So how many of you made at least one New Year’s resolution?  Please raise your hand.  I won’t ask how many of you have broken at least one New Year’s resolution already, but I will share with you a few resolutions that the late Erma Bombeck made over the years.  She stated:

·         I will go to no doctor whose office plants have died.

·         I’m going to follow my husband’s suggestion to put a little excitement into my life by actually living within our budget.

·         I’m going to apply for a hardship scholarship to Weight Watchers.

·         I will never loan my car to anyone I have given birth to.

   A joke writer by the name of Ed McManus has some words of comfort for those of us who have made New Year’s resolutions.  He says: “Don’t worry about keeping those 2009 resolutions all year.  You only have to deal with them until February and then when it’s time to give up something for Lent, you give up your resolutions.”  I have to confess I’d never thought of that before!

   Well, even though this is the first Sunday of the New Year, I’m not going to be speaking to you about New Year’s resolutions today.  And the reason I’m not is because we’re observing that special day on the church calendar known as Epiphany.  This day, which actually falls on January 6, commemorates the visit of the Wise Men to see the baby Jesus.  And as I was looking at that story in preparation for my sermon today, I was struck by the 2 totally opposite reactions to Jesus that we find in it, which led me to ask a question that you may have pondered a time or two yourself, namely, why is it that some people are so receptive to the Gospel when it is presented to them, while others, who hear exactly the same message, are turned off by it?

   Or let’s bring it maybe just a little closer to home.  How can 2 brothers who are raised by the same parents in the same Christian home turn out so differently, with one continuing to attend church regularly when he leaves home, while the other drops out of the church completely and no longer has anything to do with the Lord?  Or how about this?  How can 2 intelligent men study the stars and the wonders of the universe and yet come away with 2 drastically different opinions about its origin, the one saying it had to be the product of God’s creative design, while the other says it has to be the result of billions and billions of years of evolution at work?

   Well, this morning as we celebrate the Epiphany of our Lord, we will attempt to answer these and similar questions in the light of our text for today.  Now in this story we see God very much at work, moving in incredible ways to try to attract people to his Son.  Actually, the whole Christmas story happened because God was at work.  He was at work when the most powerful man in the world at that time, Caesar Augustus, ordered the census to be taken which, in turn, got Mary and Joseph to leave Nazareth and go to Bethlehem where the prophet Micah had foretold the Messiah would be born some 700 years before.  He was at work directing the angels who appeared to the shepherds to tell them about the birth of his Son.  He was at work when the shepherds were drawn by the angel’s announcement to go to Bethlehem and see this thing that had come to pass.  Indeed, God did all these things to attract people to himself, to get them involved with his grace and love.

   And then later on he was at work again when he placed in the heavens that brilliant star that caught the attention of some astrologers whom we normally refer to as the Wise Men.  Now Bible scholars pretty well agree that these Wise Men came from the vicinity of Babylon, which would help to explain why they came to Jerusalem looking for this infant-king.  You see, nearly 600 years before the birth of Christ, the Jews were defeated by the Babylonians, after which they spent 70 years in captivity in the land of Babylon.  During that time a very devout Jew by the name of Daniel established himself as a very wise man in his own right, and he was eventually promoted by the king to be the chief over all the other wise and learned men of Babylon. 

   Now, if you know anything at all about Daniel, you know that he wasn’t ashamed of his God.  And if you know anything at all about the book of Daniel in the Old Testament, then you know that aside from the familiar stories of Daniel in the lion’s den and the 3 men in the fiery furnace, it also contains some very significant prophecies about the Messiah, including a rather cryptic timetable as to when the Messiah would come.

   And I think it only stands to reason that when Daniel was chief over all the other wise men of Babylon he would have shared these prophecies with them and familiarized them with the hope that the Jews had of this great king being born some day.  So the Wise Men in the Christmas story were in all likelihood not totally ignorant of the Jews and their long-anticipated Messiah.  But exactly how or why they connected the star in the heavens with the birth of that Messiah we are not told.  All we know is that God placed that star in the sky in order to attract people to the birthplace of his Son, and with the Wise Men it worked.  They responded by coming.

   At first though it seemed no one in Jerusalem knew anything about this birth until some scribes researched the prophets and there discovered that this king was to be born in Bethlehem.  And as the Wise Men left Jerusalem, God acted again by placing that star in the sky one more time.  And when they saw it, I love how the King James Version of the Bible puts it.  It says:  “they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.”  Unfortunately this is something that I feel is often times lacking in our Christmas programs.  Whenever we try to depict the Wise Men, we usually have them moving very slowly and solemnly, almost as if they are in a funeral procession.  But apparently it wasn’t like that at all.  Instead, when the Bible describes them as rejoicing with exceeding great joy, I picture them hiking up their robes and hurrying to Bethlehem, running through the streets, and finally knocking breathlessly and expectantly on the house where Jesus was.

