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This is a reading from the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 2, verse 1 to 12.
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod,
Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked,
Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews?
We saw his star when 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 their 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 worshipped him.
Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod,
they returned to their country by another route.
This is the gospel of the Lord.
We praise you, Lord Christ.
Amen.
All right.
Again, good morning, everybody.
Merry Christmas.
What a joyous occasion to gather here this morning,
whether you're online or sitting here,
to celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ with you.
It's really awesome.
So I'm really glad to be here with everyone.
I'm going to jump right into the text
because I know that the kids are probably antsy to get home
and, you know, go on with Christmas.
And this text is very familiar to us,
so I kind of want to approach it in a different way,
as you guys would see it play out in the nativity play.
Every year, we introduce to children the meaning behind Christmas
and, as adults, to be reminded of God becoming flesh
and dwelling among us through the story of the three wise men or the magi.
And this part of the nativity play is colored with drama,
and I want to follow the story.
That's what I want to do as we approach the text.
I want to follow the story and ask questions along the way
because if we follow the story, eventually we will lead to Jesus.
And when we receive Jesus as the gift,
our only proper response is joyful worship.
And that is my golden thread today.
When we receive Jesus as the gift,
our only proper response is joyful worship.
So, here we go.
The story can be organized into two parts,
verse 1 to verse 8,
when the magi arrives on the scene
and enters into Jerusalem and meets King Herod.
That's part 1.
Part 2 is when the magi leaves Jerusalem
and goes to Bethlehem and meets Jesus.
So, you can kind of think about this nativity play in two scenes.
The first one goes from verse 1 to 8
and then second to 9 to 12.
So, I want to start with part 1.
The first characters who arrive on the scene in Jerusalem are magis.
Who are the magis?
They are from the east, modern-day Iran.
They were Persians,
and they were priests of the Zoroastrian.
It's one of the world's oldest organized religion.
They believe in a good God and an evil God,
and they predict that the good will eventually win over the evil.
They wore long robes and conical hats,
and they sought divine guidance from the elements and the stars.
They were off, but in their hearts, they were seeking God.
So, God used them, these Gentile priests,
in the story that would change history forever.
Little did these magi knew
they would start a multi-billion consumer industry.
20% of all your spending happens during Christmas.
So, if you need to blame somebody for spending so much money on gifts,
you can blame magi.
They started it.
But when the magi arrived on the scene, they were confused.
They had followed a star all the way from Persia to Jerusalem
to seek out this king of the Jews.
But when they arrived, they found the opposite.
They were the ones bearing the news of this new king was born.
They were the ones coming into the cities of Jerusalem
and asking people, where is this king?
And the crowd, the invisible crowd, responded with commotion.
Local gossip got so loud that Herod,
sitting in his high places in the palace, heard of this.
When he heard, he was disturbed.
Verse 3 tells us this.
The Greek word for this actually carries a physical reaction from fear.
You can think of it as Herod was thrown into confusion.
He was agitated.
And fear showed up,
so much so that he had to reach out to the magi
at the end of his scene
and have a private consultation with him.
And so was all of Jerusalem with him,
according to verse 3.
I was a little thrown off by this.
I mean, I couldn't understand why Herod was nervous,
but I was like,
why were the Jews in Jerusalem
also nervous and agitated
because of this reaction of Herod?
So we need to look at Herod as a person first.
Herod the Great was a giant of his time,
and the legacy he left behind were giant footprints.
He was half Jewish,
and he was an heir of the biggest spice trace merchant of the time.
His mother was a Nabataean princess.
So a lot of scholars have looked into Herod
and did studies on him,
and they said that he was probably the wealthiest man
who has ever walked the earth,
even before he became a regional king.
Now, if that still stands true, I don't know,
but one of the most famous architecture from Herod
is the Herodian.
And this is an example of who he is as a king.
Herod wanted a palace on top of a hill,
but there was no hill,
so he made a hill and built a palace on top of it.
That was the kind of ruler he was.
But despite all of this,
it did not lead him to security,
peace, love, or joy.
Instead, Herod the Great was an extremely anxious
and paranoid man.
He was so afraid that someone would come
and challenge his throne and authority
that he killed everyone that he was threatened by,
including his wives and sons.
So bearing this in mind,
verse 3 starts to make a little bit more sense
because when Herod was stressed out,
his people were also stressed out.
The state of a kingdom
is determined by the king who rules it.
