All Sickness Is Homesickness

Epiphany 4B Healing

“All sickness is homesickness,” writes Dianne Connelly in her book of the same name. All healing, then, is homecoming: coming home to a place where one can simply Be one’s true self. Where Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.

 

Jesus showed his power, his care and his love by healing people of all ages and stations of life from physical, mental, and spiritual ailments. He crossed all social divisions to bring them home to God, to others and to themselves. In Mark 1:21-28, we witness the first episode of Jesus healing someone, this time in a synagogue in Capernaum, which sits above and nearby the Sea of Galilee. We are told that Jesus is teaching “as one who has authority, and not as the scribes.” The scribes are those who spend their lives with the texts inscribing Torah scrolls, thus considered authorities on the texts. Jesus demonstrates even more authority when suddenly, a man with an ‘unclean spirit’ appears.  The unclean spirit recognizes exactly who Jesus is: the Holy One of God. This strikes us as odd. Yet, repeatedly throughout the Gospel of Mark, demons and unclean spirits recognize Jesus while his closest companions constantly are asking, “Who is this guy?”

 

Jesus silences the unclean spirit, the man convulses, and the unclean spirit leaves. People are amazed and Jesus’s reputation spreads. If all sickness is homesickness, then we can say that Jesus brought the man in the synagogue home – home to his real and authentic self.

 

Later Pharisees, also scholars of the texts, and willing to offer broad and even liberal interpretations of the texts and believed in the resurrection of the dead, will challenge Jesus’s authority over and over again. Also the Sadducees and Priests in Jerusalem, who were the conservative aristocracy who controlled the religious, political and economic life of the Temple, and did not believe in the resurrection of the dead – which is why they were sad, you see. There were Essenes who were into ultra-purification and fasting as a way to usher in the Messiah to rid Israel of the Roman Occupation, and Zealots, country militias, who resorted to insurgent military attacks to drive the dominant Romans out of the Land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Lastly, the largest class of people were the am ha’aretz, “the people of the land: tenant farmers, fishermen, servants and slaves, as well as people with mental, physical and spiritual ailments which prevented them from full participation in the social and religious life of their people – rendering many to be homeless beggars outside the gates of cities and towns. Such individuals were said to be “bound,” and were waiting to be freed or “loosed.” All these social divisions existed under a brutal military occupation which made Israel no longer feel like home.

 

One might say the fundamental illness throughout Israel at the time of Jesus was dislocation: God’s people were no longer at home. In the past they had been slaves in Egypt and in Exile in Babylon and were literally not at home. But now Rome, like all totalitarian empires, had transformed their home to be no longer recognizable. There was a sickness in the land.

 

We tend to lose sight of what lies at the heart of physical, mental, spiritual dis-ease, and all social division. In Advent, 1936, the British scholar of Christian Spirituality, Evelyn Underhill offered this insight: “We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, to Do. Craving, Clutching and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual - even on the religious – plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by, and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.” [The Spiritual Life, Harper&Row; 1936 – p. 20]

 

My mentor and friend, N. Gordon Cosby of the Church of the Saviour in in Washington, DC, would often remind us, “Being must always precede doing.” That is, we must be at home with ourselves, our true authentic selves God creates us to Be before taking action. As Underhill recognized, there is much to distract us from Being our true self. The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger often referred to the proliferation of television antennas on the rooftops of his hometown as inviting strangers into our living rooms so that home was no longer home. Today, the Tech-Revolution has many of us carrying around mini pocket computers with which we communicate, watch movies, listen to music, get alerts of breaking news (a curious phrase - news that often breaks our hearts and grieves our souls). We allow our minds to be filled with all manner of, yes, information, but also yes, all kinds of false narratives, misinformation and propaganda while the devices track our every move, every keystroke, and provide a sort of commercial bio-feedback consisting of a tsunami of the product offerings literally of our dreams and aspirations. We are no longer at home. We are kept in perpetual unrest. We are exhausted, which itself is a kind of dis-ease. We can no longer find the time and space to simply Be. Yet, Being, not doing and not going down the rabbit hole of tech-civilization, is the essence of the Spiritual Life, which in the end is Real Life, Authentic Life. My Life and Your Life.

