Loading...God is such a show off.
An entire star! I mean, that is so extravagant. When I get a birth announcement it’s a card. But a star?! What’s a person supposed to do with that? What the Wise Men do with God’s Epiphany of his son is come closer to God. They do what Isaiah said all nations do when they see light — they draw closer to the Light.
If you came here today seeking a bit of wisdom, you can find it in the manger. It doesn’t look very shiny there. But that is where God set the light to shine in the sky to guide those who are seeking to this place of great humility and vulnerability.
Humility and vulnerability aren’t always what we associate with wisdom. I remember as a young child feeling certain that I would only know what wisdom was when I was very very old and I decided very, very old was thirty-five.
God had called me to be a priest when I was four years old and I slowly crafted a plan to fulfill God’s call when I was wise enough to do so. Thirty-five would also give me time to be a dolphin trainer for a few years, which is what I wanted to do. During college, I tried an apprenticeship at the zoo which lasted a whopping ten minutes. After college I moved to Florida to live nearer to the dolphins. Not only did my aspirations to swim with the killer whale Shamu at Sea World not materialize but something worse happened. At the ripe age of twenty-one, I realized I was not getting any wiser. In fact, it became painfully clear to me that with each passing day any wisdom I may have had was vanishing and I was actually becoming less wise.
The metric I used to measure wisdom was flawed. I measured wisdom by blending bits of Buddhism with Phil Donahue and the result was this philosophy: “Wise people can manage their responsibilities with complete composure.” Pause for laughter. Doesn’t that describe the average American’s need for control?
What went wrong? I forgot to look in the manger. If I had just remained as wise as I was when I was four years old, I would have kept my eyes on the manger.
Look, the manger is set at the eye level of a four year old! The taller you get the harder it is to see. But there it is, for everyone to understand the wisdom in a box with tiny figurines. If you want to see what wisdom looks like, look at what is low and tiny. Because I am old, I will look at the wise men first. They are men, they are old, they are bearded, they are foreign. Of course when I was an enlightened adolescent I thought those were the attributes of wise. [If any enlightened adolescents are reading this don’t be discouraged. You do know everything.]
If you want wisdom don’t start with the wise men. While they were wise enough to follow the light, they took a detour to the palace. Thankfully, they were wise enough to heed dream intervention and return home by a road disassociated from Herod. The star did not shine over Herod’s palace. That was a logical place to look — but not the wise place. Palaces are already sparkly. Isaiah says God is going to sparkle in the dark place. Where there is gloom, God’s light with shine. The kings are not where wisdom is. Wisdom is in the manger itself.
That’s about most of all I can say about wisdom because most of mine has gone. I can only remember the tiny bits, low level things.
It’s too late for me to be wise. I have grown all up and keep company with those who have also grown too tall and too old and too bearded and too foreign and watched far too much Phil Donahue, or Oprah, or YouTube — depending on your generation. Most of us grown ups have decided it is more important to us that God be in control than in love. And that decision has left us disappointed in God.
Our only hope is in the manger. In the dark. In the cold — where God is going to show off his best and brightest work. I don’t know what that work looks like for you. For me, it looks like not being a dolphin trainer. It meant going to seminary at age twenty-three instead of thirty-five. Hope in the manger means I wake up every morning and put my feet on the floor when it would make much more sense to pull the covers over my head and pretend I are more comfortable there.
God will show off what God loves best whether we possess the wisdom to see it or not. For those given eyes to see — humble, vulnerable eyes — today is the day to look into the dark for exactly where to find the Light.
