“Night Vision” (Matthew 2:1-12), 1/4/26          

     So recently I heard a story about a Scout troop who were on a camping trip. One night their scoutmaster told them they were going on a night hike. This was around 11 PM, very late, so it was pitch dark. Some of them weren’t so sure about it because they were a bit scared of the dark. But they all got their flashlights and started hiking. About a half mile outside of camp, the scoutmaster said “everybody halt, sit down where you are. Now turn off your flashlights.” Now nobody could see a thing.  “Now we wait,” said the Scout leader. Fifteen minutes passed, but it felt like forever. They could hear little sounds in the woods so they made sure not to move.

     “OK, we’ve waited long enough,” said their leader. “Don’t turn on your flashlights and tell me what you see.”  The Scouts looked around. And then they realized that they could see each other. And they could just make out the white painted blazes on the tree trunks marking the trail. That was because it was a clear night and the moon and star light was reflecting off the blazes. They had night vision. This is so cool, they said!

Now let’s turn it around.

     Have you ever gone to a matinee movie and then when the movie’s over you walk outside into a bright sunny day and whoa! You have to shield your eyes because they can’t handle all that sunlight until they adjust. Or maybe you get up in the middle of the night and you decide you want a snack, so you turn on the kitchen light and whoa! You can’t see. That’s because when we’re in the dark our eyes adjust by letting our pupils dilate so more light comes into our eyes. If the light gets bright too quickly though, our eyes are still dilated and they can’t handle it.

     There are a lot of benefits to having night vision. It’s different from using a flashlight because you can see everything, not just where you shine your flashlight. But, like those Scouts learned, it takes patience. You have to know how to wait, and how to resist the urge to turn on the flashlight. Then we know to trust the darkness when it surrounds us, and believe it won’t harm us and to believe that the gift of night vision will come, in time.

     I remember being out on the Appalachian Trail and one night we stayed in a shelter that had an upper floor. You had to climb a ladder to get up there. It was really dark up there, but that’s where I laid out my sleeping bag. There were no windows.  And of course we observed hiker’s bedtime which is, when the sun goes down. I was dreading the call of nature and having to get up in the middle of the night. But I knew that if I could make it down that ladder and get outside, I’d be okay because the moon and the stars would guide me to the perfect place I needed to be. And it was true!

     I bet those magi had pretty good night vision. They had to trust that star to lead them to Bethlehem. Their story is one of those that took on a life of its own after it was first written. Sometimes it’s hard to separate the stories that came later with what’s actually written in the Bible. Who were these guys anyway? The gospel writer Matthew calls them magi, from the Persian language, meaning a person of great learning and mysterious powers. We get our words magic and magician from the same root word. The Magi might have been priests in the Zoroastrian religion practiced in Persia at that time. Zoroastrianism is still practiced in Iran and India today and is one of the world’s oldest religions. The idea that the Magi were kings developed over a couple of hundred years after Matthew wrote his gospel. Around the 8th Century they were even given names. Melchior from Persia, Gaspar (also Caspar or Jaspar) from India, and Balthazar from Arabia or Ethiopia.         

     Those Magi were good houseguests because they brought gifts. And because there were three gifts, do you think that means there must have been three Magi? This is one of those questions that turns up in Christmas Bible Trivia games. Nowhere in the Bible does it say there were three of them. What it says is that they brought three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold to tell people that Jesus was a king, frankincense because it was used in worship and Jesus was to be worshipped, and myrrh because it was used to embalm bodies, to foreshadow Jesus’ eventual death on the cross.

     How did they get to Bethlehem? They followed the star. Maybe that star was the coming together of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 B.C. or Jupiter and Venus in 3 B.C. Or maybe it was Halley’s Comet which was visible about a decade earlier, in 11 B.C. Whichever brilliant light in the sky they followed, it would have taken them a long time to get there. So long, in fact, that Jesus would have been a toddler when they finally met him. Did you notice in verse 11 it says that the magi came to the house, not the stable, not the manger, not even the cave which historians have said is the most likely place Jesus was born. The shepherds were long gone at that point. And yet, our nativity sets aren’t complete without the magi.

     And that brings me to this beautiful children’s book about the magi written by Barbara Brown Taylor, a former Episcopalian priest who has also written several books for adults. It’s called Home by Another Way. She writes that the Magi were minding their own business when “a bright star lodged in the right eye of each one of them… something beyond them was calling them, and it was a tug they had been waiting for all their lives. All three of them had felt something was missing in their lives, until they saw the star and felt it calling them to get out of town… away from everything they knew… out from under the reputations they had built for themselves, the high expectations, the disappointing returns. And so they set out, one by one, each believing that he was the only one with a star in his eye, until they all ran into one another on the road to Jerusalem.”

     Do we have stars in our eyes today on this January 4? Where might those stars lead us this year? Wherever we want to go, we’ll need some decent night vision. Night vision can help us navigate when the world seems like a dark place. So let’s brighten it up a bit with some good news. The first bit of good news is for stargazers. Next Saturday night you should be able to see the planet Jupiter with nothing more than your regular night vision, in other words, your naked eye. Jupiter will come up over the eastern horizon at sundown and continue to climb until midnight when it reaches the highest point in the sky. Maybe it’ll be just like it was for those Magi!

     Another bit of good news… did you know there is a thing called the Times Square Wishing Wall? People write messages either on multi-colored pieces of paper or online and then those wishes are mixed in with the confetti that falls on Times Square on New Year’s Eve. So everybody who was in Times Square last Weds night got a little bit of good news falling on them from the night sky! Here are some of those wishes.

     I wish for a kinder, more peaceful world for my grandchildren to live in… My wish this year is to finish writing my book and have it change at least one person’s life…  I wish for a cure for Type 1 diabetes….  My wish is to continue to chase my dreams and never lose sight of who I want to be… I wish for life to get a little bit lighter for all of us… I wish for more love and kindness in 2026. I wish for a happy, healthy and safe year for everyone. I wish to spend as much time with family as possible. I wish to be with friends. I wish to fall in love. I wish to continue going to church.

     What do you wish for in this new year? Do you think the baby Jesus wished for gold, frankincense and myrrh? There’s that old joke that if the magi had been women, they would have brought diapers, a casserole and a promise to babysit so Mary and Joseph could have a night out. But of course those three gifts point to something, somewhere beyond the moment. They represent that yearning in all of us for something just beyond our reach. That star in the sky led the magi onward, coaxing them out of their familiar countries and hometowns, to travel so far just to see a little baby. What is God coaxing us towards this year? Whatever it is, we’ll need our night vision to see our way forward. A long time ago, the Prophet Isaiah wrote, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.” May that be so for us also in this new year! Amen.