Other Roads

Dear People of Christ Church,
Tomorrow is Epiphany (if you have a hankering for church, St Paul’s in Bedford is doing a noon service). One of my favorite lines in the Gospels is this short description of the Magi as they leave Bethlehem:

And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

What is this other road? Did they always follow the instructions given in dreams? What are all the other roads we take or don’t take? Maybe they learned from a bad experience that you should always listen to that stuff? The Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken has always seemed a bit self-congratulatory to me—the narrator seems to boast that it’s “made all the difference” they took the road less traveled—but Matthew’s Gospel is so matter of fact about it that you wonder if there must be more to it.

Thinking about the alternate roads often becomes an exercise in nostalgia—thinking about what might have been if we’d done something else (or thinking about who we were when we made those decisions), we are easily blinded to the graces of what is. On the other hand, a la my annoyed interpretation of Frost, there can be a brittle defensiveness to being sure we did the right thing. But the magi are drama-free; they just know that Herod’s out to get them, and they keep going.

In addition to Magi’s attentiveness to their dreams, the other thing I also love is that they found the other road. We don’t have stories about them returning to Herod because they knew how to do things differently. They were attentive not just to their internal senses, but to what was around them. This is hard: often times we get absorbed into our own personal realities and don’t notice anything else. There’s also an opposite temptation, to be so externally focused we lose our bearings and can’t hear anything from our interior selves. They all are in conversation; it’s more of a double helix than two poles to balance.

Tomorrow, with the Magi we leave Bethlehem, all on our own roads. The light of the manger will be brought to all corners of the world in this season of Epiphany to the extent that we bring it with us. We’re celebrating Jesus’ baptism on Sunday, so we’re reminded of how we are one in Christ as members of one another and the church; in that same double helix way of interior and exterior, we travel together and apart.
What will you bring with you as you leave the manger? What will you leave behind?

Blessings,
Sara+