Podcast Summaries

This morning's Bible reading is from Matthew's Gospel, chapter 2, beginning at verse 1. If you want to follow it in a church Bible, that's page 2 in the New Testament section. In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, asking, Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising 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. And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel. Then Herod secretly called for the wise men 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, 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 off, and there ahead of them went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 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. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Graham, thanks very much for reading. Let me add my welcome to Gemma's and bid you a happy new year as well. Here's a question for you just as we begin this first Sunday of the new year. Who made it to midnight on New Year's Eve? Put up your hand and give me a wave if you made it to midnight. Well done. Who managed maybe to get to 10 o'clock before they dozed off in the chair? Caroline, well done. Thank you for your honesty. Hands up if you had no intention of getting to midnight, and so you were warmly tucked up in bed. Well done, you increasingly courageous few. Well, on New Year's Eve, I found myself doing lots of exciting things, catching up with friends, but one of them was sort of like a biblical trivial pursuit. I must admit, it's something that I've never played before. It was slightly niche, but the family that I was partying with really enjoyed it, and so we all played biblical trivial pursuit together. I have a biblical trivial pursuit question for you, and I'm going to encourage you to turn to the people around you and to see what answer you can come up with. How many kings were there in the story that we've just heard, the well-known epiphany story? How many kings were there? Off you go. Have a conversation with the people around you. See what you come up with. Excellent. Let me break into your conversations. It's quite intriguing, isn't it? Actually, the answer is way more intriguing, perhaps, than we might think as we get into this well-known but perhaps slightly mysterious and intriguing passage. So as we do that, I'm going to pray for us that the Lord would guide us just as he guided those magi. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you so much that this passage is all about coming to worship you, no matter how many kings there were. It's all about coming to worship you, who you are, and what we bring to worship you. And so we pray this morning that you'd help us to know you better, that in knowing you better we might know how to worship you more fully, not just this Sunday, but every day of the year ahead. In your name we pray. Amen. Well, it's really going to help if you have your Bible open in front of you. Page 2 in the New Testament sections. Our Bibles are built to design and confuse. And so you'll need to turn to the New Testament section and find page 2, about two-thirds of the way through where the numbering restarts in the New Testament. The answer to that question, how many kings were there in the Matthew 2 story, is, at least the short answer, is three kings. But it might not be the three kings that you initially thought of or who were talking about. Matthew 2, chapter 1, begins like this. In the time of King Herod, there's King 1, after Jesus was born in Jerusalem, or sorry, in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the east came to Jerusalem, asking, where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? So we're introduced to the first of the three kings straight away. King Herod, the political leader of the Jews. Not so much the religious leader, but the political leader. He's sort of the mayor of London, as opposed to being the Archbishop of Canterbury. And he kind of ruled over, politically, the area of Jerusalem and Judea and the wider countryside. In fact, Herod was an Edomite. I did a little bit of research into what an Edomite was. Edom literally means red. Herod's family ancestors came from the red sandstone city of Petra in modern-day Jordan. Over the Christmas period, you may have watched a great many films, some of which may have been worth watching. One of my favourite Christmas films, which was actually on a couple of nights ago, was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And if you watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you might know Petra. It's the place with the treasury that they approach at the end through the deserts, as I say, of modern-day Jordan. Back in the Old Testament, you might remember that Abraham had a son, Isaac, and that Isaac had two sons of his own. Esau, the eldest son, who by rights should have inherited his father's wealth. And Jacob, the youngest son. And you might remember in that story that Esau, the eldest son, in a totally kind of carefree way, sold his inheritance for a bowl of stew. Well, Esau's descendants went off to form the kingdom of Edom. Jacob's descendants went off to Jerusalem and formed the people of Israel. And Herod's ancestors from Edom were continually at war and in conflict with his brother's descendants, the Jews in Jerusalem. So King Herod, who had actually been forcibly converted, or his family had been forcibly converted to Judaism, here he was as leader of the Jewish people. It was an uneasy relationship between him and the people he ruled over. But that's not the whole story. We know that there's a second king lurking in the wings. This king actually never really comes on stage in our story, but the presence of this king is felt everywhere. And he'll be familiar to you by the name Caesar. The king or the emperor of Rome, whose empire had conquered all of those Mediterranean lands, and who ruled very cleverly by installing puppet kings, Herod being one of them, who would do his every bidding, particularly when it came to raising taxation and promoting the power and security of Roman rule and the empire. If you can identify earthly kings