 

The African Bishop, Augustine of Hippo, who had led a rather self-absorbed and dissolute younger life, in his Confessions writes, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” This is where Underhill, Cosby, Dianne Connelly, Augustine, and yes, Jesus, know is where our true home lies: Resting, abiding, in the arms of God’s Eternal and boundless Love. “God is merciful and gracious, and abounding in steadfast love,” insist the texts of the Old Testament Hebrew scriptures from beginning to end!

 

Dianne Connelly writes, “Home is the place from which I have come and to which I return. Home is where I always am…All sickness is home sickness. All healing is homecoming … Homesickness is a yearning to be home in one’s self. It is not a private matter. One’s self includes others. The work…of any healing art, is to open a conversation for being well, that is, being at home. Healing, wholing, transformation is a public matter.” [ Dianne Connelly, All Sickness is Home Sickness, pp 25&49] This is the very conversation Jesus conducts in the very public setting of a synagogue service: You, unclean spirit, come out of him. You, beloved of God, come home, back where you belong. You are free, no longer bound. Come home.

 

The man is now able once again to participate in synagogue life, in home life, in community life, and leave the dislocation that has caused him to be alienated and alone. We all want to come home again. As the Gospels bear witness, this homecoming is different for every one Jesus heals, for every one of us. Jesus calls across all lines of social division to come home to God, to be at home with others, and most of all, to Be at home with and in one’s self. That is what these healing stories are all about – homecoming. The Holy Spirit awaits with arms wide open to welcome us back to our true selves so that we can live with other true selves, escape the restlessness of all unclean spirits, and to be free from all that binds us, free to come home once again and just Be. This is the essence of the Spiritual Life. This is the healing we all need after a year-long pandemic and decades of social division throughout the land. Amen. It is so. It is truth.

Grace to Answer Readily Your Call

 

Call: Invitation, Possibility, Permission

“Your image of God creates you,” writes Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest, monk and teacher in the meditations we have been reading at Noon every weekday with people who join us for Noonday Prayer & More from across the country and around the world. [Richard Rohr, Yes, And…Franciscan Media, 2013, p 9] He has also helped us to understand our collect and lessons for this Third Sunday after Epiphany as we pray for “Grace…to answer readily the call” Jesus issues, first to a group of fishermen, but ultimately to each and every one of us, to anyone and everyone who reads and listens and ponders these accounts we call Gospels – God-spell, an Anglo-Saxon word for “good news or good message.”

 

The message has not changed for some time. From the time of Jonah and the city of Ninevah, “that great city,” some five or seven centuries before the time of Jesus, and for the people of Galilee and Jerusalem as Jesus emerges from a long sojourn in the wilderness to ponder the message and call he received at his baptism in the River Jordan: You are my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. [Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 1:14-20] Jesus, like Jonah, was called to issue an invitation, to those who would listen, to repent, to turn back from the way things are and back to the way of God, which Jesus says is near, or more specifically, “is at hand.” So near, so close, you can almost touch it. This is the Good News, the God-spell, both Jesus and Jonah proclaim.

 

Had we read just a few verses further in Jonah, we would learn that Jonah’s understanding of the image of God is that God is “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing,” a refrain that runs throughout the Old Testament. This is similar to how Jesus understands the call he receives at his Baptism by John: You are my Beloved; I am well pleased with you. Immediately, Jesus calls upon people like Andrew and Peter and James and John to repent, to turn back to the way of the Lord God of the Wilderness because they too are God’s Beloved, God is well pleased with them. They can be transformed into those who fish for people – to bring others closer to God, closer to others, and closer to themselves. They are never the same after Jesus issues the call to “Follow me.”

