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And having been warned in a dream,
they departed for their country by another way.
During the week, I had the opportunity to attend
a guest speaker from Ireland at Bellarmine College Prep.
They were hosting Pasraig O’Tuama, a great Irish poet.
It was a great experience and in it, he reminded us that
poetry has different forms.
There are different ways in which poetry is written for different audiences.
I had learned that in class many years ago
but I had forgotten that not all poetry is the same.
There are different types of poetry: sonnets, haikus, etc.
There are all different forms,
but each of them is written for a specific audience
and with a specific message.
The same is true for all of literature.
When you think of the forms of literature,
there are different genre of literature and
inside each genre there are different types.
For example, there are letters, stories, exhortations, essays, etc.
You do not write a letter the same way you write a story,
and a story is not the same as an exhortation or a poem.
They are all different, each one of them is different.
Just like poems are different, letters can be different.
You can have a letter of complaint;
you can have a love letter.
You can have a letter that is written to a company.
You can have a letter of inquiry and thus it goes on.
The audience plays a role too.
To whom are you writing this?
And for what purpose are you writing this?
The reason why I think that is so helpful today for us is that
the Bible is not a single book or a single book of one particular genre.
It is more like a library of books.
Each of them is a different type, a different form.
And inside of that form, there are different ways.
We call this form criticism.
There are four gospels and they are all the genre of a gospel,
but they are all very different
because they were written for different audiences.
And their style is different.
Today we hear from Matthew's gospel,
which is very different from Luke's gospel,
which we have been listening to pretty much
all of the Christmas season and a lot of the advent season.
Luke is the same author that wrote the Acts of the Apostles.
And he wrote very much for an audience set of both men and women.
Every time in Luke's gospel, when you hear a parable for a man,
there is another one for a woman.
The lost coin and the lost sheep.
One for a man, one for a woman.
But in Matthew's Gospel when we hear the infancy narrative,
we do not have a lot of great details about how Mary gave birth.
Matthew has none the storyline of how they get rejected at the inn, and the shepherds or any of that; completely different style.
Matthew starts with that whole long list of the family
that Jesus was born to; the family of King David.
And in that, the whole list of three groups of fourteen generations
he names every person, son of this, and son of that,
and they throw in a handful of women, just a handful,
like as if women were just incidental!
Why? The audience was not female, the audience was male.
He constantly is citing Old Testament scripture
because it matches the audience.
We can understand it to be a very literate and scribe-oriented group;
they were educated.
But he is trying to tell them that they have missed it,
that Jesus is the Messiah and they had missed it.
They were the educated ones and they missed it.
This is the Messiah.
Matthew emphasizes the lineage of David.
And that is his point, he is trying to educate them.
David was a king.
We go to great lengths to hear, to see that these kings
who come today are Gentiles, foreigners come to show us the way.
That would have been pretty hard for them to hear
that these three magi who came, knew that Jesus was the Messiah,
and they pointed the way, they followed the star.
The magi got it right and they got it wrong.
The fact is that Jesus is the Messiah.
He is the son of a Jew, he is a Jew,
and he is the one that comes to change the whole world.
And it was made known to us through foreigners, through Gentiles.
It would have been really hard to hear.
This is all great exegesis, great to understand,
but what does that mean for us today?
We need to look at what the Magi did?
To break this open, the Magi were open to listening,
even though they were not Jews themselves,
they are open to divine grace and wisdom.
They were open to divine grace and followed where it took them.
We would all do well to be open to divine grace
and follow it wherever it takes us.
Sometimes, when we are inside the church, we just follow the rules.
But when we are expecting something different,
like these Gentiles were, we were not expecting rules.
We just go wherever the light shines, wherever it takes us.
And in this case, it took the Magi to the baby Jesus.
The first thing we ought to do is follow the light of grace
and the light of God that will follow.
It will shine our way to something and
then make sure it leads us to Christ.
Follow the light that brings us closer to Christ.
For most of us, that is going to be inside the church.
But for some at home, it may not be
and we should follow the light of Christ elsewhere.
It may be that you have strayed away from the church,
and that is difficult for us to hear.
But sometimes it is the light that eventually draw us back.
We need to follow the light that takes us to Christ
and to be more like Christ.
Then when we get to Christ, we do what the Magi do today.
They worship him and they put down
their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the symbols of a king.
They are symbols of the prince, prophet and king.
Now, what are we to learn from this?
We can put down our gifts, they may not be gold, frankincense and myrrh,
but can we give our gifts to the Lord,
to do the will of the Lord and offer them to the Lord
to use for the greater good for others.
And what does that mean?
It depends upon our gifts, but we do not hold on to our gifts,
rather we should share our gifts with the rest of humanity,
whether that be in the church,
whether that be in school,
or whether that be at work,
or whether the greater community; we share the gifts
that God has given us with the greater humanity.
The final step that the Magi do is,
they depart by a different way.
They were open to conversion.
But once we experience Christ heart to heart,
we have to go back a different way.
We are not the same.
We could never be the same once we realize
how much we are loved by God,
and we ought not to be the same because of this conversion.
We are called to, in a sense, allow that conversion to happen
and expect to change and be different as a result of it,
to be open to being different.
Whether we become quieter and we listen,
or we become humble and let somebody else speak,
or whether we take the lead and show the way to Christ,
or whether we speak to point the way to Christ.
It depends on our circumstances, where we are.
Finally, I would suggest that what we notice about the Magi
is they are foreigners and that we, too, need to be
willing to welcome the stranger and the foreigner among us.
That does not necessarily mean that they are from far lands.
People who do not necessarily feel welcomed are strangers.
We need to reach out to them and be inclusive;
to really make an effort to welcome them to the table.
There are some groups that we really need to work harder on.
And one of the groups I suggest today
because we are opening the youth center,
is that we really need to work harder on
welcoming the youth into our church.
They do not necessarily feel as at home
as maybe we did when we were younger.
We need to be inclusive.
We need to make accommodations for them,
we need to have a place for them which they can call home.
And that is why we have built this, this youth center
so they can feel at home here.
But a place is not going to be enough for them.
Every one of us needs to be welcoming, encouraging,
and calling them forth, inviting them,
not necessarily harassing them,
but inviting them into the table.
We can learn a lot from the Magi,
and we can learn a lot from this particular passage from Matthew's gospel.
It is a different form than Luke by all means,
but it is very rich with meaning and symbols.
Let us listen to this challenge that
we are called to follow the light that brings us to Christ.
We are called to offer our gifts to Christ
and the world in service to his kingdom.
And we are called to allow ourselves to be converted,
to have a conversion experience.
And then we are called to welcome others to the table,
most especially the youth.
That is how we can celebrate the gift of the gospel.
And having been warned in a dream,
they departed for their country by another way.
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