2021 Rector's Address: Growing through the Storm

 

My background photo on Zoom is a contemporary painting by the German artist Beate Heinen. Painted in 2020, it’s called, “God With Us—In the Storm of the Times.” I would like to reflect on this painting with you a bit today as we look toward the future at St. Ambrose.

Time and again, the Gospels place the followers of Jesus in a boat, caught in stormy waves. The Hebrew Scriptures represent chaos as raging waters. The “nave” of the church, where we usually gather in our pews, comes from the Latin word for boat. So here we are in our St. Ambrose boat, navigating the chaos all around us. Can you find yourself in the painting? Look at the faces. We’re all here. All ages are huddled together, old and young alike. Some are frightened, some serene. Some are hiding. Some are watching the faces of others on the boat. Which one are you today? Whoever you are, you count; each of you is essential to the whole.

 I don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about the chaos of these waves. We’re in the midst of them: in the chaos of Pandemic and all that it entails; in the chaos of racism and the ongoing destruction that it brings; in the chaos of the consumerism that tears at the fabric of our humanity. We are much too familiar with the all waves that buffet our boat today. These waves are the powers of sin and death: all of the powers that bind and shackle the creatures of God. They are forces beyond our control, forces worthy of the name of Satan, which really just means, “the Adversary:” the Adversary of the goodness and wholeness that God intends for us all. 

    Turn from the waves with me today to focus on Jesus. Do you see him, sitting in the middle of the boat with the people, a mischievous twinkle in his eye? He’s smiling with quiet joy, and his face helps me to relax. Yet he’s also clearly in charge, steering everyone with an enormous paddle. The paddle even seems to become the boat, itself. It must be a powerful paddle. As we read in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has been filled with the power of God’s Holy Spirit at his baptism. He has come among us in that power to send the evil powers of chaos into a tailspin. As Jesus faces the man with the unclean spirit in today’s Gospel, the powers of evil recognize right away that Jesus has come to destroy them. Mark begins and ends our passage by commenting on Jesus’s “authority.” Authority here means the power that creates out of nothing, the power of God in nature and in the spiritual world. Jesus’s authority is a life-giving, liberating power. It’s a power that stakes a claim upon our lives. From the very beginning, liberating power pours from Jesus’ words and deeds.

    What does it mean for us that we are sitting in a boat that is steered by a God of such liberating power? It might seem like we would be free to do whatever we’d like, to get our way, to turn everything to our favor. But Jesus’s liberating power is a paradoxical one. Jesus’s authority doesn’t just scandalize the demons. It also scandalizes the human secular and religious powers around Jesus. These powers are so threatened and disoriented by Jesus’s strange authority that they condemn him to die on the Cross. In the end, God’s power conquers the power of sin and death … by giving itself over to them. Being in Jesus’ boat doesn’t promise smooth sailing, then. It promises transformation! Change!  The liberating power that we see in the Jesus of the Gospels is one that pushes us to change, to repent, to turn around: it causes controversy; it forces us to abandon the guarantees that we seek in this world. It confuses what is seen as proper and improper; it turns established structures upside down; it makes impossible demands. Jesus’ power steers us into the heart of the storm, where we are most needed.

We need to remember what kind of strange power God exerts in this world—because as Christians, we are expected to exercise the same kind of power ourselves in our daily lives. Paul makes this clear to the Corinthian Christians in today’s Epistle. Paul warns the feuding Corinthians about their use of power in their dealings with one another. He cautions them about how they wield the liberating authority that they have each received in Christ. Liberating power in Christ is bondage to Christ, says Paul. In the Christian life we all become responsible for one another. Christian responsibility is not a question of proving who is right and who is wrong, but of building up the community in love. Those who are seated in the front of the boat have a special responsibility to those in the back. Those in the light have a special responsibility to think first of those crouched in the shadows. Everyone in the boat has a special responsibility to seek out those who are treading water out there in the waves, too afraid or too weary to climb inside.

Why does this rector’s address sound like a sermon, you might ask? It’s because of where I sit in the boat. Some people might think that the rector should be the woman with blue hair in our painting, cozied up to Jesus, clearly the focal point of the crowd. But I disagree. I see myself as that person in the back with her hand in the air, pointing. Switching metaphors a bit, I believe that a good Rector is like the coxswain of the rowing team. The Rector sits in the back, perched where she can look forward to see what is coming. She calls out strategy, motivating the team, speaking the truth in love. She keeps everyone advancing together in a coordinated way. 