 

Rohr writes that at that moment, like the one down by the sea in Galilee, when the call, God’s invitation breaks in on us, we open to a new sense of possibility and permission. We begin to receive and to trust God’s “steadfast love,” and our belovedness - even with all our perceived limitations, feelings of unworthiness, limited intellect, or whatever we sense holds us back – when one begins to really hear, and feel and know that you are God’s Beloved and that God is well pleased with you, you begin to experience a new sense of possibility. And it is this possibility, Rohr says, that grants you permission – permission to be the image and likeness of God that you already are. [Ibid p 19] This is the essence of the call; the essence of the Good News; the essence of the God-spell. Your image of God creates you.

 

It was at a high school youth group performance of the musical Godspell that I first experienced this inner sense of God’s love that Rohr speaks about. I was about 28 years-old and could not have told anyone at the time what was going on inside of me, but it was in trusting that experience that opened me to both the possibility and the permission to turn back to and follow Jesus and begin to accept the possibility that I am made in the image and likeness of God. “Follow” is the operant word as I was to learn from an unlikely mentor, The Reverend Bill Caradine, someone I met when he was a Staff Officer for Stewardship at the Episcopal Church Center. The most popular song from Godspell was Day By Day, making it to number 13 on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, based on a prayer of the 13^th century bishop, Saint Richard of Chichester:

 

May I know Thee more clearly, (or, “See thee more clearly”)

Love Thee more dearly,

Follow Thee more nearly.

 

Bill Caradine said that as powerful as Chichster’s prayer and the hymn and the song are, they  have things completely backwards and upside down. For instance, Jesus does not approach the four fishermen in Galilee and say, “Hi, lads! Here is a copy of the texts of our people for you to read, mark and inwardly digest. Tomorrow I will come down and give a quiz, and if you score well on the quiz, you can follow me.” And it is not until the very end of the fourth Gospel of John that Jesus asks anyone, in that case Peter, “Do you love me?” No. The call, the invitation to possibility and permission is the quite simple and direct, “Follow me.” And somewhat inexplicably, they lay aside the family business and depart from their families and follow him. It must begin with following Jesus if we are ever to love him and know him at all. If we wait to know him or see him more clearly, we will never have time to love or to follow him.

 

Bill would go on to say, that it is only in following Jesus that it is even possible to begin to love him. And that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is so deep and so wide that to this day knowing him or seeing him more clearly is a lifetime adventure as he responds to each situation and the needs of each person differently in every time and place. It is as the fourth gospel says at the very end: there are so many things Jesus did and does, if it were all to be written down, the world could not hold the number of books it would take to tell them all! Yet, as his conversation with Peter reveals, it is love, love of neighbor, love of others, all others without qualification, that is at the heart of the image of God’s own steadfast love. For he asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter says, “Yes, Lord, I love you.” And Jesus answers, “Feed my lambs…Tend my sheep…Feed my sheep.” Your image of God creates you.

 

These lessons from my experience of Godspell and the teaching of Bill Caradine was going through my heart and mind this week as I read Richard Rohr out loud at Noonday Prayer and More: “If you keep listening to the love, if you keep receiving the love, trusting the love – even with all your limitations, with all your unworthiness, with all your limited intellect or whatever holds you back -you start to experience within yourself a sense of possibility…not just possibility, but permission…It is permission to be the image and likeness of God that you already are! We each are unlike any other image or likeness.” [Ibid p19]

 

Your image of God creates you. If our image of God is that which Jonah, Jesus, Peter and his friends all knew, graciousness, mercy, steadfast love, love of others, being God’s Beloved, then one day you become the love – the love we come from, the love to which we return, the love that is all around. We have been created to be the image and likeness of God that we already are. We are promised that when we follow Christ we will be opened to new possibilities and permission to be the very likeness and image of God. This is our calling. Today our prayer is for Grace: Grace to answer readily the call to be what we already are! Amazing grace! Alleluia!

Amen. It is so. It is truth.

 

Epiphany 2 How Does Jesus Appear to You?

 

How Does Jesus Appear to You?

