The story of the three wise men that we have today from Matthew, is strange.  Three nameless travelers follow a star to kneel before the child Jesus.  There is no way around the strangeness.  We variously have called these characters “the wise men,” or the “three kings,” or the “magi (the magicians).”  The last title is closest to the original.

In Matthew’s Gospel three strange visitors “appear” in Jerusalem.  The details of their visit are shadowy, we know they come from the East.  We know they have status.  These magicians must also be astrologers, for they have noticed a new star in their Western horizon and have followed its appearance.  Somehow though, they got a bit lost along the way…
The three magicians, seemingly used to government contracting, head to the royal authority in the region.  Herod the Great, Herod I, ruled as a client king for Rome in Jerusalem, and these three men come knocking on the halls of power.  They seem to know that a king has been born, which makes, Herod who is perfectly happy reigning as king, currently reigning as king, very nervous.  New candidates tend to make incumbents nervous.  Herod checking in with his own paid consultants, identifies Bethlehem as the city of coming anointed one, the Messiah’s portended birthplace.

You might notice I keep referring to the Magi, the wise men, the three kings, as “consultants.”  Maybe this is because I find myself living in a town where it seems more people contract or consult for the government than actually work in the government.  Probably though, I have just been watching too much of the Television show MadMen.  Now do not despair.  I worked for awhile trying to get a joke that brought together the titles “Wisemen” and “MadMen”, but it never quite worked.  So I will spare you.

But the past few months I have been captivated by the TV show MadMen, and luckily I can now stream the first several seasons.  If you don’t know MadMen, it is a primetime TV drama that centers around consultants, specifically a Madison Avenue Advertising agency Adman: Don Draper.  MadMen’s drama plays out in the usual ways: Don trips through seedy romantic relationships. The plot develops around campaigns for big name clients.  The whole show is saturated with the glamour of New York.  The twist of MadMen is that, unlike most of our TV shows which are set in the modern day, Don does not work on today’s Madison Avenue.  The MadMen universe is set in the 1960s, and the thrust, the energy of the show is a sort of “my-how-times-have-changed” effect.

Often this is played for a comedy.  As regularly as possible we hear what people earn in salary: $40 week is middle class pay.  But that is okay because apartments rent in Manhattan for a couple hundred dollars a month, and a cup of coffee costs a nickel. (My how times have changed).  Pregnant women regularly swill cocktails and smoke.  Everyone smokes.  (My how times have changed).
Other “my-how-times-have-changed” moments play around questions of justice.  Every man in the office works behind a door, and every woman, save one plucky Peggy Olsen, works in front of a door.  All the women do is answer phones, type, get drinks for the men.  The one black man in the office operates the elevator.  No one picks up on the clues that the art director is gay, not even his wife.

Part of the “my-how-times-have-changed” thrust of MadMen is that here, in the advertising offices that the fictional MadMen office represents, a major revolution took place.  You see the times they were a-changin’ in the 1960s on Madison Avenue, and in many ways the people that worked there, they helped those times change.  Regularly on MadMen the advertising agents consider how the new fields of psychology and sociology can help them sell their product.  They seek to push consumers to see how purchasing a product or service is in their “self-interest.”  Don Draper convinces Lucky Strike cigarettes that they do not need to produce the “best cigarettes” or the healthiest cigarettes, or have better filters.  They need to catch the sense of pleasure that the consumer has in imagining herself satisfied by purchasing and using the product.  “Luckies are toasted.”  (All cigarettes at the time were “toasted” but something about the word brings images of satisfaction to the consumer.)

The admen of Madmen were busy in the 60s, as they are busy today, polishing a star.  “Follow this star, the star of self-interest.  Buy the product. Consume the service.  You will be satisfied.”  This is the message of advertising.  Madison avenue still wants you to follow that star.  It is a very old star, perhaps one of the oldest, the star of self-interest and consumption.  The star of self-image.

Lest we think this was only a problem in the time of MadMen, we have an article that my mother sent me about the religious neural impulses caused by iPads.  My mom and I are Apple devotees, and so when scientists began

claiming that Apple’s iPad advertising caused the same neurons to fire in the brains of Apple consumers as icons and religious images caused in the brain pathways of religious followers, we were not that surprised.  The image of the satisfied consumer, the star of self image can exert powerful influence.
I wonder if that star, that old star, is what distracted the magi, the wise men, on their road to see the Christ child.  These mystical consultants were used to working with kings.  I wonder if the star above Herod’s palace in Jerusalem appeared more familiar that night.  That star had led them before to influence, to comfort and power.  I wonder if that star caused the detour to Herod’s throne-room.

