When I was at Fellowship of the Woodlands north of Houston our Christmas eve services were a major production… Over 100 actors, performers, musicians, in 14 identical services with almost 40,000 people attending over three days a from Dec. 22-24.

Think of it as the old Northside Christmas Pageant… on steroids… Like any Christmas pageant we presented the Traditional Christmas Story with Mary and Joseph and a real live Baby playing Jesus… 10-12 babies… Kailee played Jesus in two of the services.. Angles, and shepherds… and of course three wise men. As the music swelled the wise men entered the building, one from the left and center on camels… and one from the right on an Elephant… Why and elephant… because we could… and because we had 1000’s of non church people show up just to see if we really had one of the wise men come in on an elephant.

Every service the wise men came in right on que… proceeded up the aisles to the front of the stage, dismount their rides, and proceed up the steps to the manger and present their gifts to Marry, Joseph and Kaille… I mean Jesus. They knew exactly where they were going…

They were nothing like the original wise men in scripture…

The biblical wise men did not ride Elephants… 2nd there we do not know how many there were… there were at least two, scripture Greek there is magi… Wise Men plural… as many as 8-9 plus 30-300 servants, attendants, guards…

But the wisemen in our story today… They didn’t really know where they were going.

They saw the sign, the star in the East and headed west… to Israel…

And when they got there we discover why the Wise Men were Called Wise Men