Let us remember, epiphany means appearance. The texts and stories throughout the New Testament record the many different ways in which Jesus appears to people of all cultures, regions, wealthy and poor, young and old, of which our story about Philip and Nathaniel's experience with him in John 1:43-51 is just one example. Each recorded encounter as Jesus appears to people and groups of people tells us something about him, and shapes the way in which Jesus appears to us as well. Richard Rohr, who we have been listening to this week at Noonday Prayer, suggests: Your image of God creates you. Which in turn means, how Jesus appears in these stories, and in turn to us, creates us – makes us who we are as the Body of Christ in the world.

 

As Jesus appears to people, they attempt to describe Jesus with names and titles from the ancient texts of the people Israel. The number of “names” associated with Jesus in the Gospels, Paul’s letters and beyond is quite staggering. Just in this first chapter of John alone he is called: The Word. The Word made flesh. The light of the world. The Only Son. The one coming after me. The Lamb of God (who takes away the sin of the world). Son of God. Rabbi. Messiah (which is translated Anointed/Christos). Him about whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote. Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth, King of Israel, and finally, Son of Man, which Jesus himself borrows from Daniel’s apocalyptic vision of the Son of Man descending to earth upon a cloud in Daniel 7:13. 

 

Each of these names suggest important dimensions of who Jesus is: the one who fulfills scripture, the one who answers Israel’s hopes for a future leader, the new king like David or prophet like Moses. The reader, the listener, is asked to begin to see Jesus in all of these different ways that those who knew him experienced him. None of these on their own provides a complete picture of who and what Jesus is. And all of them together cannot even begin to fully describe who and what Jesus is. Which seems to suggest there are in fact many ways to know Jesus. Surely, we are invited to conclude, there must be at least one way of seeing Jesus that works for me!

 

Take the encounter with Nathaniel. Just prior to this, Peter and Andrew hear John the Baptist point to Jesus and say, “See that guy? He is the Lamb of God!”   Immediately they follow Jesus home and spend the day with him. Then, we are told Jesus heads north to Galilee. He runs into Philip, who knew Andrew and Peter, and says, “Follow me.” Philip does and then finds Nathaniel. Philip excitedly tells him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote! Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth!” Upon hearing that Jesus is from Nazareth Nathaniel thinks, well that’s all you need to know about him, and blurts out, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Because Nathaniel knows what everyone knows: that the “one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote” would never come from Nazareth or any of the northern region around Galilee as the people in this there were constantly running after the other gods and idols of their neighbors. Nathaniel knows that the one who is to come will come from the south, in Bethlehem, the City of David. Despite Nate’s outburst Philip says, “Come, let’s go see for ourselves.”

 

As they approach him, Jesus says to Nathaniel, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit! (or, as my old RSV would have it, ‘an Israelite without guile!’).” Nate is astonished. To address some one as an Israelite, and a respectable one at that, is how one addresses a trusted friend – and insider, a family member, members of the same clan. “How on earth do you know me? You’ve never met me!” blurts out Nate, now surely chagrined that he had deigned to diss the one who was “with God in the beginning!” To which Jesus says, “Oh, I saw you sitting under that fig tree over there before Philip even called you over.” Huh?

 

Nathaniel seems to be thinking, Is this some kind of mind-reading Jedi trick? But evidently this Jesus from Nazareth appears to have some deep, authentic insight about me just from seeing me sit under a fig tree! Nate suddenly sees Jesus for who he is and proclaims, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” To which Jesus responds, “You think that was good? You think this fig tree thing was good?  Wait until you see what I do next! Soon you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

 

Let’s ponder, just for a moment, what Nathaniel has said. Son of God and King of Israel. Israel, the name given by God to ancestor Jacob. Jacob who saw a vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven. Jacob who wrestled with someone all night who turns out to be God, and this God renames Jacob Israel- he who wrestles with God. All these ways Jesus appears to others and to us is meant to help us in our wrestling with God. But, King of Israel? Nate introduces a dark note of foreshadowing the conflict that lies ahead for Jesus, the light and life of all people that emanates from Nazareth of all places. Does Nathaniel have any idea that he is setting up the inevitable showdown with Herod, Caesar’s appointed “King of Israel”?