What I see right now is that our boat is caught up in waves of transformation—Challenging change lies ahead, not just for St. Ambrose but for the Church as a whole. It is a time for the Church to be agile, as one scholar says. To be adaptable, responsive, and alert. To ride the movement of the Spirit as it cuts through the chaos. At the same time, it is also a time to hold one another in love. No individual, no parish, even, can face the challenge alone. It’s a time for us to join with others, to be vulnerable. To risk mistakes.

So, how do we proceed? How do we grow in agility? I firmly believe in the old business maxim called, “Roxburgh’s Rule.” It goes, “’To the extent to which the work of change is undertaken primarily by leaders, there will be no change.’”  Fulfilling our mission in Jesus’ fleet of boats will require depths of learning and discovery on the part of each one of us. In the year ahead, it is my goal to help us join together in that discovery. I am going to invite everyone—over and over—into practices and small experiments that will help us to grow. I need for you to share your inspired ideas—from collecting books for children in India to book studies to promote growth to a doggie poo station for our neighbors! We’ll try them out. Some will bear fruit, and others will at least teach us something. I am going to invite everyone—over and over—into shared conversation, as well. Conversation that will allow us to grow closer to God and to the others in our little boat. We need all the voices in that conversation, and I encourage everyone to join in, starting today after the service. Learning to engage in meaningful conversation takes practice.  It’s not about wordsmithing our mission statement or creating a vision that will end up on chart paper in the closet. It’s about listening in love. It’s about following Jesus on that wild ride through the waves.

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[1] “Gott mit uns—im Sturm der Zeit.” See this and others of Heinen’s paintings at Beate und Ulrich Heinen | Atelier in Wassenach - Aktuelles (beateheinen.de).

[2] Dwight J. Zscheile, The Agile Church: Spirit-Led Innovation in an Uncertain Age (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2014).

[3] Ibid., 124.

Evangelism!

When we look together at the 2021 budget today, you might notice a new line item. It includes a word that sends chills into the hearts of many an Episcopalian: “Evangelism!” Even over Zoom, I could see the eyes of vestry members growing wide and wary the first time that I used that word at our meeting last week.

    Yes, I’ll admit that some of our brothers and sisters in Christ have abused the word “evangelism.” They have used it to intrude into the lives of others with judgment. Evangelism conjures up images of knocking on doors and warning people that they will go to hell. It reminds us of unpleasant encounters with overzealous friends who won’t leave us alone about attending their bible studies. Evangelists can “fish for people” with a barbed hook. I imagine that we all have a personal horror story about being on the receiving end of evangelism-gone-wrong.

Episcopalians, in reaction, often take a hands-off approach to evangelism. Actually, one of my favorite jokes goes: “Do you know how Episcopalians do evangelism?” Referencing today’s Gospel, the response is: “They take an aquarium and put it down in the sand on the beach. Then they wait for the fish to jump in.”[1] We Episcopalians are shy about “imposing” our faith on anyone else. We don’t like to knock on strange doors or to take our testimony outside of our comfort zones. Even I—a priest of the Church—have to work up my nerve for a few minutes before making a “cold call” to share a word of welcome with someone I don’t know.

    If Jesus had been an Episcopalian, I doubt that he would have been described as acting “immediately” to his circumstances in today’s Gospel lesson. Instead, he would probably have formed a vestry subcommittee to do a long self-study. He would have allowed prospective disciples to sign the guest book before approaching them. He would have waited for them to come back a few times before asking them to do anything. An Episcopal evangelist might even have looked more like Jonah, mumbling his proclamation with the minimum number of words, more anxious to be safely back in familiar territory than to proclaim the Kingdom of God. Right?

    Indeed, it can be easier to identify with Jonah than with Simon, James, and John. Jonah’s refusal to “evangelize” in Nineveh is actually just an excuse. Jonah’s real problem is that he hates the Ninevites. They are the oppressors of his people. They want to slaughter his friends and family. He doesn’t think that they are worthy of God’s—or his—attention. Jonah doesn’t want to talk with them, to listen to them, to let them change his heart or even to let God change theirs. Jonah is furious that God uses Jonah’s begrudging prophetic words to turn people around and completely forgive the entire nation. Jonah wants God to think like he thinks. Jonah wants God to punish his enemies. He wants to see them suffer for what they have done. Jonah can’t stand to live in a world of love and grace. How often, in our polarized times, do we react like an angry Jonah? How often do we judge, instead of opening up to grace and love?

