St.
Paul’s United Church Sunday, January 7, 2006
Wondermagi.com – Rev. David Mundy
Ephesians
3:7-12 Matthew 2:1-12
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The United Church of Canada created a stir last Fall
when it launched a new advertising and outreach campaign called Wondercafe.ca.
Our denomination hired a slick advertising company to come up with ads designed
to attract the attention of those who aren’t usually in church and they were
placed in magazines which didn’t have anything to do with religion.
One of the ads which was used closer to
Christmas showed Jesus sitting in a chair at a mall which would usually be
reserved for Santa Claus. A child is sitting on Jesus’ lap and the caption
says: “Would you still take your kids? After all isn’t Christmas supposed to
be about him, not the guy in the red suit?” It goes on to invite people to
visit the Wondercafe website where they can be
involved in lively discussions on spiritual issues and “life’s big questions.”
The media picked up on this campaign immediately and of course they got
it wrong, or at least only half-right. They grossly exaggerated the cost of the
ads, not realizing that they are part of a bigger effort to encourage young
adults to reconnect with the church called Emerging Spirit.
And they didn’t make any attempt to find out whether the new website
attracted the people it was designed for. I did and what I discovered in the first couple of days was that
there were hundreds and hundreds of visits to the website with many of those
visitors making the effort to join conversations on the topics listed.
There are thousands, perhaps millions of children, women, men in this
country who want a light to show them the way on their journey of faith but
they aren’t sure where to discover it. Sadly, many of them have come to the
conclusion that they won’t find that illumination in a church.
Did you notice my sermon title for this week? Wondermagi.com is a
tongue-in-cheek variation on the Wondercafe concept
because this is the Sunday closest to the Day of Epiphany which is always
January 6. On that day the readings include the story from Matthew’s gospel
which is about those mysterious, fascinating visitors from the east who are
described as wise men or magi.
One of the old Epiphany hymns called We Three Kings isn’t in our
current hymn book. For those of you who get annoyed that some of our favourites
have been omitted, it
wasn’t in the last hymn book or the one before that -- the old blue book first
published way back in 1930. We all seem to know the words of the chorus
anyway:
O Star of wonder, star of nightStar with royal beauty brightWestward leading, still proceedingGuide us to thy Perfect Light
It is “capital P, capital L” because Jesus is the light they are seeking.
This story which is only here in Matthew’s gospel has fascinated people
through the centuries. There are many paintings of the wise men from history,
all with their own interpretation. One by Breughel the Elder shows them at a
very European manger. Another by Tissot depicts an
exotic camel train. Do you notice how we have shaped the story with details
that aren’t there? No mention of camels in scripture of course, but we put the
magi on camels.
We aren’t told that there are three magi either – just three gifts – but
that is the number we have settled upon. One woman sniffed that it couldn’t
have been more than three magi, because where are you going to scare up three
wise men in one place at one time!
And we do crowd them into the manger with the animals and the shepherds,
even though it would have taken six months, two years, maybe longer, to make
the trip from Persia, if in fact that was where they were travelling from. We simply can’t be sure, but if true it’s far
more likely that they would found a babbling toddler “on the tear” than a
silent infant in a manger.
They made that journey though, and we can imagine one of the wise men
saying that before they left that he tried to Mapquest
their trip but because they couldn’t include the destination there was no
result – and he wouldn’t go anywhere without a map!
Or another of the magi complaining that his
arthritic knees were bothering him and squeezing the sides of a camel for that
long just wasn’t going to happen, so count him out.
Whether it was three or thirty-three magi who set out together, they
were led by the celestial body – star, comet, aurora borealis –to the toddler
in Bethlehem who, by his birth, had already begun to change the world.
If the story of the Magi is so captivating, and if the language of a
journey or pilgrimage of faith is so much a part of our Christian faith, why
don’t we take it to heart? After all, churches today are not known as places of
boldness and great adventure. While we like to hear that long ago some powerful
and mysterious strangers would travel a great distance to pay homage to the
young Jesus the tendency in the church is to become quite sedentary, to be
timid and rigid in our ways.