 

So ends the first chapter of John with its flurry of names for this Jesus who has appeared to Philip, Peter, Andrew and Nathaniel with a note of promise that what follows will demonstrate that Jesus is infinitely more than the sum of all the names and titles people attach to him. For after all, he is the Word; the Word that was with God in the beginning; and the Word that is God; not just God, but God made flesh! He is the ever astonishing one, whom each of us, like everyone in these stories, gets to know in many different ways, and what we all experience of Jesus put together does not even begin to describe all that he is and the wonder of it all! Throughout all these stories we are meant to see that it is how Jesus appears to us that lies at the center of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God. And at the center of who we are and whose we are.

 

Story-teller John concludes the fourth gospel saying, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” More astonishing than that, is that we are those people who, who like Philip and Nathaniel, know that this is not the end of the story. How Jesus appears to us, to you and to me, is all a part of this story. How Jesus appears to us matters, for it shapes who we are – collectively and individually. For those of us here today willing to follow Jesus wherever he goes as Philip does, and allow ourselves to respond to him directly, as Nathaniel does, the amazing journey of faith has just begun!

Amen. It is Truth. It is so!

 

Feast of the Baptism

 

Feast of the Baptism-Mark 1:1-11

In these seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, the gospel of Mark stands out: no shepherds, no wisemen, no star, no angel Gabriel – no birth narrative at all. Instead “the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God begins with John leading a revival down by the river Jordan. It is a baptism of repentance for people who feel that somehow or other they had become separated from the love of God. John’s baptism is a kind of reset – I have been walking away from God, I am going to turn around and begin walking with God once again. We read that all of Judea and all of Jerusalem has turned out for this ritual bathing led by John – a character who lives in the wilderness, is dressed in camel skin and eats locusts dipped in honey for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Appetizing! Most there would recognize him as looking a lot like the prophet Elijah who is supposed to return one day to announce the coming of the messiah, God’s anointed – christos in Greek, as in The Christ.

 

Wilderness in the Bible recalls the 40 year period of spiritual formation following the Passover and Exodus event. We tend to think of wilderness as, well, a dangerous place. From the biblical perspective, it is where a disparate band of slaves became a people. The 40-year sojourn lays out the normative way to be the Israel of God – a name given to Jacob after wrestling with God one night. Israel means something like, “he who wrestles with God.” Which in itself is the normative way to be people of faith: to wrestle with God; to travel with God; to be led by God; fed and sustained by God with bread that is given daily. That’s why we pray for “daily bread.”

 

So, here are thousands of people of every possible background who have turned out for to reset a life lived with God.  Upwalks a young adult from Galilee named Jesus who says, “I want to be a part of all of this – I want to be baptized.” Then it happens. The Holy Spirit descends upon him “like a dove,” and a voice from heaven announces, “You are my son, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  His part of the story is only three short sentences. He then goes off on a forty-day retreat back into the wilderness where it always begins to sort out just what all this means – to be God’s son, to be God’s beloved, to be told that God is well pleased with you. He figures out that this is good news – evangelion in Greek, which roughly means “good angel,” or “good message.” It is good news for all of us. He then spends the next few years of his life spreading the Word, the Good News: you are God’s beloved, God is well pleased with you, turn around and walk with God, for this is eternal life. The Kingdom of God is at hand; it is near; it is so close you can touch it. Take just one step and you will enter it!

 

William Countryman in his book, The Good News of Jesus, illustrates just how we and the church have done an excellent job of mangling this message by saying things like, “good news, if you are really really good God will love you,” or, “if you are really really sorry you have not been very very good God will love you,” or perhaps worst of all, “God loves you, now get back in line before God changes God’s mind!” These messages which we have all heard in one way or another simply are not good news. The Good News is that God loves you and is well pleased with you. You are God’s Beloved!

