STEERING BY STARLIGHT

This Sunday we celebrate Epiphany, which concludes the twelve days of the Christmas season with the Magi’s visit to Bethlehem. At the center of their story is a star – the star that guides them to the Christ Child.

It’s not surprising that the Magi travel by the guidance of a star. Pretty much throughout human history, stars have guided travelers on their journeys. Before the Civil War, the Big Dipper was a guide to freedom for slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad. Because the Big Dipper points to the North Star, runaway slaves who found the Big Dipper could rely on it to guide them North to freedom. Historians presume that the early Polynesian traders and travelers also relied on the positions of stars to travel enormous distances across the Pacific Ocean to islands like Hawaii and Easter Island. And the aborigines of central Australia looked to the stars and the dark spaces between them to guide them.

The Magi are described as coming “from the East.” We know that Arab traders and caravans in Persia and the Arabian Peninsula relied on the stars to guide them because many of the stars still carry Arabic names, particularly the brightest stars visible to the naked eye such as Aldebaran (“The Follower”), Rigel (“Foot”), and Vega (“Plunging [Eagle]”). Betelgeuse, another bright star in the night sky, traces its name back to the Arabic yad al-jawza’, “The Hand of the Giant”—the giant being the constellation we call “Orion.” At least 210 of the stars most easily seen with the naked eye have names derived from Arabic names that were simply transcribed into Greek by the 2nd-century geographer Ptolmey.

There is an amazing consistency across cultures around the world in their identification of the five most common constellations. Although they have attached different legends, names, and meanings to them, they all identify the same small set of star groupings that include Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades and the Southern Cross. The Big Dipper is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Job 9:9; 38:32) and Homer’s Illiad. For the Hindus, the same grouping of seven stars is described as the seven Rishis (or Sages). In Japan they are called “the northern seven stars of the dipper.” In the cave paintings of Lascaux that date between 17,000 to 40,000 BCE, researches now believe some of the images represent constellations like Taurus and Leo rather than simply being primitive images of local animals. Even in the throes of the last ice age, our ancestors had sophisticated knowledge of the stars and their movements that helped them know the times and seasons, the pathways and trails upon which their lives depended. Perhaps sometime in the distant fog of prehistory our earliest ancestors shared a common star map that they carried with them as they spread from Africa to Asia, from the Middle East to Finland.

And what of us, their descendants? What star guides us on our journeys through life? We all need some “star” to guide our journeying through life’s ups and downs. We need some constellation of values to help us distinguish good from bad, right from wrong. There are as many possible values and sources of meaning we can turn to as there are stars in the sky. And Christian faith asserts that the star over Bethlehem is still our best guide for our finding meaning and facing life’s challenges. For the One over whom the star shone in Bethlehem’s manger is the One who later said of himself, “I am the Root and Source, the radiant and bright Morning Star.” (Rev 22:16)

Blessings,
Pastor Thomas