It's a given

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
 Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 84 

The summer I was eighteen, I went on a 21-day course at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.  I had just decided to take a leave of absence from college, even though I was doing well academically.   But, you see, that was part of my difficulty.  Doing well in school a given, and had been ever since I arrived at kindergarten already knowing how to read.  I’d skipped second grade.  My high school awarded me various academic honors.  I’d received early admission to my first choice of colleges, and after a rocky freshman year I’d made the Dean’s list as a sophomore.  If I’d wanted any of these things I might have been proud of them, but I hadn’t.  It was just what came naturally to me. 

People called me “smart,” but I didn’t feel smart.  They people applauded my academic success, but it wasn’t anything I wanted.   I didn’t know what I wanted, or who I was, or what to do with my life, but I did know I wasn’t going to learn the answers to these questions from a book or in a classroom.  Luckily, my parents understood at least a little of this, and they packed me off to an outdoor education and adventure program to sail around the coastal wilderness of Maine. 

And there I got to experience myself in a way I never had before.  I’d grown up the third of four boys.  In fourteen years of school I’d always been the youngest person in my class, usually by a wide margin.  But on the Outward Bound course I was with other kids my own age—many of them were younger than me.  And while they were still in high school, or had just graduated, I’d already completed two years of college.  To them I wasn’t the smart kid; I was the strong one, the capable and mature one.  I found, for the first time in my life, to my complete surprise, that I was a leader.    

We often think of ourselves as molded into a set shape by the unchanging “givens” of our lives.   Our ethnic background and genetic makeup, our cultural traditions and national and religious identities, the circumstances of our families of origin and early life experiences, make us who we are.  So do the choices we have made, and the habits we have picked up, not to mention the mysterious ingrained qualities of temperament and those involuntary feelings and thoughts and behaviors that we sum up with the term “human nature.”  We put all those “givens” together in a story, a story we tell ourselves and others about us, and that is who we are.

But the gift that Christmas brings us is a new given.  It is given, not by the history of the past or the circumstances of the present but by the grace of God.  Christmas begins a new story of what it means to be human, a story of what we are destined to become in Jesus Christ.   One of the ways that the New Testament talks about the impact of this new story on our lives is to say that it is like finding out we were adopted.   To really accept the gift of the coming of Christ into the world is like learning that what we thought was given, about ourselves and our place in the world,  is incorrect at the most fundamental level.  We aren’t who we thought we were, because, really, we were adopted.  We are God’s adopted children.

When a new and unexpected story overtakes the one we take for granted it can be an unsettling, even a frightening experience.  In the gospel of Matthew, when the wise men from the East appear, asking to see the newborn king of the Jews, Herod is afraid.  He is afraid because, without even knowing it, these foreigners have stirred up a ghost that he has worked his whole life to put to rest.  For Herod, the old hope of a new king of Israel, from the royal line of David, was a quaint legend for old women and country rubes.  His game was Roman imperial politics and the rule of terror, and he’d played it well enough to hold on to power for close to forty years.  He’s murdered all his rivals, and outlived the others, and he’s ready to pass on his throne to his sons were ready to succeed him on, and now, these outlandish messengers appear with their dangerous fairy tale.

And “all Jerusalem,” says the gospel, is frightened with him.  Because Herod is not the kind of person you wanted to be around when he gets upset, but also because this is news they’d long ago decided they would never hear.  The chief priests and the scribes know very well that Herod is not from the lineage of David, is not even ethnically a Jew.   They know how deeply he is hated and feared by the common people of the land, but they have learned how to stay on his good side, and have done very well for themselves on his patronage and his cozy relationship with Rome.  They have their given role, soothing the people’s seething unrest, and placating Herod’s tendency to violent outbursts of repression.  And now the arrival of the Magi threatens to upset this fragile peace.

I think the author of Matthew knew exactly what he was doing, weaving all these political implications into his story.  It’s how he sets the stage for the conflict that will center on the ministry of Jesus and culminate in his death.  But this story also lifts the curtain on a new revelation of God, one that calls age-old “givens” of religion into question.  Because Matthew, of all the gospel authors, is the most explicit in grounding his story in the Scriptures.   He quotes the Hebrew Bible at every opportunity, showing how the details of Jesus’ life fulfill the sayings of the prophets.  We have an example of this in today’s Gospel lesson, when the scribes quote the book of Micah to tell Herod that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem. 