So if this king is anxious,
of course his people will be anxious.
It's like a company's culture is set by the CEO.
The mood temperature of the classroom is set by the teacher.
Because Herod was a paranoid and an anxious man
who was emotionally driven without mercy,
people who lives in his kingdom were also scared and worried.
Who knows what he might do?
All of Jerusalem was aware that Herod was a merciless king,
so they were distressed
because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
They had a shepherd who only cared about his gain and his benefits.
They have a king who has an empire mindset
instead of a shalom mindset.
And so when the king is happy, they're happy,
but when the king is distressed, they are also distressed.
A lesson that we can learn from this
is the significance of presence.
Our presence in this world matters,
and we need to take responsibility for it.
This can be applied in the workplace.
No matter what title you hold at work,
we all exert some kind of influence
and change the dynamic in the places we go into.
This is equally true for students who are sitting here today.
That's why they are class clowns,
people who use their influence to change the mood of the classroom.
But I want to bring it even further back to the basics
because work is not fundamentally where we are shaped.
It's in our family units where we are shaped.
Because no matter what kind of job you hold,
when you leave work, when you leave school,
you are a father, you are a mother, a son or daughter,
a brother or sister to somebody.
It's with our family that we begin to form and shape
and learn how to steward our presence and our role in this world.
Recently, there have been many occasions
where I had to call out my six-year-old nephew
for being impatient and rude to his younger sister.
It's not so much about what he says.
It's about how he says it
and the tone that he says it in
that reflects his attitude towards her.
He's six right now,
so he has no choice but to stop and listen to me.
But one day, he will be a teenager
and he will no longer want to sit there and listen to me.
And hopefully by then,
he would learn how to steward his presence in this world
because I took the time and the hard,
it was a hard conversation, even though he's six,
to teach him how to be respectful to others,
to teach him how to practice self-control
out of respect for another person
who is also made in the image of God.
Because if no one teaches him
that it is not okay to scream shut up to another human being,
how would he ever know it is not okay?
These conversations get harder and harder as you get older.
It's a lot more nuanced and takes more intentionality.
But if you get better at it by practicing,
it will make all the difference.
It might be awkward and hard to sit through at first,
but it is a muscle to speak in truth and in love
that we need to use,
to be gentle in our choices of words,
to give them appropriate time and space to respond,
to let go when your job is finished in this conversation
and stop pestering.
These are all things that we need to practice,
and if you don't even try,
you will never know how to exercise this presence
and this authority that God has given you.
It's not about policing people's behavior around you.
It's to remind ourselves
that we are supposed to embody Jesus in the world.
He is light.
He is love.
He is power.
He is truth.
He is authority.
He is meek.
He is gentle.
God has given me the authority and influence
over my six-year-old nephew as his aunt.
I'm stewarding it by stepping into this role
and teaching him how to be respectful
and to practice self-control.
Because even at age six,
he already knows how to exert power and authority
over his younger sister.
even at age six.
So, how does your presence affect the spaces you go into and why?
When people are around you,
can they witness the fruit of the Spirit in you
or smell the aroma of Christ and holiness and purity?
Herod's presence in this world was motivated
by his fear of losing control,
fear of change, fear of his life,
fear for not being the greatest.
So, everything he did was a reaction to this fear.
Thus, in response to the message of the Magi,
where is he who has been born the King of Jews?
We find a people who are fearful, distressed, confused, and faithless.
That's part one.
Now, part two, we shift to Bethlehem.
This is from verse nine to verse 12.
And in this scene, we find divine intervention, guidance,
because the star that led the Magi into Jerusalem
had disappeared for a while.
But once the Magi got back on course
and went their way to find Jesus to offer him gifts,
the star came back up.
God was with them.
And there, they found Jesus, not in a manger,
but in a house with his family.
Although Joseph wasn't mentioned,
we can assume he was there.
I think what Matthew was trying to do
was to set up a place where it is warm,
safe, and intimate.
Bethlehem, the house of bread,
belongs in the countryside of Israel.
So when a Jewish person thinks about Bethlehem,
they think about barley fields, gold, warm,
like the scene in Ruth.
Contrasting the city of Jerusalem,
where you would enter through cold, tall city walls,
and inside we find marketplace, politicians,
Roman soldiers standing guard,
a very impersonal, chaotic, and loud place.
It was a safe and quiet place
where we find Jesus away from the chaos of this world.
