Epiphany is my favorite season of the year. Maybe it is the calm that appeals to me, after the rush of Christmas. Maybe it is the hopeful beginning of a new year, or the promise of longer days and (eventually) warmer weather. Most of all, however, it is the wise men.
Recently I came across a booklet that brought them to mind, once again. It was written by Roland Allen in 1929 and titled Non-Professional Missionaries – exactly the role of those first-century stargazers, I thought. They were not commissioned as missionaries to the nations. They had no mission agency behind them.
Yet they were missionaries. And it is not as if they abandoned their careers to become witnesses in Jerusalem. It was, in fact, their profession that led them to Jerusalem – and in its natural exercise, they became natural witnesses. They were stargazers. But these were stargazers who permitted Christ into their careers. And once admitted, Christ became their guiding light. Their professional lives were re-centered. Their priorities were re-focused. They remained professional stargazers, I am sure; but now they became non-professional missionaries.
Roland Allen explains: “The missionary work of the non-professional missionary is essentially to live his daily life in Christ, and therefore with a difference, and to be able to explain, or at least to state, the reason and cause of the difference to men who see it.” This is what the wise men accomplished before Herod. Their “daily life” had brought them to Jerusalem and now they explained the “reason and cause”: “We have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.” They are simple and straightforward. They behave in certain ways because they believe in certain ways. Their walk and their talk coincide.
“Everybody, Christian and pagan alike, respects such work,” Allen goes on. “The spirit which inspires love of others and efforts after their well-being, both in body and soul, they cannot but admire and covet – unless, indeed, seeing that it would reform their own lives, they dread and hate it, because they do not desire to be reformed. In either case, it works.”
“It is such missionary work, done consciously and deliberately as missionary, that the world needs today,” Allen concludes. And he is right. We need an army of non-professional missionaries who will permit Christ into their ordinary lives – and by their lives carry Christ into the world. Something like the wise men.