Today is the last day of the world race. Tomorrow afternoon we’ll begin the process of returning home. For me that involves 4 plane rides and a night in LA. I wrote this blog while in Australia, but I think today is a suitable day to post it.
The Bible is full of sojourners, wanderers, and adventurers. Most of them giving up everything they had built up simply because they had an encounter with God. Most are only briefly mentioned. Matthew 2:1-12 briefly tells the story of the three magi. The magi bring themselves and their own assumptions on an incredible journey. Church history suggests that they traveled for two to three years before finally reaching the answer to their questions.
Answers found in a toddler (most scholars agree that the magi didn’t show up until Jesus was 2-3 years old). The magi allowed their questions found in their secular occupations and foreign gods to bring them on a perilous journey from the east. These questions based in the stars lead them to a land with a strange tongue, a foreign culture and a crazed king bent on destroying the very thing they were seeking. This journey brought them across deserts and probably over the Himalayan mountains. They were probably raided and attacked, hungry and lost.
Compared to the magi most of us prefer our words and ideas, we are afraid of any authentically new experience. Unlike the Magi, we do not allow the stars to divert us to a new place and away from our comfort. We would rather stay in our private castles and avoid such questionable adventures. Yes, we avoid certain danger and supposed death, but we also avoid birth. We miss out on the great epiphany.
God is constantly calling us to encounter Him. To live with greater intimacy and greater dependence on God, He’ll often lead us on paths that take us places of perceived risk and discomfort. If you had told me that I would be sitting here in Malaysia writing a blog at the end of this journey about 18 months ago, I would have laughed at you. I was too steeped in my religion and content with my plans to consider such a journey.
‘All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.’
– from T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi
Over the last 11 months we have journeyed around the world. We’ve left our private castles and stopped digging in our heels. And because of our own cycles of encountering the Greatest of Epiphanies, we’ve changed drastically. We are no longer content to live in the pale, little world created by ignorance, apathy and noise. Knowledge without an encounter becomes stale religion. An encounter without knowledge becomes hedonism. But knowledge and an epiphany becomes transformation. And we have been radically transformed.
“What they had done, what they had seen, heard, felt, feared – the places, the sounds, the colors, the cold, the darkness, the emptiness, the bleakness, the beauty. ‘Til they died, this stream of memory would set them apart, if imperceptibly to anyone but themselves, from everyone else. For they had crossed the mountains… “
— Adapted from Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire (1952)
The reality is that we cannot return to the way things were. Despite many of us shortly returning to the same environment we left, it is no longer home. We have all been radically initiated into the upside-down Kingdom. Much like the Magi returning home isn’t possible, but who would want to?