Something about where that old star had led them, it did not seem right.  The magi are wise enough to know that when they have arrived at Herod’s palace, they have not really arrived.  My family always laughs at those GPS systems that come in rental cars, the ones that tell you, “you have arrived.”  Somehow you know you really haven’t.  Something nags at the magi.  Another star beckons.
Following the Star of Jesus the Messiah takes them to an unexpected place.  They kneel not in a throne room, but in a much humbler home.  Their opulent gifts seem out of place in the ramshackle Bethlehem dwelling.  But something happens to the wise men, as they kneel before the baby under that unexpected star.  Some change is wrought.  Though Herod has asked them to return to his palace, to share the location of the competing candidate, they choose to return “by another road.”

These strange men are, in Matthew’s Gospel, the first converts.  I debated using that word “convert.”  There is another sermon to be preached about the magi, Matthew, and interfaith dialogue, because these pagan astronomers do not walk away reciting the Nicene Creed.  They might do something like that in John’s Gospel, but Matthew is content that their conversion be a conversion of life.  Their religious ideology to us is unknown, but encountering God in Christ caused them to live differently.  They walk away by another road.

I don’t know if you have heard about a billboard that was put up by St. Matthew’s Anglican Church this Advent in Auckland, New Zealand.  The billboard has received a lot of international attention.  In many ways the billboard portrait of Mary fits our traditional picture.  Mary is surrounded with just enough flowing green and red robe to evoke the Renaissance paintings.  She is blonde, and has that certain otherworldly glow.  In many ways the billboard is like all of the other images we have of Mary.  But this billboard is different.  Mary’s eyes are scared and she covers her mouth with one hand.  In the other hand, she holds a home pregnancy test, with two little blue lines.

The image had caused no small amount of ire from traditionalists, but the vicar of St. Matthew’s defends the work, as an invitation, an invitation to reconsider the story of Mary, the story we hear today.

From what we know, Mary was young: 12 to 14.  Mary was still unmarried, though things were going well with Joe, the carpenter.  Mary was poor.  This was an inopportune time to find out she was pregnant.  Luke’s version, written 90-100 years after the fact, probably, I am guessing, improves on the situation.  The Gospel writer wasn’t there, recording the conversation verbatim.  St. Luke was not writing history, the way we think of history.  Luke’s genre was Gospel, “Good News,” so we should not be surprised if he has cleaned the story up a bit.  It should surprise no one in Washington to hear that the news, even the Good News, always comes with a little bit of spin.

When you read the Bible, I really encourage you to take your time.  Any student of the Bible, like any student of literature, or history, or psychology knows that you have to listen as much for what is NOT said, as for what is said.  Today’s Gospel story, the story of Mary, is a great example.  If you want the full story, you have to pause and listen for what is being said between the lines:

And the angel came to her and said “Greetings favored one!  The Lord is with you.”  But she was much perplexed by his words, and wondered what sort of greeting this might be.

PAUSE

Remember, Mary is 12 or 13.  How many 12 or 13 year old girls do you know?  How seriously do they take greetings?  How seriously do they take ANYTHING?  I used to work summer camps largely with early teenagers.  Twelve and thirteen year old girls have a great deal of perplexity, a great deal of wonder, and they come with a great deal of eye-rolling.

But what the Angel tells her next is the frightening part.  The billboard has her fear right.  She will conceive and bear a son.  Mary’s question: “How Can this be?”

PAUSE

Don’t mistake it, this story in many ways is a story of loss.  The angel’s announcement, the awareness of her unplanned pregnancy, it changes the game.  Mary had it planned out.  She would marry Joseph.  They would by that condo in Nazareth; he made pretty good money after all.  Maybe in a couple of years they would have a couple of kids.  The schools were pretty good in the neighborhood.  I’m reading in between the lines here, but you have to a bit.  Mary would have had plans for her life.  She was a bride-to-be.  Mary, had some plans.  And Mary had to lay those plans down.  There was a moment, even if it was only a moment, recorded even by Luke, when the Incarnation did not seem like good news to Mary.

Mary’s question is so often our question when faced with loss: “How can this be?”

“How can this be?” is the question of parents who hear their child has been born with severe autism.

“How can this be?”  is the question of the worker who is “downsized” after twenty years service to a business.

“How can this be?” is the question of the high school senior who had always planned to go to her dream college, and receives a letter that begins “we regret to inform you.”

“How can this be?” is a very human question, the question so many of us ask when we face loss in our lives.

BUT the story does not end there.

The story does not end with loss.  In fact, the loss is only a moment, an important moment, a game-changing moment, but only a moment.  The words of the Angel ring true.  “Nothing is impossible with God.”  If you take anything home this Advent.  If you take anything home from church ever, let it be the words of the angel: “nothing is impossible with God.”

Still I wonder how long it took Mary to respond.  It only takes until the next sentence in Luke’s Gospel, but I doubt it was ACTUALLY that instantaneous.  The loss of a dream takes time to accept.  I wonder how many minutes, days, weeks, even months, it took Mary.  I wonder how long it took Mary to utter her line, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

The Good News, for us, is that Mary does utter her line.  Mary becomes a paradigm for Christians facing the loss of their dreams.  Mary is known, especially in the Eastern Church, as the God-bearer, the Theotokos.  Mary reminds us to bear with God, to bear with God even through the pain of loss.  Mary becomes the paradigm of looking for God’s good news, even when your own life is not going as planned.  The image of Mary on that billboard in New Zealand invites us to see this side of Mary, an important side for all of us who share the human condition, a condition that often comes with the frustration of our dreams, the perplexity of grief and loss.

