Nov. 23, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
No Kings: Some Magi, a Mailman, a Musician, and the Messiah
November 23, 2025
READINGS
First Reading: Jeremiah 23:1-6
1 Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. 2 Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. 3 Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4 I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.
5 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6 In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
Second Reading: Colossians 1:11-20
11 May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, so that you may have all endurance and patience, joyfully 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. 13 He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Gospel: Luke 23:33-43
33 When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 34 [[Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”]] And they cast lots to divide his clothing. 35 And the people stood by watching, but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” 36 The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine 37 and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” 38 There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
39 One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom.” 43 He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Sermon:
Grace to you and peace from God, the source of life, and from Jesus, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
“No Kings: Some Magi, a Mailman, a Musician, and the Messiah.”
Question for each of you: What do the three Magi, that is, the three wise men who visit the infant Jesus, have in common with a pop musician, a mailman on television, and Jesus as the Messiah? Now this is a challenging question, so I will ask it again: What do the three Magi, that is, the three wise men who visit the infant Jesus, have in common with a pop musician, a mailman on television, and Jesus as the Messiah?
Hopefully, if not already, the answer will become clear along the way in the next few minutes. If not, because I am a teacher and preacher of grace, I will answer the question directly at the end of the message. So, let’s start with the first of these M’s: the Magi.
Many of you know the hymn “We Three Kings.” The original title was “Three Kings of the Orient”. It is also known as “The Quest of the Magi,” a Christmas carol about the wise men who appeared at the birth of Jesus that was written by John Henry Hopkins in 1857, and you know, perhaps, the refrain. I sang it off key at the first service, so I’m just going to read it to you here at the second:
Star of wonder, star of night,
star with royal beauty bright:
westward, leading, still proceeding,
guide us to thy perfect light.
How many of you recognize that hymn? Many of you know it. So, you know the hymn. But do you, in the words of the radio broadcaster Paul Harvey, know “the rest of the story?”
The term Magi does not mean magistrate or king. Instead, it is the plural of magis, meaning “Persian priest or wise man,” from the Greek magos, meaning “Persian priest or sorcerer.” In other words, it is related to magic, not monarchy.
The carol centers on the Biblical Magi—sorcerers, musicians, Persian priests—who visited Jesus as a child in a manger. According to Matthew 2:1, they bring him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh while paying homage to him. The story appears only in the Gospel of Matthew. There are no further details given in the New Testament with regard to their names, the number of Magi that were present, or whether they were even royal.
There are, however, verses in the Old Testament that foretell the visitors. In Isaiah 60, for example, the author writes that “the wealth of the nations will come to you. They will bring gold and frankincense and will bear good news of the praises of the Lord.”
The number three, then, stems from the fact that there were three separate gifts that were given. The solo verses and the final verse make explicit a tradition according to which the three gifts, the three gifts symbolize three aspects of Jesus, as King, which is represented by gold, symbolizing wealth and power; and God, which is represented by incense for worship; and sacrifice, which is represented by myrrh, something used to embalm the dead. In short, while the Old Testament and subsequent Christian tradition shaped the way we read the story of the wise men in Matthew, nowhere are these men called kings.
“The King of Pain,” our next example, was written by a pop musician by the name of Sting. This was done in conjunction with the group he belonged to called the Police. The song was inspired by Sting’s then recent separation from his wife.
So we’ve just heard about three Magi who are not kings, and now we’re going to hear for a moment about the King of Pain, a man who was not a king of anything, but a pop musician who sang about the separation he had from his wife and who belonged to a rock band that was called the Police, who were not really police.
So we have three Magi who are not kings, and now the King of Pain, Sting, who belongs to a group named the Police Sting is not a king and the Police are not police.
Which takes us to the third of our M’s, Magi, musician, Mailman. Some of you may remember the show “King of Queens.” It appeared from 1998 to 2007, about 10 years. And it features three main characters, Doug and Carrie, who are a middle class couple living in Queens, New York, along with Carrie’s widowed father, Arthur Spooner, (played by one of my favorites, Jerry Stiller, who was George’s dad in Seinfeld, and who was Ben Stiller’s father in real life.)
Doug works for the fictional International Parcel Service. In other words, he delivers packages and mail as a delivery driver, while Carrie works as a legal secretary in Manhattan. Their lives are plagued by the demands of Arthur. In other words, the “King of Queens” turns out to be a delivery driver who lives in Queens, a place where there are no queens, with a wife who was not a queen, and a father-in-law who acted like a king, but is more like a court jester.
So now we have Magi who are not kings, a musician who is not the king except the King of Pain, who belonged to a band called the Police, who are not the police, and the King of Queens, a man who was a delivery driver, not married to a queen, who lived with his father-in-law, who acted like a king, but was no king at all.
That’s a little confusing.
So what about Christ the King? Is he not a king as well? I mean, today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Church year. Why do we call it that? And why do we call Christ a king, if those who execute him thought of him as nothing but a foo?
Well, first, let’s take a step back.
Did you know that God, according to various writers of the Old Testament, one in particular, thought the establishment of kings for Israel was a bad idea? In First Samuel 4:8, the prophet Samuel warns Isaiah against asking for a king, stating that it’s a rejection of God’s rule. So Samuel belonged to a larger group of leaders of Israel, military leaders who were judges. These were people who ruled on over Israel on behalf of God. The king, it’s argued, would replace God. A king, moreover, leads to oppression, God says; higher taxes as well, and conscription of people for his service. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the words of Samuel directly. He writes,
These will be the ways of the King speaking here now on behalf of God, who will reign over you. He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots, appoint them to his chariots, and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of 1000s and commanders of 50s and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters, and this is horrifying to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. That’s just a little joke I threw in there. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take 1/10 of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take 1/10 of your flocks, and you shall be as slaves. And in that day, you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves. But the Lord will not answer you in that day.
