Author Archives: mbj

The Way, the Truth, and the Life

I would like to thank my long-time friend and colleague Martin Smith for inviting me to preach here this morning, and to thank your Environmental Committee, which, as far as I can tell — given what it has been up to in just the last few months: planting trees, hosting a film festival, organizing a nature walk — is an unusually dedicated and talented group.

I want to speak about reclaiming the sacredness of God’s creation, but right off the bat I have to admit that at first glance the phrase may sound absurdly naïve or sentimental. The sacredness of creation? As soon as I say these words, I imagine someone wincing and I hear the wry, even cynical voices of people who say dismissive things like — tree hugger, whacko New Age devotee, pagan. I think of Oscar Wilde, who observed: “Nature is a damp place over which large numbers of ducks fly, uncooked.” Or of someone else’s remark that “Animals may be our friends, but they won’t pick you up at the airport.”

Fair enough. I’m not going to go all gushy on you.

But actually, when it comes to the natural world, many of us don’t feel sentimental or cynical. We feel uneasy, even anxious. There are times when I wake up at night thinking about what the future will hold. We have already burned enough coal and gas and oil to raise the planet’s average temperature by more than one degree, and if we keep to our present course, business as usual, the earth will be an average of four or five degrees hotter before the century is out. Nine of the ten warmest years occurred in the last decade. 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping. Do you know how many countries endured unprecedented heat last year? Nineteen. Temperatures in Burma reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for Southeast Asia, while the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit — a record not only for the country but for all of Asia. ¹

How serious is the threat to God’s creation? Here is what one mainstream environmental lawyer, Gus Speth, has to say: “…all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and [organisms] and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically.” ²

In a situation that speaks so much of death, of fear and hopelessness, it is astonishing — maybe even shocking — to hear Jesus say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1). For of course they are troubled! We fear for our children and our children’s children. We know only too well that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, keep carrying out our usual daily activities in our usual way, then within two, three, four generations we will bring an end to creation as we know it.

And yet Jesus tells us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” It’s a message that runs through Scripture — do not fear; be not afraid. What I like so much about this way of putting it — “do not let your hearts be troubled” — is that it reminds me that to some degree I have power over whether or not I am beset with fear. You and I have the power to guard our hearts, the power to exercise what we might call “spiritual warriorship,” so that rather than be mesmerized by the forces of death and swallowed up by the latest terrifying statistics, we can tune our awareness again and again to the love of God that is always being poured into our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). As spiritual warriors, we don’t turn away from the problems we face; we turn toward them and we engage with them, while consciously breathing in God’s love.

Jesus was hardly in denial about the fact of evil, suffering, and death. In today’s Gospel passage, he knew full well that he was on the brink of being arrested, tortured, and killed. And yet he could say to his friends, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” How was he able to say this? Because he knew that he was rooted in the love of God. Because he knew that nothing could separate him — or us — from the love of God. Because he knew that we, too, have been drawn, as he was drawn, into the divine life that circulates at the center of everything and that can never be destroyed.

That is the great promise of today’s Gospel passage: at the deepest level of our being we belong to God; we abide in God and God abides in us. As we read in the First Letter of John, “…All who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). And the love of God extends not only to us, not only to human beings — it extends to the whole created world and to its diversity of buzzing, blooming, finned, and feathered creatures. In Jesus, God took on flesh, and the incarnation tells us that God comes to us in and through our bodies and through the “body” of the earth. So maybe it’s no wonder that the risen Jesus came back for a time in a body. After he died and rose again, he didn’t just vanish into thin air, into some ethereal, disembodied realm of light. He came back first in the flesh, as if to say: look for me here, in the body of this world. Look for me in the sights, sounds, and smells, the tastes and touch of the world. Here is where you will find me, for I am everywhere present. The created world is good — so says Scripture all the way back to Genesis. What is holy and what is natural, what is divine and what is physical — these apparent opposites are embraced and interwoven in the incarnation of Christ, and all of it shines with God’s glory.

That is the vision that animates us as we rise up to protect God’s creation. We have touched the deep truth that we are God’s beloved; we have breathed in again the love and presence of the divine Mystery that dwells within us and around us, who shines out in the waves of the Potomac, in the breeze on our faces, in the touch of a child’s hand. Fired by that love, we are set free to love as generously and boldly as Jesus did, and to live through a time of turmoil with creativity and even joy.

“I am the way,” Jesus said to his friends. “I am the truth and the life.” And from his words and actions, from his passion, death, and resurrection, a movement sprang up – a movement of passionate men and women who were convinced of the way of generosity and kindness, committed to the truth of love, and dedicated to a life of praising and serving God, whatever the cost might be.

In a time when the planet’s living systems are in peril, now is the time to reclaim our God-given connection with the earth. Now is the time to renew our union with God and all God’s creation — which includes not just our human fellows but all living creatures and the larger eco-systems on which all of us depend. As a society we have to change course, for our present way of life is unsustainable. Depending on non-renewable energy and resources is by definition unsustainable. Consuming more resources than the planet can provide is by definition unsustainable. Wiping out wilderness habitat and the innumerable species upon which our species depends is by definition unsustainable. Producing a killing level of greenhouse gases is by definition unsustainable. We are living beyond our ecological means.

If ever there were a time to bear witness to our faith, now would be the time. If ever there were a moment to hold fast to our vision of a world in which human beings live in right relationship with each other and with our fellow creatures, now would be the time. Now is the time, as theologian Sallie McFague would say, to recognize that the world is not a hotel, but our home. ³ When we visit a hotel, we may feel entitled to use copious amount of hot water, to throw towels on the floor, to use and discard everything in sight and then to head to the next hotel – in short, to exercise what she calls the “Kleenex perspective” of the world. But when we realize that in fact the earth is our home – that God created it and loves every inch of it and entrusts it to our care – then everything changes. We realize that we live here; we belong here; we can no longer tolerate a life-style that exhausts the planet’s resources and that treats land, sea, and sky alike as receptacles for waste.

