“In the Name of God the Broken-Hearted. Amen.”

In January of 1991, I was a student at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, where there is a tradition of Thursday night community eucharists followed by dinner together in the seminary refectory. On the evening of Thursday, January 17, the Rev. Dr. John Kater, professor of ministry theory and practice, was our preacher and he began his sermon with the invocation I have just offered. You see, that was the day “Operation Desert Shield” became “Operation Desert Storm,” and we had all been glued to the TV sets in the common room, the dormitory lounges, or our apartments watching as the US Air Force began a bombardment of Baghdad that was to last for weeks and, eventually, lead into nearly three decades of war in the Persian Gulf region.

There was another American bombing of Baghdad just a few days ago in which the military leader of Iran, Qassem Soleimani, was killed. If the news reports are correct, his death may trigger more armed conflict in the region. So this weekend, as we read in our newspapers about the Iranian general’s death and tonight consider the visit of a group of Iranian scientists to Israel, it seemed good to repeat that invocation tonight.

This evening, on the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany, we heard the story of the visitation of the Magi from Matthew’s Gospel. We’re not singing it this evening, but I’d bet that I’m not the only one who’s been mentally humming John Henry Hopkins, Jr.’s famous 1857 Christmas carol We Three Kings of Orient. The learned General Theological Seminary professor of church music gave the Episcopal imprimatur to and firmly cemented in popular imagination all the legendary emendations and allegorical encrustations which had attached over the centuries to this story.

Let’s just quickly debunk some of those, shall we?

First of all, there weren’t three visitors. We don’t know how many there were. The evangelist only says that the Magi brought three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It seems to have been the early Christian theologian Origen who first suggested that, because there were three gifts, there must have been three visitors. In some Eastern churches, particularly the Syriac churches, the traditional teaching is that there were twelve. In the Western church, however, the number three was firmly established by several sermons preached by Pope St. Leo the Great, who reigned in the middle of the 5th Century.

Secondly, they weren’t kings. Matthew never even suggests that the visitors were royalty. He describes them by the Greek plural noun magoi which our New Revised Standard lectionary translates as “wise men.” (We’ll return to this Greek word in a moment.) It was the 3rd Century lawyer theologian Tertullian who first suggested they might be “almost kings” in his treatise against the heretic Marcion. Tertullian may have been influenced by the prophecy found in Isaiah, Chapter 60, part of which we heard this evening and which continues with the promise that “kings shall minister to you,”[1] or perhaps by verses from Psalm 72 which eventually came to be appointed as the gradual psalm for Epiphany:

The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall pay tribute, *
and the kings of Arabia and Saba offer gifts.
All kings shall bow down before him, *
and all the nations do him service.[2]

Apparently, the idea gained traction and by the 10th Century it was firmly entrenched.

And, finally, there is the allegorical meaning of their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

There’s an old joke asking, “What would have happened if it had been three wise women instead of three wise men who visited Jesus?” The answer is that they would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts.

I would argue that gold, good ol’ hard cash, is always a practical gift, but the church decided fairly early on that practicality wasn’t the point of these gifts and very quickly allegorized their meaning. It was the 2nd Century bishop, Irenaeus of Lyons in his treatise Against the Heretics who proposed the gifts allegorical or prophetic meaning: gold, the gift for a king; frankincense, the gift for a priest; and myrrh — a burial ointment, a gift for one who would die. All of this and more, including the three kings names, is immortalized in Hopkins familiar carol. It’s all lovely, and may be well worth contemplating, but none of it is really biblical and much of it is pure fantasy. If we strip away the encrustation of centuries of pious legend and just consider the gospel text what do we have?

Such a question brings us up squarely against that Greek word I mentioned earlier, the one Matthew uses to identify these visitors, however many of them there may have been: the magoi, which comes down to us in Latinized form as “the Magi.” The singular in Greek is magos, which the lexicon tells us is “of foreign origin.” In fact, it is derived from the word magush used to describe Zoroastrian priests from Persia, modern day Iran.

