Each week during Advent, Rick Court and Randy Petersen are getting together to reflect on one word that represents the Advent season! This week's word is "STAR." Join in to be encouraged and help center your spirit on the reason to celebrate the season!
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
Each week during Advent, Rick Court and Randy Petersen are getting together to reflect on one word that represents the Advent season! This week's word is "STAR." Join in to be encouraged and help center your spirit on the reason to celebrate the season!
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope.
Speaker 2:
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Meet Hope podcast. Today I'm with Randy Peterson Hi, randy, hi and so together we're going to be doing a three part, three segments on Advent. Now you and I already did an Advent podcast where we talked about the Advent wreath and, yeah, season of Advent, but for this we're going to be using three stories or three, yeah, I guess three stories from a book that you recently wrote with your brother, ken, called the Wonder of Christmas, and it's a devotional book with 25 words and carols to celebrate Advent, and you gave me a copy when we were recording the Advent podcast. You know that I'm kind of really telling our listeners, but I did read it, randy. I'm telling you that that I did read it. I enjoyed it. I didn't read it as a devotional, I just kind of read it straight through. I read the opening story and then just found myself just plugging along and read through it and enjoyed it. Great insights that I found and it actually was the idea for doing this now is that I liked it so much that I thought we should do an interview with you and kind of talk about these, some of these episodes that you have in the book, which I really enjoyed. So thanks for doing it, great Thanks for being here. So what I liked is I kind of was pulling through.
Speaker 2:
There's some traditional or typical stories from scripture that people hear about the Christmas story, mary and Joseph and Shepherds and we kind of know those stories, or we know a lot of that story. But I liked there's some pieces that I found that had some information and some ideas that maybe people don't know as much about. So I pulled out the idea of a star, the wise men and gifts, and we're going to do them, I think in that order is the way they're going to come through. So I'm calling them these unsung heroes, right? So the star always had a prominent place in the story, right, it's high in the major scene but there isn't really a lot of talk about it. There's really just a few verses. So, like Matthew 2, it says and the star that they had seen in the east guided them to Bethlehem, went ahead of them and stopped over the place where the child was, and when they saw the star they were filled with joy. So what was this that they saw, randy?
Speaker 3:
We don't know.
Speaker 2:
Great answer.
Speaker 3:
okay, that's the thing we need to remember in really throughout the Christmas story there's everyone loves Christmas so much. There's a lot of attention to every little detail of the story and the thing is we don't really know about a lot of things.
Speaker 3:
Scholars make good guesses about how things might have been in the ancient world, and the star is among those things. I think especially the star. The best scholarly opinion that I can imagine is that it was a planetary conjunction. It was two planets appearing in their orbits right next to each other, which creates an unusual level of brightness.
Speaker 3:
So it looks like a very bright star, and they didn't know anything about planets back in the time of the Magi there, and so all of those things were stars up there. So they say, okay, this is a special star that is appearing there. Now. It was apparently, according to this theory, in the place in the sky that the Magi would have associated with the Jews, and I don't know, it might have been the lion constellation that others call Leo, but there's a tradition of the lion of Judah. I'm not sure if that's the case. I'm not an astrology expert or anything.
Speaker 3:
I know that's shocking but no, I don't know much about that, but this theory holds that this unusual brightness was occurring in a place that they associated with the Jews, and so they would assume this is a birth star. This is the announcement of the birth of someone special. And in fact there are other historical examples of that. A Roman emperor would have a kid and the soothsayers would see some special heavenly thing that would alert them to some special birth, or so they interpreted it.
Speaker 3:
In this case, it's not hard to imagine that the Magi saw this thing in the sky associated with. The Jews said great, let's get over to Jerusalem, the capital of Judea and ask the king about the birth that has happened in his family. And they do that Of course, herod has a whole different reaction to that, and the story goes on from there.
Speaker 2:
But so let's stop there because I have a follow up question. So how does a star that is millions and millions of miles away mark a spot, like a location on a map, like it's not a Google Maps star, but how does that happen?
Speaker 3:
That's a great question, and so, yes, that theory kind of falls apart at a certain point. We'd need something else to fill in the gap there. How could any star lead to the house where the child was? We can sort of figure that if it was associated with Jews, it would get them to Jerusalem the capital. They would find out what was going on. And, in fact, in Jerusalem, they were sent to Bethlehem, because that's what the prophecies said.
Speaker 3:
So, they're on their way to Bethlehem, but it really says the star led them. It stood over where the child was.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, I read it stopped over the place where the child was right, yeah.
Speaker 3:
One theory on this that I kind of like is the idea that it might have been an angel or it might have been some of the other manifestation of God's presence, and we actually have these examples in scripture. Angels often appear as beings of light and guide the people of God in interesting situations, and so maybe that's the case.
