Video Transcript: Session 7 From Exegesis to Sermon
Welcome back to preacher preparation presentation a class on making and
preaching sermons. Last time we did some exegesis work we did the work of
exegesis, like how do you look at a passage historically? And how do you look
at it in a literary sense and how you look at it in the canonical sense of, of the
rest of Scripture as we try to determine what is the message that God intended
for those people back then, what did that author intended as the message and
then we draw out of that a message. And so we looked at just a variety of things
that would come after about studying Matthew 2:1-12. Well, today, I want to just
give a demonstration of how that might work to take what we did last week, and
turn it into a sermon. Now, as I was looking back at my files, I find that I have
five sermons on Matthew 2:1-12. And so as I looked at them there, I noticed that
there are a variety of ways to approach this passage. But we're going to try to
look at one which today I just want to use it as a demonstration of how you go
from exegesis to sermon. So the passage again, is the visit of the Magi found in
Matthew 2. There we read these words after Jesus was born in Bethlehem in
Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem
and asked, where's the one who has been born king of the Jews, we saw his
star in the east, and have come to worship him. When King Herod heard this, he
was disturbed and all Jerusalem with him. When he called together all the
peoples chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ
was to be born. In Bethlehem in Judea, they replied, so this is what the prophet
has written, but you Bethlehem and the land of Judah are by no means the least
among the rulers of Judah, for out of you will come a ruler, who will be the
shepherd of 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 make a careful search 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 in the east went ahead
of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the
star, they were overjoyed. And coming to the house, they saw the child with his
mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their
treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, and of incense, and myrrh. And
having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their
own country by another route. Now I titled this sermon, wise people seek. In
other words, wise people seek Jesus or seek the Lord or seek intimate intimacy
with God a variety of ways you could look at that. This is the advertising poster
for a movie that came out years ago, it was called Close Encounters of the Third
Kind. In other words, the third kind is you're actually encountering inter
Terrestrials or extra terrestrials. And so the movie started with a man a guy
named Roy Neely, and and he has investigating all sorts of out power outages in
Indiana. And as he does that, all of a sudden, he sees a UFO and he has an
encounter with this UFO, in fact, the UFO comes so close that it gives them a
great sunburn on the side of his face that's toward the UFO, well, Roy Neely
then becomes obsessed with UFOs. And he begins to read about them and he
notices in his dreams. And in his subconscious is a picture that begins to
appear. He doesn't know it yet. But it's a picture that is very much similar to this.
It is Devil's Tower in the state of Wyoming. Now, other people are experiencing
this as well. One woman named Jillian that has as a close encounter with it with
a spaceship that comes down on her house shakes so much that it that she
despairs of life itself, but she too is obsessed. And pretty soon it begins to
become obvious that all sorts of people are having this invitation come to them
subconsciously. When Roy Neely and others see this on a news report of
something that's happening out there, they see this, this tower here. They end
up deciding to travel there. So they travel there and when they get there. whole
horde of spaceships come and land and out come the extraterrestrials are there
small little gray things, the kind of people that you would picture as coming from
another planet. And Roy Neely and others actually get chosen to go back with
them for a period of time. Now, that's a very simple summary of the movie. It's
much more complex than that. But as I was thinking about that in context, in the
context of this passage, it just struck me that there are a lot of similarities that
somebody gets an invitation to be part of something pretty special. For instance,
you got Mary, she gets an invitation. And her invitation is by an angel who
comes and visits her and says, you know, Mary, you're favored by God, and
you're going to have a child born conceived by the Holy Spirit. Joseph is not
immune to this invitation. He's decided since he's engaged to Mary, and she
turns up pregnant, that he's going to divorce her quietly. But he has this
invitation. And that happens at night in a dream when an angel says, Don't be
afraid to take her. Because what's conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. The
shepherd gets his invitation. They're out in the fields. And all of a sudden, an
angel appears to them, and says, I've got good news for you of great joy, which
will be for all the people. And they end that saying, let's go to Bethlehem. Let's
go to Bethlehem and see. So there's all these people are starting to converge on
Bethlehem, for this great event. And some have received a rather supernatural
kind of invitation. Well, that's certainly true of the Magi, as well. They received an
invitation which probably occurred months before the actual birth of Jesus
Christ, they were seeing something in the sky in the in a star arrangement of
some sort, we'll talk about that in a moment. And as a result, they begin to travel
to go all the way from where they are all the way to Bethlehem, to be part of this
event of the birth of Jesus Christ, the coming of God into the flesh. Now, if you
look at these Magi, it can be a frustrating experience, because there's a lot we
don't know, we're just told in this passage that they show up, but we're not told
about them. For instance, we don't know who they are. We're not told how they
have come there, except they've seen the star and it was in the East. And so we
know that they're coming from the east somewhere, but who knows where
they're coming from? Who are they? Now there have been a variety of
traditional kinds of guesses. One guess was that they represent three different
countries. And they represent the prophecy of Isaiah, which says that, you know,
Gentiles will come to your light. And so the tradition says that one was from
Egypt, one was from India, and one was from Greece. And so they come and
they they gather representing all those nations. We don't know about that.