What can we do to simplify our lives? I invite you to think of one way you can listen more deeply to the land and to learn from it. Maybe you want to start a compost pile, to plant a garden, or to check out a farmer’s market. If you have some money to invest, you might invest in socially responsible funds or in local, green businesses. You might invest in your local land trust, seeking ways to protect some of the few remaining wild areas and local farms that we still have. You might get an energy audit, or invite the neighbor you’ve never met to come over for a cup of tea. We need to build up our local communities, to live in ways that are closer to the earth, more about sharing than about consuming, more about self-restraint than about self-aggrandizement, more about generosity than about fearful survivalism, so that we can take care of each other when the hard times come. There is joy that comes in living like this — a joy that springs up simply from being true to the basic goodness that God has planted in us. And because individual actions are necessary but not sufficient to the challenge that confronts us, together we need to create the boldest, most visionary, wide-ranging, powerful, hope-filled, hands-on, feet-on-the-ground, shoulder-to-the-wheel political and social movement that humanity has ever seen.

It is you for whom Christ came into the world, you for whom he died, you whom he now would fill with his presence and his Spirit. In a few moments we will share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, given to us by God in Christ with such tenderness and at such great cost. We will gather at that holy table, as we always do, so that everything in us and around us can be lifted up and blessed — not only the bread and the wine, but also we ourselves, and the whole creation, every leaf of it and every speck of sand. Sharing the Eucharist helps us to perceive at last not only our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, but also the fact that everyone is beloved, all beings are blessed. Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and all living things are kin. In the strength of the blessed and broken bread, and of the blessed and poured-out wine, we dare to hope that human beings will respond with grateful hearts and come to treat the world not as an object to exploit, but as a gift to receive, as something perishable and precious. We dare to hope that we will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth.

The risen Christ is among us and beside us and within us.

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

1. Facts in this paragraph are from research posted by Lester R. Brown’s Earth Policy Institute, www.earth-policy.org.

2. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge on the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. x (Preface).

3. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.

Hands-on faith

“[Jesus] said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’”
— John 20:27.

“Glory,” I kept murmuring the other day as I jogged down the hill behind Smith College. Trees were bursting into leaf; magnolia and forsythia were in full bloom; birdsong filled my ears; and I was inhaling the season’s first scent of cut grass. The sky was blue, the winter was over, and all I could say was “Glory, glory, glory.”

Earth Day fell on Good Friday this year, and rather than celebrate Creation Sunday on Easter morning, we decided to honor it today, on the Second Sunday of Easter. Now is our chance to give thanks for God’s Creation and to rejoice in the holy radiance that shines in every wild and quirky creature, in every branch and blossom, in every chipmunk and bumblebee. Sometimes, when I stand in a field somewhere and gaze at the Holyoke Range, or when I watch sunlight and shadow play across the Connecticut River, I feel what I imagine the disciples felt when they announced to Thomas with such joy and surprise, “We have seen the Lord” [John 20:24].

Maybe it is sheer sentimentality that makes us respond so deeply to the beauty of the world, but I don’t think so. Years ago, former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple pointed out that we live in a sacramental universe, for the created world is like the sacrament of Baptism or Communion — it discloses the presence of God. William Temple’s insight is entirely orthodox, for Christians as far back as Irenaeus and on to Augustine, Aquinas, and Teilhard de Chardin perceived the whole universe as being the image of God. ¹ That experience is what invites us in every Eucharist to turn to our Creator and proclaim, “Heaven and earth are full of your glory.”

So isn’t it interesting that the risen Jesus came back for a time in a body? He didn’t just vanish into thin air, into some ethereal, disembodied realm of light, but instead came back first in the flesh, as if to say: look for me right here, in the body of this world. Look for me here in your ordinary lives, here in the sights, sounds, and smells, the tastes and touch of the world. Here is where you will find me, for I am everywhere present. The created world is good — so says Scripture all the way back to Genesis. What is holy and what is natural, what is divine and what is physical — these apparent opposites have been embraced and interwoven in the incarnation of Christ, and all of it shines with God’s glory. As Jesus says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” [John 20:27]. Sometimes the best way to make contact with the divine is not to worry about abstractions and mental constructs, about what we believe or do not believe, but rather to reach out, as Thomas was invited to do — to make conscious contact, to discover the living God in the here and now, in the gift of this moment, in the flesh of the world, in the flesh of our daily lives.

Yet if the whole creation is radiant with the risen Christ, how much suffering the part of the universe that was entrusted to us, planet earth, is now enduring! The earth itself is being nailed to the cross. We learn about its wounds every day, from the BP oil rig explosion a year ago, that led to the largest accidental oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, to the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, where radioactive particles have been released into the sea and air, and where workers are apparently still locked in a desperate struggle to prevent total meltdown. This week the South and Mid-West experienced an extraordinary series of tornadoes, the worst tornado season in decades, and our hearts go out to all those who in the course of a few terrifying days lost their loved ones, their livelihood, their homes, or their lives.

Were those record tornados related to global warming? Meteorologists seem to be split on the question, with most saying no, and some saying that the unusually warm waters of the Gulf contributed to the tornados’ power. Of course, no particular tornado, flood, drought, hurricane, or any other extreme weather event can be directly attributed to human-caused climate change. But it is clear that the earth’s temperature is not only rising, but rising increasingly fast. Nine of the ten warmest years occurred in the last decade. 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping. Last year 19 countries endured unprecedented heat. Temperatures in Burma reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for Southeast Asia, while the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit — a record not only for the country but for all of Asia, and the fourth hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere. ²

How serious is the threat to God’s creation? Here is what one mainstream environmental lawyer, Gus Speth, has to say: “…all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and [organisms] and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically.” ³

Jesus says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” (John 20:27). Are we willing to reach out our hands and to touch the wounds of creation? Are we willing to make contact with the pain of the earth? It is so tempting to turn away — maybe to catch up on email or pour a drink or clean the basement, anything that keeps us from looking directly and carefully at the destruction going on around us. We do need to take breaks; we do need to take care of business; but we also need to embark on a personal and social transformation that will enable human beings to live more lightly on the earth.

