If I were to ask you to tell me the Christmas story from memory, with no peeking at Scripture, you would probably tell me the story we see portrayed in Christmas pageants.

A very pregnant Mary travels to Bethlehem with her husband Jospeh because of a Roman census.

The inns are full and so she gives birth to Jesus in a barn next to all the animals.

Jesus is laid in a manger and shepherds and angels come to visit the newborn Messiah.

Three kings then travel from a far away land to bring extravagant gifts to the newborn Jesus.

It is a heartwarming scene fit for a Disney movie, and it leaves out most of the story found in the Gospel of Matthew.

It is mostly Luke seen through modern eyes with a tiny bit of Matthew thrown in.

I’m going to ask you this morning to set aside the Lukan Christmas story (the census, the inn, the manger, the shepherds, the angels) and focus on Matthew’s story and all that we leave out from it when we tell ourselves the Christmas story.

I am asking you to do this because I think it is difficult to truly understand the incarnation, God’s revelation of Godself to us in Jesus, and the radical nature of God’s love for us and plan for us, when we only tell half the story.

So, what does Matthew’s story say?

We hear that Mary is found to be pregnant while betrothed to Joseph but not yet married to him.

Joseph discovers this and plans to quietly dismiss her, so as not to expose her to public disgrace.

But an angel speaks to him in a dream and assures him that Mary has not been unfaithful to him but is to give birth to a child who will save his people from sin and who will be named “Emmanuel” or “God is with us” and so Joseph marries her.

Sometime after Jesus’ birth, maybe even up to two years after his birth, Magi from the east travel to find the newborn ‘king of the Jews.’

Magi does not mean king, though Christian tradition came to translate the word this way.

Magi means wise person and usually referred to scholar priests from pagan religions such as Zoroastrianism, a religion practiced in what is today Iran and was then Persia.

Matthew also does not say there were three of them, that was concluded by later Christians because the Magi give Jesus three gifts.

All we can know is that a group of people who were likely scholar-priests in their home countries who gained knowledge by studying the stars visited Jesus sometime in the first 2 years of his life.

The Magi are often depicted as following a huge star that moved across the sky and led them to the cribside of the newborn Jesus.

However, this is not what Matthew says.

Matthew says that the Magi observed the star of the newborn king of the Jews in the east.

In the ancient world it was a common belief that momentous events were foretold by portents in the heavens.

Pagan priests and scholars would study the heavens to learn of events to come and to understand them better, and before you scoff at this belief, remember we print horoscopes in our newspapers?

Isn’t it the same thing?

So, these religious scholars have been studying the sky, and they see something unusual that they understand is the result of the birth of a new king in the land of the Jewish people.

Matthew tells us that these Magi decide to find this new king in order to pay him homage, to worship him.

That’s all we get.

We have no idea why these wise people decided to get up and make what must have been a very difficult and costly journey to bow down before the newly born king of an occupied foreign land.

No indication is given that they understood this king of the Jews to be a new kind of king, a different kind of king.

No indication is given that they understood this king of the Jews to be God incarnate.

But they must have understood at some level that there was something different in this birth.

They must have understood at some level that something was shifting and changing at a cosmic level.

Why else would they have set out on the journey they took?

At a deep level they must have known that this birth was the answer to something they had been looking for their entire lives.

But they are still people of their time and place, and if you want to find a newborn king then where do you go?

Well, you go to the palace of the current king, who happened to be King Herod the Great, even though we know that this is the last place that they will find the Christ child.

Now, to understand the rest of the story, I need to tell you a little bit about King Herod, for history has a lot to say about him.

King Herod ruled at the pleasure of the Roman Emperor, and he was disliked, or perhaps I should use a stronger word, hated, by most of his Jewish subjects.

He was Jewish but his Jewish lineage only went back a generation or two and it was commonly believed that his ancestors converted out of a desire for power and not because of religious conviction.

He was not from the line of David, something that most Jewish people considered to be essential for anyone who called themselves ‘King of the Jews.’

Because he did not have popular support and ruled at the pleasure of the hated occupying force, his more than 40-year rule was marked by paranoia and a ruthless and relentless quest to hold on to power.

Herod would do anything to remain king, including killing his own wife and more than one of his sons.

A father who will kill his own children in order to remain in power will do anything.

No wonder “all Jerusalem” is terrified when the Magi show up and ask Herod where they might find this newborn king of the Jews.

And it turns out their fear was justified.