Another theory is that they were Babylonian because they would know about
Jewish things, because the people of Israel were in captivity in Babylon for 70
years. But probably the best guess is that they were Persian. And that's because
it would be people in Persia, who would have this skill of astronomy or astrology.
And so they are people who are going to come as a result of a star, but also a
strange occurrence in 614, AD or CE, the Christian era, in 614, Persians were
taking over the Holy Land, they were conquering it. And because they intended
to impose the Muslim religion on the population, they were destroying churches,
right and left or converting churches into mosques, well they came to the Church
of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, and the intention was to destroy it. It's not a really
pretty place, if you've had the privilege of being there. It's, it's just kind of there,
and it's been there forever. It was there in 614 AD. Well, they ended up coming
up to the door, and with every intention of burning the place down, and then they
turned and they left and they went away. And the reason they went away was
because on the top of the door, there was a mosaic and it showed three men in
turbans of Persian kind of origin, that were entering the church to give homage
to the Son of God, Jesus. And so we don't know who they were, but still the best
guess is they were probably Persians. We don't know how many there were.
Now tradition says there were three of them. You know, we sing in America, We
Three Kings of Orient are. But we really don't know. There may have been 12,
there may have been 15. We don't know, we know, there were three gifts. And I
guess that's how we get to the point that there were probably three of them. We
don't know either why they came? I mean, it's a rather strange occurrence. Yes,
they came because they saw the star but so a new king is in Israel. So what, in
that era, there were kings all over the place. Why would they travel all this time
take all this risk, incur all of this expenses, we're not told why they came, they
just came, we read because they heard a king was born. And somehow God
revealed to them that this was going to be a life changing event. And then we
don't know what the star was. What did they see in the heavens? And there
have been various philosophies about that one says it was the conjunction of
Saturn and Jupiter which happened in 7 BC before Christ or before the common
era BCE. And that happened in 7 BC. And then 6 BC, Mars joined that Congr
configuration of those three planets. So it might have been something like that
that caught their attention. And that happened in 6 BC, it might have been a
comet. It's reported that in 5 BC that there was a comet that was visible for 70
days in that area. And so maybe it was a comet that they saw in the East. And
that brought them to that conclusion. Another group said, it's a supernova. And
some astronomers have, you know, said well, right about the right time. That's
what was happening in the Middle East that they could see a supernova in the
sky. But when it comes right down to it, we just don't know what it was, and
strange wording. They saw the star come to rest over the place where Jesus
was, what does that mean? How can you see a star, we're not told any of that.
So this can be a little bit of a frustrating thing. We are told that they bring
significant gifts, gold, which how we connect gold with kings, right? When new
tombs are dug up in Egypt, there's always gold in them because kings are
connected with gold. And that gold turned out to be a very significant gift,
because that probably was what was used to, to finance the flight to Egypt that
they're going to go on and just a chapter or so later, frankincense or incense,
this was made out of the resin of a tree, it was burned as incense it was used by
priests to indicate the prayers of God's people going up. And so this is probably
an indication of the High Priestly position of Jesus and his work as high priest
bringing our request to God the Father. And so incense and myrrh. Myrrh was
used in two ways it was used, first of all, as an anesthetic. In Mark 15, we read
that Jesus is given a drink when he's on the cross that has myrrh in it, and he
refuses it because it would lessen the pain. And then we're also told that it was
used to embalm people. Joseph of Arimethea used a great deal of myrrh, to
kind of embalm Jesus after he's taken down from the cross. So here we are,
we've got these people who have sought Jesus. Now, they came a long way.
