God Talks to Whoever He Wants

Like my pastor said, Magi means magician. The Three Wise Men of nativity fame were astrologers and sorcerers.

They were from the East. They were not Jews. They were foreigners.

And God guided them from a far land to a manger in the town of Bethlehem. God chose them to be among the first to honor the Christ child.

It may be that the gold, frankincense, and myrrh that they brought paid for the holy family’s escape to Egypt, where they fled because Harod wanted to murder Jesus. They funded the escape, and they bought time for the holy family. God told them not to report to Herod where they found the messiah; they slipped away in a different direction to elude the murder-minded king.

To be clear: with all of the wealthy women and men in Judea, God gave to these foreign sorcerers the privilege of giving the resources to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus that they needed to escape Harod’s bloody hand. And God went to some trouble to do so.

1. Foreigners and the Bible.

According to the book of Matthew, it was after his resurrection that Jesus told his disciples to "make disciples of all nations". But outsiders had already played prominent roles in the history of salvation.

Abraham paid a tithe to King Melchizedek.

Upright, god-fearing Job was of the land of Uz.

A foreign pharaoh welcomed Joseph and his family to Egypt, saving them from the far-flung famine.

Moses’s father-in-law was a priest of Median. In Exodus 18, he brings Moses’s children and wife to Moses in the wilderness. Moses bowed down to him and kissed him. He brought to Moses a burnt offering and sacrifices to God. He told Moses to appoint judges under himself to hear disputes of the Israelites.

In the book of Nehemiah, we see the leader of the Jewish community taking strong actions against Jews who had taken non-Jewish wives. He forced them to reject them and their offspring. But a whole book of the Bible, Ruth, is about a Moabite woman who, because of her goodness, stood by her mother-in-law when they were both widows. She came to the attention of Boaz, married him, and was a grandmother of King David.

At the end of the age of Jewish kings in Judea and Israel, the Jews were conquered and taken from Judea and Israel as punishment for their apostasy. But after many decades, God charged King Cyrus of Persia to send such Jews as would to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple there.

In Jesus’s time on earth, a Roman centurion pleaded for Jesus to heal his sick daughter. But he said that Jesus need not come under his roof, for he was unworthy of that honor; Jesus had only to give the order, and his daughter would be well. Jesus said that even in Israel he had not found such faith.

Jesus had a long conversation with a Samaritan woman, about her and about salvation. His disciples wondered by he was talking to her, she being both a Samaritan and a woman.

2. Today.

I had a moment when I read an article about parents of a murdered daughter forgiving their daughter’s killer. It is a story of beautiful souls. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/can-forgiveness-play-a-role-in-criminal-justice.html?pagewanted=all

I was surprised by the part of the story about the counselor who mediated the meeting among the killer, his parents, the victim’s parents, and the prosecutor. Hers is a story of finding grace and the power of forgiveness among an exile community of Tibetans. Sujatha Baliga was counseled by the Dali Lama himself, and through meditation found the power to forgive the perpetrator of her own horrific past.

Baliga returned to the United States and signed up for an intensive 10-day meditation course. On the final day, she had a spontaneous experience, not unlike Andy Grosmaire’s at his daughter’s deathbed, of total forgiveness of her father. Sitting cross-legged on an easy chair in her home in Berkeley, Calif., last winter, she described the experience as a "complete relinquishment of anger, hatred and the desire for retribution and revenge." I am now convinced that God moved Sujatha Baiga through the Dali Lama. It took a little time for my head to wrap around that.

But why shouldn’t God be present in the lives of un-believers today as he was with biblical figures such as Moses’s father-in-law, Ruth, Job, and King Cyrus? And those of us Christians, like me, who once were un-believers, are believers today because God moved us while we were un-believers.

God is the god not only of believers, but also of unbelievers. He is present in their lives, as he is in the lives of believers. Sometimes they break his heart, like the would-be murderers of Malala Yousufzai, the Pakistani teenager who advocated for the education of women. But we Christians also break the heart of our God.

3. What of unbelievers?

What of un-believers? I wish that they were believers. Unbelievers who are close to me are present in my prayers. But I do not dismiss that God is protective of them as he has been of me, even when I too did not believe.