 

That’s it: you are God’s beloved. Many of us find this hard to believe. It can be hard to wrap one’s head around such a liberating and mystical truth. Yet, what happens when we do not accept this news tends to lead to dysfunction. Alienation is another word that comes to mind – alienated from God, alienated from others, and alienated, most of all, from being ourselves – our true self.

 

As my friend in Jesus and mentor N. Gordon Cosby always used to say, “Being [capital B] must always precede doing.” Much of what presents itself to us as religion is about doing, about technique, about belief and doctrine, when at the end of the day, the essence of religion and religious experience is meant to be about Being – simply Being. It turns out that is not so simple in a world that is relentlessly encouraging us to keep busy doing things.

 

Indeed, Evelyn Underhill, one who spent a lifetime examining the Spiritual Life, the experience of the living God, reminded us in Advent,1936: “We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, to Do. Craving, Clutching and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual - even on the religious – plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting  that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by, and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.” [The Spiritual Life, Harper&Row; 1936 – p. 20]

 

This “Being” is given many names – contemplative prayer, mindfulness practice, centering prayer, raja yoga, Sabbath time. The entire Bible begins with the image of God resting on the seventh day. Just prior to that resting God creates humankind in God’s image. Put these two things together and one might easily conclude resting, Sabbath, Shabbat, mindfulness is the vital part of what it means to “Be.” And our Book of Common Prayer tells us that in Baptism we are “fully incorporated into the Body of Christ.” The Body of Christ, baptized by John, came up out of the water, the Holy Spirit descended upon his body “like a dove,” as a voice from heaven said, “You are my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” When we were baptized, whether or not we remember, that same voice says to each of us, “You are my Son. You are my daughter. You are my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

 

It is said that “silence is God’s first language.” It is in silence, in quiet, when we give ourselves the gift of what God gave us in the longest of the Ten Commandments: Sabbath, Shabbat, time to just “Be.” In such contemplative practice we begin to wrap our head around this good news that we are God’s beloved. That God is well pleased with us. Shabbat is a once-a-week practice, but these days we may need daily Sabbath time to remember who we are and whose we are: we are God’s Beloved; God is well pleased with us.

 

It took Jesus forty days to process this news. He then set off to share it with others. He continues to invite us to walk with him, to walk in his way – the way of eternal life. Eternal life is not something we pray to experience later, after “this life” is all over. There is only one life - Eternal Life. Eternal Life begins in creation and continues now and forever and ever for those of us who take the time to simply Be and accept this Good News. In fact, we can accept it or not. But even if we don’t, we are still God’s beloved, and God is still pleased with us, and for now that is enough. Amen.

Epiphany 2021 - The Wise Man's Tale

 

Epiphany – The Wise Man’s Tale [Matthew 2:1-12]

Everyone assumes there were only three of us since we only left three gifts – but try to imagine how many drovers, tent bearers, supply keepers and camel-boys alone it takes to move the group of us all the way from our home in the far east to Jerusalem, a journey of over 6,000 km! As wise as I may be, one journey for the truth is so much like another that even I cannot remember if there were 8 of us curious ones who spent 16 months getting there, or whether there were 16 of us who took 8 months to arrive in Herod’s court to ask for the final directions to go and see the one who was destined by the stars to become King of the Jews. And even Herod could see we were not kings– we were magi, star gazers, alchemists, philosophers, curious-ones; wise and curious men and women were we. Oh yes, there were women on our journey to be sure – some of the wisest among us I might add.

 

“Beware of beautiful strangers,” we told Herod. “The sun is moving into the house of Venus so affairs of the heart will prosper.” We said something along these lines, and of course it meant next to nothing. To have told him anything of real value would have taken weeks of study, calculations, and to research the births of the child’s parents and parents-parents back several generations at least! Herod, of course, knew none of this and jumped at the drivel we threw him like a dog at a bone, and thanked us for it as well. A lost man, was he. Neither really a Jew nor a Roman, he was at home nowhere, and yet was the appointed King of the Jews in Rome’s Empire. And he believed in nothing – not the Olympian Zeus nor the Holy One of Israel, who cannot be named. All he knew was power and how to preserve it and wield it. He had others, priests and scholars of the ancient texts to determine where we were to head next: “Bethlehem, in the land of Judah… no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” You could see he was not at all happy to hear what they had to say.