Next week we will celebrate the birth of Christ, the one who comes into the world, but that celebration would be impossible without Mary’s acceptance, without Mary’s decision to bear with God through the confusing and frustrating.

I want to finish this sermon by reading a few lines from a poem by John of the Cross, who I think captures Mary and Advent so well:

If you want

the Virgin will come walking down the road

pregnant with the holy,

and say,

“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,

my time is so close.”

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us

is the midwife of God, each of us.

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is

His beloved servant

never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking

down the street pregnant

with Light and sing …

 If you want.

May God be with you as God was with Mary.  May God help you bear through the difficulties of life.  May God be with you as you prepare for God’s coming into your life.  Amen.

I quibble with words, because words are important.  Exploitation is bad to, but in this teaching, Paul wants us to avoid this GRASPING.  The word we’ve just re-translated from Greek is harpadzo, it is the root for our word “Harpy,” those mythical creatures with great grasping claws.  The imagery the word conjures is strong, and sadly, a significant part of so many lives.  Grasping, always grasping.

You can read grasping in both of our other lessons this morning.  Jesus is before the elders and the priests in the temple, and they are grasping.  Jesus, and John the Baptist before him, have challenged their authority.  The priests and elders are heavily invested in representing God.  That’s their schtick, and these two country bumpkins, John and Jesus, are unwelcome competition.  John, at this point, has already been taken care of: Herod has beheaded him.  The temple authorities are now grasping after Jesus, and for now, with his clever stories he eludes their grasp for control.

Moses’ grasping at the waters of Meribah is a bit more subtle.  We can understand why wandering in the desert without water could make the Israelites grumpy.  What we don’t read in this text is what this incident means for Moses.  This is one of those moments in scripture where you know there is more to the story, more to the tradition then ended up on the page.  In Deuteronomy chapter 32 we hear of the death of Moses.  He is standing on Mount Horeb, he can see the promised land, but he is not permitted to enter because he “broke faith” at Meribah.  Moses plea, his grasping for God’s help in response to the people’s grumbling and murmuring, is a bigger deal than it seems on our page.  But, according to tradition, Moses grasped too much here, and thus he never enters the promised land.

Grasping proves problematic for the prophets and priests, and it iss problematic today.   There is a growing sense that everything that happens on the hill has to do with election cycles, with political games, with maintaining or achieving office, with grasping.  At my most cynical, I can think this town, Washington, is full of a bunch of Ron Burgandy’s, the Will Farrell character in Anchorman: folks that run around declaring, “I’m kind of a big deal.  People know me.”

We see grasping for power in this town.  We see grasping for money on Wall Street.  We watch grasping for fame on reality TV.  This is a culture infused with grasping.  Grasping, it seems, is a way of life: in our postmodern culture seeks to define us by what we can purchase, the items and services that fall within our economic grasp.

I’ll tell you the one that gets me: the next Apple product.  I can’t tell you how often I check my cell phone contract so that I know the DAY I will be eligible to upgrade to the latest iPhone.  I know there are some other Apple junkies out there.

But there is danger, danger in this cultural obsession with grasping.  If we give in to the scripts, if we become defined by our title, position, car, street address, we are in great danger of missing the point of it all.  And we all do it.  We all have moments where the grasping energy washes over us.

But there is another word for us in Paul’s letter, a better word, a word that is even well translated by the NRSV.  That word, in Greek is “Kenosis” or in the translation “emptied himself.”  There is a tension in Paul’s letter between “grasping” and “emptying oneself.”  Paul sees life basically as a tension between those two options: constant grasping, or constant self emptying.

This is the remedy for all that grasping, it is the incredibly counter-intuitive counter-cultural mind of Christ that Paul hopes will be in us.  Kenosis, self emptying, is not easy.  Self-emptying is not well rewarded with money, influence, or prestige.  All of those things we are taught to grasp after, taught will make us successful and happy, they do not come from self-emptying.  Yet Paul wishes self-emptying upon us.

Henri Nouwen captured this sense of kenosis, this sense of the self-emptying Christian way for our times perhaps better than anyone I know.  He called the Christian path a journey of “downward mobility.”  Those very words are so counter to our culture: “downward mobility.”  I am sure many of you are familiar with Nouwen’s work, but for those who are not:  Henri Nouwen was a famous Roman Catholic priest and professor of theology at Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale.  He left his high profile position as one of the sought after theologians in the Ivy League because, though he had reached the apex of his field, he did not feel fulfilled.