The good news is that the risen Christ is with us as we face and touch the wounds. As a contemporary theologian, Richard Rohr, has put it, “The fact that [Jesus] returns to embodiment tells us that salvation is first of all in this world, and embodiment is good. [Jesus] meets the disciples back at their jobs, the women in their very human grief, with friends for breakfast, with two [people] walking along a road, and first of all to a very human friend, Mary of Magdala. He does not leave this world. He re-enters this world as it is and reveals its radiance.” ⁴

It is clear to me that once we perceive the radiance of the world, we receive the motivation and the courage to protect it. Just as Jesus breathed his Spirit into the disciples on the day of Resurrection, so he breathes his Spirit into us, and with each conscious breath we draw in more deeply the presence and the power of God. Who knows what will be possible when we Christians awaken to the power that sleeps within us, and when we realize that our breath and words and hands can convey the reconciling, healing, and liberating love of God?

Traditionally during Lent and Holy Week we pray with the Stations of the Cross. Now that it is Easter, I have set up a small display for coffee hour that I’m calling “Stations of Creation.” On the table in the Connector you will find several ways to express your care for God’s good earth. I hope that you will start by signing a letter to Senator Scott Brown that will be hand-delivered to him on Wednesday by our friends at Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light. Last year the Senate failed to pass a comprehensive climate and energy bill, so we are counting on the EPA to carry out its responsibility under the Clean Air Act to reduce the emissions that cause climate change. Let’s encourage Senator Brown to protect the EPA, and let’s applaud his commitment to create jobs in Massachusetts, for by shifting from fossil to renewable energy, we will not only tackle climate change but also generate new jobs.

You might want to sign a postcard asking State Senator Stan Rosenberg to support the updated bottle bill, which would expand the bottle bill — the 5-cent deposit that we pay on some beverages to encourage recycling — to include non-carbonated drinks such as water, juices, and sports drinks.

Or maybe you’ll want to pick up material about the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, our local center for environmental education, or to sign a postcard to the Governor urging him to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Or maybe you’ll pick up an application for a low-cost share of fresh vegetables from a new local farm in Northampton.

If you are a resident of Amherst, I hope you will make a plan to contact your Town Meeting members and ask them to vote for the “stretch code” at the May Town Meeting, which begins tomorrow night. Once Amherst passes the “stretch energy code,” we will become a so-called “Green Community” and therefore eligible to apply for state grants to fund energy-efficiency improvements.

After that, step outside and learn a few things from Mary Hocken about a skill that still eludes me: how to create a robust compost pile. It is a great time of year to get our hands back in the dirt!

“Reach out your hand,” Jesus says to Thomas and to all of us. There is so much healing that we can do, so much power to reconcile that God has given to us, so much life that we can help to bring forth. The risen Christ is among us and beside us and within us. Do not doubt, but believe.

1. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.

2. Facts in this paragraph are from research posted by Lester R. Brown’s Earth Policy Institute.

3. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge on the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. x (Preface).

4. Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 150, day 159, sent by email.

Down to earth: The way of the cross

“Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there” (John 19:41-42).

The passion narrative starts in a garden, where Judas betrays Jesus, and it ends in a garden, where our Lord is laid to rest: sin in the first garden, and death in the second; betrayal in the one, and burial in the other. John’s Gospel clearly wants to remind us of the garden that begins the story of human sin and death, the Garden of Eden. Of course, on Good Friday we haven’t yet reached the end of the story. On Easter morning, from out of that garden-turned-wasteland where sin and sorrow dwell and death reigns supreme, the risen Christ will burst from the tomb. The garden will be transformed: from a place of death it will become a place where new life rises again. According to John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene will be the first person to meet the risen Christ, and she will mistake him for a gardener (John 20:15) — a wonderful insight, for the crucified and risen Christ is indeed a gardener who brings new life.

Living as we do in this time of the earth’s crucifixion, how do we follow Jesus on the way of the cross and the path that gives life? How do we stay true to the mind of Christ, keeping our hearts open and responding with boldness and generosity to his call to give ourselves to this great work of healing? If ever there were a time to bear witness to our faith, now would be the time. If ever there were a moment to hold fast to our vision of a world in which human beings live in right relationship with each other and with our fellow creatures, now would be the time. Now is the time, as theologian Sallie McFague would say, to recognize that the world is not a hotel, but our home. ¹ When we visit a hotel, we may feel entitled to use copious amounts of hot water, to throw towels on the floor, to use and discard everything in sight and then to head to the next hotel – in short, to exercise what she calls the “Kleenex perspective” of the world. But when we realize that in fact the earth is our home – that God created it and loves every inch of it and entrusts it to our care – then everything changes. We realize that we live here; we belong here; we can no longer tolerate a life-style that exhausts the planet’s resources and that treats land, sea, and sky alike as receptacles for waste.

Creating a life-giving society will not be easy. Global market capitalism, the economic system that most of us take for granted, is based on gobbling up the natural resources of the world. As Sallie McFague points out, Christians have an obligation to advocate instead for economic systems that are just and sustainable. We need “to become informed about the global injustices of market economies” and to work “to change the policies and practices of so-called free trade that result in impoverishment and unsustainability.” We have a battle on our hands, for the powers-that-be make hefty profits from the status quo. Oil companies continue to make record profits and to push lawmakers to drill even more widely in our waters and lands. The Clean Air Act is under assault, as is the regulatory power of the EPA. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which boasts that it is the biggest lobby in Washington, is pumping tens of millions of dollars into the effort to deny the science of climate change and to block our country from making a transition to clean, safe, renewable energy anytime soon. ²

There is a political battle going on in which we must engage, so that what is scientifically necessary can become politically possible. We have our own personal battles to carry out, too, as we struggle to simplify our lives, to use less of the earth’s resources, and to acknowledge the tight connection between global warming and consumerism, since unlimited consumption is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. ³ Can we learn to live more lightly on the earth? Can we learn to share rather than to hoard? Can we hear the cries of the poor and the cries of the groaning earth rather than just our own insatiable appetite for more, more, more?

