed but the landscape of Canada and
the United States as well as South America with his scientific insight.
When his family called me to lead the funeral, the more I found out about him,
the more I discovered how strange it was that I’d been asked to do this.
You see, for most of his life, he’d been an outspoken atheist,
indifferent towards religion if not openly hostile.
But before his death,
he made it clearly known he wanted a Lutheran funeral at First Lutheran Church.
His wife was very, very put out by this but she followed his wishes.
At his funeral, I reflected that perhaps in some way his deep insight into the workings of nature
led him to find understand other ways of explaining reality.
Perhaps he found the person of God alongside the laws of nature.
You see, there were lots of scientific explanations for his turning rapeseed into Canola.
Essentially, he eliminated erucic from rapeseed oil to produce low glucosinolate varieties,
a sentence which I’m sure means something to someone somewhere.
But another explanation which I learned from his family was this:
he grew up on a dirt poor farm in the Interlake during the depression,
and he wanted to do something to help farmers in Manitoba.
He ended up helping farmers all over the world.
You might think one explanation for why he turned rapeseed into canola was to be famous,
but he was a modest man, uncomfortable with honours.
You might think wealth was an explanation,
but even though canola is a multi-billion dollar a year industry,
he refused to sit on every single canola board he was invited to sit on.
He lived his whole life on his professor’s salary, something else his wife didn’t understand.
I think he discovered near the end that there is a personal dimension to reality,
alongside the scientific, natural one.
And that the one who invites us into that personal dimension was one he’d met long ago
Lutheran church member as a child in the Interlake born to Lutheran parents.
The one who invited the magi to his side through the stars.
The one who invites us all to his table through his gracious, personal invitation.
The one through whom not only was a world created that is explained by natural laws,
but that has a personal dimension that seeks the gathering of all peoples together and
their reconciliation in love.
The one through whom creation is ultimately not just a collection of atoms and laws,
but for whom creation is a personal invitation to commune with the creator and
with one another.
With casseroles of myrrh, and kettles of tea, come to the table of the one who invites us again,
to drink not just wine made through the knowledge of fermentation and
to eat not just bread made through the knowledge of the interaction of
yeast and water and heat and flour,
but to eat the bread of mercy and the wine of grace made with love by our members for you.
Come: receive the gracious invitation.
Come: commune with your creator.
Come: commune with Jesus.
Come: commune with Mary and Joseph, with the magi and Baldur Stefansson.
Come: commune with scientists and artists, and poets and musicians,
with accountants and teachers, clerks and office workers, young and old,
Come: commune with one another and find him again.
God’s grace is for all people. God’s grace is for you.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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