So, I now have a GPS, or a Global Positioning System, to be more precise. No more getting lost for me. Into the little screen, I can type exactly where I want to go, and then it tells me, in a lovely female voice with either, by my choice, an American or English accent, to go straight, turn left, take the ramp, take the exit, and finally, “Arriving at destination.” It is really quite amazing, but while the gadget always knows a way to a destination, it doesn’t necessarily know the best way that the locals know. What’s fun to do is drive straight when it wants you to turn right. “Turn in right in 500 feet; turn right in 100 feet; turn right!” the voice pleads. But, then comes the comforting, “Recalculating.” I love that. Next time your driving partner points out to you that you’re lost, say, “I’m recalculating.”
Let’s compare my GPS navigator to the form of navigation deployed by the wise men in the
Gospel appointed for this Second Sunday of Christmas. Upon arriving in Jerusalem, after a long and harrowing journey from the Persian Gulf, they ask the horrible King Herod, “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” A star, they followed a star. A star is, compared to the GPS, a rather crude method of navigation. Still, these wise men, what scripture calls the Magi, were the scientists of the day—astronomers, if you will. In this current epoch when science often drives the wedge between our mind and the possibility of faith, we remember that scientists long ago used their faith in their science to follow a star heralding the birth of an important and mighty king. What faith they had! Arrogantly, we might call their science quaint without realizing the arrogance in our faith that our science today reveals a complete truth. So sure they were, they traveled without benefit of a little scientific box that told them to turn right or left. For the wise men to travel from Persia to Israel and back was to cover the same distance that the Lewis and Clark expedition covered, some 2600 miles. For months, if not years, they traveled, no doubt in a large caravan with servants and guards for their treasures, at the behest of their kings who desired treaties that would protect their nations in the future. They journeyed relentlessly toward their star, not turning back when the trail failed, but trying again and again to find their way. They would not quit until they found the place where their star had drawn them.
It strikes me that many a spiritual person today—from the doctrinally certain to the skeptically seeking—desire a religious life built upon GPS simplicity rather than “a star rises” complexity. So many of us want to be able to type into a little box, “I want to know God,” and have it tell us to turn right or left, say this prayer or that, read then verse then that one, and we will then arrive, easily, without being lost once. Or, being already in the fold, we want to type in, “Why do I feel alone,” or, “Why does the one I love suffer,” and have the answers spoken to us by a device we can turn off if we think we know better.
The Christian life follows the experience of the wise men: a star rises and we are to wonder. We are to use our mind and freedom to ponder what the star might mean. Is the star God’s gentle whisper, a soft call to begin a journey of faith? The wise men learned that the star draws but does not direct us. We must struggle to find our way. And, as they knew, there is no final destination, simply stopping points along the way where we rest and pray, and then gather our things and journey further.
I worry some, in those abstract philosophical ways that others can express so much more articulately than I, that we are, as an American, technologically advanced culture, becoming way too “GPS dependent,” by which I mean we want our science and technology to do everything for us and solve our every problem. I am overstating this surely, but we want to have our computers make and keep our relationships as if digital community were somehow human community. We’re worried about overwhelming challenges like global warming, but are likely to be biding our time through recycling until there is a technological solution. We have silent debates with our “spell checker,” and allow embarrassing errors in our typing go buy because certainly the machine must no best. We like to complain about ads for prescription drugs all the while hoping that there is a pill to take to make us better, or thinner, or happier when we might do as well journeying within ourselves.
We are too often a people who type our questions into little machines and wait for them to tells us what to do and how to turn, and we put our trust in products delivered to us more than from our own creative souls. If we are to be the keepers of machines to tell us how to find a destination we could probably find ourselves, it won’t be long until the machines are keeping us so that we might turn them on. Again, I am overstating, but the next time I’m lost, I won’t be recalculating, I’ll be discovering, and wondering as I wander where the journey might take me.
The wise men appear on these last days of Christmas, just as we are to take them from our crèche scenes and wrap them up for storage, to remind us that the journey into God is one marked by a star rising that we must chose heroically to follow wherever it leads.
And for those among us who find all this scripture like static noise and these prayers like idle thoughts, the wise men might allow you the courage to wonder, create, pursue and strive. Don’t worry about the journey being one of faith, or into God, but just a journey. Allow, maybe, that in the journeying you may be found by God, as unlikely as that may seem. The wise men, when they finally found the child Jesus were overwhelmed and filled with joy and awe. May that possibility be a blessing yet unseen, a blessing freely given, no strings attached.
It strikes me that the wise men are the very characters in our crèches that we shouldn’t put away until next Christmas. We celebrate the birth of Christ once a year, but the journey toward Christ, like every true journey, is never ending.