Matthew, Balaam, and Elon Musk

 

We saw it in the sky on the way to youth group last night.

I had a van full of teens, so when I first noticed a strange string of lights, sort of just hanging against the black of the night, I asked if they could see it too.

Ensued a chorus of excited confusion and speculation. It did look...weird; not like anything I've ever seen before, and I had no reasonable explanation. Tumbling out of the van at the church, we all positioned ourselves for a better look.

Nope. No idea. But it was bright and long, and it was pretty cool. And yes, alien invasion was on the list of our collective guesses. It wasn't until we were inside, and Abby did what we all do now when we need to know something. She typed in "strange string of lights in the sky" on her phone.

Sure enough, it had something to do with Elon Musk. You can check it out for yourself at
https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-train-how-to-see-and-track-it

Later in the evening (I stayed for the dinner and the fun this time) when we acted out the Christmas story in crazy costumes, I was one of the Magi. And when it got to the part in Matthew where it says:

"Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him"...

you can bet we made reference to the crazy thing we ourselves had seen in the sky earlier in the evening. It must have been that strange back then too.

Without going into it too deeply, those who are really smart about this stuff suggest that the astral phenomenon mentioned in the Nativity narratives could have been a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. The timing of all this is aided by the pinning of events around "when Cyrenius was governor of Syria" (Luke 2:2). Even with some robust historical debate in play, the appearance of a "star" that would have the impression of travelling across the eastern sky at that time in the story has reasonable possibilities. [Can't help the need to cite my sources so; see Bock, ENCT V, Luke1:1-9:50, 1994, and Bateman, Jesus the Messiah, 2012.]

Of course, the Magi did not have any search aps on their phones to figure this out. But they did have a dude named Balaam.

Balaam was a prophet way back there near the beginning of the Jews becoming a nation. He was trying to explain what God seemed to be showing him, even though it was a tad foggy for him, hence he was appropriately humble about it.

"I see him, but not now;
I behold him, but not near.
A star will come out of Jacob;
a scepter will rise out of Israel."
Numbers 24:17

A ruler, a king, sometime in the future, someplace far away.
Like Bethlehem perhaps.
Like the Magi - not Jews by the way - also deduced.

In all of this, this morning, I guess I'm marveling again at the supernatural way God works within the natural.

A bright star drops into the sky at just the right time, with hints of this all along.

Not an alien invasion at all.

But something, Someone, not of this world comes to this world.
Unexplainable explanations of the Incarnation.

"On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary,
and they bowed down and worshipped him." (Matthew 2:11)

Yeah.
Me too.