But the biblical knowledge of the scribes wouldn’t have mattered if the Magi hadn’t come.   And the Magi are not scholars of the Hebrew scriptures.  They are Zoroastrian priests and astrologers from the country we now call Iran.  They have not come because of reading the scrolls of the prophets, but find their way into the story following a star.  From a thousand miles away, across great deserts and rivers and mountain ranges, across the frontiers of warring empires, the Magi saw God’s new sign.  By their esoteric wisdom, they knew it for what it was, and set out on the long and dangerous journey.  Carrying their precious offerings,  they followed the glory of the star until it led them to the greater glory of the face of the Beloved Son of God.  They gazed for few moments of wonder and adoration into that face, and then, just as mysteriously as they came, they were gone. 

But they are in the story long enough to reveal something essential about Christmas.  In the strange new light of their star, religion can no longer be a power struggle over givens.  Who has the royal blood, who owns Jerusalem and the Temple, who controls the interpretation of the Bible—the new given that is Christ is not concerned with anything like that.  Because Christmas is the point of departure for a pilgrimage of grace, a journey following the call of hope toward the face-to-face encounter with the glory of God.  

   

The New Testament is all about this journey, this grace-filled path that leads from glory to glory. It reveals a new kind of person, says the Letter to the Ephesians, living in a new kind of community, called the church. Many of us don’t think about the church this way.  We look at it and see a whole lot of givens—lectionary texts and liturgical calendars, prayer books and hymnals, old buildings of glass and wood and stone, committees and by-laws and denominational structures—all of it stamping us into a mold of givens from in the past.  But all of these things are really just accessories to the essential work of the church, the essential life of Christian people, which is praise and thanksgiving for the unfolding blessings of God.  We gather to remember a story, but it is God’s story that reveals who we really are,  what we are becoming more and more— God’s own adopted children.  And of all the things in this world that’s the only one that’s really a given.

   

The light of dawn

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

In the seven summers before I got married I took long backpacking trips in the High Sierras of California.  John Muir called those mountains “the range of light,” and for me, as for him, that name evokes many images in the mind’s eye, memories of cloudscapes and waterfalls, of flowery meadows in the sun, and evening alpenglow on granite towers high above the trees.   And when I hear the words of Isaiah about the dawn, I think of a time my father and I camped amid the rocks above the shore of a small alpine lake.  It was the last night of a ten-day hike, and, as I usually did when the skies were clear, I did not pitch my tent but slept in the open. 

The first time I woke up it was deep night.  There was no moon and it was as if there was no world but the stars, and the light of stars, shimmering like snow on the ground.   When I woke up for good it was the early dawn, and though sunrise was still far off, I felt surprisingly refreshed.  I sat up in my sleeping bag and watched the pale light creep over the sky, slowly stealing away the stars.  In that light, the earth came into view again, a blackness at the jagged edge of the horizon.  On those stark heights a cold wind awakened and blew down through a world of dim shapes and deep shadows.  I sat like that for an hour or more, listening to the silence and seeing the color gradually come back to the earth.  At last, with surprising suddenness, the sun cleared the ridge, flooding the hollow of the mountains with warmth and light, unveiling the beauty of the world’s morning.   

Today the church comes from Christmas, the birth of Jesus under the stable lantern and the starry sky, and arrives at the Epiphany, the breaking out of the Christ-event into the world-at-large.  By the likely date of the composition of the gospel of Matthew, the news of Jesus Christ had broken out of its family of origin, so to speak.  It had spread from Palestine, by the efforts of apostles like Paul, throughout the synagogues of the Jewish diaspora, to Arabia and Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa, and on around the Mediterranean.  Strangely, Jesus’ own people, the Jews, largely rejected the proclamation.  In the main it was gentiles who greeted it with enthusiasm. 

In the synagogues of places like Damascus and Antioch, Ephesus and Corinth, there were a lot of non-Jews, religious seekers of pagan background, who came on the Sabbath to hear the scriptures and to pray to Israel’s God.  To these gentiles the knowledge of that God was like the rising of the sun.  It filled heaven with a light of clarity and peace, that they had never known before.  It revealed the world in its true colors, as a harmonious and unified creation, where every drop of water and every grain of sand came into being together and was sustained by the power of a single loving will. 

But before the sun rises, you’ll remember, there is the pale light of dawn, a light that sharpens the contrast between earth and heaven, and reveals a world of dim shapes and dark shadows.  The God of the Hebrew Scriptures was a god of justice and compassion, a god who hates evil and hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed.  This was not a remote ideal principle of Oneness, like the God of the philosophers.  This was a God who cared, deeply, achingly, for his people, and promised to deliver them from grip of suffering and death.

