"A Different Road" | Liz Harlan-Ferlo | January 5, 2025

"And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road."

Please be seated.

That hymn we just sang, We Three Kings, or as I knew it as a child, We Three Kings of Orient Are, was one of the first pieces of music I ever learned to plink out on the piano. I don't remember the last time I've heard it in a liturgical setting, so thank you, Katie, for that.

And to be honest, we don't actually know that there were three of them, the Magi, the wise men. There were likely more—Eastern tradition says twelve— especially to support such a long journey.

And friends, there's no particular indication that all of them were men.

Our familiar depictions of them began in the Middle Ages, where the tradition of the three took hold, largely because of the gifts they present.

They were often depicted then as three different races or ethnicities, three different versions of "from the East."

You can see that even in our own images over here at the creche.

We may now reject these old-fashioned Magi figurines as a show of cringy stereotypes, but we can still see them as demonstrating, in a clumsy way, difference. The Magi were outsiders.

Likely in their own places they functioned as spiritual authorities, ones upon whom their communities relied to track patterns in the natural world, both seen and unseen. The seasons to plant the crops, discerning auspicious timing for important events.

They had indeed journeyed far, and perhaps many of you had the tradition of enacting their travel over the 12 days of Christmas, moving figurines through the house to the family nativity scene.

Indeed, last week, those ones were at the back of the church and they have now arrived here for today's service.

I suspect their travel to be the same in origin as most holiday season magic, quietly enacted by women for everyone's benefit. There they are!

The Magi were outsiders.

When you are an outsider, whether that's indicated by your hair texture or your social identity or just being a new face in a church community, one survival technique is to learn the rules and customs well and fast.

This was certainly my strategy as a child uprooted over and over from city to city and home to home, three times before I was seven years old.

In each new school, in each new environment, I studied carefully where power resided and how to appear to it as acceptable as possible.

As they search for the meaning of this strange star, the Magi go first to the official seat of power, King Herod.

In the Jerusalem of the time, Herod is what historians call a client king or a vassal. The occupying government allows him to keep his ceremonial role because he knows the people, he knows the ins and outs of the local culture, and in exchange, he promises to keep things quiet for the empire.

When Herod hears what these outsiders have to say, he makes some calls.

When King Herod heard this, we hear in the scripture, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him. Calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.

Chief priests were an aristocratic class, people whose authority was spiritual as well as social. They performed the sacrifices and purification rites on the people's behalf and were the arbiters of whether people were correctly following the scriptural law.

The other group that Herod calls are the scribes, the bureaucrats, and the scholars.

These two groups were the respected wise men in the community of which Jesus is a part, and later on in Jesus's story, both of these groups will push back against him, will publicly test him.

These days, gatekeepers still represent state power.

Perhaps you have waited in lines at embassies or visa offices to get the appropriate documents for your passport, or even more likely, that endless line at the DMV. Before you cross a threshold, you must indicate respect for the power that governs the land. Usually it requires an outlay of money and time, not to mention proof of your intentions and acceptable personhood.

When I left school chaplaincy after 10 years with no plan for what came next, I went to places where I was an outsider. I spent a month in South India and then eight weeks living with a friend in a residential neighborhood of Bangok, Thailand.

Eight weeks is longer than the Thai visa waiver for Americans, and although I knew that this was often overlooked by authorities, it made me very nervous to ignore it.

I had already planned to spend a few days in Cambodia, but I shifted my trip sooner so that I could adhere to the letter of the law.

I had to leave the country to stay in the country, to affirm that I was and intended to remain an outsider.

It was only an hour by plane to see Siem Reap Colombia– excuse me– Cambodia, but it felt worlds away from the glitz and sheen of urban Bangkok.

Climbing down the steps onto the tarmac in the hot night, I looked up to see an enormous full moon in a strange red-brown sky.

My Cambodian visa was to be purchased right there on site. An ATM stood beside the immigration line, and it spit out US currency, and the visa price was clearly marked in American dollars.

But the next step after my documents were stamped was a booth selling a Cambodian SIM card for my phone– arguably a more important asset at that moment than even the government visa.

While the man at the stand deftly maneuvered the new card into the side of my phone with a long fingernail, gecko lizards dashed under the fluorescent tube above him on the stained wall.

The Magi follow the rules at first.

They go to the most visible, the clearest seat of power to ask about this star, this change that has come in the great patterns that they follow.

They go to to this point of power even though it might put them in danger.

Cambodia is a complicated place. The ancient temples I came to see were built a few hundred years after the birth of Jesus, but their spiritual underpinnings of Buddhist iconography, of Hindu Dharma stories were likely familiar to these Magi.

And of course, Cambodians share a living story, a memory of terrible state violence and oppression, of genocide.

Many of their ancient temples were purposefully destroyed, stones turned into rubble by a powerful government, just as rubble piles up near Bethlehem today.

Holy places are not always ones that state power hallows.

So we can place in contrast two scenes:

first, the scene of Herod, powerful vassal King of Judea, bringing together his congress of knowledgeable authorities.

Second, a stable with dirty shepherds, frightened animals, and with, well, strangers.

There are no high-powered aristocrats here, no officials.

The Magi are outsiders.

Here are yet more misfits at the manger.

In the incarnation, God extends welcome not only to the poor and the oppressed, but also to those in unfamiliar clothing practicing traditions of faith strikingly different from our own.

It's the last phrase of this story that always echoes for me:

they left their own country by a different road.

The Magi don't obey. They do not return diligently to Herod to share the information that he wants, that will help him consolidate his power. They know now that his is not the seat of real divine power, and likely they suspect, as the story bears out, that his desires will find their end in violence.

They set out to return to their own place. The way they go is changed, as they themselves have been changed by encountering Jesus.

We can understand the Magi as the first seekers for God in our Christian story. People who understand well the world's patterns– so well that they notice this star, this sign, this savior, something wholly outside the pattern.

They are so obsessed with it that they drop everything to travel to an unknown place, risking upsetting the rules and the rulers. And when they didn't find what they were looking for where they might have expected it, they were not deterred. They continued.

So let this Epiphany mark for us a time of seeking.

Let the Epiphany story remind us that we should remain steadfast and open, especially when things unfold differently than we assume they will.

Let this story remind us that true wisdom is discernment, practice, stillness, and ritual.

Listening to the patterns and drawing closer to the holy disruptions.

Today we remember ones who trusted, who offered such deep and patient attention that they could hear God's call through a distant star.

So may we too, after witnessing Christ's Incarnation, return to our shared life by a different road.