The personal and social transformation that this period in history requires is so profound, it can only be described in the language of religion. As one economist puts it: “Sustainable development will require a change of heart, a renewal of the mind, and a healthy dose of repentance. These are all,” he says, “religious terms, and that is no coincidence, because a change in the fundamental principles we live by is a change so deep that it is essentially religious whether we call it that or not.” ⁴

The transformation that we seek is symbolized by the cross. The old has died. Behold, the new has come. That is the language that speaks to me now, the biblical language of transformation. There is so much that needs to die, beginning with the small ego-self, that sinful, separated self that lives over and against all other beings and that claims no one but itself (and maybe its immediate tribe) as kin. A whole way of life needs to die, as well, if that way of life is driven by selfishness and greed, if it results in an ever-widening gap between the wealthy few and the impoverished multitude, and if it tears apart the very fabric of life upon which human beings and all other creatures depend.

Endings are real, disruptive, and scary, whether they are the end of oil, the end of empire, the end of a stable climate, or the end of our lives. But Christians, like people of other religious traditions, always live in sight of endings. And we dare to believe that by following the way of the cross, we can do what Jesus did: we can make way for new life to be born within us and among us. We can help turn the wastelands of the earth into gardens, into places where love and life can flourish.

Jesus provoked the powerful, and he endured suffering and death. Yet his consistent message was one of hope, not fear. Why? Because he was rooted in the love of God. Because he knew that nothing could separate him from the love of God. Because he had a vision of how human beings could live well on the earth in obedience to God, a vision of a beloved community of brothers and sisters living together in justice and peace. “I am the way,” Jesus said to his friends. “I am the truth and the life.” And from his words and actions, from his passion, death, and resurrection, a movement sprang up – a movement of passionate men and women who were convinced of the way of self-giving generosity and kindness, committed to the truth of love, and dedicated to a life of praising and serving God, whatever the cost might be.

At the cross of Christ we refuse to settle for a status quo in which the poor go hungry, landfills overflow, lakes die, entire species disappear, gas-guzzlers foul the air, and the global climate is scorched. For here is our brother and savior Jesus, living for us, dying for us, rising for us, standing with us and calling us out to a life that is devoted to God’s shalom and to the healing and wellbeing of all, even when living such a life disrupts the powers-that-be.

In the light of the cross, what can we do to simplify our lives? I invite you to think of one way you can listen more deeply to the land and to learn from it. Maybe you want to start a compost pile, to check out a farmer’s market, or to start a small garden at your home or church. If you have some money to invest, you might invest in socially responsible funds or in local, green businesses. You might get an energy audit, or invite the neighbor you’ve never met before to come over for a cup of tea. We need to build up our local communities, to live in ways that are closer to the earth, more life enhancing, more about sharing than about consuming, more about self-restraint than about self-aggrandizement, more about generosity than about fearful survivalism, so that we can take care of each other when the hard times come. And together we will need to create the most diverse, bold, visionary, wide-ranging, powerful, hope-filled, hands-on, feet-on-the-ground, shoulder-to-the-wheel political and social movement that humanity has ever seen.

It is you for whom Christ came into the world, you for whom he died, you whom he now would fill with his presence and his Spirit. In a little while we will venerate the cross on which he gave his life, and then we will share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, given to us by God in Christ with such tenderness and at such great cost. We will gather at that holy table, as we always do, so that everything in us and around us can be lifted up and blessed — not only the bread and the wine, but also we ourselves, and the whole creation, every leaf of it and every speck of sand. Sharing the Eucharist helps us to perceive, at last, not only our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, but also the fact that everyone is beloved, everyone is blessed. Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and everyone is kin. In the strength of the blessed and broken bread, and of the blessed and poured-out wine, we dare to hope that human beings will respond with grateful hearts, and come to treat the world not as an object to exploit, but as a gift to receive, as something perishable and precious. We dare to hope that we will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth.

I invite us to take some time in silence as we consider the way of the cross. What in your life needs to die? What needs to be transformed? What small action step do you feel led to take that expresses your desire to follow Jesus and to live in a way that helps God’s creation flourish?

1. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.

2. Bill McKibben: Money Pollution — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Darkens the Skies

3. McFague, op cit., p. 96.

4. Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: Economics of Sustainable Development, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, p. 201.

Claiming kin

“…Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home” (John 19:25b-27).

I want to tell you right up front that I find this gesture deeply moving. Jesus is suffering unimaginable pain; he is dying; and yet his dying words are completely consonant with the life that he lived: he wants to build relationship. Even as he dies, he reaches out to these two people that he loves so much, his mother and the beloved disciple, and he offers them to each other, inviting them into a fuller, more intimate, and more conscious connection. Jesus spent his whole life generating lively connections among everyone he met, challenging relationships that were built on domination, exclusion, and rejection, and creating ever-widening circles of love in which no one was left out.

We might interpret this scene at the cross simply within the context of personal relationships: here is Jesus showing us how much we need each other, how much we matter to each other. To quote the King James Bible: “Woman, behold thy son… Behold thy mother.” Behold, there is so much love that human beings can give each other! Give it, Jesus says to us. You belong to each other! Let your care for each other be expressed and cherished and known!

Yet I hear in these words much more than Jesus’ longing to connect one human being with another. I also hear his longing to connect human beings with the rest of the created world, his longing to heal the deep split between humanity and our brother and sister beings. The one we call Christ is the one through whom all things were made, in whom everything is knit together, and toward whom all things on heaven and earth converge. As we read in Colossians, “…In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). As he hangs on the cross, Jesus not only reconciles human beings with each other; he reconciles everything in heaven and on earth, including humanity with the rest of the creation.

This is may be a deeply biblical insight, but it is a very different spirituality than the one with which many of us grew up. I grew up believing that “spirituality” was completely disembodied and ethereal. The God I grew up with had no body. Being a good Christian was all about distancing oneself from the body and transcending the body — both one’s own body and the “body” of the natural world. The natural world and its diversity of buzzing, blooming, finned, and feathered creatures was essentially irrelevant and dispensable, only the backdrop to what was really important: human beings. As a matter of fact, since the time of the Reformation, Western Christianity has had very little to say about the salvation of the natural world and the cosmos, as if only one species, Homo sapiens, is of any real interest to God.

