The magi see signs in the night sky, celestial revelations announcing that the long-awaited Jewish king has been born.

After traveling for months across the desert, the astrologers from the East finally arrive in Bethlehem, at the birthplace of Jesus, where they find the promised child whom they pay homage with lavish gifts.

In the Gospel of Matthew, after Jesus is born, the magi are the earliest visitors, not the shepherds we hear about in Luke’s Gospel. For Matthew, the foreigners arrive first, the travelers from pagan lands enter Jesus’ story first.

To call them “wise men” misses the scandal of who they really are. They aren’t kings or elders or sages. They are astrologers, sorcerers, fortune-tellers, priests who consort with the gods of Babylonia, Arabia, Persia, perhaps members of Zoroastrian priesthoods, magicians—our word “magician” comes from the biblical name “magi.”

People called magi show up in the book of Daniel. They are the religious servants of Babylon, of king Nebuchadnezzar. Magi are enemies of Israel, enemies of the prophets and priests of God, despised foreigners. Yet they are among the first to find Jesus.

At the beginning of the story of Jesus, we read that outsiders and strangers, unacceptable people, practitioners of a questionable religion, foreigners with an offensive history, with a genealogy that ties them to the enemies of God—the people who shouldn’t belong—end up part of Jesus’ story. They see God in the flesh.

And not just see but worship. “We have come to worship him,” the magi announce. When they enter the house of Mary and Joseph, when they find themselves in the presence of the Messiah, they kneel down and worship.

To worship, “proskuneo” in Greek, means to bow down or lie down and kiss someone’s feet—a gesture of humility and reverence, of submission and yieldedness. We worship with our bodies, with our lives, with all we are. And we learn the movements of worship from the magi in Matthew’s Christmas story.

I’ve been reading the Rule of Saint Benedict, a book from the sixth century still in use today as a guide for the sisters and brothers who live in Benedictine communities. The book instructs members of the community into a full-bodied welcome when strangers show up, a worshipful gesture of reverence, of yieldedness.

“Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he is going to say, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me,’ ” Benedict of Nursia urged. “Let the head be bowed or the whole body prostrated on the ground in adoration of Christ, who indeed is received in their persons.” Just as the magi knelt before the Christ child, Benedict’s monks bowed at the feet of strangers, lying prostrate in adoration. Because the visitor is Christ.

Because the foreigner is Jesus. “I was a stranger,” Benedict quoted Jesus’ words from Matthew’s Gospel, “and you welcomed me.”

Worship invites us into a posture of reverence before one another, because Jesus lives among us, in us. We are patient with each other, because I am learning to see Christ in you, and you are waiting to see Christ in me, even when we are entangled in a quarrel, as we are now, in our church, in our denomination. Our differences render us strange to one another, as strange as the magi seemed to Mary and Joseph, as strange as Jesus seemed to the magi, who expected to find a palace, not a shack, a royal prince, not a peasant child. Yet there, with Jesus, there’s room for bewildered strangers. With Jesus there’s room for incomprehensible differences.

We have a motley denomination. I know, because I’ve read your letters and emails, I’ve listened to your pastors and conference ministers, I’ve read surveys and reports, I’ve worshiped in our congregations across the country—from Hubbard, Ore., to Harlem, N.Y., from Lancaster, Pa., to Buras, La.

I didn’t grow up in your churches, but I’ve come to believe that my faith is bound up with yours, despite our racial and cultural and liturgical and theological differences.

I’ve learned to sing a verse from a hymn that you’ve taught me, a song I hope we can still sing together: “May we all so love each other and all selfish claims deny, so that each one for the other will not hesitate to die.”

Isaac Villegas pastor of Chapel Hill (N.C.) Menno­nite Fellowship and serves on the Executive Board of Mennonite Church USA.

This ran in the December issue of The Mennonite.