Sunday 5th January 2025 – Communion Service led by Mike Findley
One of the pleasures of Mike’s reflections is the amount of new information he offers us – and today was no exception.
We learned that he’s been preaching for 38 years, and now that he is deemed to be old by his family, Christmas for him involves having to turn up where he’s told, and do what he’s told. A wonderful time, but it leaves him with a fridge full of all sorts of bits and pieces that don’t make up meals.
So it was a good Christmas for him!
Our Bible readings were from Matthew, about the coming of the Magi, the wise men which celebrated Epiphany – the showing of Jesus to the wider world. The second reading was from the Letter to the Ephesians about Paul’s calling – what he felt called by God to do.
Mike told us that the Magi were Zoroastrian priests who came from Persia. They earned the title “Wise Men” mainly because of their skills in interpreting dreams and understanding astrology and they were well known for telling fortunes and preparing daily horoscopes. They were the scholars of their day and enjoyed access to the Persian Emperor.
Zoroastrianism was one of the oldest religions in the world and was still quietly active in some parts of the Middle East today. It was the official religion of Persia before Islam. The primary prophet for Zoroastrianism was Zoroaster who they believed was miraculously conceived in the womb of a 15-year-old Persian virgin – just like Jesus. And like Jesus, Zoroaster started his ministry at the age of 30 after he had defeated all of Satan’s temptations, and he predicted that other virgins would conceive further divinely appointed prophets as history unfolded. The Magi believed they could foretell these miraculous births by reading the stars and, also like the Jews, Zoroastrian priests were anticipating the birth of a true Saviour.
Mike’s view is that Matthew told his audience that the Zoroastrian priests followed the star of Bethlehem to Jesus’s birthplace to assure them that Jesus was a fulfilment not only of the Old Testament prophecy of the virgin birth, but also the Zoroastrian virgin birth prophecies. The Maji were Gentiles, and they recognized Jesus’s divinity and kingship. Matthew was presenting Jesus as the expected King of the Jews and of the Gentiles as well. Matthew in this part of his Gospel wanted to contrast the Gentiles on the one hand, and the Jewish secular and religious leaders on the other. The Magi knelt down and paid Jesus homage but King Herod the Great wanted to kill him. Matthew wanted to show throughout his Gospel that Jewish leaders rejected Jesus and oppressed him but the Gentiles accepted him. So we had a message of Jesus being a Saviour and a king not just for the Jewish people but for all the peoples of the world as well.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul’s calling was to spread the gospel to the Gentiles, which in Greek simply means the peoples of the world other than the Jewish people. Epiphany was the showing of Jesus to the wider world and the message from both Bible readings was about Christianity moving out from its Jewish base to address itself to the wider world.
We were also given the advice, “Don’t look back, you are going the other way”, (which Mike liked) as we looked forward into 2025. Of course, we should look back to learn from all the things we’d done, and whether we had done them well or badly, to help us for the future. But we shouldn’t look back to do a balance of the good things we’d done and the things we’d failed to do over the year to work out whether we’d actually had a good year. In Christian terms we’d all failed, sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God, and it was only by God’s grace, a free gift, that salvation was possible, not through any work that we might have done.
Mike was realistic about New Year’s Resolutions – which lasted until about lunchtime on New Year’s Day – but he told us that we should plan for the year, because if we failed to plan, we planned to fail. And when we did we should involve God in every step of the way. That should be the resolution that we had every year – to involve God more in our lives as individuals, as a church, as families, and as a neighbourhood.
At Epiphany, the challenge was how we showed Jesus to the world today. How we showed to other people the beliefs we had, and what we could do to demonstrate that our faith was genuine. How we showed this through our lives, through what we did, what we said, and from the way we treated people who were different from us and welcomed them into our midst. We had to spread the good news to people who were not like us.
And to those who said, “If there was a God, he would never allow all that evil in the world” , Mike’s answer was that the Bible was written – almost all of it – in times of war, or of oppression. The New Testament message of love and care and compassion was written in time of war and oppression. When the Magi visited, Joseph, Mary and Jesus had moved out of the stable and into a house. They had stayed in Bethlehem because Nazareth, a satellite village of the city of Sepphoris, was a war zone. Sepphoris had rebelled against Roman rule and the Romans had brought the army down from Syria and demolished the city and the surrounding villages.
So when we took down the Christmas decorations there were three things to remember;
- The light that came into the world with the birth of Jesus not only shows us the way, but shines light on all those murky corners in our lives too. And unlike a candle, the light of the world doesn’t go out.
- We do not have to try to face this year alone, we have the ongoing presence of God with us.
- We show Jesus in our lives and the depth of our belief through the way we act over the coming year, and how we deal with the challenges that confront us.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 