Sometimes in scripture and other sources, the word is used negatively to describe astrologers, soothsayers, false prophets, and sorcerers, but that can’t have been Matthew’s intention in the gospel. It must, rather, have been his purpose to name them as, in fact, Zoroastrian priests. This is what St. Clement of Alexandria understood when, in his First Century text The Stromata, he named them among the “first in [the] ranks” of those among whom “philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished [and] shed its light”[3] in preparation for the Incarnation. Methodist pastor and author Adam Hamilton writes of the Magi:

They were . . . respected court advisors, scholars, sages, devout believers in God, and scientists of a sort. They studied the stars and looked to them for signs of God’s plans and world events. They were astrologers in a time when astrologers were not simply creators of horoscopes but students of the stars.[4]

And historian K.E. Eduljee describes them as:

. . . renowned for their wisdom beyond the borders of Iran. They were unsurpassed in their knowledge of philosophy, history, geography, plants, medicine, and the heavens. The efficacy of their beliefs and faith was demonstrated in their actions. Their high moral standing, their wisdom, their ability to heal the sick, and their years of learning made them legendary throughout the Middle East.[5]

In other words, they were polymaths, what an earlier generation might have called “natural philosophers,” what today we would call “scientists.” As priests, their investigations of the natural world were in service to their community, guided by the Zoroastrian Creed found in the 18th Chapter of their scriptures called the Vendidad:

On three noble ideals be ever intent:
The good thought well thought,
The good word well spoken,
The good deed well done.[6]

It turns out, then, that everything these priest-scientists brought with them when they visited the Holy Family, not just the gold, was very practical. Both frankincense and myrrh were known to Chinese traditional medicine and to Indian ayurvedic medicine; they were and still are used for such things as sedation and pain-relief during childbirth. In fact, frankincense continues to be used for that purpose in Iran today. They were used to treat digestive disorders, such as colic in babies, and oral maladies like gingivitis in adults and teething pain in infants.

Cash and useful medicines. With all due respect to the wise women of that joke, these wise men brought some pretty practical gifts, as well, even if they didn’t make a casserole.

Epiphany then, stripped of its emendations, celebrates the peaceful visit of a group of Iranian priest-scientists to Israel. Zoroastrianism, of course, was not the first nor the last religion whose priests were the natural philosophers of their day. The history of modern science is populated by Christian priests, monks, and nuns. The Venerable Bede, in addition to being a historian, wrote at least two treatises on the nature of time. The 11th Century Pope Sylvester II was a mathematician and astronomer. In the same century, Hildegarde of Bingen was a brilliant physician and pharmacologist. The 13th Century Dominican Albertus Magnus wrote about such varied sciences as botany, geography, astronomy, astrology, mineralogy, alchemy, zoology, and physiology, among others; he is honored by the title “Universal Doctor” and is considered the patron saint of scientists. His contemporary, the Franciscan Roger Bacon, is sometimes called the father of the scientific method, the study of nature through empiricism. Anglican deacon Charles Darwin, of course, proposed the law of natural selection; Austrian monk Gregor Mendel pioneered genetics; and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ priest-physicist Georges Lemaître proposed the “Big Bang” theory.

But we live in an age when religion and science have been separated. It is argued that scientific progress requires a critical mind, free of prejudice, open to new ways of thinking, and independent of theological or religious beliefs. Science and religion have become estranged, and it has not been an amicable divorce.

Beginning in the 17th Century and continuing into the 18th, dissemination of knowledge and exchange of new theories become the province of secular scientific academies rather than monasteries and other religious institutions, and at the beginning of the 19th century, the universities which had been founded by religious orders saw a remarkable rise in academic research, sometimes called ‘pure’ research. Scientists were instructed not to be interested or concerned with practicalities or the technological application of their results, nor with the ethics thereof. Science was deemed to be morally neutral, the advancement of knowledge neither good nor bad. Science was not responsible for its applications, and even less for their subsequent use.

