January 4, 2004
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture
Isaiah 60:1-6, Matthew
2:1-12, Eliot’s "Journey
of the Magi"
"Tripping Out: There’s Always Another Way Home"
"Astrologers three are we – 1, 2, 3!" Ain’t life a
trip? Seriously. I go tripping all the time! That’s why I keep a cane
in the car. To walk any distance at all, especially on snow and ice, I
got to take help along! Like the prophet Rocky Balboa, these Magi just
want to go the distance! They just want to chase down that star to the
end. The poet reports fifteen rounds of sheer calamity. The length of
journey itself, bitter weather, bitter camels, handlers who won’t stay
put, night-fires that won’t stay lit, cities and towns and villages
price-gouging alike, traveling all night, sleeping in snatches, ruing
the day they left home! Sound like a family trip anyone can remember?!
Even below the snow line, which we know something about: darkness,
bleak trees on the sky, a riderless horse, dicing, drinking, and no
information. No end to ambiguity: The whole world still watching,
waiting, wanting to know: "Were we led all that way for / Birth or
Death?" What is the difference? Beginning or ending? Start or
finish? Alpha or Omega? Does one always require the other? Do the two of
them always point to a third? And beyond? Beyond every
"either-or" to a "both-and?" Beyond every thesis,
and antithesis, to a new and emerging synthesis? A new way of seeing? Of
thinking? Of speaking? Of acting?
Like our deaths to sore parts of the people we’ve been? Our
presumptions? Our privileges? Our positions? Our perspectives? Our
places in old dispensations? Like an alien people still clutching our
gods? Through scripture? Tradition? Reason? Experience? Anything to deny
and defy that we are as question marks stuck in the craw, lodged in the
heart of a living God? With a living Christ? By a living Spirit? In a
living Church? For a living World?
Filled with conflict and contradiction? Problem and paradox?
Difference and diversity? Contrast and complexity? Option and
opportunity? Challenge and change? So many, many more ways than one, to
see things, to think things, to speak things, to do things? And we only
know, for a minute or two, once in a very great while, how it’s all
turning out? What it all means in the end? Or is that, "in the
beginning"? Again, and again, and again? Should we be glad of
another such death as this birth?
After all, Kate Compston reminds us in our "Words for
Meditation," this always-unusual God stirs us "with holy
discontent over a world / which gives its gifts to those / who have
plenty already," a world whose rich grow richer, whose poor go to
war and to jail. God yet calls us, compassionately, as ones who are
"rich to travel toward poverty," as wise to embrace God’s
folly, as powerful to know our frailty, as strangers to a sense of
homecoming, as stargazers to true light and vision. For the light has
come over us, comforts Isaiah, like glory, like shekinah, growing around
us, bringing to life, and even to love, all that long-lingers in
darkness, in shadow, in depth, in hiding from us. Epiphany brings forth
chances to see ourselves as God has been longing for us to see: fully
revealed as we are, and accepted, embraced, anointed, empowered.
Once we the people, in solidarity, come clear to ourselves in the
light, Isaiah foresees, then all the nations we are, 192 of them, and
counting, will join us, and even the leaders of nations will seek to
share the light! We’ve got to stop looking to so many leaders and look
for more strengths in ourselves, in each other! Once we become open and
honest about who we are, how we are called, what we most want and need
for our world, then even our sons and daughters, all who wander dimly
and desperately from us, may yet be returned. Then, Isaiah assures us
further, we "shall see and be radiant!" Our hearts "shall
thrill and rejoice!" And we shall be covered with "a multitude
of camels!" O joy!
