Green Stars
Isaiah 60:1-6
Eph 3:1-12
Matt 2:1-12
Today is Epiphany Sunday. Epiphany is the event where the church celebrates the breakthrough of God into our world that revealed to us the nature of God.
How is that different from Christmas, you ask? It’s a fair question and the answer is that it isn’t. In some ways Epiphany is an obsolete celebration. In its original form, it has become kind of redundant.
Back in the old days, Epiphany was the joyful festival of Christians throughout the world. Epiphany was the most wonderful time of the year. Epiphany was the celebration of the great revelation of God to our world in the person of Jesus Christ.
Over the centuries, this celebration of Epiphany was gradually taken over by a late arrival known as Christmas. The Epiphany celebration of God’s breakthrough into our world morphed into royal birthday party similar to the weeklong extravaganza that accompanied the birth of a new prince in the European monarchies. This new celebration called Christmas grew to include everything Epiphany had to offer and a whole lot more.
For you college basketball fans, Epiphany became the NIT of the Christian church. Once the premier college basketball event in the land, the National Invitational Tournament was overwhelmed by the creation of the NCAA tournament. It still takes place every year in the interest of tradition, but since its original purpose was usurped, it is resigned to status as a second-rate ritual of limited significance.
Similarly, in the interest of tradition, the church has kept the season of Epiphany, but that season also has assumed a second-rate status, with limited significance. In order to keep it relevant, we’ve had to retool and redesign the season. Epiphany now celebrates the more general issue of the revelations of God—the times when God peels back the curtain on the impenetrable mysteries of life and gives us a glimpse of God’s self.
The story associated with this revelation is that of the quest of the Magi. And the symbol of this revelation is the bright star.
The Magi are often called the three wise men, or the three kings. In fact, the Bible never mentions a number, and the tradition of the Eastern Christian church is that there were 12 of them. The Bible never calls them kings; and it’s a bit misleading even to call them wise men. The Greek term “magi” more accurately translates to astrologers.
Which makes sense for Epiphany. After all, it would seem that astrologers would be perfect examples of the dramatic breakthroughs of God into our world. They are people who unravel the mysteries of life, discovering where God writes the fate of our lives and our universe in the arrangement of his stars.
In this story it appears they have done so. They have decoded a special message from God written in the stars. They then rushed to act on this life-changing information by finding the king whose birth the stars announced. The point of the story seems to be that this is the way God communicates to God’s people—through strange and otherworldly interventions. And so at epiphany, we celebrate those strange and otherworldly interventions in which God appears more clearly than in most other times.
In this narrative, the bright star is held as the symbol of these startling breakthroughs in which God suddenly appears more clearly to us.
There are times when I wish I could just take Scripture and tradition and conventional wisdom at face value—just skim the meanings of these stories off the surface and never question anything. But for some reason God keeps pulling me into the Word. God keeps challenging me to jump in and spend time not just in small talk with him but in real conversation. God challenges me to wrestle with God as hard as I can, and to find in that honest struggle, a deeper meaning.
And so I find myself wondering about that old interpretation of epiphany and the magi. The problem is that, in our time, astrologers, those who study the stars as predictors of human events, are not particularly associated with wisdom.
If indeed, we considered them wise, then we would give astrology a high place in our theology, and part of my job as a pastor would be to consult the stars along with the scriptures. But we don’t. The Christian church does not give astrology any place in its worship or beliefs.
In fact, astrology is considered a pseudoscience, a fantasy diversion at best and an elaborate scam at worst. If the magi were astrologers in the modern sense of the term, they were either gullible practitioners of a discredited belief or con men.
The fact is, however, that the magi were not the same as today’s astrologers. There are reasons why the term “wise men” could be applied to them. There were elements of serious astronomy in what they did. They did detailed mapping of the heavens as well as intricate record-keeping of the movements of celestial bodies. They amassed a tremendous amount of data and knowledge that required considerable education and powers of observation. In fact, they were well ahead of their time in applying some of the principles of science. In some ways, you could say they were the premier scientists of their time.
Unlike Mary and the shepherds of the Christmas story, who were blinded by an intense vision of the supernatural, the magi drew their conclusions from their study of the physical world. Their records indicted the extreme rarity of what they were seeing—an alignment of planets and stars that no one alive had ever seen and would never again occur for many centuries. From this data, they drew conclusions, and drawing conclusions from the study of the natural world is not epiphany, it is at least a crude prototype of science.