So what a healing it is, what a restoration of the ancient biblical understanding — an understanding that has never been forgotten by the indigenous peoples of the land — to know that Christ on the cross is reconciling all things, restoring all things, and revealing again the deep truth that the earth is holy. Its creatures are holy. The whole created world is lit up with the power and presence of God. The created world is “very good,” as God proclaims in Genesis [bbllink]Genesis 1:31[/bbllink], and the first task of human beings is to tend and protect it.

We human beings are on a long journey back to understanding our God-given connection with the earth. That’s our greatest task and calling at this point in human history: to find our way to union with God and all God’s creation, to learn to reclaim our partnership not just with our human fellows but also with all living creatures. Heaven knows that we humans do not live in right relationship with our brother and sister beings who are four-legged, feathered, or finned, nor with the larger eco-systems of trees and soil and waters on which both they and we depend.

Our estrangement from the natural world is clear in the ecological crisis that is upon us, and when we set this crisis in the light of the cross, we understand it as a moment of judgment, a moment of reckoning. Our society’s way of living – what the bishops of the Episcopal Church decry in a recent pastoral letter as “unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, and rampant consumerism” ¹– is a direct contradiction to the way of Jesus. We all know that we’re living in an unsustainable way. Depending on non-renewable energy and resources is by definition unsustainable. Consuming more resources than the planet can provide is by definition unsustainable. Producing a killing level of greenhouse gases is by definition unsustainable. Wiping out wilderness habitat and the myriad species upon which our species depends is by definition unsustainable. We are living beyond our ecological means.

Like it or not, we are the generation of the cusp, the generation that bridges the familiar and lovely old world of a stable climate, clean air, and temperate weather, of animals and birds that know when to migrate, where to nest, and what to eat, of farmers that know when and where to plant, of fishermen that find a catch — and this raw new world of sudden spikes in heat and cold, of wild winds and punishing droughts, of torrential rains and brutal heat.

As Bill McKibben writes in his latest book, global warming is “…our reality. We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.” ² And there is no going back. Human beings have irrevocably altered the earth into which you and I were born. As McKibben puts it, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has….” ³ Our task now is not to stop global warming, because that is impossible. Our task is to “keep it from getting any worse than it has to get,” ⁴ and to find ways to live more “lightly, carefully, and gracefully” ⁵ in this new world.

What is the way forward? To kneel at the cross in a spirit of profound repentance. To express not only our love and grief, but also our guilt. To confess the ways that we ourselves benefit from the destruction of the earth, and to admit our own patterns of consumption and waste. And to listen afresh to these words of love: “Woman, behold thy son… Behold thy mother.” Jesus is showing us how to move forward: connect with each other. Choose each other. Claim each other as kin. Turn with love not only to your fellow human beings, but also to the other creatures of the natural world.

On Tuesday The New York Times reported the story of a man who was snorkeling in the blue waters of the South Pacific, photographing a humpback whale and her calf swimming less than 50 yards away. “As [the man] waited for the right moment, the playful calf swam right up to him, so close that he had to lower his camera. That’s when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. Turning around, [Bryant Austin] found himself looking straight into the eye of the mother whale, her body bigger than a school bus. The tap had come from her pectoral fin, weighing more than a ton. To Mr. Austin, her gesture was an unmistakable warning that he had gotten too close to the calf. And yet, the mother whale had extended her fin with such precision and grace — to touch the photographer without hurting him –that Mr. Austin was in awe of her ‘delicate restraint.’ Looking into the whale’s eye, lit by sunlight through the water, Austin felt he was getting a glimpse of calmness and intelligence, of the animal’s consciousness. The moment changed Mr. Austin’s life.” He went on to devote himself to making life-size portraits of whales, so that other people might perceive the grandeur of these enormous creatures, and might sense what he saw when he looked into that mother whale’s eye. ⁶

What a marvel it is to break out of our usual state of alienation from the earth and its creatures, and to begin to perceive how connected we are with the other beings all around us. In our fear and despair, it is so easy to feel that we are alone, and that if human beings have irrevocably damaged the creation, then we might as well give up the struggle to create a more just and sustainable future. But then our consciousness breaks open. We meet the gaze of a robin, or a fox, or a frog, we gaze at a tree, we feel the wind on our cheek, and we hear Jesus speak within us, “Behold thy son… Behold thy mother.”

When our inward sight is restored, and our eyes are opened to behold Christ in all his redeeming work, the earth comes alive again and Christ shows up in every sound we hear, in every handful of dirt that we hold, in every bird that we see. The God who created all things also redeems all things and fills all things. Through the crucified and risen Christ, divine love has woven together the human and natural worlds into one inter-related whole. We participate in that mystery, whether we know it or not. Awaken to it, take our place within it, and maybe we will find the strength we need to live more lightly on the earth and to exercise the same delicate restraint regarding our fellow creatures that the mother whale showed to that awe-struck photographer. The only way forward is together.

What would change if we began each day in the way that St. Patrick began his, consciously arising “through the strength of heaven: light of sun, radiance of moon, splendor of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of wind, depth of sea, stability of earth, firmness of rock”? What would become possible if we asked our brother-sister beings for support? Most of us have never tried it, and I wonder if this might be how the Holy Spirit is now calling us to pray.

So I invite us to take some time in silence and to let the breath bring us images of the living beings that surround us — maybe a red-tailed hawk or a magnolia tree, maybe a frog or prairie dog, a wolverine or walrus, bumblebee or bat. Let images of our brother-sister beings come to you, especially those that are threatened or in danger. Can you sense their support? How different these creatures are from us, how particular and strange, and yet how much they can help us as we take our place in the family of things.