Nouwen went on a sojourn through Latin America, thinking he would give his life in service to the poor, but he could not force a sense of call in the slums of South America.  When he returned to the US, he remembered invitation to come live at the L’Arche community a very strange living situation set up by Roman Catholic priests and lay people.  Able-bodied and disabled people share life together, spending time in meals and at prayer, living side by side.  The group started in France and has grown into an international organization.  We actually have a couple of L’Arche houses here in the DC Metro area.

Henri spoke and wrote often of his first months with the folks at L’Arche.  He spoke of his time with Adam, a young man who was so disabled that he could not speak, or get himself out of bed, bathe himself, dress himself.  Henri wrote about how terrified he was during his first weeks with Adam, how frightened he was that at any moment while Henri was trying to lift or dress the fully grown man, he might errupt in an epileptic seizure.  He talked about the patience required to sit with Adam over the course of the hour it would take him to eat his meals.  Nouwen wrote about how it got easier, about how eventually the anxiety faded, the need to get everything right fell away.

I want to read you a couple of quotes from a speech Henri Nouwen gave, where he talks about Adam:

“Adam taught me a lot about God’s love in a very concrete way. First of all, he taught me that being is more important than doing, that God wants me to be with God and not to do all sorts of things to prove that I’m valuable. My whole life had been doing, doing, doing, so people would finally recognize that I was okay. I’m such a driven person who wants to do thousands and thousands of things so that I can somehow finally show that I’m a worthwhile being. People say, “Henri, you’re okay.” Here I was with Adam and Adam said, “I don’t care what you do as long as you will be with me.” It wasn’t easy just to be with Adam. It isn’t easy to simply be with a person without accomplishing much.”

After months with Adam Nouwen wrote of a particular moment when he “suddenly realized that Adam was not just a disabled person, less human than me or other people. He was a fully human being, so fully human that God even chose him to become the instrument of God’s love. He was so vulnerable, so weak, so empty, that he became just heart, the heart where God wanted to dwell, where God wanted to stay and where God wanted to speak to those who came close to God’s vulnerable heart. Adam was a full human being, not half human or less human. I discovered that. Suddenly I understood what I had heard in Latin America about the preferential option for the poor. Indeed, God loves the poor and God loves Adam very specially. God wanted to dwell in his broken person so that God could speak from that vulnerability into the world of strength, and call people to become vulnerable.”

That is Kenosis, that is self-emptying.  Henri Nouwen learned it from Adam, and shared it with us.

Now, I am not declaring that to know God, to have the mind of Christ, you have to give up your job and move to L’Arche or Latin America.  That may not be your call, but I do not want to exclude the possibility either. God needs self emptying doctors, self emptying lawyer, self emptying janitors and teachers and stay at home moms.

What I can say is that I think some of the best teachers we have for the spiritual life are those who are excluded from the grasping of our world.  I hope you have had some teachers.  I hope you have caught glimpses, perhaps even practiced this self-emptying way.  If you need a teacher, let’s talk.  I can introduce you to some children in Anacostia at Ferebee hope, or some folks who sleep out on the streets of Washington.  You might even go visit L’Arche up in Adams Morgan.  I am with Paul, in my limited experience I think that this self-emptying leads us to the mind, and to the heart of Christ.  All our grasping won’t get us there.  We have to let go.

For liturgical Christians, the lectionary cycle is important.  That both seminary and the lectionary last for three years make sense.  As Dr. Kate Sondregger would say, it is “fitting.”  Leaving aside arguments about how the lectionary is shaped.  Sacramentally at least, during these three years we touch elements of the whole Bible, the whole story.

My first year of seminary, I went with my Hebrew class down to Aggudis Achim, the synagogue down South of Quaker Lane, for the celebration of Simchat Torah.  The Jewish lectionary actually reads through the entire Torah in a year, and the feast day marks the end of the cycle.  Because the liturgical Torah is an actual scroll, the community has to re-wrap the whole story at the end.  I am not sure whether Aggudis Achim follows custom, or if the liturgy that evening had a touch of Rabbi Jack Moline flare, but I was incredibly moved by what I saw.

Slowly, carefully, Rabbi Moline and helpers unwrapped the entire Torah, passing in a circle around the room.  Each of us carefully held the lambskin between our thumb and pointer fingers as the whole assembly was encircled by the text.  As teenagers who had just finished their bar and bat mitzvah’s read key passages, I looked around the room.  We were literally surrounded by sacred story.

This celebration expresses the hope of those of us who undergo the lectionary cycle.  We hope to be surrounded by the text.  The year in and year out repetition slowly forms us.  The lectionary is an investment in formation.  The lectionary shapes the way we see the world.  The lectionary helps us to “grow up into the full stature of Christ” as our reading from Ephesians has it today.  In the words of Ed Kilmartin, the Jesuit theologian, it helps our autobiography look more and more like the biography of Christ.

This shaping is important when an interruption occurs.  We hear this announcement from St. Mark’s Gospel, “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ” with ears shaped by the whole text, by the whole story.  We cannot hear this “Good News of Jesus Christ” in a simplistic way.  We know the nuances.

