The Epiphany: Symbolic Story, Narrative Truth

Isaiah 60.1-6

Psalm 72.1-7, 10-14

Ephesians 3.1-12

Matthew 2.1-12

Epiphany means to reveal, to manifest, to make known.  The earliest Christians, in seeking to find words to express their encounter with God in Jesus of Nazareth and to make him known, found the medium of story or narrative as a helpful way to tell the truth of Jesus.  Truths that are too fantastic or too hard to comprehend are often told in story.  Using symbolic language and events, stories help us to understand the deep mysteries of God, mysteries which are ultimately ineffable.  The earliest Christians used stories to reveal who Jesus was, to manifest his truth and his glory.  It is important therefore, that we pay close attention to the stories of the New Testament, and that we come to grips with what their writers are trying to reveal to us is true about Jesus of Nazareth.  Later tradition will build on the stories, but it is always important to return to the stories themselves, plumbing the depths of their meaning and hearing in them the proclamation of who Jesus is – for the earliest Christians and for us.

This morning three new figures have been added to our crib scene – the three wise men who, guided by the star, came from foreign lands to worship the new-born king and to offer gifts.  But if we look carefully at the record of events as told in the gospel of the Matthew, we find that no number is mentioned at all: “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?  For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ ”(Matthew 2.1-2)  The writer of the gospel of Matthew is clear about the time, place and purposes surrounding the journey of these wise men.  The writer is clear about what they say upon arriving in Jerusalem; but about the exact number of travellers, the writer is vague: “wise men from the East”, an indeterminate number.  The tradition has supplied the number derived initially from the gifts which they brought to honor the king of the Jews whose birth the star had announced.  For the writer of the gospel of Matthew is clear in this respect: “On entering the house, [the wise men] saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.  Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”  These foreigners, these Gentiles, come before Jesus acknowledging his kingship and his sovereignty, performing the traditional acts associated with the respect due a king: paying homage and offering gifts.  Nothing is random in this story and nothing is by accident.  The story is rich in symbolic meaning, and is in itself a deep theological statement about who Jesus is believed to be by the early Church community. 

In the first Book of Common Prayer the feast of the Epiphany is also given titled “the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.”  The Gentiles are all those who are not Jews.  For this reason these wise men are foreigners, they are non-Jews who come from the East and to whom the Christ is made known, or manifested.  They represent the nations of the earth.  By their visit the writer of the Gospel of Matthew is not just telling a story, but making a theological point.  The writer is reminding us of the promise made by God through the prophets, that the peoples of the nations shall go up to the Jerusalem, there to worship in harmony the God of heaven and earth:  “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.  Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’  For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 2.2-3)  The Christian tradition quickly picked up this idea, and for this reason the wise men are depicted as they are in so many crib scenes: one white, one asian, and one black – one representative from each of what were believed to be the three races of the earth.  The writer draws on the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures, but can also be seen as looking forward to a future time when “the kingdom of the world [will] become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah.” (Revelation 11.15)  The theological point is this: that God is not just the God of the Jewish people.  God is not just a local deity, but the God of all the world, the God of all peoples and of all nations, and that this God reveals the divine nature in a little baby.

The gifts themselves are almost a creative lesson on the nature of Jesus.  The first two mentioned – gold and frankincense – represent what you would expect for a messiah.  Gold is brought to represent to us that Jesus is a king.  Gold is, in all times and in all places, the symbol of money and power, of renown and prestige.  It is the gift appropriate to a king.  Frankincense is brought, to represent to us that this young child is God.  It is a symbol of dedication, worship and prayer – the dedication, worship and prayer due to God – and it was commonly used in the Temple at Jerusalem.  In bringing this gift of frankincense the wise men acknowledge Jesus as God.  Again, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew is drawing on the inherited tradition of the Jewish people to make a point; in the form of narrative the writer echoes the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…All those from Sheba shall come.  They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.” (Isaiah 60.3, 6b)  But the wise men in the Gospel of Matthew also bring with them another gift, a gift not mentioned by Isaiah or by any of the Hebrew prophets.  They offer to the child myrrh.  Myrrh is not a gift for a king or for a god.  It is a gift for the dead.  Neither gold nor frankincense will appear again in the gospels, but myrrh will.  It is offered to Jesus in wine to alleviate his suffering on the cross (cf. Mark15.23), and it is brought by Nicodemus to wrap the body of Jesus before it is placed in the tomb, according to the  burial custom of the time. (cf. John 19.39-40)  If gold is to represent Jesus’ kingship and frankincense his divinity, then surely myrrh is to represent his humanity, and the suffering and the struggle which is so much a part of human life.  Like the old man Simeon who at the presentation of Jesus hints at Jesus’ suffering by telling Mary that a sword will pierce her soul, so too these kings in their gift of myrrh hint at Jesus’ eventual suffering.  But this is the risk that God takes, and the cost of being so intimately involved in human affairs.