If you prefer, I invite you simply to bring awareness to your body, which in itself is already linked to everything else. Breathe in, and oxygen released by plants and trees flows into our body. Breathe out, and we exhale carbon dioxide that plants in turn absorb. Most of our body’s weight comes from water, just as the surface of the planet is mostly made of water. The salinity of our blood matches the salinity of the sea, as if we carry an ocean inside. Not only that — the carbon and other elements that make up our bodies are the same elements that composed the dinosaurs who roamed the earth sixty-five million years ago, and that will compose whatever beings inhabit the earth sixty-five million years from now. Our body connects us to green-growing plants, to the earth and its creatures, to the oceans, and to every being that preceded us and every being that will follow. Our body even links us to the stars, for everything that makes up our body ultimately comes from stars. Our bodies can become radiant with Christ’s presence.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Rejoice. We are not alone.

Behold thy son. Behold thy mother.

1. “A Pastoral Letter from the Bishops of the Episcopal Church” meeting in Hendersonville, North Carolina, March 13-18, 2009 to the Church and our partners in mission throughout the world.

2. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii and book jacket. Italics in original.

3. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 2.

4. McKibben interview, op. cit.

5. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 151.

6. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “Whales’ Grandeur and Grace, Up Close,” The New York Times, April 18, 2011. For a fine article on whales, visit “Watching Whales Watching Us” (The New York Times, July 8, 2009).

Sacred mourning

We are keeping company today with Jesus as he moves through his betrayal, arrest, and trial, and as he gives his life on the cross. I want to thank the Cathedral Scholars for chanting the Gospel for us with such clarity and fervor. The passion story may be deeply familiar to us, but this afternoon we can’t help but hear it with fresh ears. No doubt you know that today Good Friday coincides with Earth Day. This is the first, last, and only time that these days will overlap in our lifetimes — unless, of course, we plan to be around 84 years from now, in 2095, which is the next time it will happen. Of course we can dismiss today’s overlap of dates as nothing more than coincidence. But if it is just a coincidence, then I rejoice in the God who provides such coincidences. For when we place Earth Day and Good Friday side by side, or, to put it another way, when we take Earth Day and our concern for the ongoing integrity and vitality of life on earth, and bring it to the cross of Christ, we receive power not only to face the precarious state of our ailing planet, but also “to comprehend … the breadth and length and height and depth” [bbllink]Ephesians 3:18[/bbllink] of the redeeming love of God.

It is often in nature that I perceive the divine and come face to face with the glory of God, so in recent years the destruction of our life-giving and God-given eco-systems has struck me more and more as a crucial dimension of Jesus’ crucifixion. The meaning of Good Friday has opened up for me: I see the earth itself being nailed to the cross.

Back on that first Earth Day in 1970, some twenty million Americans — that’s one out of every ten of us — rose up to proclaim their love for the natural world. They took part in rallies, protests, and teach-ins, and demanded that our government take action to restore the environment. And it worked. Soon afterward, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, strengthened the Clean Air Act, and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

But forty years later, the troubled relationship between human beings and the rest of creation is starker than ever. A quick scan of the past year makes it clear how much we need a national and international movement to protect God’s good earth. A year ago this week we watched, aghast, as the BP oilrig exploded, killing eleven rig workers and spilling five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest accidental oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. This week we watch, aghast, the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, where radioactive particles have been released into the sea and air, and where workers are locked in a desperate struggle to prevent total meltdown.

Meanwhile, “since the Industrial Revolution, emissions from human activities of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have driven the earth’s climate system dangerously outside of its normal range.” ¹ Of course there have always been natural cycles of warming and cooling, but for the first time in our planet’s history the cycle is now being driven by human activity. Heat-trapping gases released in the burning of fossil fuels are forcing the earth’s temperature to rise, and the earth’s temperature is not only rising, it is rising increasingly fast. Nine of the ten warmest years occurred in the last decade. 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping. Last year 19 countries endured unprecedented heat. Temperatures in Burma reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for Southeast Asia, while the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit — a record not only for the country but for all of Asia, and the fourth hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere. 2010 brought us a heat wave in Russia, fires in Israel, flooding in Pakistan and Australia, landslides in China, record snowfall across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and 12 Atlantic Ocean hurricanes — the kind of extreme weather events that climate scientists consider characteristic of a hotter climate. “Unless global temperatures are stabilized, higher sea levels from melting ice sheets and mountain glaciers,” combined with the expansion of warmer ocean water, will displace “millions of people as low-lying coastlands and islands are inundated.” ² Heat waves and droughts will decimate harvests, and shrinking mountain glaciers will imperil the water supply of hundreds of millions of people.

Climate change epitomizes our assault on the natural world. Scientists tell us that modern industrial society, with its sudden expansion of our capacity to extract and consume the planet’s abundance for the sake of short-term profit, is simply not sustainable. For the past 250 or 300 years, human beings have been extracting goods faster than they can be replenished, and dumping waste faster than the earth can absorb it. Those who are rich live in a luxury once reserved for kings, while the billions who are impoverished struggle for clean water and a mouthful of food. Species are going extinct at a rate unprecedented since the death of the dinosaurs. ³ And the global climate with its delicate balance of gases turns out to be more fragile then we ever imagined.

How serious is the threat to God’s creation? Here is what one mainstream environmental lawyer, Gus Speth, has to say: “…all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and [organisms] and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically.” ⁴ Back in 1951, when I was born, there were 3 billion people on the planet; today there are close to seven billion.

Are you still with me? Have you tuned out yet? It is no easier to listen to even a quick sketch of the damage going on around us than to it is to face the agony of Jesus on the cross. It is painful and scary to acknowledge this devastation, this crucifixion, and if I were speaking at a climate rally, I would probably leap right now to saying what we can do about it and what actions we must take. God knows that there is a lot that we must do, and do fast. But holy wisdom tells us that first we must stop on Good Friday and reflect deeply on how we respond. What do we feel in the face of the crucifixion of this beautiful world that God entrusted to our care? Where do we feel the ache of what has already been lost, and what we are likely to lose? We cannot rush ahead to Easter if we want truly to understand where we now find ourselves, if we want to change course, and if we want to draw upon the self-giving love of God who pours out his life for us on the cross. If we don’t take time to pray through our emotional response, we may do one of two unhelpful things: either become paralyzed with anxiety and do nothing, or go rushing off to do something, anything, not because the action is particularly effective, but simply because we want to stay one step ahead of our feelings. When we don’t stop to feel our love and grief, then our actions are likely to be motivated only by anxiety, worry, and fear.