In other words, God effectively says to the Israelites who demand a king, “Have it your way, but when you experience these things, don’t come crying back to me, because you know what I will say: “I told you so.”
And sure enough, as books like Kings and Chronicles in the Old Testament confirm, the unchecked power of Kings often leads to disaster and ruin for the Israelites.
So here we are: Christ, the King Sunday.
We’ve learned about three Magi who are not kings.
We’ve learned about the King of Pain, a famous musician who’s not a king,
and we’ve learned about the King of Queens, a sitcom which is not about a king, nor is it about a queen, nor is it even about a king, and his a father-in-law, because the father-in-law is like a court jester—so, why are we doing this?
Why are we talking about “Christ the King” on this Sunday, especially knowing now what God says regarding kings in the Old Testament?
Well, Christ the King Sunday, as a few of you may know, was established by Pope Pius the 11th in 1925 to counter the rise of secularism and ultra nationalism, that is fascism, after the First World War.
The festival day, in other words, was meant to show how Christ, as King of the Church, is an alternative to the worldly kings who rule over others and do so in sometimes horrific and oppressive ways. The message of the Pope is basically this: Kings, and authoritarian kings, come and go, and the world is often the worst for it—but only Christ’s rule is everlasting.
Now I for one am extremely sympathetic to the Pope’s resistance against fascism in the name of Jesus Christ, and this is why I regard the life and witness of the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer against the Nazis in World War II to be one of the best examples of what it means to be a Lutheran Christian our faith has ever known, but I differ with the Pope in one significant way, and I want you to hear me out on this and hear me carefully.
Christ was not a king.
Christ was not a king, at least in any conventional, ordinary or worldly sense of the term.
Let me explain. In all four gospel accounts of the crucifixion, people around Jesus mock him or his supposed pretensions to kingship, to rule. They dress him up as a king. They give him a reed as a staff. They place upon him a crown of thorns and beat him. They deride him with a sign that he possibly carried around his neck to the cross that says, as you heard in our gospel reading for today, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Judeans” (I use the word Judea, incidentally, because it gets us away from blaming the Jews as such for Jesus’s death and points to the fact that it was a certain locale of people who belong to that faith tradition who were responsible, in particular the leaders, for killing this man.) They taunt him, as we read in Luke’s gospel, by saying things like, “He saved others. Let Him save Himself, if he is the Messiah of God, the Chosen One,”
Even Paul, though he gives no account of the crucifixion, observes how Judeans regard Christ crucified as a stumbling block, a joke, a scandal, a contradiction in terms. Why? Everyone of the Jewish faith expected a Messiah who doesn’t suffer and die. According to our Old Testament reading and others, the Messiah King will come from the line of David, and he will conquer God’s enemies by force and liberate the Jews, understandably, from their oppressors, and there were many people of the first of the new in the New Testament of the first century, rather, one mentioned in the New Testament who did so and led others to destruction, which is why Jesus, in the Gospel of John, is called The Good Shepherd, because his path of non-violence did not lead His followers to destruction.
So the Jews, in short, expected a Messiah who would, by force, conquer God’s enemies and liberate the Jews from their oppressors. This is why they regarded a crucified Messiah as a contradiction in terms, and why Paul calls it for them a stumbling block, an obstacle to faith.
But that’s not what happens, that is, conquering the foes of the Israelites by force. That’s not what happens in the crucifixion of Jesus at all, is it?
Instead of destroying God’s enemies, Jesus forgives them.Instead of perpetuating the cycle of violence and retribution, Jesus ends it. Instead of abandoning the weak, the vulnerable, the godforsaken and marginalized, Jesus joins them.
The Cross puts Christ at the center of everything. His unbroken unity with God, evident even in his last words, his unbroken unity with his fellow human beings, evident in the fact, as this gospel tell us, that he would forgive them from the cross.
This is why, when he dies, the Centurion confesses Him, not the Emperor, to be the Son of God, confessing Jesus as the Son of God, the One who reconciles humanity to God’s self; turns the whole concept of kingship and royalty upside down.
Jesus is the King who conquers the world with love. He is, as we heard in our first Gathering Hymn this morning, “the Lord of love.” The cross, accordingly, is the foundation of the gospel. It is the basis upon which we can say with Paul that “nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
The cross delivers what the former priest of Canterbury Cathedral, Romans Bishop, calls “the world’s most challenging insight.” He writes, beautifully, “God is not where you thought he was.” Let me just repeat that:. God is not where you thought he was. “God was in and with this mortal man who is helpless and about to suffer a terrible death. This is where God chooses to be and to declare himself. And the gospel is the echo of that divine self-declaration.”
God, therefore, as we have seen, has redefined kingship on the cross. God’s power is not brute force, it is love, and God’s love is stronger than death.
Which brings us back to our opening question, “What do the Magi have in common with a musician, Sting and a mailman, dog from King of Queens?
Well, none of them, as you know, are actually kings. And when it comes to Christ, the same is almost true for Jesus, the Messiah. He too, was not a king, at least not in the ordinary, conventional sense. He is what our hymn of the day will call “a different kind of king.” His power is not brute force or control, but love. And that’s incredible good news.
He conquers hearts. And conquered hearts, like yours and mine, can change the world. In Jesus’s name. Amen.