Knowing the nuances becomes important for Christians who are shaped and formed by sacred story.  The interruption of Good News cannot be seen simplistically.  In the last 13 hours or so, we have begun to hear a piece of Good News that has been jarring.  The immediate reception of the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden, the crowds that gathered last night around the White House, seems premature to me.   Bin Laden’s death in some ways is good news, but in others, like any death, it is tragic.  Unexamined rejoicing can be dangerous.  Uninformed celebration could take a quick turn to Islamophobia.  How much better would it have been if Bin Laden had stood trial in the Hague?  If the world had had the opportunity to deal justly and humanely with a criminal who had committed such inhuman acts, there would be no opportunity for Bin Laden to be seen as a martyr.

Good News, for Christians, often requires discernment.  Even, and perhaps especially when the Good News seems obvious.  That first line from Mark’s Gospel gives us a hint.  The word “Good News” appears in the genitive.  It is inextricably linked to the words that follow: Jesus Christ.”  For Christians good news always belongs to Christ.  The Christian task is to discern Christ in the good news.

In the weeks and years to come, I believe those of us in Christian leadership face an important task.  Lest our society declare some misguided idea about victory over Islam as the Good News today, we are tasked with discernment.  Where can we see the good news in Islam?  As Christians, shaped by our own texts, how can we look for and affirm the Gospel, the good news, in the faithful lives of our Muslim sisters and brothers?  Failure to do so, seems to me a kind of atheism, a denial of God’s presence in the lives of others.

We are coming to the end of the seminary year, and many of us are facing some Good News.  Whether we are starting professional ministry , a summer of CPE, or a sabbatical, whether the good news comes as we cross international borders.  Our work, shaped by the whole Christian story, is to discern how our good news is of Christ.  New beginnings are an invitation to find the “of Christ” in our “Good News” to discern the Christ alive in our lives.

Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich., celebrated the news of the death of Bin Laden. (Image from nytimes.com)

The stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances often involve confusion.  The disciples just don’t get what has happened.  Peter keeps needing reminding that this guy is the resurrected Lord.  Mary Magdalene confuses Jesus for the gardener.  In Mark’s Gospel, the ending, at least what Scholar’s consider the original ending, people run away terrified from an empty tomb.  All of the disciples seem to mess up, and that is frankly comforting as a Christian.  We follow in the footsteps of people who frequently got it wrong.

But no one gets the resurrection as wrong as Thomas.  Who knows what drew him away from the Upper Room the night that the Risen Christ appeared to the other ten, but when they all tell him what happened, Thomas is nonplussed.    I can identify with Thomas’ response.  I could see myself turning to my friends and saying, “sure guys, whatever you say.”

The resurrection is unbelievable, as our rector said in his sermon last week, the idea could even be seen as funny.  The resurrection is nonsensical.  You can kind of see why Thomas might have thought that the others were having him on.  His response, “I will believe when I can see his hands and touch his side”   The scene makes you wonder whether the disciples were prone to playing practical jokes on gullible Thomas.

But a week later, for Thomas, the Resurrection got REAL.  Jesus calls Thomas out.  He invites him to see and to touch.  The encounter is intentionally disarming, as Thomas hears his doubtful words repeated to him, his spirit must have sunk.  As someone who sometimes suffers from foot-in-mouth disorder, I feel for Thomas here.  He has let down his teacher, his Lord, his God.  Yet Jesus embraces Thomas, and then the editorial hand turns Jesus’ words out to the reader.  “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

John’s is the latest of the Gospel’s in the New Testament.  It was written a couple of generations after the events of Jesus’ life.  The eye here is to all of us, the ones who didn’t get a chance to see Jesus.  It would have been hard for John to imagine how far away some of us could feel from those first days of the Resurrection.  So many generations have passed, and our Church and faith have developed so far from that little cluster of wobbly disciples in the upper room.

On Friday, we witnessed a shining example of exactly how far we have come.  Could a bunch of first century Palestinians ever have imagined that three billion people, one third of the world’s population, would watch a Christian worship service live on television, or over the internet.  I have to say, the Royal Wedding was a resplendent example of Anglican liturgy.  I come from roots of the Anglophilic branch of Episcopalianism.  I sang along to Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s setting of Jerusalem AND Psalm 122.  And at six AM Friday morning, I was in a room full of seminarians, so I was not singing alone.

(As an aside, it is an interesting endeavor to watch a Royal Wedding with a group of seminarians.  In some ways, it’s like watching the wedding with any group.  But we get excited over an entirely different kind of fashion.  While most people wanted to know which designer made Kate and her sister’s dresses, we were MORE interested in where the Dean of Westminster got his robes.  And if there was a contest over who had the best hat, for us, hands down it was the Archbishop of Canterbury.)

Check out THAT hat.