If we feel the love we will also feel the grief. But, oh, there are so many reasons to avoid our grief! For starters, who wants to feel pain? Not I. What’s more, we may not want to look morbid, or we may fear bringing other people down. Maybe we’re afraid of being considered weak or emotional or sentimental. Maybe we’re afraid that once we start feeling the grief, we will succumb to despair.

I remember going to a weekend climate conference on Thomson Island in the Boston Harbor about ten years ago, and listening to a cascade of facts about thinning polar ice caps, melting glaciers, and the projected rise of the average worldwide temperature in one hundred years. I took copious notes, trying valiantly to absorb the information and not to go numb. But by Saturday afternoon, as I listened to a presentation by a doctor from Harvard Medical School, I was feeling overwhelmed. Before bed I went outside and stood alone under the stars, trying to assimilate what I had heard. At breakfast the next morning I looked for the doctor, and carried my tray to his table. I told him how stunned I was by what he had told us.

“How do you bear it?” I asked him. “What do you do with your feelings?”

“I don’t get into my feelings,” he told me. “I focus on what I can do.”

I considered that comment as I ate my cereal. On one level, it made sense. In the midst of battle, we need to act. We need levelheaded leaders who can say, This is what we must do. Let’s go. When labor organizer Joe Hill was dying, he reportedly said to his followers, “Don’t mourn. Organize.” Maybe it’s a guy thing, too — who knows?

Yet for the long haul we also need to sort out what we feel. Is not grief a way of expressing our love? Is not anger a natural response to injustice? Is not allowing ourselves to express our guilt and regret, our sadness and rage, a way of drawing close to the God whom we meet at the cross? It is in kneeling at the cross that we discover how close God is to us in our terror and vulnerability and sense of loss. When we look at Jesus dying an agonizing death, we look squarely at everything that frightens us, and does us harm. We face our fear, our sadness, and our guilt. And we see that all of it — all of it — has been taken up by Jesus, that all of it has been embraced by God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing that we can experience, that God in Christ does not share with us. Even our sin, even our willfulness and greed, our impatience and envy, our laziness and despair – all of that, and more, is met on the cross by the outpouring love of God.

So I invite you to let yourself kneel in your mind’s eye at the foot of the cross and to notice the love you feel for the earth, and where you most feel its pain. Is it the mountains of Appalachia, whose tops are being blown off so that coal companies can extract the coal that generates most of the electricity in this country, perhaps in this very cathedral? Is it the millions of acres of pine trees that have been killed from New Mexico to British Columbia by the mountain pine beetles that no longer die off in winter because the winters are no longer sufficiently cold? Is it the diminishing songbird population, the dying coral reef or alpine meadow, the polar bear on the iceberg or the elephant in the forest? Is it the refugees on the move in sub-Saharan Africa because Lake Chad has dried up, or the islanders forced to leave their homes in the Pacific Ocean because the sea is rising? Is it the poor in this country who struggle to pay high heating bills and who need help to weatherize their houses, if they have one at all? Is it something more modest and closer to home, maybe a particular field once full of meadowlarks and clover in which you wandered as a child but which has since been “developed” into a mall? Or a sweet little city park you once knew that has fallen prey to drug dealers and neglect? Where do you most feel the pain of the earth? Where do you hear the groaning of God’s creation? What do you need to bring to the cross of Christ, where Christ takes up what we cannot bear ourselves, and whose every word to us is love?

1. Facts in this paragraph are from research posted by Lester R. Brown’s Earth Policy Institute.

2. Ibid.

3. For two recent articles on mass extinction, visit “Multitude of Species Face Climate Threat” and “Saving Endangered Species as the Climate Changes”

4. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge on the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. x (Preface).

The journey of the wise men

Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way. – Psalm 84:4

When I think about the three kings, what leaps first to mind are the crèches that I unpack every year a couple of weeks before Christmas. On the piano in the living room I put the tall, earthenware figures of Mary, Joseph, and the baby, of shepherds and sheep, and — yes — of the three kings and their camels. On the mantelpiece goes a miniature nativity set in which each teeny-tiny figure is made of clay, delicately painted, and no more than one inch high. On the coffee table I put the plastic figures and the cheap wooden stable that children can play with to their heart’s content without making their grandmother worry that something is going to break. No crèche is complete without its three kings, and when the Twelve Days of Christmas are over, back go the various kings and camels into their boxes, where they spend the rest of the year stored in the basement.

As I pondered today’s Gospel, I got to thinking: what would happen if the wise men walked out of those crèches and into our lives? What would happen if these figures — so easy to trivialize as nothing more than decorative props for a mid-winter festival that we pack away when the festival is done — what if the wise men actually came to life for us? What if their journey informed and deepened our own spiritual search, and propelled it forward? What if their experience of seeking and finding the Christ child was an archetypal journey, one that could lead us into a move vivid and lively relationship with Christ? So I began to read the story for its spiritual significance, as a sacred story about how to grow in intimacy with God.

Four parts of the story stood out for me.

The first, of course, is the star, that mysterious, shining presence that startles the wise men and sends them out on a search. Ancient tradition held that an unusual star could appear in the skies to mark the birth of someone special, such as a king. That is how the wise men interpret what they see: something out of the ordinary is taking place, something truly significant is afoot, and out the door they go, leaving their ordinary lives behind as they follow the light wherever it leads.

I think it is worth pointing out that although every painting, movie, and Christmas card that depicts the journey of the wise men shows a dazzling star above their heads, we don’t actually know from the biblical story whether anyone but the wise men can see that star. King Herod, the chief priests and scribes, don’t seem to know anything about the star until the wise men arrive in Jerusalem and tell them about its rising. So the star may be visible to the eye or it may be perceptible only to one’s inward sight; it may be seen or it may be unseen. Either way, it is significant, for it signals the birth of something new in the world. It heralds a presence and power that is just now being born. The wise men are wise, indeed, for they spot that star and they set everything aside to follow where it leads.

