Matthew 2:1-12 and Genesis 12:1-3
When Wendy’s Mom was visiting with us in November we went into Belfast to do a bus tour. It was on the same day that Holland were playing Northern Ireland in the football. All over Belfast there were people dressed in Orange. It was quite an experience seeing Belfast invaded by all these orange uniformed Dutch football supporters. It was a reminder of just how small the world is. For someone from South Africa, Europe often felt so far away. But here, the rest of the countries of Europe are just a short flight away. It is quicker to fly from Belfast to Amsterdam than it is to fly from Jhb to Cape-town.

But seeing all these orange clad football supporters was also a reminder that even in modern Western societies, the concept of belonging to a tribe still exists, but in different forms than it would in other parts of the world, like South Africa, where the concept of tribalism is still very much alive.

In modern Western societies, sports clubs, like football clubs have become sort of substitutes, or modern expressions of that more ancient concept of tribal identity. On the whole, when it comes to sports, such tribal identities of being a Manchester united supporter or a Liverpool supporter are generally kept within the realm of fun and recreation. (I use the word generally, because I have seen that there are some in this congregation who take these affiliations very seriously.)

But in more ancient cultures, as reflected in the Bible, tribal belonging had far more at stake.

Rob Bell writes that in the Biblical Culture of the ancient Near East, your tribe was your family, your bloodline, your home, your identity – your tribe was everything. Everyone belonged to a tribe. Every tribe had it’s own God or gods who they prayed to and who they sought protection from.

The whole of life was regulated by one’s tribal affiliation. You worked for the well-being of your tribe, as did everyone else in the tribe. You accumulated possessions, fought battles, made alliances, all in the name of tribal preservation. And if you did something unacceptable, something shameful, it reflected poorly on your tribe.

The world that the Old Testament introduces us to was a world in which tribal war-fare was a regular occurrence. (There is a reference in the Old Testament that says it was the season for battle. War was a seasonal occurrence. And so, your tribal identity wasn’t just about your bloodline and your gods – it was also about safety. The world was an extremely dangerous place, and without the protection of a tribe, you could easily find yourself enslaved or killed by another tribe.

Tribalism was ultimately about survival. In the Bible, this was life and death. Kill or be killed. And no matter how many battles you’d fought and won, you were always only one battle away from the enemy crushing you and wiping out your entire tribe, or killing some of you and taking the rest to be assimilated into the conquerors tribe.

And so within this context, in the story Genesis chapter 12 with the calling of Abraham we find a fascinating and an interesting thing happening... something quite unheard of begins to happen within this world of ancient tribal identity.

In Genesis 12, into this world of tribal conflict and tribal protectionism, according to the ancient Jewish story , we find God calling a man called Abram (later to be called Abraham) to be the father, or the leader, of a brand new tribe.

And as God call’s Abram, in this ancient story, God tells Abram that “All the people’s of the earth will be blessed through you.”

At that time, tribes existed for their own well-being and preservation. That was the whole way they operated. In a sense it was their reason for being... to protect and preserve themselves against other tribes.

But in Genesis 12, as God calls Abram to be the father or leader of a new tribe, we learn that this tribe, would be different. This tribe would not exist just for itself and its own safety, this tribe exist to bless all the other tribes of the world.

Into this primitive and violent world, we find a leap forward in human consciousness, the concept of a new tribe that wouldn’t only exist for itself, but a tribe that would exist to be a blessing for other tribes.

The rest of the Old Testament is essentially the story of Israel trying to work out the implications of this sense of calling to be a different kind of a tribe. But generally in the Old Testament, Israel doesn’t quite get the hang of this new concept.

I guess, it is possible for all of us to see why this was such a radical new idea and why it would take so long for this idea to catch on. It is still a concept that is hard to sell in this world.

But the story of Jesus is essentially a story of a person whose meaning and purpose in life was to call his Jewish tribe back to their original calling to be a blessing to all other tribes.

It is one of the major questions in Matthew’s Gospel. Has Jesus as the Messiah, the New King David, come only for the benefit of his own tribe to restore the fortunes of the Tribe of Israel. Or has he come to restore Israel’s original calling as the tribe of Abraham to be a blessing to all other tribes and to the whole world.

