Ephesians 1: 3-11 (Common English Bible)
Matthew 2: 2-12 (Common English Bible)
Happy New Year! As we wade into this year of our Lord 2025, I’d like to begin with an old camp song that goes, appropriately enough, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” Maybe you know it. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…” It’s probably the most pointless song ever – and that’s the whole point! Beneath its obvious goofiness, though, it’s actually a little unsettling. We’re here because… we’re here. And where’s that? And why? And so what?
Of course, we have plenty of ways to locate ourselves
in space these days. We can pinpoint our current position and ask Waze or Google Maps to get us from point A to point B by turning left in a quarter of a mile and veering to the right in 900 feet. But whether we actually know where we are – whether we have a sense of place, of being somewhere – that’s something else again. And in a larger sense, in this time of dazzling speed and constant change and shrinking distance, it can be challenging to get our bearings. Where are we, really, on this January 5, 202…5?
One sign of the times is the current revival of Thornton Wilder’s Play Our Town on Broadway. If we’re feeling a bit dislocated, it’s nice to be able to spend a couple of hours in the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, around the turn of the last century. It’s a place and time where people knew who and where they were – a place where, as one of the residents puts it, “we’ve got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them, and trees and plants. And we watch the change of the seasons: yes, everybody knows about them.” And although Grover’s Corners exists only in imagination, it is, in a way, our town. And there’s some comfort to be taken in that, even if we can’t live there for very long.
Of course, the experience of being dislocated isn’t new. The Bible itself, from Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden to Israel’s exile in Babylon to Mary and Joseph having to travel to Bethlehem at a very inconvenient time, is full of stories of displaced people. Our gospel lesson for the morning, the Epiphany story from Matthew’s gospel, features some dislocated people who nevertheless know exactly where they are, though not in an ordinary sense. In fact, everything about the magi, these “wise men from the East,” is pretty sketchy.
As Matthew tells it, we don’t really know where they’re from, or who they are, or how many of them there are, and they don’t quite know where they’re going. While the gospels are explicit about several locations surrounding the birth of Jesus – Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem – the magi are only said to be coming from “the East,” and various later traditions have them coming from places as scattered as Arabia, Ethiopia, Persia, and India.
Even the meaning of the world “magi” isn’t clear. We do know that they were astrologers, students of the positions of the stars, and that means they could have accurately determined their location by checking plenty of existing constellations. Yet here they are, following a new star that simply popped up out of nowhere; where it goes, they go, and they aren’t sure where they’re going.
After all, why would they have checked directions with the notoriously paranoid King Herod, of all people, if they knew where they were headed in search of the new “king of the Jews”? With the appearance of this new star, these experts in astral location were completely off script. Did they have any idea where they really were? They did, no matter what the coordinates said.
They knew who they were looking for, and they knew what that star portended. “When they saw the star, they were filled with joy. They entered the house and saw the child with Mary his mother. Falling to their knees, they honored him. They opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” Strange gifts for a baby, as has often been noted, but not for the Lord of all our living and dying, of heaven and earth. Because, beyond all their calculations, beyond sight, beyond all common sense, they knew that they had come to the epicenter of everything. And, being lost in wonder, love, and praise, they weren’t lost at all. And they invite us to be there with them.
What they have arrived at defies description, but it is hinted at in a breathless passage that opens the letter to the Ephesians. In fact, in the Greek text, this is one long, run-on sentence, and I think it’s meant to be read as fast as possible, so here goes:
Bless the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! He has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing that comes from heaven. God chose us in Christ to be holy and blameless in God’s presence before the creation of the world. God destined us to be his adopted children through Jesus Christ because of his love.
This was according to his goodwill and plan and to honor his glorious grace that he has given to us freely through the Son whom he loves. We have been ransomed through his Son’s blood, and we have forgiveness for our failures based on his overflowing grace, which he poured over us with wisdom and understanding.
God revealed his hidden design to us, which is according to his goodwill and the plan that he intended to accomplish through his Son. This is what God planned for the climax of all times: to bring all things together in Christ, the things in heaven along with the things on earth. We have also received an inheritance in Christ. We were destined by the plan of God, who accomplishes everything according to his design.
That’s it, and if it’s a bit overwhelming, I think that’s the intent. The point is that this is what it means to be “in Christ,” a phrase that the writer uses eleven times in these few verses. That’s where we are, and where we’ve always been, and where we always will be. “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,” in the words of the old hymn.
Marinated in God’s love and tucked into God’s plans from the get-go, that’s where we are, and when everything finally gets its act together through God’s overflowing creativity as revealed in the life, death, resurrection, and glorification of Jesus, that’s where we’ll be. That’s the point, and it will continually reorient us, if we let it. And centering our lives on it, really recognizing and living in it and through it, is the work of a lifetime.
I think Thornton Wilder had something of this in mind when he wrote Our Town. If there’s one thing you remember from the play, it’s probably this little soliloquy given by one of the townspeople, Rebecca Gibbs:
I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was so sick. The minister of her church in the town she was in before she came here. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America. But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God – that’s what it said on the envelope.
And the postman brought it just the same.
(Our Town, p. 54-55)
“And the postman brought it just the same.” That’s where Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, truly is, and when the postman delivers the letter, that’s the address. Which is to say that it’s at the intersection of heaven and earth. Wherever you are, you’re in Christ, and in the mind of God. We’re here, not just because we’re here, but because Christ is.
To make this more concrete, I want to share a couple of passages with you from the recently published memoir of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who for years exposed corruption at the highest levels of government and tirelessly advocated for human rights in his home country.
Imprisoned on fabricated charges, and having survived at least one assassination attempt, Navalny died last February under suspicious circumstances in a labor camp near the Arctic Circle. Put in solitary confinement 27 times, for a cumulative total of 300 days, he was accused even there, in a random and arbitrary way, of new crimes that he could not possibly have committed while in confinement. He was often transferred between prisons in a windowless van, with no idea where he was being taken.
If anyone ever had a right to be completely disoriented, he did. But he never was. In the most extreme conditions, he reoriented himself in creative and at times even in funny, ways. He described his prison cell, tongue-in-cheek, as a monastic cell, even as a spaceship:
Judge for yourself. I have a simple, spartan cabin: metal bedstead, table, locker. There’s no room in a spacecraft for luxuries. The cabin door can only be opened from the command center…I don’t cook for myself. Food is delivered straight to the cabin on an automatic trolley… A voice coming out of the wall says over an intercom, “Three-Zero-Two, prepare for sanitation. I reply, “Yeah, sure. Give it ten minutes. I need to finish my tea.” Naturally, at that moment, I realize I’m on a journey into space and flying toward a brave new world.
But for him, these weren’t just flights of fancy; they were deep plunges into possibility, redescriptions of the here and now.
In his final entry, written early last year and smuggled out of prison, he wrote,
I have always thought, and said openly, that being a believer makes it easier to live your life and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler…
You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about?… Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.
My job is to see the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.
- Alexei Navalny, final words from prison, March 22, 2024 (Patriot: A Memoir)
Alexei Navalny had no illusions about what the immediate future held for him. Locked in a cell in which he fully expected to die, Navalny was at the epicenter of everything, and he knew it. He died in a place that was almost no place at all, that he might live in Christ, who is all in all.
And here we are. If it’s a holy place, that’s because it’s the place where we gather to be reminded of the presence of our Lord always and everywhere. We’re here because…we’re in Christ, who invites us to his table, to be nourished in body and spirit and to be sent from here into God’s 2025 in confidence and joy. So come, let us break the bread and share the cup, for all is prepared.