“We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.? So said the Magi according to Matthew (2:2). Herod, a filthy deceitful tyrant, wants to know where Jesus is born so he, too, can worship the newborn king. Then we read that “On coming to the house, [the Magi] saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him” (2:11). A significant word for Christmas is “worship.”
And it’s not the easiest time of the year to worship.
We travel to places to be with family and friends; we scurry about shopping and tending to the festivities of Christmas; we cook and bake and clean up pans and make room in refrigerators and freezers; we take our kids here and there; the kids are not in school and they don’t have as structured of a life so they make extra demands on us just when we need more time to get too many things done. Goodness, we know how hard it is to find peace and quiet.
But the Magi point the way. They had traveled and they had scurried about finding where Jesus would be born. There weren’t tourist maps that had an “X” over the spot where Jesus was (to be) born. They had to go from one corner to the next asking and watching that star.
But they got there. And when they go there, they knew what to do.
You might not have a peaceful, quiet, Silent Night kind of Christmas, but you know what to do when the moment comes. Christmas is about God entering into the business of our own lives, into the scurrying about, and being the Incarnate One. As God breaks into History in His Son, so we break into our own History in Worship. We stop and we focus on Jesus Christ and we offer to him the worship he is due. Though a baby, he is God with Us. He is King. He is the hunted king, the one Herod will seek and scurry about trying to find him.
Amidst the swirl and whorl of activity, we pause and we worship.