and queens, by whose head is on the currency, then coins have been discovered with both Herod's head on them and also Caesar's head on them. And in fact, the names that go along with Caesar's head on those coins are really interesting. Lots of those coins proclaim him as Divus Julius. Julius Caesar thought he was God. We get our modern name Diva from it, somebody who thinks they have a God-like status. And on the day in 42 BC where Caesar was proclaimed a god in Rome, where he was called a saviour, there was a comet in the sky that stayed around for seven days. The Romans took it as a great omen. So three kings. We've met King Herod. We've met Emperor or King Caesar. And then we're introduced in verse 2 to the third of the kings, a humble child born to be king of the Jews and king of kings. The one who later in the passage, in verse 4, is called the Messiah, God's promised king. Messiah is a Hebrew word. It means God's anointed king. The Greek version of Messiah is the name Christ or Christos, where we get our name for the oil that we use to anoint kings today. When we anointed Charles King, the oil that he was anointed with behind that screen that they put up is called the oil of chrism. It's linked to the name Christ. It means anointed king. And verses 5 and 6 tell us that Jesus is going to be following on from his anointed shepherd king ancestor, King David, who was also born, you might remember, in the town of Bethlehem. So three kings. Herod, Caesar, and Jesus. The people who we may have thought of as kings in our Christmas story may not actually have been kings at all. Sorry to burst your bubble if that's the case. Verse 1, if you notice, calls them magi. They travelled from the east. That's what we know about them, possibly a very long distance and perhaps on camels. But we don't know whether they were kings or not. And we don't know how many of them there were, although they bring three gifts and so the supposition is that there were three of them. Actually, the Bible, if you notice in the Bible passage, doesn't number them at all. We just know that there are three gifts. You might see in the footnote in the Bible, if you've got your specs on or have particularly good eyesight, that the word magi can also be translated astrologer. It's where we get our English word magician from. So almost certainly the occupation of these people wasn't kinging. It was astrologing. That was their thing. But if we think of them as some kind of showman or cheap conjurers, that's not really doing them justice. There may have been those types of people amongst their wider colleagues, people who were sort of interested in kudos and showmanship. But it seems as if these people diligently studied the stars because they were seeking to understand in a deeper way the realities of a greater power beyond this world. They wanted to know how that power might want to interact with them. And they wanted to interact with it as well. They may well have come from Babylon in the east. That's one of the fairly commonly held theories. Babylon had a particularly strong history with reading the stars and trying to interpret them. And you might remember that Babylon was where God's people had been called on exile earlier in the Old Testament. You might remember from the book of Daniel that Daniel and his friends were taken off to Babylon. Perhaps it was that Daniel and his friends had told their Babylonian captors all about the coming king who God had promised to them. They may well have alluded to the prophecy of Micah which was written in the time or before the time that Daniel and his friends were there. So actually they would have known the words of Micah. Those words are recorded for us in Matthew 2 or some of Micah's words. But you, O Bethlehem Ephrata, who were too little among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days. Given that billing that the prophet Micah gives to King Jesus, you can understand why King Herod was in verse 3 described as being frightened. He presumably thought that ruling Israel was his role and he got there by suppressing all opposition. His natural instinct was not going to allow a pretender to go unchallenged. Equally, his political instinct was that King Caesar wasn't going to be too chuffed either. Caesar was going around, a different Caesar by this point, but was going around with titles like God and Son of God and Saviour and was used to having special stars pointing to his crowning. Neither of them were going to be particularly pleased. And so perhaps in verse 7 it's no surprise that Herod interviews the Magi full of his pantomime-like cunning. I'm not sure if you've seen a pantomime over the last few days, but Herod certainly fits the role of a pantomime villain, albeit one that has actually the ability to deliver on his murderous schemes. Verse 7, he sends the wise men on their way. Verse 8, locate the child and to report back supposedly so that he could go and worship too. But we know how that turns out later in chapter 2. Perhaps it's no surprise not only to read of Herod's murderous plotting, but also to read that having travelled such a long way and invested so much in finding this promised king, that verse 10, when the wise men get there, they are overwhelmed with joy. This has been a journey probably for months if not years. And now they have found the one who they've been looking for. Imagine their joy, verse 10. And so verse 11, they kneel down and worship. And their worship is proved genuine by in part the gifts that they offer. As I was sat there on Christmas Day unwrapping gifts and giving gifts, I wondered to myself whether gifts say more about the giver or the receiver. You might like to replay some of your Christmas gifts in your mind and think, I wonder whether that says more about me or more about the person who gave it to me. Perhaps the person's generosity. And you think, gosh, that was more than I really expected them to give. I'm so grateful for that. I didn't realize that I meant perhaps that much to them. Perhaps as you unwrapped the slightly unique gift that some people