January 3, 2010 Second Sunday after Christmas, Epiphany
Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12
The story of the wise men has received much alteration in the modern
mythologizing of Christ’s nativity. In the Bible, the wise men arrive at a house,
not a stable and manger. A little later in the story Herod has his soldiers kill all
the children in Bethlehem who are two or younger, “according to the time that he
had learned from the wise men” that the star had appeared. So Jesus could have
been as old as two by the time the wise men arrived.
I am not suggesting that we rewrite our pageants and remove the Magi
from crèches around the world. I don’t think factual accuracy was Matthew’s
motivation in passing on the story, which undoubtedly already had the quality of
myth in his own day. What mattered to Matthew was that we ourselves would
heed the signs that led to the wise men’s insight that this lowly child was the
prophesied one, and we would kneel before this mystery and offer gifts of
homage and joy. The point of the story is for us to live out the wise men’s
journey in our own spiritual life.
We need to find our way to what the birth of Jesus symbolizes, to the life
and light and love of God working in this world, for two sets of reasons, one
personal and the other global. We need to make that journey first because we
face sickness or hardship or mortality and need the help of Christ’s higher power
to endure. We need to follow the wise men because we long for the joy and
peace they found kneeling before that child’s mysterious force.
But we also need to walk in the wise men’s footsteps because we live in an
age when enormous changes are taking place in society and in nature, and we
have to decide how to respond. We face a choice of allegiance to one way of life
or another, one power or another, that is as stark as the wise men’s choice
whether to obey Herod or obey God. It requires spiritual wisdom to be able to
find our way to the light of Christ through the dark night and swirling desert dust
of personal or global upheaval.
The first part of the Magi’s wisdom was to live in expectation. They
expected God to do something in the world. They expected God would send
messages and signs to guide them toward the fulfillment of God’s will on earth.
There is a wonderful scene in the John Sayles movie, The Secret of Roan
Inish, where an old Irish islander is talking about signs in nature, and his wife
tells him it is all just superstition. Then she turns around and does her nightly
ritual of formulaic prayer for the help of St. Brigid to protect the house and all in
it as they sleep. We smile at the irony and the quaintness of both forms of
superstition, but the reason that movies like The Secret of Roan Inish have such
powerful appeal for modern audiences is that the characters live in expectation
that a higher power will guide and help them, and we love to see that expectation
fulfilled. We envy how attuned they are to the spirit of their place, and how
adept they are at reading its signs, and how courageous they are as they follow
the signs even at the risk of suffering or being called fools or feeling let down
when expected miracles do not happen.
We do not have to envy—we can live this way, too, if we are willing to
take the same risks. There is an art to holy expectation that we can choose to
learn and nurture in our lives. Mostly it is a discipline of looking and listening
with our spiritual senses. It is a spiritual literacy that we can develop through
practice. One form of practice is the contemplative way of living that we attain
through meditation or centering prayer where we expect God’s presence in the
silence. Another is the practice of mindfulness, meaning letting go of our
thoughts and feelings and being as simply present to what is happening within
and around us as we can be.
Spiritual literacy means being able to catch glimpses of God’s presence
first by looking and listening deeply, and second by having a feel for who or
what God is. The Magi studied stars and books and dream interpretation.
Christian spiritual masters study the Bible and the writings of other spiritual
masters, they immerse themselves in other works of art that express the same
truths, they seek spiritual guidance from people they consider learned and wise,
and they listen and look in prayer in order to gain a feeling for God.
But there is one final step to the wise men’s art of holy expectation, and
that is to let all specific expectations go. This is where so many people fail to
complete their training. Some Christians expect God to respond to their prayers
in certain ways, or expect God to police world events according to predictable
and understandable rules. Millions of Christians have specific, cherished and
rigidly held expectations about the second coming of Christ.
In the days of the Magi, the Messiah (Christ is the Greek translation of
Messiah) was expected to be a King of the Jews like David only greater,
overthrowing the Roman empire. The passage we read responsively from Isaiah
prophesies about it, saying “the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you and
the wealth of the nations shall come to you.” Isaiah was talking about the rise of
Israel to greatness. Jews of Jesus’ day expected the Messiah to make that
happen, and presumably the Magi expected the same thing.
