“…To Worship Him”
By Dr. Tom Pace
January 1, 2017
Matthew 2:1-12

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea,during the time of King Herod,Magifrom the east came to Jerusalemand asked, “Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews?We saw his starwhen it rose and have come to worship him.”
When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born.“In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written: ‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’”
Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared.He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”
After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed.On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.Then they opened their treasures and presented him with giftsof gold, frankincense and myrrh.And having been warned in a dreamnot to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. (Matthew 2:1-12 NIV)
So it begins this way. It begins “after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the time of King Herod.”
Okay, if you don’t like history you can just maybe think about something else for a little while. But I need to give you a running start at this because it’s pretty significant and we often get confused about King Herod.
I want you to go back a ways well before King Herod. Alexander the Great dies and they divide up his kingdom, his empire. A group of his followers, one of his generals, begins a dynasty called the Seleucids. They reigned in Palestine in the entire Middle East until about 167 BC.
That year a man named Judas Maccabeus led a Jewish revolt against the Seleucids that lasted about seven years. In the year 164 BC the Jews had taken control again of the Temple in Jerusalem. They purified the temple but they did it under siege. They were surrounded by the Seleucid armies. So in the midst of that they had only enough oil for one night of burning the lamps and that’s where the Hanukah celebration comes from, that God magically provided the oil for eight days of purification during that time.
So Judas Maccabeus was the key Jewish leader in 167. By 164 Judas Maccabeus had died but the Jews had really earned their independence. It was sort of a semi-independence in that they had called on some allies from around them to help them in this battle.
I’m going to get to why this matters in just a minute, hang on!
So between 160 BC and 63 BC a group of kings reigned in Israel who were semi-autonomous and for the most part were good kings. And they were called the Hasmoneans. Sometimes they’re called the Maccabeans after Judas Maccabeus. So the Hasmoneans reigned for a hundred years of Israel’s being fairly independent, until 63 BC when Pompey from Rome conquers Palestine. Once the Romans came in, the Hasmonean kings are kicked out of power and one of Pompey’s buddies, a man named Herod Antipater who was not a Jew, an Idumean, which is from Edom, in what is now just south of Israel. He was put into power there as a governor and he had a son named Herod who began his political career in Galilee. He was made tetrarch, which means he controlled part of the kingdom – he was made Tetrarch of Galilee.
He was an up and comer. There was a little revolt at that time and Herod convinced Mark Antony who was in power in Rome that his own father – Herod Antipater – had been unfaithful. So he kicked his dad out of power and Herod became king. In 37 BC King Herod comes to power.
Now the reason I tell you all this is because that Hasmonean dynasty… this is not about this particular story, but when they wave palm branches, that was the sign of the Hasmonean dynasty of kings. So when Jesus rode into Jerusalem and everyone’s waving the palm branch, they’re saying, “Hey, let’s get rid of Herod and bring back … this one’s going to be like the Hasmonean kings.” No wonder they killed him.
Now let me tell you about Herod the Great. He was a terrible despot. He was an architect and builder. He rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem and he built many other palaces all over. He built Caesarea. He built the palace at Masada. He built a whole kingdom called Herodium. Just an incredible builder. He was also a paranoid schizophrenic, crazy guy. I want you to think Kim Jong-Un.
I couldn’t remember all of these so I wrote them down. Here are the people in his own family he killed: his favorite wife (whom he said he loved). He had to kill her because he loved her so much. He killed his two sons by her, her brother, grandfather, her mother. Anyone who threatened him, he killed them.
If you go to Masada you’ll see that he’d build these stairs that were very narrow so only one person could come down at a time. And at a bottom would be the place where was his sort of safe room. The idea was that he could get down there with some soldiers then those attacking him could only come at him one at a time. So they could kill them as they came down the stairs one at a time.
So this is Herod the Great. What the Scripture says is that during the time of Herod the Great, “Magi from the East came to Jerusalem.” Note they came to Jerusalem which was the seat of where Herod lived. “And they asked ‘where is the one who has been born King of the Jews?’”
I can just imagine them knocking on the palace door. I keep thinking of the “Wizard of Oz” and how the guy opens the door and says, “What do you want?”
Now Magi were astrologers, alchemists, and those were days when spirituality and science were not so divided. The word “magi” comes from the same root as the word “magic.” They came in a huge entourage with camels and all that sort of thing. We learn from our children that there were definitely three of them today.
So that the Wise Men came and knocked on the door. They’re probably Zoroastrian. That’s the oldest monotheistic faith. It began about 3500 BC. So they came from Iran probably to Jerusalem, in about a six to eight week journey.