Meanwhile, an increasingly vocal segment of the Christian population counters scientific neutrality to ethics with an increasing religious hostility to facts. They ignore the fossil and geological record, deny the theory of evolution, and insist on the factual accuracy of a six-day creation myth. Dismissing centuries of theology and legal precedent, and discounting medical evidence to the contrary, they are adamant that human personhood begins at conception. Refusing to accept the fact of global warming, they deny the dangers of world-wide pollution and anthropogenic climate change.

There may still be modern day Magis, like the late Roman Catholic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the late Episcopal priest Jeanette Piccard, the still-living Cambridge physicist and Anglican theologian John Polkinhorne, and others, priest-scientists who can bridge the gap between science and religion, but they seem to be becoming fewer and fewer.

So here we are beginning the third decade of the 21st Century. Ethically neutral science has given us nuclear weapons and other implements of war, including long-range drones that allow American military personal to sit at comfortable work stations and assassinate foreign leaders hundreds or thousands of miles away. On the other hand, it has also warned us of global climate change, of digital information warfare, and of the dangers of interfering with reproductive freedom, but self-styled religious conservatives refuse to listen. Perhaps the story of the priest-scientists visiting the Holy Family should encourage us to ask if the divorce of religion and science was a good thing.

At the beginning of this century, medical ethicist Maurizio Iaccarino criticized science’s ethical disinterest:

In the present climate, [he wrote,] upholding the neutrality of science would not be amoral, but immoral. Scientists are the first to receive crucial information, sometimes years in advance, about the potential dangers of certain scientific knowledge. * * * Thus, the onus is on the scientists to inform the public about the potential dangers of new technologies and to engage the public in debates on how to use their knowledge wisely and in the best public interest.[7]

As we celebrate the visitation of the Magi, these priest-scientists, to the Holy Family, however many of them there may have been, whatever their names may have been, whatever their gifts may have been, I suggest that the example of their visit should prompt the church and its members to be engaged more vocally in those public debates as well.

This weekend we have read in our newspapers about the Iranian general’s death and in our bibles about the visit of a group of Iranian scientists to Israel. It would be so much better, wouldn’t it, if the deaths of generals was the thing of history and scientists’ peaceful visits were in the headlines? I’m sure it breaks God’s heart that it’s not.

Let us pray:

Broken-Hearted God, you made the universe with all its marvelous order, its atoms, worlds, and galaxies, and the infinite complexity of living creatures, and you have endowed human beings with the ability to search out your laws and have given us the freedom to apply our knowledge as we choose. We confess that we have not always done so as true and faithful stewards of your bounty. We seek your forgiveness and ask your blessing on all scientific research and its technological application, that they may enhance human life and have regard to the safety and well-being of the natural order. Grant that, as we contemplate the example of the visiting Magi, we may come to know you more truly, and more surely fulfill our role in your eternal purpose; in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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This homily will be offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Eve of the Feast of the Epiphany, January 5, 2020, to the people of Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio, where Fr. Funston will be guest preacher.

The illustration to this page is The Adoration of the Magi by John McKirdy Duncan (1915); it is held in a private collection. See The Athenaeum, website accessed 4 January 2020.

The lessons scheduled for the service (The Epiphany) are Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7,10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; and St. Matthew 2:1-12. These lessons can be found at The Lectionary Page.

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text.

[1] Isaiah 60:10 (NRSV)

[2] Psalm 72:10-11 (BCP 1979 Version)

[3] Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, Book 1, Chapter 1, William Wilson, tr., from Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2, Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds. (Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, NY:1885), New Advent website accessed January 2, 2020

[4] Adam Hamilton, The Coming of the Wise Men, AdamHamilton.com blog, website accessed January 3, 2020

[5] K.E. Eduljee, Zoroastrian Priesthood: The Role of Early Priests, Zoroastrian Heritage, website accessed January 3, 2020

[6] Zoroastrian Scripture Selections, Zoroastrian Heritage, website accessed January 3, 2020

[7] Maurizio Iaccarino, Science and ethics, EMBO reports vol. 2,9 (2001): 747-50. doi:10.1093/embo-reports/kve191, National Library of Medicine website accessed January 4, 2020