The writer of the Gospel of Matthew is not clear about the number of wise men which visit the Christ child, neither is the writer clear about their names, for that matter.  Their names – Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior – and their number are supplied by later tradition.  But Matthew’s silence on these points make sense, because the object of the story of their visit in the Gospel of Matthew is not to tell us about them, but to tell us about Jesus.  Every aspect of the story has symbolic meaning pointing to the nature and person of Jesus.  The writer wants to tell us clearly who Jesus is, and relates this story of the wise men to do just that.  Using the device of story the writer makes theological points; and therefore, the story serves as almost a kind of creed or catechism, revealing belief statements about God and Jesus: the God of Israel is the God of the whole world; God’s promises are bring fulfilled;  Jesus is king;  Jesus is God; Jesus is a human being, and therefore subject to suffering.  While the stories of the nativity are marvelous stories in themselves, they were not meant to be read primarily as such.  They are a way of using narrative to express a truth too deep for words.  It is helpful to remember that when we approach them.  It is helpful to search out not only what they say, but what they are trying to say; to see the ineffable revelation they seek to manifest.

First Sunday after Christmas: Experience of the Word

Isaiah 61:10-23
Psalm 147:13-21
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1.1-18

 “And the Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) It is this simple statement which separates Christianity from all the other religions of the world: the belief that God became fully a human being. Five simple words – five in the Greek too: “And the Word became flesh.” But if we believe this so strongly why have we spent the most part of the last 2,000 years making the flesh word? Let me try to explain. Christianity is founded not on words or creeds, but on an experience – the experience the first disciples had of Jesus. They kept no journals that we know, nor did they at first feel especially inclined to write down their experience in order to explain it. The oldest writings in the New Testament are not the gospels which tell the story of Jesus’ life, but the letters of Paul. The oldest of these, the first letter to the Thessalonians, was written some twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The oldest of the gospels, the Gospel of Mark, was written about forty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Clearly the Jesus experience did not initially move people to record it. It was only as the new faith expanded and letters were needed for communication, or as time passed and the original witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus began to die, that a need for recording that experience came about. 

 But, here is where the problem begins, because words are always limiting and can rarely capture in fullness the impact of a profound experience. People who are in love know this. Are there really words capable of expressing the experience of being held in the lover’s embrace? Those who have borne children, know this I am sure. Are there words which can adequately name the experience of giving birth? Those who have suffered deeply know this. Are there really words to give voice to the tragedy of watching your world fall apart around you, whether through losing a job or losing a loved one? Joy as well as tragedy are experiences which words cannot completely describe or convey. Words are only pointers to the experience. We use words to somehow capture the experience and to share it with others, but anyone who has had a profound experience, whether of joy or tragedy knows that words always fall short. If we can understand that, then we can begin to understand the situation which the early followers of Jesus faced. In Jesus they encountered something completely new and completely ineffable. In the person of Jesus they encountered the power of God unleashed and available in an unspeakable new way. The Word of God was not only made flesh in the person of Jesus, but in their own lives, in there own selves. The abundance of God’s spirit was poured out on them and new things began to happen. How does anyone have words for that? Well, the reality is that we don’t have words for it. We have language only for what we already know, for what we have already experienced — the Jesus experience had for those early followers no precedent. 