may have given you and you looked at it quizzically, this mystery that you were unwrapping in front of you and you thought, is this talking about me or is this talking about you or the present that may have been recycled out of your recycling presents drawer? Gifts can say quite a lot about the person they're given to. And quite rightly at this time of year, we tend to focus and sermons often tend to focus. Today, there will be thousands of sermons across the world that focus quite rightly on what these gifts tell us about Jesus, the person they were given to. Gold for the King of Kings, frankincense for the great high priest, myrrh for the one who was born to die for our sins and to be raised again. And that is completely correct. But I did wonder this year as I was opening my gifts, I wonder what these gifts say about the people who gave them. Jesus, I give you my gold. I submit to you my earthly life, my ambitions, my possessions, my wealth, my

material goods, my physical body, I submit that to you. Jesus, I submit to you the frankincense of my life. I submit to you my spiritual being. I recognise that I am an unsteady captain of my soul. And so I submit to you and put under you my spiritual self and being. Jesus, I submit to you the myrrh of my being. I submit to you my death, not just my life. If you asked me at this time last year what you could pray for me, one of the things I would have said is that I would trust Jesus more in my life. As I've gone through this year, I've recognised that my prayer has changed somewhat because at this point last year, I was sat there thinking to myself, Simon, if you don't trust Jesus with your life, how on earth are you going to trust him with your death? When I got through to February the 18th and a slightly unexpected diagnosis from the doctor, I learned quite quickly that I was going to need to trust Jesus with my death and not just with my life. Myrrh, do I worship Jesus with trusting him with my death as well as with my life? So as we come into land, where does that familiar story leave us this morning at the beginning of 2026, almost 2,000 years later? Well, it might encourage us to look at this story and to think God has clearly got a plan that he is working out. As we look at this story, the things we've talked about this morning, God has been working that plan out for literally thousands of years. We've mentioned King David, we've mentioned Abraham, we've mentioned the prophet Micah, we've mentioned Daniel, we've mentioned Babylon, we've mentioned wise men traveling across the desert for months, if not years. We've mentioned young kings and old prophets. We've thought about teenage mothers and rough and ready shepherds. We've got intellectual wise men. We've got people who, when we look at them, they look like me. I've got people who don't look like me. We've got people from all across the planet. These events that God works together show us that history is not chance. When we look at world politics, quite often in free fall or seeming free fall and chaos, this story is a reminder that God is in control. He hasn't left the building. And he has got a plan that he is working out. And that plan fundamentally is actually centered on the kind of the gravitational pull of history is towards Jesus, his death and his resurrection. The fact that he is the king of kings and that he's the great high priest. The supreme proof of all of that is the death and resurrection of Jesus. That's the center of gravity of history that this story points to, and that's where history still points to today. We point back to Jesus even as we move back to the future. The story also shows us, I think, how easy it is to become or to fall into the Herod trap. To be so selfishly committed to our own rule and to the projection of our own personality. So confident in our self-reliance that actually our natural instinct becomes one of killing off all opposition or threat. The fact that the Bible story this morning notes that all Jerusalem were frightened with Herod shows that this wasn't just a Herod-shaped problem. And although we might look at Herod and condemn him as a murderous pantomime villain, actually there's something in Herod that we recognize in each of us. The Herod instinct, we might call it, still infects leaders, it still infects governments. It infects business boardrooms, it infects academic institutions, it infects community clubs, it affects family life, it affects individuals at every level. But the story also shows us that with real commitment and sacrifice, the worship that the wise men bring to Herod is also something that we can bring as well. It asks us the question, what does our worship tell us about who we think Jesus is? And what does our worship tell us about who we think we are? I wonder if you've ever thought about that. What do the songs that I sing, what do the things I volunteer, what do the actions that I perform, what does the worship that I bring show about who I think Jesus is? Are there things that are missing? Are there things that I want to do a little bit more? How do I look at my life of worship and what it tells me? As I was growing up, I can remember a notice board on our church curtilage, and it was right in the centre of town. And it used to have this sign that we put up quite regularly during Epiphany. It said, 2,000 years ago, wise men sought Jesus. 2,000 years later, wise people still do. In our church in the last few months, and stretching back further, there have been a number of people who have, in my view, very wisely been seeking Jesus. People, many of whom have had no previous association with church or with seeking after Jesus. And it's been a privilege to see people doing that. I wonder whether that's a great thing for us to do this new year as we acknowledge Jesus as our King, the one before whom we lay our physical lives, our ambitions, our wealth, the one before whom we lay our spiritual lives, everything that our soul contains, the one before whom we lay not just our lives, but our death and our resurrection as well. God bless us into this new year. Amen.