   They were excited at the thought of seeing this special Child, and that’s the same kind of excitement that our Lord wants us to have.  Now it’s easy to feel that way on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day when this holy season of the year reaches its climax, but by the time we reach Epiphany, our spirits tend to dip a bit, don’t they?  By now the Christmas rush has become the Christmas lull and our Christmas joy has been put away for another year much like our decorations.  But that’s not the way it should be.  So as we behold the Epiphany star by faith today, let us recapture and reclaim the same excitement and joy that the Wise Men felt.  Actually we should experience more than they because to our knowledge, all they knew was Jesus the infant.  We know Jesus the man, who went on to lovingly and willingly give his life into death on the cross so that we might have his personal guarantee of one day spending eternal life with him.  We really have reason to rejoice with exceeding great joy, then, don’t we?

   So the news of Jesus’ birth and all that it meant had what we might call the thrill effect on the Wise Men.  But now we will see the completely opposite effect that it had on somebody else in this story, and that would be King Herod.  He became involved in this story when the Wise Men came to Jerusalem looking for the one who had been born the king of the Jews.  Naturally this caught Herod’s attention since he was the current king of the Jews.  He was also a very proud, arrogant, and paranoid man who killed several of his own sons and his favorite wife when they stepped out of line.  So as soon as news of this king’s birth reached his ears, he started to get a little worried.  He thought that his throne might be in jeopardy and that if he didn’t do something, he just might lose it all.  Unfortunately, what he didn’t realize was that all this commotion and excitement about a newborn king was actually God moving in his direction, God moving with his grace toward this less than gracious king.

   So Herod took action.  He first found out from the Bible scholars of his day that this infant-king was to be born in Bethlehem.  Then he sent the Wise Men there with the instructions that they were to return to him as soon as they found this baby and tell him where it was so that he too could go and worship him.  Of course, Herod had no intentions of worshiping Jesus.  So from this part of the story we see that more than anything Herod was really a puppet of Satan for nobody was more eager to rid the world of Jesus than the old devil.  Yet God moved again by appearing to the Wise Men in a dream and revealing to them Herod’s true intentions.  So they avoided him, which caused Herod to set into motion a plan that he thought would most certainly do away with this potential threat to his throne.  He instructed his soldiers to go to Bethlehem and kill all male children there 2 years old and under.  But again God moved in another dream as he instructed Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee Bethlehem.  By so doing, God spared the life of his Son, but he also removed this opportunity of grace from King Herod.

   So in Herod we see one very good reason why Jesus is not well received by certain people even though they have been exposed to the same message as those who do accept him.  Herod viewed Jesus as a threat, and sure enough, that’s what a lot of people do today.  They know he would not approve of their particular lifestyle.  Or they feel that Jesus just doesn’t want Christians to have any fun in life.  Or they’d rather spend all their money on themselves rather than give a certain percentage of it to the church.  In other words, these people see no possible compatibility between their true loves in life and the Christian life.  So like Herod, they do away with Jesus, or at least they try to do away with him.  They ignore him or deny his existence or speak out against him, and in the process they do what Herod did.  They bring God’s eventual judgment on themselves when in fact they could have found themselves on the receiving end of his mercy and forgiveness.

   All of which brings us to a very important question:  What kind of effect does Jesus have on you, my friends – the Wise Men effect or the Herod effect?  The thrill effect or the threat effect?  Do you rejoice with exceeding great joy when you think of him and all that he’s done for you?  Do you excitedly race to church on Sunday morning like those Wise Men raced to Bethlehem so that you can worship this King who came to save you?  Do you willingly present to him gifts as the Wise Men did, not just of money, but how about the gifts of your time, your talents, your heart, your life?

   You know, those would make some excellent new year’s resolutions, wouldn’t they?  Now I know what some of you are thinking:  “There’s no way I could keep those resolutions perfectly.”  And you’re right.  We can’t keep them perfectly, but don’t you think it makes God happy when we at least try?  And besides, he even promises to help us.  That’s the work of the Holy Spirit.  So let’s look at this day not just as the first Sunday of a brand new year, but let’s make it with his help the start of a brand new walk with the Lord, a walk that will find us rejoicing daily in our salvation, excitedly and faithfully worshiping in God’s house throughout this year, and giving to our Savior the best we have to give, knowing that he did the same for us.