 When people sat down to write the Jesus story they were not writing history the way we would think, they were not writing science books or biographies, like we would today. They were trying to put into words the amazing experience they had had, an experience embedded in their encounter with Jesus. The writers of the gospels chose to write their experience in the form of stories about Jesus: stories which illustrated their experience of a Jesus who brought life out of death, who freed people from the demons which oppressed them, who lived in such a way that through him others experienced the loving generosity and bounty of God. But at the core of those stories was their ultimately indescribable experience. In writing them they hoped these stories would allow people to have their own experience of Jesus. They hoped that these stories would be the vantage point from which people could see that the word had been made flesh and was still living among us. 

 But what did we do? We made the gospels, and the rest of the Bible for that matter, a rule book. We took the writings of those first disciples attempting to put into words their experience of Jesus, and used them not necessarily to encounter Jesus, but all too often as something to beat our brothers and sisters over the head with. Instead of the gospel narratives being the way through which we can experience the Word made flesh in our own day, in our own way and in our own lives, they have become quite literally the Flesh made word. Perhaps that is the progression of events with human beings: we have an intense experience; we attempt to express that experience as best we can; and then as time passes we forget the experience and put more and more emphasis on the description of the experience or worse yet we confuse the description of the experience with the experience itself. Many Christians today put more emphasis on the description of the Jesus experience, that is the Bible exactly as it is written, rather than on the Jesus experience itself. The results of this convey little of the original liberating experience of Jesus. 

 And so we come back to the Gospel of John. Because of today’s gospel reading, Christmas is a good time to reflect on our own experience of Jesus. Christmas gives us the opportunity to open ourselves up again to a deep experience of Jesus. We have all had experiences of Jesus. Everyone of us can remember a moment when our experience of Jesus moved us to say. “Yes, I believe. Yes, I want to follow this Jesus of Nazareth.” The reminder that the Word was made flesh should move us to experience that Word, Jesus, in the daily encounters of our lives, in the day to day fleshiness of our existence. The Bible, holy pictures, and even church services may point the way to Jesus, but they are no substitute for Jesus himself. Once, some Greeks came to Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples and said to him plainly, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” (John 12:20) They had had second-hand accounts of Jesus, but now they wanted to see him for themselves. They did not come wanting to read a story about Jesus, or to look at a picture of Jesus. They wanted an experience of Jesus for themselves. The shepherds likewise, after seeing the heavenly host of angels, did not say to themselves: “Well, we’ll catch the full story tomorrow with the morning gossip.” They said “Let us go now to Bethlehem and this thing that has taken place.” (Luke 2:15) Even the magi came to see Jesus for themselves and offer their gifts. Is anything less expected of us? I don’t think so. We too should long to see and experience Jesus for ourselves. Like I said, second-hand accounts – even the gospels – are not enough. We must go out and search for Jesus in our world, and set aside time to encounter him in our prayer. If we do not, then we become like the person who has read every book on sailing, but has never actually been sailing herself. Is she a sailor? For all her knowledge, she has never had the experience of being on the open sea, an experience which no book can fully convey. 

Like advertisements used to say: “Accept no substitute.” God did not send a book from heaven to reveal the divine love. God sent God’s only begotten Son to reveal that love and to share our human condition. God did not send a book to read or a picture to look at or a service to attend. God sent God’s own Son with whom we can have a relationship, whom we can know, whom we can experience. As Christians we must be committed to knowing Jesus, not just knowing about Jesus. The Word became flesh for our salvation, let us not make the flesh word for our convenience.

