|
There was a season in our children’s lives when they loved the movie, The Star. Have you seen that one? It is an animated – and, frankly, pretty hilarious – take on the Christmas story chockfull of memorable characters. Among them are the three wise men who travel from afar to pay homage to the newborn King. Now we do not know exactly who the wise men really were or where they came from or even how much time passed between Jesus’s birth and their arrival. What we do know though is that they had to travel some distance to reach Bethlehem. They had to journey, in other words, from somewhere familiar (i.e., home) to somewhere new and unfamiliar.
A willingness to journey to the unknown is a central motif throughout the Biblical story: Abraham and Sarah setting off from home, Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, prophets preaching in faraway cities, fishermen walking away from their nets. Since the beginning of creation itself, God’s story has been a story of going new places. Which brings me back to the movie. The one thing that has always bothered me about The Star is that those wisemen are depicted as looking almost down-right bored as they take their epic journey. In fact, the camels they ride have more personality than they do in the film! Surely that could not have been the case though, right!? I believe every sense in their body was alive and awake with wonder and awe as they took in the new places and people in front of them.
We often make a big deal about how this piece of the Christmas story ends with the Magi going “home by another way.” But perhaps it is more important for us to pay attention to the way they go in the first place. These wise men were willing to follow God somewhere new – somewhere they had never been before. All they had was their faith that the star in the sky was more than just a star. And where that faith led them was to a manger where – with wonder and awe – they found a tiny baby, the Word made flesh, the hope of the world, the fulfillment of the long ago made promise: “Behold, I am doing a new thing!”
Christmas Day is a day that often stirs nostalgia. But it is also a day for looking forward and remembering that faith in the newborn babe calls us to follow God to places we have not been before. For it is precisely in those places that we will discover the Hope who not only gives us life but brings us to life.
| 