And they came seeking, they recognize that there was something happening
here, that this birth of this baby was going to somehow impact even their world,
so far away. Now, what strikes me, as I read about these people who are
earnestly seeking Jesus, wise people seek Jesus, that there were others who
didn't we read in this passage, other religious leaders and how they missed it
entirely. And you wonder how could that be? You see, one of the reasons I know
the wise, the wise men or the Magi saw Jesus is because God has planted the
hunger in our hearts for something significant. And we know that that significant
thing when we come to Christ is having an intimate relationship with God for
Jesus Christ. The Book of Ecclesiastes, in the Old Testament says he has put
eternity in our hearts. So we've got it in here, we have a drive in us to try to find
something that's going to fill our, our heart, our spiritual need. And so they come.
Now, the religious leaders must have had that. Certainly that hunger is there. In
fact, that hunger must have been really noted during that time. You see, during
the history of the Jews, they were looking forward to a messiah, ever since
Genesis 3:15 where a messiah is promised or in Deuteronomy, where Moses
says, there's going to come a leader that's going to come out of my people, and
he's going to make everything right. And he's going to, he's going to do justice,
and he's going to do mercy. They've been waiting for a Messiah and that hunger
for a messiah would get worse, or get more intense, during times of oppression.
And so we read that in history that people would say, wouldn't this be a good
time for the Messiah to come? That's one of my favorite lines from the musical.
Fiddler on the Roof. It's a story about these Russian Jews in a little town called
Anatevka, and they're forced to leave their homes. And one of the characters
comes to Tevye one of the main characters in the musical and says, wouldn't
this be a good time for the Messiah to come? And so for leaders have been
reading their culture they would have said, this would be a good time for
Messiah to come. They knew where the Messiah was going to be born,
Bethlehem and the land of Judah. They knew when they knew when because
now there's all this sign of these Magi coming, which was a symbol of the
Messiah, that even Gentiles will come to your light. And they knew what the
Messiah was going to be. Now, they misinterpreted a great deal. But they knew
from the scripture study, they knew what he was going to be. And yet they
missed it. Why? Why did they miss it? They were only a few miles away. I mean,
here, you've got the Magi coming from miles and miles and miles. And here they
are just a few miles away. And they missed it. Why? Well, the text doesn't tell us.
But if we start thinking about it, I think there are a couple of reasons we might
recognize why they missed it. One, I think that maybe they felt they didn't need a
Messiah. But some people feel that they really don't need somebody to die for
their sins. Remember, Jesus told us a story about the Pharisee. And the tax
collector went up to the temple to pray, and the Pharisees stood before God and
said, thank you God that I'm not like other men. And then he lists all those holy,
righteous things that he does. But the tax collector, on the other hand is on his
face before God and He's beating his chest and saying, God be merciful to me,
a sinner. And Jesus says, that's the one that went home justified. There's a lot of
people like this, who think that their goodness is going to qualify them to get into
heaven. They don't need a savior, because if they look at their lives, they don't
sin. They don't sin. I've had people say this to me, you know, I don't need a
Savior. I mean, compared to Hitlers, and the Idi Amins and cetera, et cetera, and
Stalins in the world, I'm a good person. Maybe that's why they didn't know
maybe these religious leaders felt like they have things together. And so they
didn't need or want a messiah. Or secondly, maybe they didn't just want a
messiah. I mean, a Messiah coming would shake up their religious system
would shake up their system of control over the people of Israel. Or maybe they
were disappointed with God. While back, I had the privilege of being involved in
the funeral, a woman from my church died very suddenly. And one of the people
I was looking forward to meeting at the funeral was her brother. I had been good
friends with him during middle school years. And during high school, we sang in
groups together. And I hadn't seen him probably in 30 years. And so what an
exciting thing to anticipate meeting an old friend and talking about old times, I
was shocked when he showed up. Because he was still doing good work. He
was working in Africa with I believe it was UNICEF and he was trying to make a
difference in the lives of people there who were poor. But when it came to God,
he had, he wanted nothing to do nothing. And it was shocking to me to a
shocking because he grew up in the same school I did in the same church I did.