When we are faced with new challenges, we are often reluctant to be
mobile and responsive to the work of God’s Spirit. At times we are as stubborn
as a camel!
In an excellent book on strategic planning for faith communities called Holy
Conversations the authors, who have worked with many congregations, observe
that the tendency is to do what they call “problem planning,” which tries to
fix something which doesn’t seem to be working any more in the way we would fix
a broken heating system. It is short-term work that doesn’t usually include any
vision.
Other congregations venture into developmental planning which can be big
on evaluation of the past but tentative in acting on what they have learned.
The writers
maintain that we must take a different approach, which they call
“frame-bending” planning, disturbing expectations to make space for God’s
unseen or unconsidered future. As you might expect, this is the sort of
planning which can be most unsettling.
We always need to be ready for the differences of opinion which bold new
approaches to offering the message of Christ represent. In the latest issue of
the United Church Observer magazine there were back-to-back letters to
the editor which are responses to the Wondercafe
campaign. The first one said:
Brilliant! The Wondercafe
advertising campaign is catchy, funny, provocative and
speaks louder than anything else that we are a denomination of people who
believe faith is a journey . . .
The second letter was a polar opposite!
I have been a member of the United Church all
my life and I have never been so disgusted and embarrassed as I am now after
seeing the ad on television . . .
You may be wondering if I am “fer or agin” the Wondercafe campaign.
I am for anything that will bring us a step closer to the Christ, the one who
says in the vision of the book of Revelation “See, I am making all things
new.”
That said, I am convinced that we will never discover the sense of
community we all need sitting in front of a computer screen. Being Christian is
not a solo act. Our faith flourishes in the koinonia,
the community. So whatever happens in our United Church Emerging Spirit
and Wondercafe programs, the spirit others
seek will be found in the richness and depth of life together as Christ’s
people.
At Christmas I chatted again with the brother-in-law whose family is
attending a church in the Hamilton area where the worship services are not held
in a “churchy” looking building. In fact they meet in a movie theatre on Sunday
mornings, before the first screenings of the day begin. Not only is this
congregation flourishing, others have been added in the area. While the way
they meet and worship is unconventional, the emphasis is on sound and creative teaching and worship.
Anc of course the focus of our life together and
our personal faith is Jesus, the Christ. Did you notice that in the passage we
heard today from Matthew we are told that when the magi arrive, a demonstration
of their wisdom is to kneel before the Christ child and pay homage, or worship.
Why is this here? Why was it included? It tells us that whoever comes to Christ, does so with a sense of wonder and humility.
It has been suggested that so many congregations are struggling in our
times because they are rigid at the edges, but soft at the core. They are hung
up on the conventions of “churchianity” but have
forgotten that Christ is at the centre of their life. Churches that are
responsive and thriving are soft at the edges and strong at the core. There is
a flexibility which allows them to uphold Christ through whatever means are
effective. The infamous Bobble Head Jesus in the advertisements offended some
people, but it is Jesus after all.
The gospel message is ultimately about discovering Jesus, even if we as
seekers and searchers don’t know that it is Jesus we are looking for. So our
glorious task is to ensure that Jesus the human baby, the challenging teacher,
the compassionate healer, the Crucified One, and the resurrected Christ is
always at the centre of who we are. We are compelled to be as creative and
imaginative and passionate as possible in making Jesus known, but we have to
remember that it is always about Jesus.
As we begin this New Year we can choose to live as a community of wonder
and life and hope in Christ. However we
follow the star, it will take us to Jesus.
I will leave you with a poem/prayer by Jan Berry which invites us to
discover God-with-us in Christ.
God of gold, we seek your glory:
The richness that transforms our drabness into
colour,
and brightens our dullness with vibrant
light;
you wonder and joy at the heart of all
life.
God of incense, we offer you our prayer:
our spoken and unspeakable longings,
our questioning of truth,
our searching for you mystery deep
within.
God of myrrh, we cry out to you in our
suffering:
the pain of all our rejections and
bereavements,
our baffled despair at undeserved
suffering,
our rage at continuing injustice;
and we embrace you, God-with-us,
in our wealth, in our yearning, in our
anger and loss.
Thanks be to God!