Christmas: Listening to the Voices

Isaiah 9.2-7

Psalm 96

Titus 2.11-14

Luke 2.1-20

Perhaps it is because there is a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas, or perhaps it has been the recent rains, but as I thought about preaching tonight a line from one of my favourite poets – Edna St. Vincent Millay – returned to me over and over: “…the rain is full of ghosts tonight that tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply.”  And if tonight is not exactly full of ghosts, it is most certainly full of voices – voices that tap and sigh upon the glass of our spirits and listen for reply.  It is a night full of demands and requests, of voices issuing commands, making invitations, singing praises; voices of emperors and of angels, of wanderers and of shepherds.  The night carries with it the booming voice of power and the silent voice of the heart.  All of them within the context of this one magical and mysterious night, the night when earth and heaven meet and the Word is made flesh.  On this night it is God seems almost desperate to get our attention.  In the night – in the dark – when our vision is compromised and our hearing sharpened, it is the voices which we hear most clearly; it is often when the presence of God is most keenly felt.  The dark almost seems to prepare us to listen to God, and sometimes to attempt to make a response.  Diane Reiners was  a volunteer at St. Paul’s Chapel – the church closest to Ground Zero in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11.  With others, she provided hospitality and care for those still working in the rubble and debris of the World Trade Center.  In an interview at the time, she said, “We will generally have about 600 people come through each night.  The night visitors are quieter, they tend to come in alone or in pairs.  Conversations about religion, about faith and God, seem more frequent at night.”

So we come together tonight, in the dark, to hear the voices once again: the voice of the great Emperor Augustus that makes itself heard all the way from Rome even to the small village of Nazareth in far away Judea; the voice of Joseph seeking a place to stay for himself and his pregnant wife, also the responding voices of inhospitality; the terrified yet determined voices of the shepherds; the heavenly voices of the angels, telling the birth of the Christ, singing the praises of God and announcing peace: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!” (Luke 2.14); the unspoken voice of Mary who “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2.19); the eternal voice of God proclaiming the divine word in an astonishing way – in the person of a new-born baby.  Tonight these voices all make claims on us.  They all “tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply.”  And they come in the dark, so perhaps we can listen just a little more carefully.  They come in the middle of the night, so perhaps we can engage with them with fewer distractions, a little less protected, a little more vulnerable.  Perhaps in the quiet and dark of the night we can listen to them afresh and hear the good news in a new way, an inspiring way; a way which will carry a message for us; a way which move us to make a reply.

To each of us different voices will speak, different parts of the story will be relevant, and reveal for us new things.  Some days ago someone told me that for the first time she realized that Jesus’ birth in the stable was a real birth, with all the pain, mess and blood which a real birth entails.  For her, the voice of the Christmas story was the voice of Mary crying out in the pain of childbirth; the voice of the undoubted midwife who must have been there, encouraging Mary to continue pushing, as she wiped the dirt and sweat from Mary’s brow.  In a sense, this was her good news for Christmas, the deep realisation that the Son of God became a real flesh and blood human being, and came into the world in a real flesh and blood way.  Whose is the voice that speaks to you this Christmas?  Augustus, Joseph, the shepherds, the angels, Mary?  Whose is that voice which springs to you from the story?  In the dark of the night, whose voice comes to the sharpened ears of your spirit, tapping and sighing on the glass?  Whose is the voice that carries for you the good news of Christmas and the incarnation?  In the bustle – even chaos – we have created around the the celebration of Christmas, is there enough night, enough dark, enough quiet to hear any voices at all?  If we are to listen to the voices of the Christmas story, then we must be willing to tune our ears and hearts – because they will not yell at us – willing to live with the story, willing to carry it with us in the depths of our being in such a way so that we are able to really hear the voices, and hear them speaking to our lives and our experience

In the quiet and dark of the night the voices of the Christmas story speak to us powerfully, but they also “listen for reply.”  The message they bring to us demands from us a reply, a response.  They ask that their words be vindicated by our own illumination and conversion.  I suppose the voice that speaks most clearly and deeply to me in the Christmas story this year is the voice of the angel to the shepherds: “Do not be afraid.”  I am reminded that every time angels appear in the New Testament they always say these words first: “Do not be afraid.”  Certainly this past year has brought much to make us fearful and anxious.  Increasing divisions in our country, continuing economic difficulties and uncertainty; and of course, the terrible murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School have again disturbingly reminded us how unspeakable violence and cruelty can make itself known even in the most peaceful of places, even in the most unexpected of circumstances.  But I still hear the angels say: “Do not fear, see – I am bringing you good news of great joy.”  I am not always sure exactly how that good news will manifest itself, but I am convinced that as individuals and as communities our response is to be one of trust.  Our reply to the circumstances of our lives and of our world must not twist us into a hopeless, frightened little people, but draw us closer in trust to the God who sends angels to shepherds with astonishing news.  My response to the Christmas voices that speak to me this Christmas season must be one of trust – to trust and to keep trusting; and one of hope, hope in the God who makes light to shine in the darkness. The voices of the Christmas story require of those who hear them a response, and each of us must make the response which our own spirit calls us to make.