 

“Go and find me the child,” the king ordered us, and as he spoke the rings on his trembling fingers rattled together like dry bones. “Because I want to come and worship him,” he said, and with that his hands were as still as the death he imagined would put an end to this pretender to his throne. I ask you, does one need to consult the stars to know that no king has ever bowed down to another king? He thought he could play us for foreign fools, the sly old fox, and like the fools he took us for we nodded our heads and replied, “Yes, yes, yes of course.” We knew then and there we would never return to this sneering son-of-a-long line of Herods who would think nothing of ordering every little child in Bethlehem to be killed if necessary, to consolidate his hold on his job and his power in service of the Emperor of Rome.

 

Why, you might ask, had we traveled so far to witness the child’s birth and drop off several rather odd gifts? To this neither we nor the stars had an answer. Our charts and calculations only told us he would be born. It was another voice that told us to go – a voice as deep within ourselves as the stars are deep in the never-ending universe! I could not even tell you now, and could not have told you then while we were on the journey of a lifetime. It’s not that we had no motive, but that there were so many! Curiosity was one. To be wise is to be eternally curious, and we were very wise. We wanted to see the one to whom even the stars are said to bow down – and to see if it were really true since even the wise have their doubts. Why, doubts are the ants in the pants of faith, science and curiosity itself! And there was a deep longing. Why will a person who is dying of thirst crawl miles across sands as hot as fire at simply the possibility of water? But if we longed to receive, we also longed to give. Why will a person labor and struggle all the days of one’s life so that in the end one has something to give to one’s beloved?

 

When we finally got to Bethlehem, as Herod’s scholars had directed us, it was night and it was cold. Very cold. The family was in some sort of outbuilding behind all the others that made up the family compound of those descended from David who had been a real king. The odor of the hay was sweet, and the cattle’s breath came out in little puffs that hung in the air for what seemed an eternity – for it was eternity that we were soon to enter. There was the man, and the woman. Between them the king. So tiny and vulnerable like any other baby that had ever been born. We did not stay long. Only a few minutes as the clock goes, ten thousand, thousand years is how it felt. We set down our foolish gifts in the straw before the manger and left.

 

I will tell you two terrible things. What we saw on the face of that newborn child was his death. Swaddled as if wrapped in a funeral shroud, death sat on his head like a crown, this death that he was born to die. And we saw, as sure as the earth beneath our feet, that to stay with him would be to share that death. And that is why we left – giving only our gifts and withholding the rest.

 

On our long journey home by another way than we had come, I had time to contemplate what we had experienced in that little child. Was it possible, I asked myself, that God is love, and in his infinite love God has created us, and that in his love by dying, he will redeem us? And that to return to God, we, too, must learn to love, but distracted and blinded as we are by so much sin and greed and violence and falsehoods, that most of us can rise to the spiritual love of God only through a simpler love for a God like ourselves, who was born that day in Bethlehem as a helpless infant? And like him, must we also learn to love one another, all others, neighbors and enemies alike? Had we witnessed in that far away manger the easily comprehensible but utterly astonishing moment when, quite simply, God became a baby?

 

And now I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it of myself ever since that day in Bethlehem, the City of David: Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, that to live without him is the real death, and that to die with him is the only life?

 

Every night as I go to sleep, I look out of my tent into the night sky, at the moon and the stars, wondering what, why and wherefore, and always I see that child who was born for us all, for everything and everyone, and I feel as if he is still with me right here and right now. Then I say some words to the close and holy darkness, and fall asleep.

 

With apologies to Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat, [Seabury Press, 1979] pp 68-71, The Wise Man; Neil MacGregor, Seeing Salvation [Yale Univeristy Press, 200]; Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales [New Directions, 1959].