A threatened Herod is a dangerous Herod.

Herod doesn’t let on to the Magi that their words have frightened him.

Instead, he pretends that he wants to help them because he too wants to pay homage to this newborn king of the Jews.

So, he sends for his religious scholars, and they answer the Magi’s question.

They tell the Magi that the newborn king will be born in Bethlehem of Judea.

And Herod sends them off with instructions to let him know where this newborn king is so that he can go and worship him too, maybe.

And this is where the moving star comes into the story.

Matthew tells us that the star that foretold the birth of the King of the Jews went ahead of the Magi and stopped over the home of the child.

Much time has been spent trying to figure out what natural phenomenon this star could have been.

Frankly I don’t really care.

Matthew wasn’t trying to describe a scientific phenomenon; he was trying to tell a theological story.

In the ancient world, stars were sentient beings, gods, or angels.

The star is a heavenly messenger not a science lesson.

Whatever that star was, God led the Magi to the home of Jesus and his family.

These learned and religious men with the means to travel many months and many miles carrying gifts of enormous value who thought they were seeking a worldly king come to the side of a peasant child and his mother.

You might expect that they would be filled with disappointment and frustration, but they aren’t.

They seem to understand that God is doing something entirely new and different here and they fall down and worship this child peasant king…and apparently, they also fall asleep.

For they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, and they return to their home by a different road and are never heard from in scripture again.

And that is the end of the story we heard today, but it is not the end of Matthew’s Christmas story.

For Herod is not finished.

When he discovers that the Magi have tricked him and chosen loyalty to the child king over loyalty to him, he is infuriated, and he has a plan.

He might not know exactly who the newborn king is, but he does know that this young king lives in Bethlehem and is 2 years of age or younger.

So, Herod has all boys in Bethlehem under the age of two slaughtered in order to protect his own position and power.

Little did he know that Joseph, Mary and Jesus had already fled to Egypt because they had been warned in a dream to do so.

All those innocent little lives lost because of the paranoia of a ruthless man about the power of a little child who never would be interested in the kind of power the Herods of the world wield.

Imagine a pageant based on Matthew’s Christmas story.

It certainly would be hard to sing Silent Night at the end of that performance, though we might find more preteen kids interested in signing up, particularly for the role of Herod.

Matthew clearly wants us to know that Jesus will be a different kind of king than Herod, or the emperor, or any other worldly king.

Matthew is telling us that God’s reign is breaking into this world in the birth of Jesus and this reign is going to look different from what we have known from the reigns of human kings, and emperors, and dictators, and presidents.

This reign will change the world, but not through coercion, violence or control, but through peace, freedom, and love.

And when we encounter this reign, this power, this love of God breaking into our world there is no other way to respond except for falling down and worshipping.

But we should also be prepared, because those for whom the status quo is working, those who hold earthly power will not let go of that power easily.

The Herods of this world will fight tooth and nail to hold on to what they have, and they will use whatever means necessary to do so.

In Matthew’s Christmas story we are clearly being given a choice, just as the Magi were given a choice.

We too live in a world in which various power structures exert sovereignty over our lives and clamor for our loyalty. Some of these powers are political and some are structural and economic.

If you want to know which powers you worship, take a look at where you spend your money, how you spend your time, what you give most of your attention to, and whose side you take (the powerful or the powerless).

You might find that your loyalties and your professed values are not always in alignment.

I certainly know that is true for me.

There is more Herod in most of us than we are comfortable acknowledging.

Matthew’s Christmas story is meant to make us take a closer look at ourselves and our world.

Matthew wants us to feel uncomfortable, because it is only when we are uncomfortable that we are open to change.

God created us because of love, and because love can only exist in freedom, God in love has made us able to choose to love or not to love.

God became incarnate in Jesus to show us what love looks like, to show us what is possible when we love, to show us a world in which love is the predominant power.

For some, like the Magi, when they see this love, the response is worship and joy.

For others, like Herod, this love brings feelings of terror, and they respond with hatred and violence.

For most of us we will be somewhere in the middle, sometimes Magi and sometimes Herod.

Sometimes we will live from a place of love and radical acceptance and other times from a place of fear and judgment.

Matthew is urging us to make the choice of the Magi to make the choice of love.

Perhaps this isn’t the Christmas story we are used to hearing or are comfortable hearing, but it is a story worth hearing, for it is a radical story that has the power to change our world.

And I don’t know about you, but I think that is really good news.