The Gentiles came to the synagogue and heard that this promise now included them.  They heard that God’s own Son, the anointed righteous king of the Jews, had come.   They heard that he’d been crucified, and every barrier to God’s inclusive love had died with him.   They heard he’d been raised from the dead, to reveal God’s hidden plan of salvation which held a central place for them.  And they embraced this message, and a new community began to form at the periphery of the synagogue, a community in which Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and free persons, sought the grace to live as equal citizens of a new people of God.

 In the eyes of these followers of Jesus, their community was itself a sign that he is the messiah, and that the promised deliverance had begun.   They heard anew the ancient prophecies of the dawning of a new age, when all nations would come and offer tribute and worship to the one true and living God.  In the light of that dawn, they began to hear the scriptures in a whole new way, to see things that weren’t visible before, and find new meaning in familiar stories.   They also told new stories, stories about Jesus.  They repeated things they’d heard about him, the things he did, and the things he said.  They told new converts and new generations about his life and death and as they spoke their imaginations were full of the light of the scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, which were the only scriptures that they had.

Today some of the spiritual descendants of these gentiles, here at St. John’s, along with about 700 other people around our diocese, are beginning a project to read the entire Bible by the end of the year.  Every day we will read three chapters and psalm from the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Old Testament, and one chapter from the New.   Reading in this way, we will restore a connection that has been too often and too cruelly broken, the connection between Israel’s God and the one that Christians worship as his Son.   Our reading will echo the experience of those first gentile believers who came to the synagogue to hear the glorious truth that God is one. 

This is a courageous undertaking.  Not just because the Bible is a long book and a year is a short time in which to read it all, nor just because it takes some effort to understand even a little part of it.   But because it is a book that is full of light.  It contains the light of stars, as when Abram stands outside his tent in the desert night and God says, “look up and count them—so many will your descendants be.”  It is full of the light of evening, and morning, and of that dark hour just before dawn, when the world is a place of dim forms and dark shadows, a light that reveals the darkness of history and the coldness of the human heart.  And it is a book that is full of the light of God, like the glory atop Mount Sinai, which no one can see and live.

But like those other gentiles, the wise men from the East, these adventurers will not set out empty-handed.  They bring something with them.  For one thing, they bring the understanding that not all the world’s light is contained in a book.  The wise men followed the leading of a star, and it is worth noting that it is when they took a detour to consult the experts in biblical interpretation, that they almost ruined everything. 

The wise men carry gifts, and we also bring rare treasures on this year of journeying.  The gift of life experience, of remembering what we have seen, of lessons learned and choices that cannot be undone.  We bring the gift of feeling deeply—hot anger, belly laughter, love, joy, envy, malice, gratitude, world-weariness that sinks into the bones, and every other emotion there can be.  We bring gifts of intellect, and imagination, and wonder—even the gift of doubting that it is true.  And none of us would be daring to take this "Bible Challenge" if we did not possess in some small measure the supreme gift, the gift that makes us shine, that makes us radiant with the glory that has risen over us like the dawn—the gift of the willingness to give ourselves, to offer what we have brought, to lay it down of our own free will, for nothing more nor less than love.     

In the beginning

Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7
John 1:1-18
Psalm 147:13-21 

The Christmas stories we know best sound like history.  Maybe not history as we understand the term, as something academic, or scientific, but history nonetheless.  Luke tells how Jesus was born in this place, to these parents, at the time of that imperial decree, when so-and-so was governor of Syria.  Or if you prefer Matthew’s version, sages from Persia, observing unusual astronomical phenomena, came to Jerusalem looking for the newborn king of the Jews.  This aroused the malice of the usurper Herod, and so Jesus’ family fled to Egypt for safety.   

The mythical or supernatural elements in these stories, the angels and prophecies and dreams, tell us that they are sacred history.  These are events in which God is afoot.  But the backdrop against which they take place is the natural lives of people and the history of nations.  The principal actors are human persons.  When God intervenes, it is by sending messengers to those persons, or by filling them with the Holy Spirit, so they become bearers of the message.  But God remains offstage, invisible, unknowable, on the other side of the curtain that separates earth from heaven.

