Nearly four thousand years ago, there was a man living in the vicinity of the ancient city of Babylon. This man heard God speak to him, and it turned out to be a major turning point in history. That might not seem like an exaggeration. After all, don’t we believe that God speaks to us on a regular basis? The answer would be, “yes, of course.” But whatever confidence we might have that we can separate out God’s voice in our hearts from the other voices clamoring for our attention, we owe very much to this man who lived so many generations ago.
I am referring, of course, to Abraham. At the time of which I am speaking, he lived in what we would call a pagan land, where there were many gods. The stars themselves were held to be divine in some way, and the wise men of Babylon were expert at mapping the heavens, watching them for divine messages. Later Jewish and Christian tradition held that Abraham was grieved by this perplexing multitude of gods and the superstition and magic that went along with them. In other words, Abraham wanted the Truth, and despaired of finding it in the paganism around him.
In Abraham, God, the One, True God, found a heart ready to hear the Truth. What Abraham heard was that to follow this Truth required of him a great sacrifice. He would need to leave his homeland and his family and travel to a place that this God would show him. But Abraham followed, because the Truth is better than make-believe, and certainly better than lies. As I said earlier, we owe a great deal to these patriarchs and their wives who heard the voice of God and obeyed, often at high cost to themselves. Through them, God was establishing a foothold in this world that had rebelled against Him. Abraham’s children, the Israelites, became a light for the nations because they worshipped the One, True God.
This vocation, to hear God’s word and follow, was often very costly, because the old gods were not about to give up their power easily. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful and successful by worldly standards were often the most dedicated to the false gods. Someone like Socrates, who had a similar thirst for Truth as Abraham, ended up being executed by those who felt threatened by him. This was a world of conflict, scarcity, fear, and mistrust. Too often, it was held together simply by the threat of violence and the predations of the stronger against the weaker. This is why God’s call to Abraham required him to renounce that world.
Today, on the Epiphany, God speaks again to a group of three men from the East. What is more, God speaks to them through one of the stars which they watched so carefully. The stars had always belonged to God, and were intended to be His messengers, but fallen man had forgotten how to read them properly. With the arrival of God’s Son, fallen nature begins to regain its true purpose, to offer us signs of God’s presence and His love. These three men do exactly what Abraham did many years before. They set off for a place unknown, following this star.
They know that a king has been born, and he is somewhere in this small country of Judea. By their obedience, by their willingness to set out, they make known the identity of this child. I said that the willingness to follow God comes at a cost. The gospel tells us that King Herod and Jerusalem were in an uproar about this news that God was sharing with them. In his famous poem “Journey of the Magi”, T.S. Eliot captures this cost well. He has one of the Magi, many years after his encounter with the baby Jesus, say this: “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods.”
Today we celebrate the fact that God did not only call Abraham’s descendants, the Jews, to know the Truth. In the Magi, we see His rescue mission reaching the Gentiles as well. God reveals Himself to us and to all. In the Incarnation of His Son, Jesus Christ, we have a perpetual point of reference to discern God’s voice in today’s world. In the Church, which is the extension of the Incarnation in space and time, we continue to enjoy the assurance that we can hear God. He speaks through nature, through stars and trees and wind and rain. With God’s Word alive in our hearts, we can learn to read these signs. But His invitation still calls us to leave all that is fallen within us and in the world. In other words, following it will require our ongoing conversion. Not everyone welcomes this. Herod heard what the Magi had to say, and he rejected it. He was unwilling to give up that old world in which he enjoyed power and status.
Where is God speaking to me today? How can the Church help me to clarify God’s voice and His invitation to conversion? Will we set off in faith toward what is still unknown in God’s plan? Will we put it off, or even reject what God is asking, fearing the cost? Guide our hearts Lord God, to hear and heed, and to follow where so many holy men and women have gone before, believing not only that the Truth is better than make-believe and lies, but that Your Truth is greater than all we can imagine.