The Pagan Priests of God

Somniodelic Workshop

Propers: The Epiphany of the Lord, AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Religions are not closed systems. They don’t descend from heaven, engraven on golden plates. They talk to one another, learn from one another, both in conflict and coöperation. If I tell you my story of God, and you then tell me yours, we come to a greater understanding; both of one another, and also of the sacred mystery which all humankind has encountered.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the pages of our Bible. The Bible is not one book but many, written by fifty-some authors over the course of a thousand years. Right from the get-go, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are very different stories. The details don’t match up at all. But the message at root—as to who God is, what sort of world we inhabit, and what humanity’s role remains within it—that’s dead-on. There the two match.

The conversation then continues. The history in Kings doesn’t match up with Chronicles, and for good reason. The Prophets play off one another, in a dialogue of justice and mercy. And Wisdom literature outright fights! Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Job do not get along. Yet all of their voices are heard. And somewhere in there we find Wisdom.

Judaism, as a tradition, has tended to emphasize that truth is found, God is found, in respectful argument, in communal debate. And this carries over into the New Testament as well. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—not to mention Paul—each offer to us their different perspectives, different witnessings of the Christ. In so doing, they help us to find our own witness, our own testimony to the Risen Christ alive within our lives.

I honestly think that this is one of the most wonderful aspects of faith: that it’s alive, it grows, it learns right along with the people in whose hearts it dwells. We strive to embody the eternal, unchanging Truth of God within a mercurial world. And the only way to do that—the only way for finite creatures to interact with an infinite God—is for us forever to learn, forever to grow, forever becoming more. Christianity historically is an educated faith. We did invent modern science, after all, not to mention literacy.

You have often heard me say that the Bible was born in Exile. Judaism as we know it, as Jesus knew it—as People of the Book—was born in Exile. The mighty Babylonians came and wiped their world away: king, land, temple, all. And any Judean with two shekels to rub together was carted off to Babylon, strangers in a strange land. There they encountered Mesopotamian myths, Mesopotamian stories of the gods, which they then twisted, inverted, reinterpreted into the stories that we know.

The Flood was a big one. Everyone in Mesopotamia knew about the Flood. But the Judeans said that it wasn’t the act of cranky old gods who hated humankind. No. It was in fact God’s mercy, His cleansing of a fallen world in order to save it, to grant us new birth. The Tower of Babel was another. The Exiles looked to the great ziggurats of Babylon and told the story of an arrogant, overweening empire collapsing under the weight of its own pretensions, so that its captive peoples may scatter, taking their own languages to their own lands. Now I wonder what they could have meant by that.

But it’s not just Canaanite, Egyptian, Mesopotamian stories that we find the Bible. See, the Neo-Babylonian Empire roughly corresponds with modern-day Iraq. And right nextdoor is Persia, roughly modern-day Iran. It was the Persians who would conquer the Neo-Babylonians, allowing the Judeans to return after 70 years of Exile. As far as conquering empires went, the Persians got full marks; the Bible is pro-Persian.

And the Persians had a prophet of their own: Zoroaster by name, or sometimes Zarathustra. We actually don’t know exactly when he lived. Traditionally dated to the time of Cyrus, he would’ve been around when the Exiles got to go home. But some argue for a much earlier date, as early as Abraham perhaps, some 4000 years ago. He’s in the running for world’s first monotheist, up there with Moses or maybe Akhenaten. 

Zoroaster preached that there is one good uncreated God: Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom. Ahura Mazda was attended by lesser divinities—the yazatas or angels—and opposed by Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit, along with his wicked host of deavas, the false gods. Eventually their conflict would culminate in the triumph of good and renewal of the world, at which point even those souls who joined Angra Mainyu to descend into darkness shall be reunited with Ahura Mazda, forgiven their sins, and resurrected immortal.

All of this ought to sound rather familiar, because it’s precisely the sort of thing that the biblical prophets of Exile began to promise to the Jewish people. Did the Persian prophet learn this from his Judean counterparts, or did the Judean prophets learn all this from him? Does it truly matter? The prophets encountered one another and learned a greater truth about God. This is when they spoke of Resurrection. This is when God promised them the Christ.

The Zoroastrian symbol for God, for the Lord of Wisdom, wasn’t a statue or graven idol. They made images of angels, but not of God. For them, rather, the symbol for God was fire: warming, enlightening, purifying, alive—just like the Holy Spirit. And the shadows cast by sacred flames within their temples illustrated the ephemerality of evil: not a substance in itself, but merely a lack, a temporary darkness which evaporates in the light.

And because the stars were seen as divine—we still name our planets after gods, you know—these so-called fire-worshippers looked to the flames above, to the celestial heavens obeying the will of God. The stars were messengers, you see, a sort of angelic astrology. And these Zoroastrian priests—who knew the Jews, who knew the Prophets of the Bible, who looked to the heavens for signs, and for divine flames to resurrect the world—they were called magi. It’s from them that we derive our word for magic. Wondrous people, these pagan priests, who know the same God whom we know: the original People of the Book.

That’s why they show up in our Gospel reading this morning. When Matthew tells the story of Christ’s Nativity, he and he alone includes the Visit of the Magi. They come from the east, from the direction of Persia, having seen in the stars the birth of the Savior. They come bearing prophetic gifts of frankincense, gold, and myrrh: gold, of course, for a King, shining and incorruptible; frankincense, reserved by Jew and Gentile alike for the worship of deity; and myrrh, a resin associated with embalming and cremation, a cloying aroma to cover the scent of death. The Christchild already here is King, and God, and Sacrifice.

The magi are led by a star—or an angel, often interchangeable in the ancient world—yet for specifics they must consult the Scriptures, in order to find the Babe in Bethlehem. And having offered Him homage, they return by a different road, as they were warned in a dream not to trust the murderous House of Herod. This is us, you realize: people led to Christ by nature, by dreams, by angelic visitations, and by some familiarity with the Hebrew Bible.

Over the years, we embellished additional details. We concluded they were three, though Matthew never says that. We said that they were kings, though Matthew appears to have a poor view of royalty. In art, they are depicted at three stages of life—youth, middle age, and dotage—hailing from the three known continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Thus they are all of us, drawn from around the world, from every time and clime, to worship the Incarnate God revealed in the manger. God leads the world to His birth in Bethlehem.

Christ has come for us all: not only to His own people, the Jewish people; not only to Christians, those of us who dare to go by His Name; but to every single person who has ever sought the truth. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” He says. I don’t believe that all religions are the same. But I do believe that prophets have been sent to every nation. I do believe, along with Paul, that nature points to God. And I do believe that God, whom humans call by many names, reveals Himself fully in the person of the Christ.

People argue over the historicity of Matthew’s magi, but that isn’t his point at all. What matters is the theology, what this story tells us of God. God is in Christ Jesus. God has come for all. And the echoes of Christianity which we find in other faiths allow us to offer up the gifts of our myriad traditions to the service of our one shared Lord. For all truth leads to Christ.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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