Probably every spiritual journey begins with a star. At some point we get a sense — perhaps a very vague one — that there is something more to life than the ordinary round of tasks and responsibilities, something above and beyond, or perhaps within, material reality that can give a larger meaning and purpose to our days, something that is beautiful and shining and that lights up the world. So we set out on a quest to follow that star and to see where it leads. We may name the quest in different ways — maybe we call it a search for meaning or wholeness, a search for happiness or peace. Maybe we seek to know that we are loved, or to draw closer to the divine Source of love. Maybe, as some Greeks say to Philip in the Gospel of John, we express our desire in a simple, straightforward way: “We wish to see Jesus” John 12:21.

However we name that desire, deep down we want to know God. And so, like the wise men, we set out, and what beckons us forward is a star, a subtle, shining presence that keeps company with us, and that we follow as best we can. For most of us, most of the time, following the leadings of God is not like having a GPS fastened to the dashboard of our car, delivering clear-cut instructions: “Turn left in .2 miles; take the freeway; turn right in 4.3 miles.” Like it or not, the star of Bethlehem is more elusive than that, so we have to develop an attitude of careful listening, a stance of open inquiry, and a practice of prayer that develops our sensitivity to the glimmers of the holy. It takes practice to stay attentive to the star, for, as Boris Pasternak once wrote, “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.”

The star is the first thing that catches my attention in this story, and the second is Jerusalem. Where does the star lead the wise men? Straight to Jerusalem, straight into the center of political and economic power, where King Herod the Great, a client king appointed by Rome, rules with the same ferocity that Stalin wielded over his own country in the 1930’s. We might wish that following a spiritual path were purely an individual and internal enterprise — that following the star meant nothing more than developing a personal practice of prayer or going away on periodic retreats. There are plenty of contemporary books and speakers out there that define spirituality in a very individualistic way as being mindful of your own mind and cultivating your own soul — and of course that is part of the journey. But right from the beginning, from the very moment that Christ is born, it is clear that following his star also means coming to grips with the social and political realities of one’s time. Being “spiritual,” for Christians, is not just an interior, individual project of “saving ones soul” — it also has a civic dimension, a political dimension, and as the wise men faithfully follow the star, they are drawn straight into the darkness and turmoil of the world, where systemic power can be used to dominate and terrify. Without intending it or knowing it, the wise men even contribute to Herod’s program of terror, for Herod takes the information that they give him and uses it to order the slaughter of all the children under the age of two who live in Bethlehem.

Following the star evidently means being willing to become conscious of the darkness of the world, and even to perceive how we ourselves are implicated in that darkness. With my taxes, I am paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; with every turn of the ignition key, I burn fossil fuels that add to global warming. Until I recognize how I am caught up in and how I contribute to the contradictions and injustices of our political and economic system, I am not following the star and accompanying the wise men into Jerusalem.

We notice, too, that King Herod trembles at the news of the star — in fact, its rising frightens him. The powers that be are terrified whenever God in Christ draws near, for God’s love is always a threat to those powers; it opposes everything in us and around us that is selfish, greedy, and motivated by the urge to dominate, control, and possess. As I read it, the wise men needed to come to know those powers, both within themselves and in the world around them, if they were going to find and follow Christ.

So they entered Jerusalem, and they saw what they saw; they learned what they learned. Then, keeping their eyes on the star, they kept going, “until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy” Matthew 2:9b-10. This is the third part of the story: the encounter with Christ. What a beautiful line that is — “when they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.” The long, long journey with all its uncertainties and privations, its cold nights and its restless, ardent searching, has reached its fulfillment. The star has stopped, and the wise men can be at peace at last, they have arrived at last, they have found what they were looking for, at last! They enter the house, they see Mary and the child, and they fall to their knees in a gesture of deep reverence and humility.

Do we know what that’s like? Of course we do. We glimpse such moments whenever time seems to stop, when, for instance, our minds grow very quiet in prayer, we surrender our thoughts, and we seem to be filling with light. Or maybe it happens when we gaze at something that captures our complete attention — maybe a stretch of mountains or the sea, or when we take a long, loving look into a child’s sleeping face, or when we are completely absorbed in a piece of music. In moments like these, it can feel as if we are gazing through the object on which we gaze, and seeing into the heart of life itself. Love is pouring through us and into us, and all we can do is throw up our hands, fall inwardly to our knees, and offer as a gift everything that is in us, just as the wise men open their treasure chests and offer everything that is in them. Worship is what happens when we come into the presence of what is really real. When we come to the altar rail at the Eucharist, whether we choose to stand or whether we kneel as the wise men did, like them we stretch out our hands to offer everything that is in us, and like them we receive — we take in — the living presence of Christ.

Finally, the fourth element of the story is its last line: “… having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road” Matthew 2:12. In other words, the wise men refused to cooperate with Herod. They deceived him. They resisted him. The wise men have been called the first conscientious objectors in the name of Christ. They are the first in a long line of witnesses to Christ who from generation to generation have carried out acts of non-violent civil disobedience in Jesus’ name. The journey of the wise men is our journey, too, for, as Gregory the Great reportedly remarked in a homily back in the 7th century: “Having come to know Jesus, we are forbidden to return by the way we came.”

So, as we set out together into a new year, I hope that you will join me in keeping the wise men at our side, rather than packing them away in a box somewhere.

Like them, we can attune ourselves to the guiding of the star, and renew our commitment to prayer and inward listening.

Like them, we can enter Jerusalem and all the dark places of our world and soul, following wherever God leads, and trusting that God’s light will shine in the darkness.

Like them, we can make our way to Christ, and kneel in gratitude.

And like them, we, too, can rise to our feet with a new-fired passion to be agents of justice and healing, and a renewed desire to give ourselves to God, for “happy are the people whose strength is in [God, and] whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.”