I found myself thinking about Katherine and William.  I found myself a bit moved by their very public promises to one another before God.  It struck me as very brave.  The whole wedding went off without a hitch.  The queen, the princes, even the bride to be arrived just on time to walk down the aisle.  Everything was perfect, and I thought, that must be very hard, unimaginably hard.  In England, like here, the paparazzi keep certain celebrities in the public eye.  On their wedding day, and for the rest of their lives, there is an external push for William and Katherine to APPEAR perfect, and there will be thousands of cameras following their every step for the moment they let perfection slip.

That kind of perfection, it isn’t just hard.  That level of perfection is impossible.  We all screw up sometimes, just like Thomas.  Thomas, in John’s Gospel, gets the resurrection wrong.  Yet Jesus embraces Thomas.  Jesus takes imperfect Thomas’ hands and puts them to his torn side.  He takes Thomas’ imperfect fingers in his wounded hands.

For me, the story of Jesus and Thomas keeps the resurrection from being a fairy tale.  Because of Thomas, the resurrection is not a thin “happily ever after.”  Jesus still has wounds.  Jesus’ resurrection includes his whole self, even his scars.  Thomas meets Christ, risen in an  imperfect body.  Thomas is not redeemed FROM his imperfections, but in them.  The resurrection does not magically take away painful memories.  Christianity is not a magic wand that erases the hard parts of life.  We bring our whole imperfect selves, our whole stories, to the resurrection.

Thomas reminds us that Christianity is not about perfection.   The old saying is true, perfect can be the enemy of the good.  If we expect perfection from ourselves, we can end up wallowing in all of our imperfections, missing out on the grace of the good life God gives us.  If we expect perfection of others, we can find ourselves in endless critique rather than loving embrace.

At our baptism, we make a series of promises.  Yet we do not promise to be perfect.  As we promise to break bread, to read scripture, to work for justice, to respect human dignity, we do not swear to always get it right.  We promise to try, and we acknowledge.  “I will with God’s help.”  We knowingly make promises that we cannot keep on our own.

Thomas the apostle appears again in the narrative after this scene.  He is back with the disciples fishing, reincorporated into the Community.  In legend, it is Thomas the apostle who carries the Gospel message farther than any of the other eleven.  Thomas becomes missionary all the way to India.

Thomas is not the perfect disciple.  Following the New Testament, really none of the disciples are.  I find this insight comforting.  Knowing that the founders of the faith got it wrong at times takes the weight of perfection off of our back.  We are reminded that even the most faithful followers can take missteps.  Missteps are part of the journey.  What matters is that we keep on walking toward the Christ who embraces us, even when we get it wrong.

Psalm 22:1a My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Today is Good Friday, and today the tomb is full. Jesus has died a miserable and tortured death. The death of Jesus was not unlike the suffering of so many in our world today. The Salvadoran theologian Ignacio Ellacuria referred to the poor and oppressed as “the crucified people.” The question of the crucified Jesus, “my God why have you forsaken me?,” is a question that echoes across history from the lips of humans who suffer.

Last year I again made pilgrimage to the University of Central America in San Salvador, El Salvador. It was here where in 1989 Ellacuria and five other Jesuit theologians (along with their housekeeper and her daughter) were executed because they dared to write that God was on the side of the poor. Now their clothes, books, and eyeglasses are displayed in glass cases like the relics of more ancient saints. They remind us that the Christian journey is risky.  Following Jesus means challenging the structures that lead to suffering.

Jesus’ cry comes from Psalm 22, which we read this morning. The Psalm moves from lament to praise, reminding us that Jesus’ tomb is also a womb.  Christ, through suffering with humanity, becomes the firstborn of the resurrection, of the Kingdom of God where:

Psalm 22:26 The poor* shall eat and be satisfied;

those who seek him shall praise the Lord.

May your hearts live for ever!

Prayer: Jesus, after hearing your cry of dereliction, after hearing of your suffering and death, now we wait. We wait with all those who are anxious about when they will next be able to feed their children. We wait with those who wonder whether the new day will mean safety from war. Today we wait.

Martyrs' relics at the UCA

One of the biggest blessings for me in this time has been directional.  Our old Chapel was set up, like most Episcopal Churches, so that the entire assembly faced one direction.  Before the changes instituted by the Roman Catholic Church at Vatican II, even the priest faced the altar, which was mounted on the  back wall.  I will say, I have worshiped this way, and there is something wonderful about it.  When everyone faces the same direction, you feel like you are all walking somewhere together.  But, there is another blessing when you turn around and face one another.  In our current configuration, we see one another’s faces across the Communion table.  As the priest lifts up the bread and wine, we don’t just see these symbols, we see each other.