    Jesus’ disciples, on the other hand, seem to run toward the change that Jesus is offering. What is going on with them?! Simon, Andrew, James and John sure seem to realize from the beginning that this is no time to dilly-dally. They drop what they are doing and walk off together into the new life of the Kingdom. Thinking about Jonah and the disciples this week, I began to wonder: “Did I ever make a decisive life-change without running away first, or at least hesitating?” And then it hit me. Yes, I did! And it wasn’t my call to ordination!

    Once upon a time, I was just like those disciples, throwing down their nets and hitting the road with Jesus. You see, when I was 21 years old, I went to France to live for a year at a French Protestant seminary. I was just supposed to stay and do some research in church history—just for the school year--before coming back home and going to grad school. But one day, after I had been there about 5 months, I was walking back to the seminary from town, and I suddenly decided to stay for good.

          The story that I usually tell people is that I fell in love. I got engaged. That version makes for a dramatically romantic and even shocking story, but that’s not really all that happened. After all, my fiancé could have come back with me to the US. What happened was that I had entered into a new world in France, a world that I wanted to make my own. I had lived for 21 years in a very narrow world. It was a safe world, but it was also a sad and confining one. It was all about pleasing other people, following the rules, working, doing what was expected. Suddenly, across the ocean in France, I found freedom: the freedom of expressing myself in a new way, in a new language; the freedom to be remade from the inside out in a new culture. I also found community—the close-knit community of the French Reformed Church. In the seminary dorm, I found friendship with men and women from countries all over the world, and I learned for the first time how God was working in those countries for justice, how the church was working in those countries to fight poverty and disease. I wanted to be a part of that world of limitless horizons and goodness: that world of freedom, love, and transformation. It’s hard to describe how I changed. Almost overnight, my life in the United States didn’t matter anymore. My family and friends, my old career aspirations …. None of it mattered. I had glimpsed something better. Something that I knew I had to join, or wither and die.

          That world of new horizons, I believe, is what Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John saw in Jesus of Nazareth. They caught a glimpse of God in Jesus’ eyes. They saw the immediacy of God’s reign of love and freedom and transformation in Jesus’ words and deeds. And nothing was going to keep them from holding on to what they saw. They saw fishing to feed their Roman oppressors, as the emptiness that it was. They entered into Jesus’ world because they found life and joy there, and, stepping over the threshold into God’s Kingdom, their lives and their work were transformed.

    Eugene Peterson’s translation begins our passage: “After John was arrested, Jesus went to Galilee preaching the Message of God: ‘Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.” The urgency of God’s call is as if … as if, a big net has come in to sweep us along into a new place. It is as if the whole world is being carried into a new creation on the crest of a wave. The arrival of God’s rule in Jesus Christ is not a piece of bait bobbing around, luring us to grab hold of the hook inside. The arrival of God’s reign in Jesus Christ is a huge net scooping up everyone and everything in its path, drawing them to God and holding them together as a new entity.

          I can certainly identify with feeling swept up in a big net these days. Time does seem to be up on so many of the old, comfortable ways. We live in a time of rapid change—in society and in the Church itself. There is a new urgency for long-withheld Justice finally to be unleashed. There is a new hunger for love and mercy. There is increasing need for food and medical care and housing and hope in our land. And at the same time, no more fish are jumping into our nice little aquarium on the shore.  

    We have a new line-item in our budget called, “Evangelism--Sharing the Good News” because … “Time’s up! God’s Kingdom is calling.” --Calling us all into God’s amazing new life. It’s time for St. Ambrose to become a place of life, love, mercy, and joy so wonderful that freedom-hungry 21-year-olds, hope-starved workers, jaded elders, and thirsty, starving travelers of all kinds will gladly put their burdens down, jump in, and join us. But for them to know us, to see us … we have to get out of our little aquarium and into God’s enormous net. We have to let it pull us and our treasure away from the shore and into the waves with everyone else. The Kingdom of God is coming near. Turn, jump in, and be free. Turn, change, and believe in the Good News of God’s love and mercy.

 

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[1] A joke told to me by a colleague years ago; I don’t know where it originated. 

