Episode 1504: They All Gather Together

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1, 504 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:08] Treveal Lynch: I'm Treveal Lynch, and I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talents, and your treasures. To live out your calling, having the ability to see the possibilities in yourself is key.

[00:00:29] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Maderer.

[00:00:49] Scott Maderer: That's Latin for come and worship. And that's the invitation of the wise men. That's the prophecy from Isaiah. That is the meaning of epiphany. [00:01:00] That is the gift of God. Come and worship. Come and be made whole. Come together and be re membered. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:01:16] If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your wisdom. And your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:44] In today's Spiritual Foundation episode, I talk about Isaiah 60, verses 1 6 and Matthew 2, verses 1 12. I share how the season of Epiphany is about when we finally gather together to see the light. And I also talk about how [00:02:00] we often have difficulty seeing the light because we are focused on everyone seeing it the same.

[00:02:07] Isaiah Chapter 60, verses one through six says, arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you and His glory will appear over you. Nation shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

[00:02:27] Lift up your eyes and look around. They all gather together. They come to you. Your son shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried in their nurses arms. Then you shall see and be radiant. Your heart shall thrill and rejoice, because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you. The wealth of the nation shall come to you.

[00:02:48] A multitude of camel shall cover you. The young camels of Midian and Ephah, all those from Sheba, shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord. [00:03:00] Matthew chapter two verses one through 12 said In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, made guy from the east came to Jerusalem asking Where's the child who's been born?

[00:03:13] King of the Jews for re observed his star in the east and have come to pay him homage. When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him. And calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet.

[00:03:34] And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judea, are by no means least among the rulers of Judea. For from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel. Then Herod secretly called for the Magi and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, Go and search diligently for the child.

[00:03:52] And when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage. When they had heard the king, they set out. [00:04:00] And there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen in the east, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.

[00:04:10] On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

[00:04:30] 2025. It's a shocker in a lot of ways. It's not shocking that we'd make it to 2025. I'm not talking about the end of the world or the apocalypse or anything like that. It's just that we've now switched from 2024 to 2025. And no matter what, that always seems to catch everyone by surprise. No matter how closely you've been looking at your calendar or following it along, no matter what kind of job you have, it's Bankers will tell you they get misstated checks, if people still write checks, or [00:05:00] the people that go to school, they'll put the wrong year at the top of their test, if you date things at work, you're going to put the wrong year on those reports, no matter what.

[00:05:10] We have trouble mentally making the shift from 2024 to 2025, to shift the year. There's a need to pay attention more, but it's still hard to do. There's a lot of different things swirling around in our heads, coming before our eyes, and we have trouble focusing and paying attention to the details.

[00:05:35] At the end of the year, we've gone through a frenzy of all this activity around the holidays. And it's probably not that surprising that we don't pay all that much attention to the little kind of unimportant detail of writing the correct year when we write the date. In fact, the first Sunday of the new year that we celebrated just a few days ago is all about [00:06:00] paying attention.

[00:06:01] Being aware of what is under your nose is a duh, kind of message. And yet it is appropriate for what we do at the beginning of the new year. A few weeks ago, over the last few weeks, I was talking about various things. And at the end of it, we talked about going home, about settling down and breathing after the hectic holiday season.

[00:06:27] And that's a common mood that we have at the beginning of the new year. We made it. We're here. Now let's just relax. Instead, in the scriptures this week, we have an arrival. The wise men show up, the baby is already there, but the wise men show up, the magi or whatever you want to call them, they show up. We just got through that one major event of the birth of the baby, and now we have another one.

[00:06:55] And the reason for that is simple. This is Epiphany. That's the season. That's what we [00:07:00] call it in the church. It's not actually Epiphany this last Sunday. Epiphany is on the 6th of January. And if you count, that's 12 days after Christmas. And in fact, that's the 12 days of Christmas. We always talk about the 12 days of Christmas and people think about that as the days before Christmas, counting down to Christmas.

[00:07:20] But those 12 days were actually the countdown from Christmas to Epiphany. Because Epiphany in the early church, that was the big celebration. Yes, we had mass of Christ's birth and we recognized that, but the big party was across those 12 days all the way through to Epiphany. That's when gifts were exchanged.

[00:07:44] That's when the families gathered. That's when the big meals were eaten. But we're on the brink of Epiphany here as we're talking so we can talk about it like we've made it. So what is epiphany? It actually [00:08:00] comes from some Greek words that translates roughly as the light shows forth or the light comes to.

[00:08:06] In other words, epiphany is when we figure it out. It's when we see the light. In Matthew's story that I read earlier, the Christ event is a quiet affair. There's no multitude of heavenly hosts, no flocks, no shepherds crowding into the barn. It's just Mary and Joseph and a bunch of dreams, at least until chapter two.

