Summary: Last fall in Washington, there was a very contentious Senate hearing over appointing a new justice to the Supreme Court. At one point in the hearing, one of the senators on the committee lost his temper, lost his cool, and melted down in rage. Shaking his finger at the senators from the opposing party, he shouted that they were acting disgracefully and conducting a sham process. And then he turned to the man being examined, the man who was nominated to the Supreme Court, and said to him, "You're looking for a fair process? Well, you came to the wrong town at the wrong time." He was speaking, of course, about Washington in 2018, but ironically, we could say something similar about the wise men in our biblical story from Matthew. They came to the wrong town at the wrong time. Here's what happened in the story. Many years ago, some wise men living in the Eastern lands of the ancient world, saw an amazing sight in the heavens, the rising of a new star, or maybe it was a comet blazing brightly across the dark curtain of the firmament, and they knew that the rising of this brilliant light was a sign from the heavens, a signal that something momentous, something world-changing, had happened. Although we sometimes sing at Christmas-time as if these wise men were kings - "We three kings of Orient are..." - actually they weren't kings at all. They were almost surely philosophers and astrologers, some think they may have been Zoroastrian priests. But, whoever they were, these wise men were shrewd observers of the night sky, those who looked for signs of decisive events and clues to the future in the heavens. So, Matthew tells us that just as Jesus was born, they saw this new star rising in the western sky over Judea, the land of the Jews. Using all their powers of analysis and interpretation, they determined that this star was a sign that a new king had been born; the Jews had been given a new king, and the lights of heaven proclaimed it. What they did not yet know was that this new king who had been born in Judea was not only the King of the Jews, but the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the savior of all, and his name was Jesus.
