God Really Is Still Speaking

"God REALLY IS STILL SPEAKING"

Matthew 2:1-12
January 4, 2008

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from
the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “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.” When
King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling
together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the
Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been
written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means
least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my
people Israel.’” Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the
exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go
and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that
I may also go and pay him homage.”

When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star
that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was.
When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering
the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him
homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold,
frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,
they left for their own country by another road.

I know many of you are quite aware of the “God Is Still Speaking Campaign” ad
campaign that was being waged by the United Church of Christ a couple of years ago,
in 2005. If you look on the cover of your bulletin this morning, you can see some of the
fruits of the national settings labor—the lines God is still speaking, and the comma that
has become familiar to many of us, the comma instead of a period, representing the still
speaking God. The tagline, of course, has become quite familiar to those of us in the
United Church of Christ: “No matter who you are or where you are in life’s journey, you
are welcome here.” And the campaign stirred up some controversy in 2005 when a few
networks wouldn’t air some of the ads, which brought an extra 20 million dollars worth of
free publicity for the 2 million dollars spent on the actual ads themselves. And I have to
admit that I do really love this particular publicity campaign, and I’ll share with you the
reasons why I do in a few seconds, but the greatest source of anxiety during that time
for me wasn’t the complaints of some outside of UCC that the tagline about welcoming
all was somehow insulting to their churches, that somehow the ads were impling that
their churches have not been so welcoming of all God’s children—that really didn’t
bother that much, because, frankly, I had been to a few of those churches, and, well, I
know I wasn’t welcomed and people like me weren’t welcomed, so I had experienced
that truth for myself. And it didn’t bother me too much that UCC might not really been
ready to welcome all of those that its actually issued that word of welcome to—I really
do believe that the church in general has the ability to change and grow, even now—
even in my relatively short lifetime, I’ve seen changes that I couldn’t imagine happening
20 years ago.

None of these controversies bother me all that much, but what really caused me the
most anxiety has been my gut wrenching decision to actually put one of the God Is Still
Speaking bumper stickers on the back of my car, my Ford Focus that I had up until a
few months ago. You know I’ve mentioned that dilemma in the past, a couple of years
ago-the great bumper sticker debate, the debate in my head! That was what has kept
me up at night! With all my hand-wringing about it a couple of years, you would have
thought I had been asked to attach one of those lit Domino Pizza-type signs on the top
of my car! Many of you know that I’ve just never been a fan of bumper stickers on my
car, especially religious ones—I’ve had a couple of my colleges on my previous cars,
but never anything religious. And I’ll tell you again why I don’t like them: because I
know my reaction when I’m tooling down the road, and someone with a “Jesus Loves
You” bumper sticker cuts me off, and my immediate reaction is, “well, I’m glad Jesus
loves me, and especially YOU, because I know I’m not feeling a lot of love for you at the
moment.” Or you see the person going 55 in 30 mile-per-hour zone with the ancient
Christian fish symbol that has become popular again of late. Or you see someone with
the “Warning: In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned” bumper sticker is driving as
if the rapture had indeed happened, swerving all over the road, and driving as if the car
was, indeed, without its driver. You know, when someone cuts me off or is just a rude
driver, and they have a bunch of religious stuff all over their car, I know I instantly go to
the place of being smugly self-righteous, ready to point out their hypocrisy when I see
them acting in ways that fail the words on the back of their car. I don’t like myself when
that happens, when I do that, and I also don’t want to be one of those people that other
folks become self-righteous about when I cut them off on I-94. Christians already have
a pretty bad reputation, especially when it comes to our hypocrisy, and I just don’t want
to add further fuel to the flame. And besides, if I put a religious bumper sticker on my
car, it might actually mean I might have to become a more courteous driver…and I’m
not sure I’m ready for that!

But, still, the God Is Still Speaking Campaign and the obligatory bumper stickers that
came with it was a relatively easy sell for me, even with all these reasons I’ve had for
not messing up my bumper. I really did and do like what UCC is trying to say in this
effort to reach out to those who have felt alienated by the church—that God is alive
and still present, and is continuing to speak to the church and the rest of the world in
so many different ways—and that truth is personified in the quote by Gracie Allen, who
is not known in many circles as being a theological giant: Never place a period where
God has placed a comma…”   Again, the comma. I just like the idea of a church, a
tradition, saying that we have not always had the right answers, and we know that God
is continuing to speak in this world, sometimes through the Scriptures, sometimes
through voices in the church, sometimes through those have become alienated to the
church, and sometimes through voices of other faiths or no faith at all. The church has
always been hard of hearing, always stubborn in hearing God’s call to do justice and in
hearing God’s call to do the work of the Gospel, which is keep welcoming and
welcoming all of God’s children home, until the categories like insider and outsider
eventually just melt away, and we realize that we have always been home, and that we
have always been God’s children, each and every one of us. And at the root of this
belief is the idea that revelation, the great unfolding, the great shining forth of God, has
never ceased—that revelation didn’t stop thousands of years ago in the Scriptures, as
some believe, and it has never ceased, and the great work of the church has been to
listen and to do whatever new thing God has called forth for us to do. The revelation
continues, and our work is to listen, to discern, to do the new things that God has put
before us to do.

