When the Star Stops...
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The 1971 movie, The Last Picture Show, is a coming of age movie set in Texas in the 1950's. Although color had been in movies for decades, Director Peter Bogdanovich shot the film in black and white, to convey the bleakness of the rural small town. When I was young I saw the movie and was partly bored at the wide empty street scenes with the wind blowing-it's a winter film, with some Christmas decorations. But I did get the longing that was in the characters for something to happen. The lack of excitement leads to fighting and promiscuity: the coming of age comes not through sexual or other initiation rites like football, but through the lead character, Timothy Bottoms, seeing the failed dreams and compromises and disappointments of the adults who have stayed in that community.
Near the end of the film, after one dream of escape through an early marriage has been cut off, the mother of the girl says to Timothy, you're lucky my daughter didn't get you-the daughter is a conformist who will do almost anything to be popular-and then this mother (played by Ellen Burstyn) remembers a time of true love and adventure in her life-fleeting-lost, but if she hadn't had it, "whatever it was," she wouldn't have known what life was about. A bit after that scene, Timothy starts to drive out of town, clearly heading out, but then something makes him turn the car around go back to that almost God-forsaken place.
The wise men go home another way because they have seen what "it" was. They have lived a whole dream. They bring a little pot of gold to the end of the rainbow. I imagine that if they were filmed in black and white coming-and we may remember T.S.Eliot's poem, The Journey of the Magi-a black and white poem, full of foreboding. But in our version, when the star stops and they look and see, the stable would go to full color. Like the special effects in the movie Pleasantville, but at much more profound level. In a way, the wise men's lives would be two dimensional until they reach the stable, and then when they look in, it becomes 3 dimensional and in color and they step in to this glory-filled space.
Over the years, most of you worshippers have known these wise men and been attracted to them. They are strangers, exotic travellers, on a mysterious quest. They are Gentiles representing the whole outside world coming to a small part of Israel. They are wise, wise precisely in reading King Herod and seeing through his false devotion to his murderous jealousy. They bring gifts, but the gifts are not the point-but bringing gifts has transformed them. Maybe some of you can even imagine them shopping in the bazaars, or chosing the gifts from among their possessions. Our gifts, even the cheapest and quickest ones, always reflect ourselves and the amount of attention we are giving to someone else. It is dangerous to give gifts, but fatal not to, because the parable of the man with the bigger barns tells us that the man with the big new barns dies. Not everyone with the most toys wins. And perhaps they had no gift for Herod, who certainly had a lot of toys already.
Our journeys begin and end with prayer, the kind of prayer that sees stars. Some of us have to travel like Peer Gynt all over the world before we can recognize the joy and purpose that are in our own backyards or Kansases. But many of us can not travel or do not travel deeply in our hearts out of ourselves. We are like the woman crippled for 18 years in the synagogue in Luke 13: 11. Jesus, like God, already knows what her prayers are. He doesn't ask, do you want to be healed. The fact that she has been coming to this small church for 18 years tells us that she wants to be healed. The high school kids in her town think she's a joke, they don't understand the old and infirm, they don't understand the long obedience and dedication of those who live with unanswered prayer. And then Jesus comes and the star stops and her prayer is fulfilled.
The Last Picture Show actually shows a whole town that is crippled, even the wildest and sexiest live half-lives. In that synagogue where Jesus heals, they are outraged and we learn that the leadership precisely doesn't want healing to occur-that crippled woman may have been the only alive one, kept alive by that hope against hope that is faith.
Our second text gives us part of Jesus' own journey and involves reference to Herod's son, also Herod. Jesus teaches the disciples on the way. I touch on only one of the parables in this section. There are these guys who are waiting outside the master's house and the master says, I don't know where you come from. And they say, we have been your neighbors for years, we've eaten with you at the diner, we've commuted with you on the train, coached each other's kids, voted for the same whoever... But the master still says, clear out. I don't know where you come from.
So the journey is always partly inward, and the journey of prayer is into God's presence. We don't pray, or make resolutions for personal kingdoms: we pray for God's kingdom to come and in praying we are entering it. The Wise Men are the model of the kingdoms of the world that become the kingdoms of our Lord; their gifts become not signs of where they have been, but where Jesus is going-and Jesus has already gone into them.
I chose that second passage also because it gives us Herod's son, who is also after Jesus, just as his father was. Today and Tomorrow, Jesus says, I will be casting out demons and curing people, but then on the third day I reach my goal. That's when the star fully arrives. And the parable about inclusion is about our arrival where the star has stopped, even if we have journeyed only in prayer. (We still encounter Herods).
Herod wanted to be first, and he may not even be among the last. The people in the inn are outsiders, and the outsiders are on the inside. These wise men, nuts to leave their prosperous homes, are among the first in the large sweep of history: "People will come from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, to sit at table in the kingdom of God." But the Wise Men were also last to arrive-and that is comfort to us; may we too be among the last but still welcome! Amen.
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