And we find our Savior as a baby
in his mother's embrace under his father's roof,
protected.
I think Matthew does a masterful job
teaching us what the house of God should look like.
Unlike the first scene,
this one is marked by peace,
quietness, love, safety, and joy.
It is in a place like this
that the Magi encounters God.
And I wonder if this is a general rule of thumb
for our spiritual lives as well.
I'm not saying that God doesn't exist in the marketplace
or could care less about our government.
God rules over that too.
He is omnipresent,
and the whole world is his.
So he can use whatever circumstance you are in
to teach you something
or to put a thought in you
to stir you up like he did
with the crowd in Jerusalem.
What I am saying is
in order to receive him as a gift,
to know him as your Savior
from your biggest fears and insecurities,
to invite him in to heal you of your deepest pain,
it happens in safe and quiet places
where you can respond freely as you are
without the demands of this world,
without the pressure from yourself within
to be somebody else.
It's in the stillness and quietness
where you are just you.
You are just you, a beloved child of God.
You are just you whom God loves so much.
It's in the stillness and quiet with God
that he tells you that and affirms you of that,
but it doesn't come without effort.
It takes pursuing and following God
in unexpected ways to unexpected places
like the Magi's.
That is where all of our faith journey started though,
wasn't it?
Before we professed our faith to the church,
before we got baptized,
God confronting us of our sins
and opening our eyes to see how we need him,
it was in an intimate surrendering to Jesus.
After wrestling with the implications
of this decision to surrender to him,
all which happened within the inner chambers
of our heart.
It was in a still and quiet place
where your faith begun.
This stillness and quietness needs to continue
in order for our Christian lives
to deepen in Christ.
A lot of times Christians plateau for this reason.
They stop receiving God's gift for them.
The gift is always there because God is impartial
and he gives to all of his children
and he is infinite.
But in order for us to enjoy the gift,
we have to receive it, we have to open it,
and we have to use it.
Here's an example of what I mean.
If you're at least two decades old,
you can probably relate when I say
nothing triggers you more than your parents
or family members,
especially during the holiday season
when it's in your face and there's nowhere to run.
Broken parent-child relationship is nothing new.
It started way back with Noah and Ham in Genesis.
I mean, that's what God came to redeem us for.
But some of the most hurtful and damaging experiences
are from our parents
because they are the first people
we learn how to be in relationships with.
I'm not here to blame any parents
or to pin responsibility on anyone.
Most of our parents have given their best
and they have done what was right.
But as adults,
we need to take responsibility for the choices we make.
And this doesn't take away from the pain
they have caused you by rejecting you,
silencing you, or neglecting you.
Forgiving someone who have hurt you over and over again
when they were supposed to be your world
and protecting you seems impossible at times.
How do you forgive
when you don't even know how deep the wound is
or how far it will affect you?
It's in times like this
when I think Matthew provides direction.
Because if you want to forgive,
you have to first receive forgiveness
because we can't give what we don't have.
But we can have it
because after all,
that is what he endured on the cross for us.
It's so that we can say
it is possible to do this impossible job of forgiveness.
It is possible to let go and forgive
because he has done it.
It is possible for us to heal
and recover from generational trauma
and choose differently for ourselves
because that's what Jesus made possible for me
when he said,
Father, forgive them
for they do not know what they are doing.
It is possible to forgive someone
who has repeatedly hurt you
because that's what Jesus is doing for us.
Even now,
Jesus didn't just forgive me or you
on the day we became Christians.
He forgives us every single day.
He forgives us every single day
and his mercy is new every morning
for all of my life.
He is always giving me a second chance,
a new chance to choose differently,
to embody his forgiveness to the world.
I can forgive because he has forgiven me,
but I must receive this gift of forgiveness.
I must first understand
and know that at the core of who I am,
I am a sinner saved by grace through faith.
This doesn't happen when you rely on worldly values
or visions and secular therapy to change.
They are helpful for a time,
but it's hollow unless you ground it
in the person of Christ
because for Christians,
forgiveness is not hollow.
Forgiveness is a person.
Forgiveness is a gift from God
and it cost them everything.
It wasn't without a price
and he gave all of himself
so that we can be reconciled to God
and say,
I am yours and you are mine.
He was broken so that we may be made whole.
So if your life is still marked
with brokenness and broken patterns,
then maybe you've forgotten to open the gift
that is just sitting there from God.