This has profound theological meaning.  Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the product and summit of the reform of worship in all of the liturgical churches, stated clearly that Christ is present in the Eucharistic species (read: bread and wine), the word proclaimed, the priest who presides, and in the assembly that “prays and sings.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium I.7)  Not only the word proclaimed, not only the bread and wine, not only the priest/minister, but in the assembly. When we pray the epiclesis, the portion of the prayer that asks the Holy Spirit to sanctify the gifts, we don’t just pray for bread and wine.  We ask the Spirit to come upon the gathered people.  St. Augustine in a sermon on the Eucharist said: “If, therefore, you all are the Body of Christ and His members, your (plural) mystery is presented at the table of the Lord, you all receive your (plural) mystery. To that which you all are, you all answer: `Amen’”  The Body of Christ is not something magical that appears for moments under the form of bread and wine when the right words are said.  The body of Christ is always present whenever “two or three are gathered together in my name” (Matt 18:20).  But I rant.

Some in the Virginia Seminary Community have expressed their distaste for “seeing other people’s faces when I worship.”  I think this is a problem.  Worship isn’t something we do alone.  We can pray alone, but worship isn’t the time for individual prayer.  Worship, and especially the Eucharist, are about the mystical body of Christ of which we TOGETHER are members.  Seeing each other, we encounter the mystery of Christ.

Our faith comes from a time when the collective, when the village, when the tribe and society were more important than the individual.  In this, Christianity is counter-cultural today.  Our presiding bishop really set off a firestorm when she made the claim, in her 2009 General Convention opening address, that “the great Western heresy” is individualism, that we can be saved as individuals.  The thing is, we’re not.  We are not saved alone.  We are knit into an active, living, moving body of believers.  If we are to worship Christ, we have to look at one another, at least sometimes.

That’s what’s tricky about Christianity, it means we have to work on reconciling one to another.  Christianity calls us to deal with the really hard issues and divisions between us.  Gathering together, looking at one another while we worship, reminds us that building relationship is hard work.  Community is hard work.  Love is hard work.  But it is the gift of God’s presence among us.

Discipline during Lent seems to be a malleable concept.  Some seminary friends and I were out at a beer tasting yesterday, when we learned that the Belgian monks used to brew Double-Bock beer, very heavy sugary stuff, to replace the calories they lost by fasting from bread during Lent.  (For the record, I’m a fan of disciplined beer drinking.)  A couple of years ago someone at Trinity WallStreet published this video about taking a different bridge from Brooklyn into Manhattan as a way of shifting perspective during Lent.  Over the years I’ve experimented with vegetarianism, running, and reading the Bible in Spanish as ways to mark the season.  Anything that helps me break through the humdrum of my daily life, that causes the cracks in my routine that allow me to glimpse God, seems to count

Not a Belgian Double-Bock, but another spiritual take on Beer.

But as I was preparing a sermon for the Spanish-speaking congregation at my Church this Sunday, it struck me that sometimes we choose our discipline, and sometimes it chooses us.  Brad and I never made a concrete decision about our Lenten walk this year.  He didn’t respond to my email.  I’m not upset.  Brad and his wife Rachael were in Tokyo last week.  They are teachers there at an international school, and their lives have been utterly upended at the start of Lent.  They didn’t choose this discipline, but it has brought them back to what is important.  Brad and I will definitely be praying and checking in throughout this season.  Through this I have come to believe that choosing our disciplines, when we have the chance, helps prepare us to walk with God and with one another when disciplines choose us.

My Father can attest to this. My parents live in Denver Colorado, where my dad practices law, and my mother is a priest. Years ago now, my mom took a group of parishioners to a conference on Christian meditation, and dad came along. They sat for a session of silent meditation, led by the world famous contemplative monk Thomas Keating. After a few minutes a horrified look came across my mother’s face…you see my dad is an epic snorer. He had closed his eyes in contemplation and drifted off. They laugh about it now, and Thomas Keating would not have been upset. He teaches that falling asleep in meditation is perfectly okay. Silence does not come easily to us.

My Dad being "contemplative" with a beer at Sunset on Roatan

When it does come, it can be such a break from our constant mental processing that our body will simply fall asleep, like my dad did. The truth is, we are an anxious people. And friends, we live in an anxious city. Moving here from California was a major mind shift. So many of my friends in DC work 60 hour work weeks, and still feel like they don’t get enough done. For so many of my peers, the district is where you come to prove yourself. DC is a town of striving. Outside of WallStreet, I can’t think of another area code where so much is at stake for so many people at any given time.

So understandably, Washington is an anxious place. And today we have “don’t worry be happy” Jesus. The Gospel for this morning is our last from the sermon on the mount. Jesus paints several lovely word pictures, which if you are at all like me, are a little irritating. I don’t know about you, but if I am in one of my anxious moods, if I’m in that place of anxiety, the last thing I want is for someone to tell me: “consider the lilies of the field.” I am not liable to respond well. If someone tells me to look at the birds or consider the lilies, silence will not come easily.

