Tradition--

it's a funny thing.

What would cause otherwise sensible people... 

to tuck into roast turkey, plum-pudding and custard...

in the middle of a hot summer's day?

Of course, tradition says something about identity and history...

belonging and memory.

And yet, it's interesting, isn't it, how traditions evolve over time--

how they get blended and conflated?

A decorated tree from Continental Europe...

combined with a meal whose culinary origin is old English...

and, perhaps, with some concessions to modern Australian life.

Or, take Father Christmas, whose pre-cursor--

St. Nicholas--

was a bishop in Turkey in the fourth century...

and, according to legend, was a healer and miracle-worker...

who secretly gave gifts to the poor.

Wedded to some old Germanic and Nordic pagan myths...

St. Nicholas evolved, in the middle ages, into the patron saint of children--

especially in Holland and Germany.

Riding a white horse and dressed in a red bishop's cloak and mitre... 

he gave small gifts to good children on the eve of his feast day--

the Fifth of December--

while naughty children were threatened with being bundled into his helper's sack...

and carted off to Spain.

Dutch and German migrants took this tradition to America...

where it was modified and commercialised, in the early twentieth century, by the Coca-Cola Company.

Father Christmas became a chubby bearded man in a red suit...

riding a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer...

and accompanied by elves.

But that sort of adapting and conflating of tradition also happens in the Church.

Take the traditional nativity scene:

rustic barn with rough wooden crib...

Mary, Joseph, and baby...

shepherds and sheep...

and three wise men.

It's a scene that we find in countless works of art down the ages...

and used to find on Christmas cards.

And, perhaps, that's what many suppose the first Christmas was like.

But the census and the "inn"...

Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary journeying from Nazareth to Bethlehem...

only occur in Luke's story.

Whereas Matthew's story presents Mary and Joseph as residents of Bethlehem.

More significantly, the shepherds only appear in Luke's version. 

They come.

They see.

They return.

All, supposedly, in the space of, say, less than an hour.

End of story.

Whereas those mysterious Wise Men from the East only appear in Matthew's story...

and the author doesn't bother to tell us how many there were...

or when they were supposed to arrive. 

It could have been anywhere up to two years after the birth of Jesus. 

And that's why Epiphany--

when we remember the visit of the so-called Wise Men-

is celebrated some time after Christmas.

 

But, let's be honest...

as far as traditions go, Matthew's is a pretty far-fetched story--

clearly one that the author has crafted himself...

at least partly based on the Isaiah reading that we heard this morning.

After a very perfunctory statement about Jesus being born...

the author launches into this colourful account of a visit by some foreigners, known as "Magi"--

often translated politely as "wise men"--

but, actually, pagan priests of the Zoroastrian "religion" from somewhere near modern-day Iran.

As such, they were astrologers, not astronomers...

regarded by most first century people as magicians or wizards...

and they were assumed to practice incest.

Indeed, there are legends that the Magi married their mothers or sisters.

They were also assumed to engage in cannibalism. 

And they came from an area of the world--

the Parthian Empire--

that Rome had never defeated-

which made them politically dangerous as well.

Thus, to first century readers, they were foreign, strange, and totally "other".

They must have been dangerous and anti-social--

even sociopaths.

They were people who were capable of anything.

They were people who ought to be feared. 

 

Well, in crafting his story, the author first of all posits the appearance of a new star.

Of course, the Magi--

believed to be astrologers--

saw it...

and they drew a culturally-appropriate conclusion about its significance.

In that world, the birth of great men--

men like Alexander the Great...

Julius Caesar...

or the Emperor Augustus--

was thought to be accompanied by astral and cosmic phenomena.

So, naturally, they assumed that a great man had been born.

And yet, the author doesn't have the arrival of astrologers from Rome, or from Greece, or even from Egypt...

nowhere from the known and safe world.

No!

Ironically, the only ones whom the author has observe the star...

and understand its significance...

are these strange...

bizarre...

immoral...

fearful foreigners.

And, as the author crafts the story, at the end of a lengthy journey to seek a new born king...

they find a child...

supposedly all tucked up in his parents' tiny, peasant cottage...

in a small, obscure village...

in the middle of Hicksville.

If you can picture it, the image is almost laughable in its imaginative absurdity.

 

And yet, the author is using it to make a very profound point:

that God's presence among us...

is perceived and recognised by a group of strange and suspicious...

immoral and dangerous...

foreign priests.

Now, it's true... 

that the author isn't necessarily implying that the Magi understood deeply...

or that they recognised the full meaning and implications of these events.

But he's saying, unambiguously, that these men--

the most unlikely of sorts--

searched and found.

They had a potentially transformative encounter with the divine...

while the people who should have been searching and seeking...

the people who should have perceived that something was happening...

the people who should have recognised the presence of God in their midst...

didn't--

not the residents of Bethlehem...

not the inhabitants of Jerusalem...

and certainly not good religious folk. 

Matthew's original readers must have been horrified!

It's as if Jesus were to come among us today...

and the people who realised that something special had happened--

who came to see...

and who responded with joy--

were fundamentalist Muslim clerics from modern day Iran or Indonesia--

the sort of people that we would probably consider terrorists--

or a bunch of secular humanists and militant atheists...

while good, respectable, Church-going folk didn't notice...

or didn't seem to care.

 

Matthew's Christmas story might be vastly different from Luke's...

but, in many ways, the result is much the same!

The metaphor of the incarnation confronts us with a God of the unexpected and the unlikely...

a God who defies conventional wisdom, custom, and belief...

a God who offends our sensibilities.

And that's something that we, in the Church, still need to hear.

Because, so often, we presume to know God.

We presume to know what God wants or expects of us;

we presume to know whom God is or isn't pleased with;

we presume to know how God works... 

where... 

and through whom--

so that we can be closed to the God who acts in unorthodox ways...

through unexpected people... 

and in unlikely places. 

And, we're not always open to the fact that those of other faiths--

and those of no faith--

might have grasped something that we have missed.