Throughout Matthew’s Gospel, there are clues along the way, that Jesus has come to call the people of Israel back to their original calling to be a blessing to all other tribes and all other nations.

And that brings us to our passage today. In the story of the Magi from the East, we see the first major clue that the coming of Jesus is meant to help Israel to fulfill it’s destiny of becoming a new kind of tribe. A tribe that no longer lives for it’s own self-preservation and protection, but for the benefit of all people.

Right near the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, we see that Jesus has come for the benefit not only of his own people, but for the benefit of foreigners as well. People of a different skin colour and a different language and a different culture. Jesus has come to break down our old tribal identities and to make us into a new people a new tribe that will embrace and include everyone.

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the message is clear... go out into all the world and make disciples from every tribe or nation.

And in the book of Revelation chapter 7 we see a vision of this calling coming to fruition:

“9 After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages...”

The challenge of the Story of the Magi remains for us today... the calling to see beyond the boundaries of our own tribes.

The calling to become part of Christ’s new tribe that will include people from every nation, tribe, and tongue.

And the calling to move beyond just our own self-preservation to become a people who live to be a blessing to others... even those who are different from us. To become part of a tribe whose purpose is to bless all other tribes.

Let us pray...

John 1:1-14

I would like to read a reflection from a book by Robert Fulgham. He writes the following:

"When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.

I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light in to dark places where the sun would never shine - in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light - truth, understanding, knowledge - is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.

I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world - into the black places in the hearts of me - and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of life."

Most of us can identify with the image of a cracked and broken mirror, because often it is how we ourselves feel: broken and fragmented, and sometimes with sharp edges and sometimes feeling like we are only a piece of something much bigger that we have lost sight of. And yet even a broken piece of mirror still has the ability to shine and reflect light.

At Christmas we speak of the Light of God coming into the darkness of this world in Jesus.

But we make a mistake if we think that somehow the Light is only contained in Jesus. Jesus reminds us in Matthew’s Gospel that we too are meant to be lights in this world, like Robert Fulgham, coming to see that our true meaning in life is found when we learn to reflect the light of God into the dark places of this world, beginning with the dark places in our own hearts.

Christmas was never meant to be a once off event in the past. Christmas was always intended to be repeated over and over again, every day in each of our hearts as we learn to become the Light of the World, learning to reflect and shine the light of Christ into the darkness.

Christmas only becomes meaningful when we allow Christ the light of the world to be born within our hearts and in our actions, when we allow the light of Christ to be reflected from us towards others, even when all we have to offer are the broken pieces of ourselves.

And so may Christmas be repeated this year as we allow the Light of Christ to be born in our hearts and as we become the light of the world for others. Amen.

Matthew 1:18-25

Two weeks ago we looked at Jesus family tree in Matthew’s Gospel and spent a little time looking at the scandals in that family tree.... scandals of incest, prostitution, mixed race, adultery, and murder.

As we continue on to the next section of Matthew’s Gospel which deals with the birth of Jesus, we discover that there is another scandal. Mary conceives a child out of wedlock.

In verse 19 we read the heaviness or the weight of the scandal... Joseph, her fiancée, was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly.

It’s funny that verse. We read that he was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly. But in actual fact, doesn't it sound a whole lot more that he didn’t want to disgrace himself publicly, because the truth is, the only way that he could make sure that she wasn't disgraced was by marrying her.

By divorcing her, Joseph would have been sealing her fate. Forever more, she would be regarded as an unwed mother. For the rest of her life she would live under the shadow of scandal.

And indeed, within the early years of the Christian Church, there clearly was scandal around the birth of Jesus.

There was even a story or a rumour that went around that suggested that Mary had become pregnant by being raped by a Roman soldier. Not only that, the Roman soldier even had a name: “Pantera”. It can be found in the writings of Celcus in the 2nd century, as well as earlier in the Jewish Talmud.

The scandal around Jesus birth can even be seen within some of the New Testament Scriptures:

• In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is referred to as the Son of Mary. It was a very strange way of referring to someone in 1st century Jewish culture. No-one in Jewish culture was referred to as the son of their mother, unless there were question marks about the paternity.
  
  
• Some suggest that in John 8:41 where the Pharisees protest that they are not illegitimate children born of sexual immorality, they are by implication suggesting that Jesus is.
  