The Gospel of John, on the other hand, begins the story of Jesus on God’s side of the curtain.  The principal actor in John’s Christmas story is not a character in history.  The backdrop is not the places and events of the human world.  Instead it is a story that begins with the beginnings of the universe.  The principal actor is God, and the backdrop is God.  For John the story of Jesus Christ begins with the no-beginning that makes all beginnings possible, in the no-time that precedes every moment of time.  The miraculous birth that John begins with is the primordial mystery of existence itself, the mere fact that there is anything at all.

One of the first experiences of my childhood that could be called “religious” concerned just this mystery.  I was eight or nine years old, and my Grandma Lenore, was undergoing her first round with cancer.  I was lying in my bed at night and for the first time that I can recall it really hit me that I was going to die.  And my parents and my brothers, and everybody I knew—all of them were also going to die.  If felt as if a great abyss of dread and meaninglessness was opening up beneath me and was going to swallow me up.   And then, suddenly, a light went on.  Another thought came to me, that brought me comfort and hope and filled me with gratitude.  It was the thought of how completely gratuitous, how unnecessary, even arbitrary, and utterly not-to-be-taken-for-granted it is, that there should be anything at all.

That anything and everything comes into existence at all is a gift.  It is grace.  That the world exists, in spite of the improbabilities, in defiance of entropy, notwithstanding its tendency to instability and metamorphosis, is the one undeniable and irreducible truth.  The created universe, and everything in it, is not simply there, at random, out of nowhere and to no purpose.  It exists because there was in God, from the beginningless beginning, the impulse to create.  And if that, then also the desire to be created.  To be light, shining in the darkness.  To be word, spoken in the silence.  There is nothing in the universe that does not owe its existence to that love by which God becomes an other to herself, pure potentiality moving into act, absolute freedom taking form and pattern, perfect being becoming becoming.

John’s gospel begins with this beginning to tell us how radical is the grace that comes through Jesus Christ.  John wants us to understand that Christ’s coming transforms everything we thought we knew about our relationship to God and our place in creation.  He wants us to perceive that the very stuff of our consciousness is the word of God.  We reflect, like an image in a mirror, that intrinsic act of standing apart from oneself by which the one becomes two, and the uncreated creates.  We participate, not just instinctively, but consciously, freely, and artfully, in the bodying-forth of God that unfolds of the universe as.  

But the irony is that this god-likeness also gives us the capacity to imagine a godless universe.  The intrinsic stepping apart from ourselves by which know ourselves as knowers, also makes us prone to believe the lie that we are separate.   We can fall into the delusion that the light of our minds is the only light.  We can think that the words we use to name, to classify, to make distinctions and count quantities and rationalize the world are the only truth there is.  We can use our freedom to act upon the other creatures in the universe as if we and they were disconnected things.  And we can grasp that freedom as power, power without relatedness.  We can fight and kill for power.  We can worship it, and in worshipping it become its slave. 

This is the precarious freedom into which Christ is born. To talk about it as I have done can seem abstract, disconnected from our every day human life.  It is no surprise that we’d prefer a history.  We can make sense of a baby in a manger, and shepherds, wise men bearing gifts, and a star.  For all of their legendary quality, we can connect these stories to our own stories, and infuse them with our feelings and our memories.  We can feel like we know what the story means for us.  And it can also leave us out of it. 

The Gospel of John asks us to find Christmas at a deeper level of experience, in the very heart of reality.  John asks us to see the Christ child in the manger and know that there we are.  Paul says something similar in the letter to the Galatians.  To really understand what the birth of Christ means, to really receive the gift of his grace, we need to be like children in relation to God.  We need to experience the word of God as a child might, in utter simplicity, as light, as life, as bread, as the cry in our hearts for love and protection, as consciousness itself.  This is the experience of Christmas that is sometimes called contemplation, or mystical illumination, or even gnosis, and even the church has not taken it very seriously.  Or we have treated it something dangerous and exotic, reserved for a select few, rather than the universal birth-right of every human being. 

And it is dangerous.   It is dangerous to the powers-that-be who worship their own alienation.  It is dangerous to theological systems and ideological orthodoxies, to false piety and self-serving cynicism.  It is dangerous because it finds a God who comes from completely outside our existing frame of reference.  We want to know where he comes from, because we feel the irresistible draw of our true home.   But if we are going to come alive in the way that he is alive, we have to be willing to become other than ourselves.  We need to let God take away from us everything we thought we knew we were—our tribal and religious identities, our ideas of morality and virtue, our understandings of human nature and the historical situation, our fantasies about how to improve our lives or make the world a better place.  We have to let it all go and let God speak.  We have to allow God to begin again with us at the beginning, where nothing is taken for granted, and to tell us again who we really are.