Speaker 3:
We also know we got that great example of the Israelites as they went through the wilderness after escaping from Egypt on the way to the Promised Land, that they were led by a bright cloud during the day, which became a fiery cloud at night, to lead them exactly where God wanted them to go. That's really the case here, where God wanted to lead them to the specific place. And so maybe it was they associated it with the star. It was like the star up there suddenly came down here and was guiding them.
Speaker 3:
So, we can understand how they might think that this was the manifestation of that same star, and it was actually in the same way. It was God's provision, god's guidance to take them to the right place. So it's a theory. We don't really know any of this stuff, but it's a good guess, I think.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and so this star that was either a real star or an angelic star, which would still be real, but it would not be a star by definition. It would be an angel, at any rate, it was, it was there, was. There was a path that these astrologers were following to find this birth Of this, of the Messiah.
Speaker 3:
Yes, exactly, and that's what we know. We know, what we see in the story and all of those other explanations. It's it's guesswork. It's a little bit of scholarly, but it's still guesswork. So so really, people shouldn't just take Anything that any scholar says about it. They should stick with the story. This is what we know. Anything else is just kind of the whipped cream on the top of the cake, right exactly.
Speaker 2:
So? So what about a? So what? Why can't, why don't you give us a? So what so? What is significant about this for us today, in the 21st century?
Speaker 3:
There's. There's an important point here and we'll get into it a little bit more in our next podcast, I think, when we talk about who these magi were. But there's a strong tradition in the Old Testament that we find as people look into the heavens, into the skies, on the one hand they see God at work, see the Creator Having made all the stars and the, and, and there are just some wonderful poetic bits in the Old Testament about celebrating the, the Creator, god, through the creation that he's right however, there's also the tendency of human beings to worship the creation Rather than the Creator right and we see that too.
Speaker 3:
With regard to stars, and there were some people who got involved in the kind of star worship and there were this some Some astrologers and soothsayers who would, who would see signs in the stars and imagine that their gods Were talking to them or something, and and change their lives according to what they thought the stars were saying. In fact, there's one Israelite, king Manasseh, who was especially known for this not really okay, he's called out in scripture no, don't worship the stars, worship the God who made the stars.
Speaker 3:
So there is this Continual challenge to us in scripture to worship God alone and not any other star. Now, nowadays, when we talk about stars, and stars that we worship. We think of Taylor Swift.
Speaker 2:
Yeah right, celebrities or sports stars yes exactly and and often we can.
Speaker 3:
We can build our lives around these humans there, these stars that you know that we idolize. We make them idols and and no, we, god says don't do that. Worship me, pay attention to what I want for you. Don't try to model your life after whoever your current hero is. Listen to me and I may lead you against the grain. Somehow. I may lead you to do something courageous. I may lead you to do something that all your friends are saying no, that that doesn't make sense. But but follow God in this and don't just follow whoever the star happens to be that who's popular at the time?
Speaker 2:
And we can even worship stars. The idea of worshiping stars in that we worship the blessings that God has given us, right. So we worship our family, we're excited about, we love our family, and we end up worshiping the blessings that God has given to us instead of worshiping God.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, yeah, and so these are good things.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, or my job or my finances, like I may be blessed with these things but I end up worshiping those things instead of worshiping the God who has given me these blessings.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I think we see in the first two of the Ten Commandments some really interesting. The first commandment do not have any other gods before me. The second commandment don't make a graven image, an engraved image. The idea is don't create an idol of me. And I use that King James English so easily.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, look at that Graven image, but that's it, it's.
Speaker 3:
Don't make something that, even if it's an image of God, even if it's some kind of carving of God, don't worship that, and I'm not. I don't think that this is saying painters don't paint religious things or you know you can't enact something on a stage. It's not saying that. It's saying don't replace the living, powerful, invisible but amazing God with something.
Speaker 2:
Settle for something less.
Speaker 3:
Settle for something less. That's idolatry. So even if it's the star of Christmas, we don't worship the star. We don't worship anything in the Christmas story. We worship the God who gave us the Savior Jesus.
Speaker 2:
That's great, naren. Thank you so much for that, and you know what. We want to end these Advent podcasts, these devotional podcasts, in a sense, with something for us to consider. So I want to offer a question for you as we wrap up here, for you listeners what are the ways I might be worshiping a star instead of Jesus? And I hope you've enjoyed this episode and we look forward to seeing you again real soon. Have a great day. Thanks, randy.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for being a part of the Hope community as we continue our conversations about faith and hope. If you don't already, please join us for worship on Sundays or, on demand. Find us on socials at meethopechurch.