  
• Some have even suggested (like Celcus) that claims of a virgin birth were the early churches attempt to downplay or even cover up the scandal.
  
  

And so, if by Joseph marrying Mary there was still a wiff of scandal around Jesus’ birth, how much more there would have been if he had quietly divorced her and left her to fend for herself, never able to marry ever again because no one would take her as a wife.

The logical implication in tour Gospel story today is that Joseph was probably more concerned about saving his own reputation than saving the reputation of Mary.

Isn’t that human nature. Don’t we do that sometimes. We make it look like acting in someone else's best interests, but it is a strategy to cover over the fact that we are acting in our own best interests.

"Joseph, her fiancée, was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly."

I would like to pause for a moment and examine the word righteous that is used to describe Joseph, because it is a significant one in Matthew’s Gospel.

It is one of those disputed words in the Gospel. Part of the purpose of Matthew’s Gospel is to explore the true meaning of the word ‘righteous’. It is a word that appears seven times in Matthews Gospel.

As the rest of the Gospel unfolds it is clear that the Pharisees, the main Jewish political and religious party had their own understanding of that word ‘righteous’. It had a lot to do with following minute and detailed rules and laws.

Jesus on the other hand has his own understanding of what that word means and he is very critical of the way in which the Pharisees live out their so-called righteousness. For Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel the word righteous has a lot more to do with the word’s compassion, fairness and most importantly the word love.

As I had shared two weeks ago, in Matthews Gospel, Jesus is critical of the Pharisees righteousness, because it is primarily about outward show. On the outside, they like to give the appearance of being righteous. They say long prayers in public. They wear special religious clothes, wearing long tassels and a little box called a phylactery on their forehead that contained a verse of scripture. They liked to make a public show of how much money they would contribute to the temple treasury. Outwardly they liked to show just how faithful they were to following the religious rules and laws.

But later on in Matthew’s Gospel, as I suggested two weeks ago, Jesus compares the Pharisees to white washed tomb-stones. Nice and neat and clean on the outside, but full of dead bones. The righteousness of the Pharisees was an external righteousness. They fulfilled the letter of the laws, but their hearts remained unchanged.

Early on in Matthew’s Gospel in the sermon on the mount, Jesus tells his first followers, that their righteousness needs to exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees if they are to truly live as citizens of the Kingdom of God. In other words their righteousness needs to go deeper than that of the Pharisees. It needs to flow from a heart of love, which Jesus suggests is the heart of the Law... love of God and love of neighbour.

Near the end of Matthew’s Gospel, in the climactic parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus describes the actions of the truly righteous: The truly righteous are those who give water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, those who show acts of love to those in prison, and all the while, they are not even aware that these actions are actually righteous. They do them spontaneously out of love rather than by trying to be religious or trying to earn brownie points in heaven.

And so getting back to the story of Joseph, we read that he is a righteous man. Right at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew introduces us to this word ‘righteous’. But the big question is, what kind of righteousness is it? Will Joseph act according to the Pharisees approach to righteousness where he is more concerned about outward show and public opinion, making sure that he keeps his reputation in tact in the eyes of his neighbours? Or will Joseph act in accordance with Jesus approach to righteousness. Will Joseph act out of faithfulness and love even at the risk of his own reputation?

In the story, Joseph has a dream in which an angel encourages Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife and that the one born of her will be called Immanuel for through his life and presence, people will know that God is with them.

In verse 24 we read: “When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife.”

Joseph listens to the Divine voice within. He follows the voice that speaks within the depths of his heart rather than the voice that speaks from his head that is more concerned about what others will think.

At the end of this little episode, the reader sighs a little sigh of relief. Joseph is indeed a man of integrity and honour. His righteousness is not just outward show but inward authenticity. Early in Matthew's Gospel, in this act of faithfulness and love towards Mary, Joseph is already showing us the way of Jesus.

But ultimately this story is not just about Joseph is it. Ultimately the story is about us. It is about you and it is about me, the readers of Matthew’s Gospel.

And the question remains....

Will we live our lives with our primary concern being outward show and public opinion, or will we live a life of deeper authenticity. Will we live our lives primarily out of the desire to win the approval of those around us? Or will we live our lives from a deeper principle, a deeper integrity, listening to the deeper voice of Divine Love from within?