If your life is still marked by complaining
instead of thankfulness and joy,
maybe you need to open your gift.
Let's all work on being better receivers of God's gift.
Learn to cultivate quietness and stillness
to receive God in a fresh way every day.
Because when we receive the gift of God,
our only proper response is joyful worship.
And here is my conclusion.
When I was reading the Greek of this passage,
I had to do a double take on verse 10
because literally the Greek says,
the Greek says,
now when they saw the star above the house,
they rejoiced with a very mega joy.
That's a lot of joy in a moment
and you can't help but smile
because that's the magic of Christmas.
There is so much joy everywhere.
Now that joy might trigger some of us
and it might be packaged in such a way
that it's a little shallow,
but the joy can't be denied
and it brings people together.
It gives us an excuse to show love in a different way
and that's why we love Christmas.
But I think something very valuable
that the Magi is teaching us here is,
if the Magi responded to King Jesus
with joy and worship and treasures
to bless his family,
how much more do we respond to Jesus
as his children?
Joyful worship of the heart
is an act of offering what is best of you
to God.
Imagine when the Magi opened their treasure boxes
and all of a sudden,
the light hits the gold
and starts to reflect and glisten.
When the box opens,
the smell of frankincense and myrrh,
the Magi gave Jesus and his family treasures
because Jesus is expensive.
Jesus is precious.
He's royal and he's absolutely worthy.
They worshiped in a very mega joy
because Jesus is awesome.
And in this season of giving
and for the new year to come,
may I encourage you to think about
how you can offer your best to God.
And here is an illustration.
So this is a card that I received
from the same nephew.
This is a card that I got from him.
And I think this is the first time
he had made me a card.
And inside he drew a dolphin.
And I brought this because
it means a lot to me.
As a boy,
this was his best gift to his aunt.
He's not earning any money.
He doesn't have any possessions.
And so this is the best gift
that he could offer me.
And I will never look at this gift
and say it is not enough.
I will never look at this
and say,
oh no, I want something else.
No, I treasure this
because it tells me
that he loves me.
And it tells me
he even drew my favorite animal.
Like he knew
it would make me happy.
He gave me a gift
because he wanted to make me happy
because he loves me.
And this is how God feels
about our gifts to him.
God is not asking you
to give beyond
what you have earned
or can offer.
He is asking you
to give him your heart.
He is asking you
to give him your love,
the best of yourself.
God wants you.
So what is the next step
you can take
to give God
your best worship,
your joyful worship?
Maybe you don't have
a Bible reading plan right now.
Maybe the next step
is to follow the Bible verse,
the daily Bible verse
on the Bible app.
Maybe you don't have
a consistent schedule
because you're leaving
at the end of the day.
Adjusting that
would really help.
Maybe you don't have time
to pause and think,
okay, what about
driving to work?
That's a good time
to pause and listen
to sermons
and reflect on your day
and invite God
into that space.
There are so many ways
to go about it.
What really matters
is you want to do it.
You want to do this for God
because you want
to make him happy.
Because you know
that you have received
a gift from God
that changed
your entire life.
So make a solid step forward
in this new year
because Christmas
might pass
but our act of worship
is a lifestyle.
It is always
and it continues
beyond Christmas.
God smiles
upon his children
and he wants you
to take the next step.
Commit to it.
Give him a gift
because you want
to make him happy.
And finally,
I want to say this.
You have received
his gift
and you know
how it changed
everything about your life.
When I got baptized,
my mom gave me a Bible
and inside the Bible
it says,
which means
when you have God,
you have everything.
So,
let us come
and receive
the gift of God
who is Jesus Christ
so we can go out
and be a gift
to this world
and ask his disciples.
Amen.
Will you pray with me?
Heavenly Father,
thank you
for being with us
right now
here
as we
bring our best worship
to you, Lord.
Thank you
for giving us
your son,
your everything
so that
we can be yours
and you can be ours.
Thank you
for this family
that we get to have
in you.
How amazing it is
that we're family here,
Lord.
All of us
are connected
because of you
and Lord,
we are just
overjoyed
because it's so different
from everything else
in this world
and Lord,
I pray that we would
see this
as a precious gift
from you
and we would steward it well
and in stewarding well
we would bring our worship
to you, Lord,
even after Christmas.
Lord,
be with us.
We love you.
In Jesus' precious name
I pray.
Amen.