So it took tremendous wisdom, tremendous spiritual literacy to let go of
their expectations and accept that God could be manifest in a way that was
completely different from what they thought. Instead of a mighty king in a
palace, they found a child in a humble family, closer to poor than to rich. This
was a mystery, but they were wise enough to kneel before the mystery and pay it
homage.
T.S. Eliot puts it this way in his poem “Journey of the Magi.”
Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
Eliot says the birth of Jesus was like death, and we know the death of
Jesus was like birth. It is one thing to understand God’s upside down ways
intellectually. It is much harder, though, to let go of our expectations of how
things should be in our own lives and accept God’s ways. Yet this is exactly
what we need to do if we are going to follow the path of wisdom and epiphany.
Father Thomas Keating is a Trappist monk and one of the founders of the
Centering Prayer movement. Many of us in Prayer of the Heart follow his Daily
Reader for Contemplative Living. The entry for Christmas day is taken from his
book The Mystery of Christ. In it he writes,
Readiness for any eventuality is the attitude of one who has entered into
the freedom of the Gospel. Commitment to the new world Christ is
creating…requires flexibility and detachment: the readiness to go anywhere or
nowhere, to live or to die, to rest or to work, to be sick or to be well, to take up
one service and to put down another. Everything is important when one is
opening to Christ-consciousness. This awareness transforms our worldly
concepts of security into the security of accepting, for love of God, an unknown
future…. The light of Christmas is an explosion of insight changing our whole
idea of God. (Daily Reader p 359)
Buddhist writer and psychotherapist Rob Preece elaborates on this
readiness to accept any eventuality. Preece writes,
As a psychotherapist, I am fascinated by those times when—through
factors outside of our control, like illness, loss of work, or a change in
circumstances…. the ego begins to recognize that it doesn’t have real control
over what’s happening. We feel lost, unsure of our ground, fearful of the
unknown, and powerless…. It is tempting to grasp at something that will rapidly
patch up the cracks and create a sense of security. We can experience these
fearful times as periods of great danger, or we can see them as opportunities to
change the orientation of our life…. Buddhism asks us to relinquish the
domination of the ego and its habits…. We can…understand this as the surrender
of the ego to a deeper aspect of our nature that is transforming us…. It has often
surprised me that in the process of surrender what I give up is fear and struggle.
A kind of strength comes from truly giving up. Something changes when I
genuinely let go and ask for help. (tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Spring 2007 p
36ff)
Preece talks about the ancient spiritual practice of prostration, of
physically kneeling before mystery, as an expression of this surrender that helps
a person let go of specific plans and expectations and illusions of control. He
talks about the power of accepting the truth of our lives, of surrendering to it, of
kneeling in prostration before it, even when that truth is the possibility of
imminent death. There is more power in this acceptance than in the poet Dylan
Thomas’s advice to his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage
against the dying of the light.”
As many of you know, my father died on December 17th, but he almost
died a year before that. He was on a gurney in the emergency room a year ago
when the doctors thought they had lost him. He had a vision in that moment of
what he described as a very clean, very bright place where he felt completely
comfortable. Afterwards he said that it was a turning point for him—for the first
time, he felt he could accept death. It gave him peace and strength and a sense of
humor as he went through his often quite painful final year.
As Rob Preece says, there are times like our own serious illness or the
death of our parents when we are forced to face our mortality in a new way, and
assess our life more truthfully. If we are not ready for it, we can feel the impulse
to grasp at old illusions of security and control. But if we are ready, if we have
heeded the visions and insights God has given us, if we have learned how to
surrender to God’s ways and turn our life and will over to God’s care, then at
least on good days we can feel the flexibility and detachment that Thomas
Keating described. We can feel peace and joy.
If we learn and practice the wisdom of the Magi, we will be able to accept
the humble truth of our own lives and deaths when we confront them, and yet at
the same time see the light of Christ within the rough manger of our humanity. If
we follow Christ’s star, we will come to the insight of a powerful truth, that even
within what looks like the worst or lowliest of circumstances, God is present,
God is moving, God’s realm is breaking into this world. If we dare to become
adept at the holy art of expectation, we will learn to recognize signs of God’s
presence within and around us, and we will kneel before that mystery and offer it
our gifts of love and trust and we will serve it with our entire being. Then all our
actions will transmit some measure of Christ’s radiant light, and it will affect not
only our own lives, but the lives of all around us, and the future of the earth.
Let us pray in silence, opening ourselves to the possibility of the wisdom
and epiphany we need right now…
Sermon 01/03/2010