So for them, there is no unexpected intervention from God that clearly reveals the answer to a previously baffling mystery. Instead, the magi form a conclusion based on the evidence of the natural world. In other words, the story of the magi is in some ways the very opposite of epiphany.
A second problem that I struggle with is the use of a star as the symbol of the startling breakthroughs in which God suddenly appears clearly to us. Is anything in this universe less comprehensible than a star?
If I ever want to get weirded out by life, all I have to do is think about stars. Stars are what tell me I really don’t understand much about reality at all. To me, stars are the symbol of all that is beyond our ability to understand.
Is there any way a human can comprehend the numbers of stars or the distances involved? If you could live long enough to count to one billion and then repeat that count one billion times, you would have counted 1/100th of one percent of the stars in the sky. And those are just the stars close enough for us to see.
The closest of these stars, in the Alpha Centauri complex, is 4.35 light years away, which is roughly 24 trillion miles, or the equivalent of 40 million round trips to the moon.
Can you begin to comprehend these numbers?
Stars are not revelations; they are mysteries. They are not what they appear to be. They appear to be tiny specks that give off a whitish light. But in fact there are stars with 100 times the mass of our sun, and stars that are 10 million times brighter than our sun. Despite what we see from our vantage point, stars come in all colors of the spectrum. Many stars are green, but because of a lot of complex factors, we don’t see them that way.
Stars appear to be fixed in position in the sky; in fact navigators have long counted on that “fact” in determining location. In fact, all stars are revolving around the center of their galaxy.
Many of the stars we “see” don’t even exist. When we view a star, we are not seeing present reality, we are viewing a running video of ancient history. The starlight that we see was actually sent out by that star as much as 3 billion years ago. Stars are live voices speaking to us from a time before the earth was created.
And as mind-blowing as all this is, it pales compared to the weird things that go on with collapsed stars.
So my question is, how did the star, a concept that none of us can begin to fully grasp, come to be a symbol of how God reveals the truth in crystal clarity?
When I ponder all this, in relation to the story of the Magi, I see different and more profound messages coming to us in the season of Epiphany, in our celebration of the breakthrough of God into our world.
1. The symbol of epiphany should be light. The star is fine if used as an example of light. Because as the Gospel of John says, epiphany the act of God breaking through into our world to reveal himself clearly, is all about the light.
From John 1: “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.
The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” It is not the star itself, but the light it brings, that symbolizes epiphany.
2. How does this light from God break into our world? How does this light reveal the truth of God’s nature?
The answer seems to be that
those impact moments come in all ways and all shapes. They can be intense
and blinding spiritual experiences such as Mary and the shepherds
experienced, and Paul experienced on the road to
What we celebrate in Epiphany is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that comes to us in many shapes and forms, the light which breaks through the dark shell of our skepticism, our ignorance, and our self-centeredness to show us, clearly, the truth.
These impact epiphanies are not just one-time shots of brilliance; they have an accumulative effect that adds up over time. As little as we understand about stars, what we do know has come about through many epiphanies, many moments of inspiration over the centuries. It works the same way with God. No one experiences the whole truth of God all at once in a blinding flash; we get closer to it as it comes to us through many epiphanies, many moments of inspiration that have added up over the centuries.
3. The major breakthrough, the great epiphany of the life of Jesus is
that God desires relationship not with just a chosen few, but with all
people. Those who came to honor the birth of Jesus were not the chosen
people, not the religious establishment, not part of the “in” group. The
Magi were foreigners. They came from a long way off. Their ways were
strange, they were outside the traditions of the Hebrews, their interest in
the stars was baffling to the people of
Yet it was they and not some leader of
All of today’s readings combine to proclaim this message of Epiphany. In Ephesians, Paul talks about the great revelation of his life, the breakthrough, the unveiling of the mystery. He says that the boundless riches of God are not restricted to a small band of true believers, but belong to the Gentiles, to all people. The Magi are the first to experience that.
“May you experience the breakthrough of God in your own life,” prays the Psalmist. “May you understand what God is really like.
And “rise, shine, you people,” writes the prophet Isaiah, “for you light has come.” The light of epiphany has come. God has broken through into our world. God continues to break through into our world in many ways.
The light of epiphany has come, and will continue to come. To pierce the gloom with which we surround ourselves and reveal the truth about God. Keep your eyes open.