I preached this sermon at Dreams and Visions’ Queer Christmas Pageant in December, 2019. The texts are Luke 2:1-20 and Matthew 2:1-12. This sermon is about the magi who see a star rise, and come to find Jesus.
For many years,
I read the bible like a straight person.
That’s because I thought I was a straight person,
because this world around us expects us all to be straight people
and they expect the Bible to be straight too.
I’m not a straight person. I’m Queer.
And every time I pick up the bible
I’m shocked, AGAIN.
By how subversive it is.
Did you see tonight?
How wild and unexpected this story is?
Mary is this poor kid from a backwater town who’s basically a revolutionary —
singing that God will tear unjust tyrants to be torn from their thrones.
Joseph makes a decision to raise a kid who’s not biologically related to him…
And follows instructions he receives from angels in dreams.
Their first kid is born in someone’s back room
and their first visitors are leather skinned, hard-drinking shepherds
who say they had some kind of vision.
Later, a bunch of astronomers who have traveled over a thousand miles
turn up because a star told them to.
And again I marvel:
at how God is always choosing weirdest, least likely people
to be part of a scheme for love to break into the world.
I marvel.
At how God makes misfit family.
Chosen family:
of people who by all rights, never should have even met,
and brings them together In borrowed rooms in towns far from home,
to see love born.
*
This year, I keep thinking about the Magi.
We call them kings or wise men,
but many scholars believe they were Zoroastrian priests from Persia.
Zoroastrianism is a religion that precedes Islam.
The Magi were mystics:
people who interpreted dreams and studied the stars.
Many believed in that time that when a powerful person was born
a sign of it would appear in the heavens.
And so when the magi saw a new star in the night sky
they knew they must follow it.
They would have traveled, not alone — three dudes on camels —
but, as Persian travelers did, in a caravan, that likely included women.
And because they were mystics, people who searched for truth,
people who found themselves a little outside ordinary life in society,
in my sanctified imagination, I can see that many of them were Queer.
These were people who inhabited in-between spaces.
Between heaven and earth, truth and magic, present and prophesy.
The magi followed a star 1,000 miles or more,
through arid deserts and high mountain passes.
They followed the star to the place of truth.
I think that each of us has a star in our lives:
a beacon that God’s places on our horizons,
to help us find our own way to truth.
It took me a long time to find my star.
Thirty seven years of waiting and searching…
feeling like I was one step removed from myself all the time.
I thought I was straight. Because the world expected me to be.
But once I caught sight of my star,
I couldn’t refuse the journey.
Once I caught sight of it, I couldn’t help but follow.
You each have your own stars.
Your own shining beacon
that God has scattered across the constellations of your night sky.
Your star hangs, waiting,
above your fullest, truest, self.
Your own Emmanuel — god with you.
It’s possible to lose track of our stars.
There are forces in the world, much like Herod,
that want to divorce us from truth,
cut us off the source of love,
even seek to kill love in the world.
But Queerness is like the magi.
Queerness follows the star
until it stops, over the place where truth and love are born.
*
Maybe you’ve had a very long journey.
The star was so distant, you worried you would never reach the place where it waited.
You’ve traveled through deserts and mountains to try and find your way to yourself.
Or maybe you were one of those people
who had stars in your eyes the moment you were born.
You’ve always known who you are —
it’s just that the world around you that tries to call you off course.
Whoever you are,
wherever your star is,
Don’t loose sight.
Don’t loose hope.
Keep on with your journey.
*
Let’s not pretend that the journey is without risk.
Whenever truth and love are revealed in the world, forces of hatred and fear try to blot them out.
I don’t know what each of you here has experienced in the life-long journey to be the person God made you to be.
What I do know is that you’ve probably been told somewhere along the way,
that your fullest self was not of God.
Whether you heard it from your family, who could not accept your fullness,
from the kids at school, who can be so incredibly cruel,
or from your pastor or priest —
sometimes the places where we should receive affirmation are the very places that cast us away.
Don’t be afraid.
God has been making misfit families of those who found themselves on the outside
for thousands and thousands of years.
And Queerness means making a resilient, vibrant space for our joy, our fullness, our whole selves
right in the middle of a world that wants to strip all those things away.
*
You who live on the streets or the outskirts of the city,
you who always stood just outside that group of friends you wished you were part of.
You who never quite finds your way in this overwhelming world of noise and chaos…
It’s you God chooses to bear witness to love,
born in a borrowed room,
crying out on a dark night.
Like the Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the sheep,
the world may decide that we’re not worth much.
But in God’s eyes, we are exalted.