Jesus’ examples probably worked the first time, but centuries later they have been used in ways that are trite. Their meaning comes in the final verse. Jesus tells us not to worry. Well, in the translation we have in our bulletins he says not to worry. We’re reading from the New Revised Standard Version, but for this verse I want to read you the Old Revised Standard Version: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.” I prefer this translation to the NRSV, which tells us that “tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” If I’m anxious, hearing that tomorrow will bring more worries isn’t helpful, Jesus. Luckily that’s not what he said. The Old Revised Standard Version is closer to the Greek: Jesus says “tomorrow will be anxious for itself.” This is Zen Jesus, giving us reassurance through poetic language, we have to ponder what tomorrow being anxious for itself looks like, but this takes the anxiety off of our shoulders.

Additionally in the translation the distinction between “being anxious” and “worrying” seems important. Worry is more specific. I worry when I have something to worry about: a grade on a test, a friend who is having an operation, Worry tends to have a specific end point. Being anxious doesn’t. Anxiety has a certain constancy to it. The Buddhists, who spend a lot of time trying to quiet their brains, call this “monkey mind.” I can work something over and over again, like a canker sore that you can’t stop bothering with your tongue. “Being anxious” is a state. Getting my mind to quiet down, to go to a place of silence, does not come naturally.

For some of us anxiety is a medical condition, that requires medical care. The anxiety I’m talking about, and that I think Jesus is talking about, everyday anxiousness, seems one of the most common frustrations of modern life. And, not surprisingly, there is insight from Jesus about the source of this anxiousness. Our Gospel begins this morning: “No one can serve two masters…You cannot serve God and wealth.” For Jesus, the question here is about idolatry. David Foster Wallace, sort of a post-modern literary genius, gave the commencement address at Kenyon College a few years ago, and put the same idea this way:

“here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

Foster Wallace goes on to list several other things that people in our day worship. Power, intellect, the list goes on. He finishes with this sentence: “the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.” Jesus and David Foster Wallace both tell us that, unconsciously, we don’t allow God to be God. Our society shapes us to grasp after wealth, or power, or beauty. We build up a lot of energy, a lot of mental processing, a lot of anxiety, searching after status and things. We end up striving to achieve some image of success, we end up anxious. When we encounter the real living God, the only response is awed silence: to be still, and know that God is God.

Being still may not be what comes to mind first when we’re baptizing squirming infants. But baptizing babies this morning teaches us something about that still silent knowledge. There is beauty in adults making a statement of faith. But we still baptize infants as well. Babies are incapable of saying yes to our questions, but we baptize them anyway. It is a reminder that God does not need our intellectual assent to be God. When we carry children to the waters of baptism, we plunge them into the mystery of a community shaped by death. Paul says so much in his letters to Romans: “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.” Paul goes on to say that baptism is about allowing our old sinful selves to die, about rising to new life with Christ.

It strikes me that so much of the work of Christianity involves letting our selves die to our desire for money, power, control, prestige. Living as the Baptized involves dying to all of those wonderfully quantifiable measures of success in our world. Christian exercises in meditation and contemplation are about letting go of all of those thoughts that over-occupy our mind. Beyond all of that worry and anxiety, beyond that desire for us to control, in the silence that comes, we find God. If we are able to let our own grasping stop, we are set free to seek the Kingdom.

We are in the build-up now to Lent, that season where Christians get very serious. If you are looking for a Lenten discipline, I want to commend to you any of the spiritual exercises that help calm and quiet the mind: Christian Meditation, Centering Prayer, even Zen meditation. I do so with the caveat that it is easy to make our spiritual practice into one more thing to be anxious over, so remember those lilies. Any practice that helps us give ourselves to silence, should be freeing rather than another “to-do” item. There is a definite connection between Christian contemplation and the Christian practice of sabbath. If you are going to add meditation to your plate for Lent, be sure it is as a way of letting go rather than adding to your anxiety.

I can report that there is something to silence. Not so much from my own life, I am still a struggling student in the school of silence. I told a story earlier on my Dad, so it is only fair I finish with another. I admit to being an anxious person, and if you were to tell me that anxiety was an inherited trait, I would believe you. My early memories of my dad are of a very preoccupied person. It makes sense, he was building a law practice. He was also improvising the art of parenting (his own mom and dad had died when he was young). And my father was often anxious. Dad may not have been able to sit through meditation with Thomas Keating, but he found another teacher of the contemplative way. The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr runs the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, and about a decade ago my dad went on one of his retreats. Since then dad has become a bit of a mystic. A couple of years ago when the economy was at its worst, it became clear that the law practice my father had spent so much anxious energy building was going to shrink drastically, if not close entirely. The man I knew when I was a boy would have been a wreck, angry and frustrated. His anxiety would have passed around to all of the family members, this is anxiety’s wont. When I talked to my dad about how things were at the firm, I was amazed. He could laugh at himself, and he took the whole process lightly. His biggest concern was helping his employees search for other jobs.

Dad kept quoting Julian of Norwich, the 15th century English Saint. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” My father had allowed all of the anxious energy that occupied him to die, he had let go. My father had ventured into silence, and the God he encountered in silence left him changed.