And the work of listening and watching, of being witnesses to the great unfolding work
of God is actually integrated into the great yearly rhythm of the church’s life—Epiphany,
revelation, the beginning of something new, begins the great work of watching the
unfolding work of God in this world. Today we celebrate the Epiphany a little early—it
actually begins next week, but Rev. Johns will be preaching next Sunday, and I just
wanted to get my two cents in about this upcoming important time in the Christian
calendar.   Epiphany is the beginning of a time of reflection on who this Jesus of
Nazareth really was and is. Epiphany is a season of revelation for us Christians, a time
when the church reminds us that we have not always known what we now know about
God, that there was a time in history that revelation, that disclosure, took place in the
life of a particular human being and it slowly unfolded before the eyes and ears of
women and men who knew this man some two thousand years. It was a time when God
was speaking through a life of a peasant named Jesus from the town of Nazareth. The
word “epiphany” means to “shine forth”, or to “reveal”, or to even “expose”—I mean, I
am sure you have heard someone say they had an epiphany, meaning of course, that
they finally got it? The Epiphany season is the time between the beginning of Jesus’
life, the birth of Christ, and, on the other end, the Passion drama, the story of the end
of Jesus’ life—it’s the middle part of the story, and, actually, its most of the story in the
Gospels, even though we spend so little time inside the guts of the great story of Jesus’
life. And the good thing is that revelation, more often than not, revelation, which is that
divine unveiling, it comes to us in such unexpected ways, and through such unexpected
means, and so often, so very often, that revelation comes to us through truly
unexpected people. If the story of the Magi has anything to teach us this Sunday, it
probably has to do with the fact that revelation from the God who continues to speak
comes through such unexpected sources, and that God will not settle on the familiar to
tell and teach us what we need to know.

And those unexpected, surprising people who hear God’s voice are found almost at the
beginning of Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ life story: the Magi, these ancient visitors,
outsiders of the first order to people and culture of Israel, they come in response to a
divine voice.   Actually, these wise men, these magi, were magicians and astrologers—
and they tended to specialize in the interpretation of dreams. Now, keep in mind that in
Jewish thought, these sort of people were actually forbidden to practice their craft in
Israel—and they were for many Jews of the time the very epitome of Gentile idolatry—a
scholar describe the attitude of disdain for these men—and I quote—these “dabblers in
chicken gizzards, forever trotting off here and there in search of some key to the
future.” The chicken gizzards, I suspect were used to read the future, not fried and
eaten like they would in my next of the woods I am from—Mississippi — the gizzards
were probably examined much like some people use tea leaves today to try and tell the
future. And in the Book of Acts, we have a story of Paul in chapter 13 where he
confronts one of these fortune tellers, where he calls him all sorts of names and
denounces him and just tears him up, to be honest.

So, we have some pretty negative attitudes here about these sort of people—and yet,
and yet, it is to them whom revelation has been given, it is to them whom God has
spoken and speaks, and it is they who see a star in the East, and they follow it,
persistent, so persistent that this quest carries them across borders and cultures until it
finds them in Jerusalem before a King, inquiring about where this Jewish Messiah was
to be born. What unexpected people, what unexpected visitors that we find here in
Matthew! But it fits the divine pattern, doesn’t it—every time we think we’ve got God
cornered, every time we think we’ve got God in a box, every time we think we’ve got
God defined, God goes off and slips out of the corner, God sneaks out of the box, God
expands the definition! Its frustrating for those of us who like things nice and neat,
orderly and defined, but, of course, we don’t get the God we want, we get the God who
is, and that God is not so nice and neat, nor is this deity easily ordered or definable—
this is the unexpected God, the God of relationship, the God of our lives, the God who
meets our questions with some answers, and then oddly enough, with a few questions
of his own for us. It is the God we meet in the manger, vulnerable and beautiful, so
human and so divine, full of mystery and full of light.

You know, I know that we are a congregation who is very comfortable with the idea of
God meeting us in unexpected ways and unexpected means, of the truth that God is
still speaking, really speaking in this world, saying new things, or at the very least,
finally being heard clearly for the first time.   In fact, we may be a congregation that
actually does expect God to meet us in new ways, and through new voices. But I tell
you where I think this openness to God’s voice really hits the road—or the ear drum, if
you will—it’s the moment when we acknowledge that every person that comes through
the door of this church building, every child and youth we nurture within the Christian
faith, that every stranger who does not look like us, or exactly believe like us, or make
love like us, that each of them and us is possibly a new vessel, a new voice with which
God may yet be speaking to us. And the difficult task for the church has always been
the work of listening for the voice of God, as I suppose listening has always been the
hard part of any relationship between two people. But maybe that is our work for this
year, to listen to the voice of God in each other—the upcoming retreat is one of the
ways you can do that—but I would also say this: that we especially listen to the voice of
God through the new people that will join us this new year, and I believe that there will
be new, surprising voices who do join us this year in the work that God has for this
particular congregation. There may be new magi coming through the door this year,
speaking of a new thing, bringing their own peculiar and precious gifts, pointing to
some new wonder that is being born among us, we who may not even recognize that we
are ourselves pregnant with this wonder, even after this difficult year for many of us,
especially economically. And the voices of these new companions on the journey, they
may not sound like us, but I suspect the difference will do us a world of good because
they will remind us that God does continue to speak to us in different and unexpected
ways, we who are often hard at hearing. Amen.