Ephesians 3: 1 - 12; Matthew 2: 1 - 12
Do we need to travel to find God; or does he meet us where we are?
That’s one of the questions raised for me by this morning’s wonderful story of the wise men travelling to find Jesus.
My natural inclination would be to start out with the assumption that God can meet me, does choose to meet me, where I am.
But even if that’s true, and he does meets me where I am; that also means he meets you where you are. So if I’m to understand how he’s met you, I need to go on a journey, because however close you and I might be, we’re still in different places, need to make some effort, some movement, to understand each other.
And if Church is the place where we share our experiences of God, find some common language to talk about how God has met us, then some translation, some interpretation, inevitably has to happen.
Whether God meets us where we are or we have to travel, I think it’s clear that God meets us somewhere rather than nowhere. In other words, our encounters with God are rooted in real life situations, in particular cultures, landscapes, languages. And that means that all these experiences are coloured and take on their own distinctive character. Which creates a gap between these moments and the rest of our lives. How do we bridge that gap? How do we make connections between those special moments and the everyday reality of the rest of our lives?
Clearly the wise men in today’s gospel reading needed to go on a journey. But why? Why couldn’t they find God by staying at home?