And they knock on the door and they say, “Hey, where is the King of the Jews?” And Herod consults his smart people and they say, “The Scripture says he’s to be born in Bethlehem.” So Herod says to the Magi, “Hey, would you go find him. I hear he’s in Bethlehem; and send word to me where he is so that I may come and worship him.”
Well, that’s what I really want to talk about today, this idea about worship. But let me finish the whole story and we’ll come back to this part.
The Magi do find Jesus, they don’t tell Herod where he is, so Herod just decides what he’s going to do is have all of the children aged 2 and under killed. It’s called the Slaughter of the Innocents. All of the children in all of Bethlehem and in the surrounding areas are murdered. Joseph is told in a dream to become a refugee and he takes his family and goes to Egypt where he takes refuge.
Now Herod the Great dies, we think about six months after Jesus is born. His kingdom is divided into four components. Herod Antipas goes to Galilee, the northern part; Herod Archelaus comes to Judea and that’s where Jerusalem is. So when Joseph heard that Herod Archelaus had taken over Jerusalem, he doesn’t go back to Bethlehem, he goes to Galilee, and goes to Nazareth. And that’s where they live when he comes back. The Wise Men go on back home.
So what can we learn from this story? I want to lift up very briefly four things that spoke to me. It’s really a dark story. I can see why we don’t read it at Christmas but it does speak to our time.
Four things I want us to see. The first is that in some ways we’re not all that different from King Herod. Now it’s not that we’re so cruel and vicious and vindictive. It’s that Herod said he wanted to go and worship him but that’s not what he really wanted. What he really wanted was to pursue his own agenda.
I have a friend, David McNitzky, who’s the pastor at Alamo Heights church in San Antonio. He wrote a book called Accidental Herod, and I love that book. It’s not what we intend to do, but what we discover is that we’re not following Jesus’ agenda. What we’re trying to do is get Jesus to follow our agenda. That we co-opted the faith and try and make it support that which we already have decided we want to do.
We say we want to go worship Jesus, but what we really want to do is pursue our own agenda.
It comes on us kind of innocently. So we say, “Why do I want to be Christian?” So I want to be a Christian because I’ll be a happier person. I want to be a Christian because I want God to bless me. I want to be a Christian because I could live a more balanced life.
You see then our faith is just a means to an end, it’s not an end in and of itself. It isn’t what we’re pursuing. It’s not that we’re pursuing God with everything we have, and that’s what really matters and whether we’re happy or not happy is not as relevant as whether we’ve really decided to follow Jesus.
Do you see the difference between counterfeit worship and real worship? Counterfeit worship says, “I want to follow Jesus. I’m going to put a fish on my business card so I can say I’m a Christian. But what I really want is other Christians to do business with me so I can make some more money.”
I’m not saying if you have a fish on your business card that’s your motivation, but what I’m saying is that we often are using our faith to try and get something for ourselves. Counterfeit worship.
But we can learn from this what real worship is. So if you look down with me at verse 9, it says, “After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star that they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. And when they saw the star they were overjoyed.”
The first way that you know if it’s real worship is that there’s joy involved, that when we come into the presence of Christ there is a joy that comes over us.
Can you imagine what the Magi would have felt like at that moment, when after eight weeks of journeying and trying to find it, and when they finally get to the place where the Christ child is, the sense… it says, “They had great and amazing joy.”
Sometimes when I have a Sunday off I go and worship at Windsor Village Church. Their pastor, Kirbyjon Caldwell, is a friend and I think he’s a great preacher. One time I went and as the service began, Kirbyjon came out and said, “I don’t know what’s going on in your world. Maybe your lights have been turned off. But the lights are on here and we’re going to rejoice.” Then he went with a whole litany of “This might be happening in your world… but here in this place there’s joy.”
There ought to be a sense of when we come in to worship of putting behind us the difficulties and brokenness of life, and stepping into simply enjoying God’s presence, simply to be there in the midst of the joy.
Remember, we define joy as that feeling, that sense inside us that we are in the midst of something holy, that we are experiencing something divine of God.
I’ve shared this with you before but it’s always been very significant for me. It’s just a picture in my mind. When I was Youth Pastor here at St. Luke’s my supervisor was a man named Joe Zink. And Joe passed away here. His wife was named Mary and she was our eighth grade Sunday school teacher, just an amazing woman. I will never forget – it’s just one of those little snapshots in my mind. At his memorial service I was up here – I had a prayer to give – and Mary was seated there with the family where the family sits at a memorial service. We were singing the song “Shall We Gather at the River?” We’re singing that and I look down at Mary’s face and there are tears streaming down, and this huge smile. This moment of incredible grief and yet at the same time joy because she knew she was in the presence of something divine and something holy.