He had the same significant people in his life as I did, except for my parents had
a family system that was similar to my family system. He learned the things I
learned, he knew everything I knew about God, and yet said, don't believe it
anymore. I mean, that was his phrase, I don't believe it anymore. There are
people who don't go seeking Jesus because they're disappointed with God. I
think I shared with you Ted Turner, Ted Turner, the owner of the Atlanta Braves
and TBS and TNT and those television stations. When his when his sister died,
despite his prayers, he decided he was an atheist who didn't believe in God. And
maybe that's what was keeping people. Think about that in your own life. What
is there something keeping you from seeking the Messiah, the life changing
event that was announced so prominently by God to so many people? Those
who don't feel like they need a messiah are pictured for me. In this picture, this
is Evan Roberts. One of my avocations is I study revival periods in the history of
the world, in 1905, in Wales, in England, there was a huge revival started with
Evan Roberts, changing the way he preached and he began to preach directly
from the Bible it's significant, we may come across him later again, began to
preach from the Bible. And as a result, people were coming to faith and you
know, who opposed him? The church and my own experience in the history of
the United States, there has been this variety of revival periods, again, all kinds
of stuff Spiritual up, spiritual down spiritual up, and spiritual down. And, and in
my lifetime there was promise keepers, which was a movement among men to
keep promises with people. And you know who opposed it? people in church,
when I was a young person, see, it's possible it could have been this, that they
just didn't realize. And so we want to take a warning from them to be more like
the Magi who are seeking. And then the last person who contrasts with the
Magi, for me is Herod. Here's a bust of him King Herod, the great servant of
Rome. Now we read that he was the ruler of Rome, he was given that privilege
by the Romans, he ruled at their behest, and he gathered taxes. And we know a
lot about him, he was a great builder. We also know he was a bit paranoid. In
fact, he killed his favorite wife, because he thought she might be plotting against
him to take over rule, He killed three of his sons, so much so that he thought
that they were plotting against him. And so one after another, he had the oldest
son, the one who would inherit the throne, killed. Now this is this is the kind of
man who is paranoid. And so we read about him, that when he came, that he
was disturbed. It's a wonderful word, it means troubled, emotionally engaged,
he's disturbed, he shook up because he recognized that his rule might be
threatened. I mean, he lived his life being in charge of that area. And now if
there's a Messiah coming, his response is fear. This means I might have to
change my life. There are people like that I remember presenting Christ to a
couple of young men that we went through the story of the Good News of Jesus
Christ, that mankind was created beautiful the world was created beautiful
mankind sin and fell into sin. We're all sinners, our world is twisted by sin. And
God didn't want to leave us. But he created a way where his justice, payment for
sin could be, could be exacted on Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, and that
we could now be invited into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And at
the end, you know, asking the question, you know, do you understand this?
Yeah, they understood it. Do you believe it? Would you like to pray to receive
this Jesus Christ into your life? And they said, No, no, I don't think so. So maybe
later, I'm having too much fun right now. Because their interpretation was if
Jesus comes in, wow, some of the things I do for fun might be limited. So Herod
missed it, the greatest event in the history of the world is happening just a few
miles away, and he missed it. Now, final question, Are you seeking a savior?
Maybe you are someone who identifies with the reasons that they missed. They
missed the event. Religious leaders and Herod, then I invite you again, you can
hear this is another invitation of God because he he regularly comes and gives
us invitations to be part of this great event that is changing the world still today.
And he invites you today. I feel like the Magi invite you to keep seeking. And the
promise from Jeremiah is from God says, You will seek me and you'll find me
when you seek me with all of your heart. And as you invite Jesus into your life,
he'll come because that's what he does. He's the Messiah. Okay, that's just the
demonstration. Next time we're gonna move on