If we read and re-read the Christmas story without paying heed in a deep and creative way to what its voices are saying to us, the story will become for us just another story among the myriad of stories which we know; simply a part of our inherited customs to be taken out, dusted off, read once a year, then returned to its place of distant honour.  It will cease to be for us a living word with the power to  challenge and transform lives.  But if we take it seriously, its voices will not let us rest.  Like the ghosts in Millay’s poem those voices will haunt us, in the best sense of the word.  They will continually and persistently come to us.  In the night, the dark, the quiet, they will “tap and sigh upon the glass” with their message and their invitation.  They will invite us to get caught up in the message that they bring, they will invite us to make a response – a reply – which draws us closer to the Great Voice, the one who spoke all things into being.  Carry the story and its voices around with you and allow its voices to haunt you.  Find the voice in the story speaking to you.  Allow a place of darkness and quiet for its power and challenge to come rushing to you.  So that you may make your reply, and with the shepherds glorify and praise God for all you have heard and seen, for all that has been told you. (cf. Luke 2.20) 

Fourth Sunday of Advent: "...So Ancient and So New"

Micah 5:2-5a

Canticle 15: Magnificat

Hebrews 10:5-10

Luke 1:39-45

Throughout Advent we have been considering how by engaging with the past, how by looking back, we can not only make sense of our present but also find ways and means into the future.  In large part, this is a process of conscious contemplation, of intentional listening to the voices of peoples and situations that have gone before.  It is a process which allows us to hear echoes of past experiences in our own, and thus to discern meaning out of our experiences, to discover something meaningful we can say in order to address our own time and circumstances, or to express what believe to be most true.  As we contemplate and amplify what we have inherited of the past, we add our lives and experience into the stream of history; and as Christians, we believe, into the ongoing stream of God’s revelation.

The Book of Micah presents us with such a situation.  The prophet Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah; both lived in the latter part of the 8^th century BC.  Their careers corresponded to a period when both the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were coming under increasing pressure from the aggressive and expanding Assyrian empire which would eventually conquer them both.  However, only the first three chapters of Micah are specifically from that period.  Most scholars believe that the last three chapters of the book were actually set down within the context of the Babylonian exile, the Jews eventual return from captivity and the rebuilding of the Temple – some 300 years after Assyria’s rise.  So, as the Jews faced a new crisis in the form of the Babylonian Empire they re-worked and expanded the prophecies of Micah to reflect their contemporary circumstances.  Those living under the pressure of Babylon discerned echoes of their experiences in the voices of their ancestors living under the pressure of Assyria.  They discerned echoes of those voices, and found a language of hope, words enabling them to remain faithful to God’s promise: “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days….[H]is kindred shall return to the people of Israel…and he shall be the one of peace.” (cf. Micah 5:2-5a)  Certainly God’s promise in the midst of the Assyrians, must be the same as in midst of the Babylonians, and so echoes of the past brought the Jewish people more deeply into the contining unfolding narrative of God’s salvation and redemption.

This dynamic of listening to echoes of the past was not lost among the early Christians, and Luke particularly makes ample use of it as he relates the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.  The figures of Elizabeth and Zechariah, the parents of John the Baptist, are figures created out of the collective memory of Judaism: the faithful and dutiful older, barren couple – think Abraham and Sarah, or less well-known Elkanah and Hannah, the parents of the prophet Samuel who – not coincidentally like John the Baptist – prepared the way for a king.  Then the there is the Magnificat – the Song of Mary – which is today’s gradual and which the choir so beautifully sang.  It finds its inspiration in Hannah’s prayer from the first book of Samuel in which she exults the Lord for having blessed her with a child, and vindicated her in the face of those who lorded over her their success and strength: “My heart exults in the Lord,” she cries, “my strength is exalted in my God….The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength.  Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil….The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts.  He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.” (1 Samuel 2:1, 4-5, 7-8)  With these words and images – and many others – the early Christians listened to the echoes of the past so as to make sense of God’s revelation in Jesus.  In God’s choosing Mary in her lowliness, they heard echoes of how God had always lifted up the poor, the downtrodden and the enslaved.  In God’s granting a child to Elizabeth and Zechariah they heard echoes of how God had in the past brought about surprising, unexpected events.  In God’s raising John the Baptist as herald and fore-runner of the Messiah, they heard echoes of all those in the past who had proclaimed and awaited God’s revelations.  Like the later editors of the book of Micah, those first Christians listened to and amplified the echoes coming through from the inherited tradition, carrying them into the present conversation about what God might be doing.  As they did so they experienced their lives, the events of their present, as linked into the big picture, the overriding narrative of redemption, God’s story of salvation for humanity.