When we come to worship, if it’s real worship it isn’t necessarily happiness, but there’s a real sense of joy, of being in the presence of the divine.
The Magi, Zoroastrians of a different faith, stepped into the presence of Christ and felt incredible joy.
Here’s the second thing we can see from the Scripture. It says, “On coming to the house they saw the child with his mother Mary and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.”
The second thing we can see is that real worship is giving. It isn’t receiving, it’s giving.
I must confess that one of the difficulties as a pastor, and all of us church folks feel this, is thinking, “What can we do to get you to come?” We ask, “What can we put out there that you’re going to like? What kind of advertising can we put out, what kind of deal can we get out there that will sell you on something and that you’ll come?”
We think that way because we’re a part of a consumer oriented culture. It’s a consumer culture. You want to hear a good sermon, and you want to hear some awesome music, and so what we want to do is present to you something that touches your heart. And the truth is that there’s nothing wrong with receiving, with being touched and being inspired. But that touch and inspiration is there to draw something out of you. That we are supposed to be worshipping – this isn’t a spectator sport.
I had a mentor many years ago. She was one of the real prayer partners for me. She said that her worship experience changed dramatically when she quit asking at the end of the service how did they do today and started asking, “How did I do today? Did I really pray when they were praying? Did I really pray for those babies who were being baptized? Did I sing hymns from my heart? Did I engage with the Scripture that was being read?”
See, worship is something that we give. When we do the offering at the end of the message we do it as a way not just so you’ll give money, but as a way of demonstrating, of signifying that the response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to give our lives. And the gifts that we give are just signs of the real gift we give, which is the gift of our whole lives.
Anne Zaki teaches at a seminary in Egypt but she has worshipped all over the world. She talks about what worship is like in the Third World when people bring with them the fruit and grain and chickens and all sorts of things. At the time of the offering there’s this giant procession as they all come forward and leave those things there. She says it’s also tied to the way they worship, the way that they sing, the way that they celebrate. And that worship is not something that’s done to them; it’s something that they do as they give of themselves fully into the worship experience.
So if it’s real worship it is not something we just get, it’s something that we give and when we walk in the door, we’re coming in to give.
Here’s the last piece of it. It says, “And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another way.”
They returned another way – if worship is to be real it is to be transforming for us. It is to change who we are.
Aldous Huxley is most famous for writing Brave New World, and you probably had to read it in high school or college or something. But he also wrote a very short novel called The Genius and the Goddess. In it there’s a scene where on Christmas Eve a person is leaving a house and here’s what he has the narrator say: “Drive carefully. This is Christian country [it’s Christmas Eve] and this is the Savior’s birthday. Practically everybody you meet will be drunk.” This is Christian country, it’s the Savior’s birthday and we’re partying and everyone you meet will be drunk.
We were visiting with some friends just last night and we were talking about our children and their spiritual journeys and whether they come to faith or don’t come to faith and how that happened. And what we came to realize was that we had worked hard with our children growing up to be open-minded and broad-thinking and that too often the Christians that they met were not open-minded and broad-thinking, so they struggled with whether to fully engage with the Christian faith or not.
I wonder if we are really changed when we come to worship. Do we really return another way?
Here’s what it ought to be like. We often, after church, go for Mexican food. Are you guys Mexican food people? I love to go for Mexican food. We eat fajitas and all of that and depending on the size of the restaurant you will know the rest of the day whether we ate Mexican food. It’s because you smell like fajitas. You come out of the place, someone sniffs and says, “You guys had Mexican food for lunch. I can tell.”
That ought to be what happens. We ought to carry the aroma of Christ out the door with us when we worship. You know how you put a carnation in the glass of food coloring and it sucks up the color? We ought to come into the presence of God and draw that into us so that when we leave this place we’re different. But too many of us are hard like steel. And you can put us in the food color water and when you take it back out again it isn’t any different.
Are we really transformed?
An anonymous poet has written these words:
“Sweet manger baby, to thy gentle sway
We yield all pride, all knowledge, and gifts for thee
We worship in the radiance of thy face and rise a different way of life to trace.”
If it’s real worship we come into God’s presence and we leave different, to live a different way of life.
So each week on Sunday morning you follow the journey of the Wise Men. We were just talking before the service that the longest distance on Sunday morning is from the bed to the car, not from the car to wherever you’re going. You come here and I just wonder why? I would hope that you come to give your life fully to Christ and to experience the joy of that act. And then to leave somehow differently.
Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you that you have spoken to each one of us in a different way today, and that you have through your own way of showing us a star led us to the babe of Bethlehem. We pray that we might really come to worship him. In the name of Christ. Amen.