[00:08:30] Here in chapter two, the doors get blown open. The wise men from the east show up and they turn everything upside down. When word gets out about the birth of the king, it gets way out. The Bible doesn't really say where these guys come from, And there's all sorts of speculation. They may have come from Persia, which is modern Iran, Babylon, which is modern Iraq, or even further east, Asia, or who knows?

[00:08:57] The point is, that's not really important. [00:09:00] But notice that the point is that those paying attention to the birth of the king are the foreigners. They're the strangers. They're the people that aren't there. The folks that shouldn't be in the know. The people that were there that heard the prophecy, the people that have been looking for the Messiah, they didn't know and they almost missed it.

[00:09:25] It nearly passed them by. If not for the kindness of strangers, maybe they would have never known. The Magi, the wise men show up and say, we have seen his star. By the way, a star is not something hidden, but it's something evident. However, have you ever gone out on a night when the sky is full of stars and tried to show someone a particular star?

[00:09:51] Right there, you say, and they seem to look everywhere but where you're pointing. Right there. You see that tree? The little one? No, the big one. Over there. Over [00:10:00] where? Right there. Beside the house. Between the house and the streetlight. It's right above that tree. What tree? Never mind. It's hard to show someone that.

[00:10:09] It's hard to get people to see what we see and hear what we hear, but yet we keep trying. We want to share what we've seen. People often wonder why the wise men showed up in Jerusalem in the first place anyway. Wouldn't it have made more sense to just keep following that star? Maybe. Maybe there was a political necessity or a diplomatic protocol.

[00:10:33] After all they're foreigners coming into another king's land. Or maybe they just wanted to share it with everyone to go tell it on a mountain, so to speak. And Jerusalem there's no mountain higher than Jerusalem in the story. Notice how the Bible always talks about people going up to Jerusalem, no matter what direction they were going or coming from.

[00:10:55] Partly that's a theological statement. but it's also about the [00:11:00] geology because Jerusalem is a high spot in the nation of Israel. It was where you would go to make a proclamation if you wanted everyone in the kingdom to know. And maybe they didn't know Herod's reputation or maybe they knew better than he did and did just what was needed.

[00:11:18] After all, Herod needed the same thing we all need, community. Gathering is one way we can be put back together when we've broken apart. And the prophet Isaiah draws a picture of light breaking through in a dark time in the Hebrew scripture of the text this week, the Isaiah passage that I read. And we recognize this scene.

[00:11:43] After all, if we reflect on Advent and Christmas and we know what epiphany is and what it means, this is the light that's shining in the darkness. But look closer, look at the response to this light. Not just from the people who recognize it, knowing what it [00:12:00] represents, but, and have been looking for it, but it also is recognized by the nations who are gathering.

[00:12:06] That's what it says. What an amazing thing. And notice the nations aren't gathering as a result of some sort of evangelism project. They're not being conquered. They're not being browbeaten. They're not saying, you have to be like us and we're going to make you like us. but just by being the people of God, by walking in the light together, they all come together.

[00:12:30] That's the key. Walking together. It's often a handicap to the church's mission about making disciples. It's a handicap that we don't seem to have a single voice on anything. We disagree across denominations. We disagree within denominations. We disagree within our own families and our own churches. And we have a variety of voices.

[00:12:55] And by the way, that's not a bad thing, but when we continually [00:13:00] war with each other and our siblings, when they disagree with us, that's the bad thing. It's not the variety and the differences, it's that we confuse unity and uniformity. We think the only way we can be together is if we all act the same, look the same, believe the same.

[00:13:18] And if anyone disagrees with us, they must be wrong. And our job is to beat them into agreeing with us. Instead, if we just focused on bringing the light to the nations and bringing people together, what is it that draws others to seek and to search and to gather with us? What is it about having some humility and knowing that we don't know all the answers and being okay with that?

[00:13:45] And therefore, that belief that other person has might not be wrong. All of these things are part of what we need to pay attention to, part of our community, part of our [00:14:00] need to worship. And it's not just a need, but a longing, a deep longing to come together in worship, something that nothing else will fill.

[00:14:11] And we're incomplete without it. An epiphany is an opportunity to fill that void, to make us whole. Vente adoramus. That's Latin for come and worship. And that's the invitation of the wise men. That's the prophecy from Isaiah. That is the meaning of Epiphany. That is the gift of God. Come and worship. Come and be made whole.

[00:14:40] Come together and be remembered. Thanks for listening.

[00:14:52] Thanks so much for listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to [00:15:00] not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor. Go over to facebook. com slash inspired stewardship And like our Facebook page and mark it that you'd like to get notifications from us so that we can connect with you on Facebook and make sure that we're serving you to the best of our abilities with time and tips there.

[00:15:35] Until next time, invest your time, Your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact the world.