One of the pitfalls of modern living is how dis-jointed we are, not just from our past but from so much of the world around us.  More than ever we seem to live episodic lives – that is to say, that so many of us often experience our life as series of episodes rather than a cohesive narrative, rather than seeing the events of our life as directed to a particular end or purpose.  Yet, our Christian faith and inheritance would teach us otherwise.  Our lives are not simply a series of disjointed, disconnected episodes, they are part of the story God is trying to tell.  It is God’s story we discern as we read the Scriptures year in and year out, and it is God’s story we seek to join as we as we gather week by week to worship, and as we direct our homes, families and relationships according to certain principles.  Still we are not always good at listening carefully and sensitively to the echoes of the past, the voices and actions of our ancestors in the faith which help us to tell God’s story.  But if our faith is to have any meaning at all, we must learn to better hone our ears and our senses, because if we do not we may find ourselves unknowingly basing our religious and spiritual lives simply on our own particular, idiosyncratic preferences or prejudices.  As we move through our lives as individuals and as a church we must always be willing to ask if we are still telling the old, old story, God’s story, albeit amplified according to our present experience.  This is what it means for Anglicans that we are grounded in Tradition, Scripture and Reason.  Scripture and Tradition bear for us the echoes of our shared experience as the Christian famly, and it is Reason which allows to make sense of that inheritance in ways still consistent with it, while at the same time being alive, present and active.  Without these, our faith becomes either an ananchronistic fossil or something we invent with every passing change, a series of disjointed, personalized episodes.

We sometimes think that all this talk we Anglicans – we Episcopalians – have about Scripture, Tradition and Reason is some new-fangled thing we made up.  Hardly true.  It’s simply the Anglican way of explaining how we listen to and engage with our past – its voices and echoes.  The Jews did it in their own way as they tried to make sense of the vicissitudes and upheavals attendant on the political scene of their day.  And the early Christians did it too as they tried to understand the revelation of Jesus within the wider of narrative of salvation history, a history they had inherited and of which they saw themselves a part.  At the heart of this engagement is the reality that we are part of God’s unfolding plan, God’s ungoing story, and that  each generation links itself to it by engaging with the past while moving into the future.  St Hippo Augustine of Hippo in describing his conversion to Christianity and to the love of God prayed: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!”  What is true of God is true of God’s story – so ancient and so new.  As we prepare ourselves to tell the old story of Christmas, how are we engaging with its voices and echoes in order to say something about God’s continuing revelation in the present?  How are we allowing its truths to carry us into the future?  How are seeing our lives as a part of God’s unfolding narrative, God’s story – ever ancient and ever new.

Third Sunday of Advent: "...and the Rich Must Lie Down with the Poor"

Zephaniah 3:14-20

Canticle 10

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:7-18

At one time or other, we have all heard someone make a call for a return to the basics.  It is often a cry that laments the present state of things in favor of some past, prettily clothed in nostalgia.  In our day it is all too often the cry of some religious or social conservatives, and which often hearkens back only so far as the time of their childhood.  It is a call usually to a very narrow understanding of personal morality, and while posed as a challenge, whether to individuals or society generally, it is actually a desire for facile comfort – comfort in the midst of change, comfort in the midst of the unknown, comfort in the midst of the stranger. 