Next Sunday, the day of Jesus’ baptism, of God’s self-proclaimed
"de light" in his life, we are invited, literally, to be in
touch with our own baptisms, with God’s own "de light" in
us. (We may process "through the waters," lavishing them upon
us, as, in the 10 am worship, special musicians wail "When the
Saints Go Marching In!") We also will recognize and install our
"leaders among the leaders" who are this congregation, and we
will pray for Renewal of the Covenant with our God. Let us not take God
for granted but acknowledge the nascent newness each day, each week,
each year, of life in the body of Christ, whose Spirit is gifting and
calling us even now. Following 10 am worship we urge everyone to stay
for a congregational meeting, to finish election of leadership, to adopt
a budget or spending plan, to brainstorm of a calendar of events for
this new-entrusted year.
The more things change, we like to say, the more they stay the same.
The world remains other than safe for infants and gift-bearing weirdoes.
These Magi, as we’ve come to know and to tell about them, are such a
tribute to our imagination! Scripture says nothing of their names, how
many they are, what they are to be called, their colors or
nationalities. We have, gloriously, improvised all of that! Wise ones,
kings if we want to call them that, astrologers, priests, whatever –
They arrive in such a conventional way, deferring to the local head of
state, assuming for some strange reason that an old king would welcome a
new one! They may well have come from what now is called
"Iraq" and are bound to have been considered
"unclean" as foreigners in a "chosen" culture.
Kate Compston says the Magi bear "singing hearts,"
doxologies of gold, for celebration! They bear stillness, serenity,
frankincense for meditation. And they bear brokenness, rage and sorrow,
myrrh for sacrifice. For they face realities harsh and dreadful as
Iraqis yet face today. We will not take time to read here this playfully
painful, painfully playful commentary on Romans and "smart
weapons" in Jesus’ time. [Attached: David Benjamin,
"If the Romans had had ‘smart weapons’. . ., San
Francisco Chronicle, just before Christmas] It is required reading
for next week!
Suffice it to say, we are asked, in effect, how many "Baby
Jesuses" yet today, as then, here and everywhere in the world, are
counted as lucky to survive, -- birth into infancy, infancy into
childhood, childhood into adolescence, much less adolescence into
adulthood, and adulthood into any decent and dignified kind of old age.
This Winter Cycle of Advent/Christmas/Epiphany seasons in the Earth
Church Year is a time of self-discovery and growth for us, as every time
is, yet in winter so much growing remains hidden from us. So much
growing is done underground. And we face, together, bittersweetly, the
fruits of underground growings, of growing undergrounds. for better, for
worse, all over this world.
The section of this satire concerning the Magi, who find "the
humble stable reduced to ashes and surrounded by smoking body
parts," ends with one of them lamenting, "Something in our
hearts told us we must follow the (alleged) star, for the son of God was
about to be born, to suffer and die for the sins of humankind. We had no
idea he was going to die this quick. What are we going to do with all
this leftover myrrh?" All this leftover brokenness? All these
leftover tears of rage and sorrow? All this endless, needless, merciless
sacrifice?
I often imagine the Magi are made to sit down at the kitchen table to
engage in intense conversation of prophetic reeducation with Mary and
Joseph! The Magi reveal they have promised Herod, a king no less
obsessed with intrigue and ruthlessness than any number of heads of
state we might name today, to tell him where to find this child whose
star they follow. Mary and Joseph, with such a profound and passionate
sense of the destiny of their child’s role in the liberation of life
for their people and of love for all of the world, I imagine will not
let the Magi leave without pledging them to a new promise: Imbued with
new and differing ways of seeing, of thinking, of speaking, of acting,
-- no longer at ease in the old dispensation of destruction and death,
-- they will conspire with this nonviolent subversion of tyranny and go
home by another way.
"He IS the way," claims the poet Auden, encouraging us,
giving us heart to face this new time in new ways. "Follow him
through the land of unlikeness; / you will see rare beasts and
have unique adventures. "He is the truth. / Seek him in the Kingdom
of anxiety; / you will come to a great city that has expected your
return for years. "He is the life; / Love him in the world of the
flesh; / and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for
joy." Dance for joy. Dance for joy! And, amen.
John Auer, Pastor
