Sunday, January 8, 2017: "Three Wise Guys Talking" Fr. Carey Stone



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Epiphany 2A’17

(Epiphany transferred)

Is.60.1-6; Ps.72.1-14; Mt.2.1-12

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

North Little Rock, Arkansas

The Rev. Carey Stone

 

All Kings shall bow down before him, and all the nations do him service: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.        - From Psalm 72

 

If you knew then what you know now, would you have said “yes?”

The answer to that question was what a Facebook friend of mine was pondering the other day. The couple had just celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary, and she remarked that nothing in Bridal magazines prepared her for the challenges they would face and the changes that would result after saying “I will.” From frequent attendance at Heavy metal rock concerts (her husband is a huge fan) to giving birth to a special needs child she got way more than she had bargained for. But she also said that she had laughed more than she ever had before and can’t imagine her life without taking the plunge.

 

Plunge – that brings to mind an old TV commercial that some of you might remember when someone stands in front of a swimming pool filled with iced tea and falls backward into the pool and they called it “taking the Nestea plunge.”

Both of these images of the bride and the person in need of relief from the sweltering heat shows one simple truth that life presents us with many choices.  The choices to get married or not, or to fall backwards into a pool of ice-cold tea on a hot day, hold out the promise of making life better. But as always there are hidden risks and unforeseen dangers.

 

What makes people take the plunge? Discontentment, restlessness, boredom, loneliness, heat (both actual and metaphorical) can create the right environment for risk taking and the person then has to be open, willing, and ready to move when the call comes.

 

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with the retired bishop of Mississippi Duncan Gray, Sr. when I was trying to discern my call to ordination. He said, “First of all you must be sure that you have the call, and then, if you know you have the call just get ready for lots of joy” (deep southern accent). Well one of the ‘joys’ that Bishop Gray encountered was receiving a beating at the hands of a mob of racists during the days of the civil rights movement when he was marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If Bishop Gray had known then what he knew now would he have still said “yes?” Based on the fruits of his labor and my meeting with him that day I don’t think there was any doubt. God calls us and we don’t know where we are going or what it will mean but we know we must answer.

 

When I finally did know that I had the call to ordination one of the first things I was told was that in order to go to seminary I would have to sell anything I could find to liquidate, to sell my house and give the equity to the seminary. I had to resign a successful career, and to put practically everything I owned into a u-haul and move to Virginia a thousand miles away from home. With God’s help I took the plunge not knowing what all I would face but knowing that Jesus was the author and finisher of the call. 

 

The promise of the journey of faith is not that you won’t encounter difficulties and hardships but that that Jesus will go with us and that will make all of the difference because that is what Jesus does in our lives.  Because of my call to the priesthood I ended up with two more calls, to be a husband, and a daddy!

 

Church tradition says that there were three wise men because there were three gifts given to the Christ-child, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Church tradition has also named the three wise men as Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar. Whoever they were and however many of them there were what was it that caused them to take the plunge, for them to load up their camels and take off towards a star that would lead them on a journey that some scholars believe would take two years?

 

There had to have been plenty of wise men out there in the east who had seen the star and knew something was up but must have had excuses, maybe their wife was pregnant, or they had to stay and work for the family business, or their camel was sick. Those who did have the courage to go had to face all of the scoffers who did not cheer them on their way but jeered them as they headed off. But these wise men were open, there was something unfulfilled in them and they believed this long awaited ruler would be the game changer for the world. and they’d be right but God had even more in store for them. They would get called for an audience with King Herod who would give them a job they hadn’t counted on – to come back and let him know where he could find him (an unbeknownst to them – to try and kill him).

 

So it was taking them longer to get there than they thought it would, their journey was halted by a royal interruption where they were assigned a job. Finally they arrive when Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were already living in a house. Then that great scene happened that has been memorialized throughout the centuries with the three wise men paying homage to the King of Kings.

 

Something happened that night in Bethlehem the wise men had a face to face encounter with Emmanuel – God in human form and their lives were transformed. In the face of a human was the face of God smiling back. Later than night they were warned by God in a dream not to go back to Herod and to pick a different road home. Nothing could ever be the same for them, they would indeed go home a different way. T.S. Eliot in his poem Journey of the Magi describes this unforeseen change:

 All this was a long time ago, I remember,

                              And I would do it again, but set down

                              This set down

                              This: were we led all that way for

      Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,

                              We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and    

                              death

                   But had thought they were different; this Birth was

                    Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

         We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

                      But no longer at ease here, (in the old dispensation),

     With an alien people clutching their gods.

                                I should be glad of another death.

 

Ultimately we can choose to remain stuck “clutching our gods” as Eliot says or we can take the risk and move toward a path where God is calling us that promises us contentment in the midst of our discontent, peace in a sea of restless hearts, excitement in the midst of boredom, a welcoming community in the midst of loneliness, Life instead of death. Which direction is God pointing you – be wise and ‘take the plunge!’ Amen!