Yet the call for a re-engagement with the basics is not a bad thing in and of itself, especially if we are realistic about what those basics are, especially if are prepared to be challenged by their significance and sometimes surprising ramifications.  Take for example, the book of Deuteronomy in which God says, “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor…Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’ ” (Deuteronomy 15:7, 11)  As Christians, one can’t get any more basic than Torah, God’s covenant with the Jews, our ancestors in faith.  The message is similar in the prophets: “Is not this the fast that I choose?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isaiah 58:6a, 7)  Or, “this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49  The ethical demands here are far from privatized, far from nostalgic.  They challenged the Hebrews into new ways of understanding and contextualizing their relationship with God, their responsibilities to others.

John the Baptist is trying to recapture this vision.  In the wilderness he is making a call for a return to the basics – yes, but there is nothing of nostalgia or privatized morality.  The Gospels, justly or not, present a Judaism losing vitality; a Judaism in which people justified themselves not by what they did or how they lived, but by claiming an ontological connection with the past, for example through a genealogical relationship to the patriarchs: “We have Abraham as our ancestor.” (Luke 3:8)  Rather, John reminds them of the covenant.  He calls them back to the basics of God’s will and purposes expressed in the law and the prophets:  “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” (Luke 3:11)  He calls the people not to some idealized past, but the living truth of God’s law of justice and compassion, and to the making of it a present reality among them.  This too was in large part the message of Jesus and which he called – as I have often said – the kingdom of God.  He called people to the basics, and not only to the basics of the law, but to the very basics of our human existence – the basic reality that we cannot control everything, the basic reality that worrying or fretting changes nothing, the basic reality of our utter dependence on God, the basic reality that little of we think is ours really is ours: “…do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:34); “Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” (Matthew 5:42)  Jesus’ call to basics, like John’s, was not just a lament for a bygone era, but a challenge to live at a more human level, to live with more compassion and understanding, to live more authentically.

When we really begin to ponder on the basics of life, we recognize how little we can control and how much of what we receive is at the hands of others or of God, or both.  Those of us who are more or less comfortably well-off can hide from that reality more easily.  We can distract ourselves by our possessions or our wherewithal to make plans and follow them through; but have real tragedy or disaster come our way, and we realize how much we are at the whim of things.  They level the playing field, unmasking the lies we tell ourselves about self-sufficiency, about the power we have over the events of our lives.  And while a simplistic call to basics is about controlling things according to our comfort zone, the scriptural call to basics is about giving up that false sense of control or superiority, recognizing how much we are all of us in the same boat in one way or another, recognizing our own poverty in any of its many forms.

There is little doubt that for many of us, the poor and issues of poverty make us feel just a little uncomfortable.  It’s more than just guilt, but rather the hint they may suggest that “there but for the grace of God, go I” or we.  In part, for this reason in so many cultures and among so many people the poor are ignored or demonized (we used to do this with the sick as well, but that’s perhaps another sermon for another time).  The call to the basics of Torah, of the prophets, of John the Baptist and of Jesus confronts us with the reality of the poor and the downtrodden, and the truth that they are not separate from us:  “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:19)  A return to the basics in this respect, can carry us into the a future of living more honestly, can point out the many little ways we hide from, ignore or disguise the precariousness of our existence; and can make us more compassionate, more willing to see ourselves in the other.  A return to the basics, in this respect, challenges us to engage with our basic, shared humanity regardless of anything else.  It allows us to the see the poor and disadvantaged not as other, but as us, and demands that we make a difference in their situation; which could be ours but for grace or luck.

The future God plans for us, and envisions for the human family is enshrined in much of  the ethical teaching of Torah and in the pronouncements of the prophets.  Both John the Baptist and Jesus emphasized this aspect of the Jewish tradition, this particular concern for the poor and preoccupation with the most vulnerable in society.  It is basic to anything we may want to say about God, basic to any engagement with the Gospel.  When people cry out for a return to the basics, I wish they would think about this – rather than some cozy view of the 1950s.  I wish they would allow themselves to be challenged by the reality of our basic and shared humanity, seeing themselves in the poor and disregarded, and especially in Advent when we not only prepare ourselves to celebrate Christmas, but when we look to and confront the truth that, as an old song says:

“The time it will come when our Saviour on earth

   “And the world will agree with one voice…

“Saints, Angels and men, Hallelujahs will sing,

   “And the rich must lie down with the poor.”