  

A Strange, Risky Love

 

Did you hear about that priest at St Ambrose? St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church, that is.  He went viral on the Internet last Holy Week when photographers took a picture of him with a plastic water gun, spraying parishioners with holy water in remembrance of their baptism. Many of my friends had a good laugh at this story. I received a flurry of photos of this priest in his mask, holding a neon green water gun, squirting little bits of water into car windows during a drive-through procession.[1]

He looks pretty silly, doesn’t he? He seems to symbolize the epitome of the church’s desperation in these pandemic times! I myself wouldn’t have chosen a gun of any sort as a reminder of our baptism, but this photo got me thinking, as well as laughing. Here’s what I’m wondering now about baptism: Do the sweet little silver shells of warm water, spooned gingerly over foreheads at a traditional Episcopal baptism, represent St. John’s kind of baptism any better than that water gun?

I’ve seen the Jordan River, and believe me, it’s neither a marble font nor a silver-plated shell. I know that the Jordan held more water in Jesus’ day, before human industry sucked it dry. But the Jordan is a brown, muddy little river, flanked by brown, sandy banks. Imagine scraggly John the Baptizer standing waist-deep in the brown, muddy water, waving his arms and shouting about sins like some revival preacher. Imagine his unkempt hair and long beard flapping in the breeze. Imagine dozens of down-and-out folks in shabby cloaks and worried faces milling around on the brown, sandy banks. It wasn’t the wealthy elite who were hanging out at the river with the prophet John. It wasn’t the powerful politicians, or the holy Temple priests, or the educated scribes. It was the poor and the distressed, the sick, the outcasts, the political radicals, the desperate ones, loaded down by their sins.

          In case we get ideas of grandeur about Jesus himself, the evangelist Mark makes sure that we understand where he comes from.  Mark makes clear that Jesus comes “from Nazareth of Galilee.” Nazareth was a small, unimportant village that no one would have heard of before Jesus appeared there. One scholar says that we could translate Nazareth as “Nowheresville” today. Galilee, on the other hand, was a place that people would have heard of. But for all the wrong reasons! Galilee was a notoriously poor region, full of unholy gentiles, cut off from the rest of Judea by the land of the ornery Samaritans.^[2] Mark wants us to picture a baptism about as far from decorum as you can get, in worldly terms. Here’s a man from unholy Nowheresville striding into a motley crowd of poor, sick sinners. Jesus stands among the others on the brown, sandy banks and, in turn, hikes up his robes to be washed in the brown, muddy waters. It is this Jesus for whom the heavens open. It is this Jesus on whom God’s Holy Spirit descends.

          For Mark, the Good News begins with such a baptism. Mark doesn’t begin his Gospel with stories about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. He leaves out the angels and the shepherds and the kings. Instead, Mark begins the Good News with Jesus’ baptism—and he ends it with the story of the Crucifixion. Mark holds up these two images very deliberately, like bookends. In today’s Gospel lesson we see the Spirit-dove descend on Jesus; we see the heavens ripped open; and we have the voice from heaven that proclaims Jesus as God’s beloved son. And at the crucifixion, we have the exact same pattern. On the Cross, instead of receiving the spirit, Jesus breathes out his spirit. Instead of the heavens being ripped open, we have the curtain of the Temple, the separation between humans and the Holy, torn in two. And at the crucifixion, in a parallel to God proclaiming, “You are my beloved Son,” the Roman Centurion proclaims, “Truly, this man is the Son of God.” In using a pattern like this as bookends for his Gospel, Mark makes it clear that Jesus’ baptism points to his death on the Cross, and his death on the Cross echoes his baptism. In baptism, Jesus is taking his first steps on his path toward the Cross.

It’s a strange, risky Love, then, that God pours out upon his Son at his baptism. In the Eastern orthodox iconography, we see Jesus submerged up to his chin in turbulent waves of water, while John and several onlookers lean in to watch from the safety of the shore. Deep within the river, under Jesus’ feet, are sea monsters—the mythological representations of chaos, the face of all of the dark, dangerous forces that threaten the order of creation. In his baptism, Jesus not only takes his first steps toward the cross, but he fully enters into chaos itself. He goes under the raging waves with the all of the powerful forces that seek to unmake the world.^[3] He submerges himself in all of the inner turmoil and bedlam of our world.

Early Christians portrayed the dangers of baptism better than we do. They had no marble fonts and silver shells. They entered the chilly waters of deep baptismal pools, built over springs of running water in dank, dark caves. Stripped naked, they were dunked completely underwater by the priests, Southern-Baptist-style. Emerging choking, spluttering, and blue with cold from an experience much like drowning, they were clothed right then and there in new white garments, wrapped in a new life in Christ. It must indeed have been a very dramatic—even frightening--sacrament.

When we remember our baptisms, we need to remember that we are baptized into the life of the One who came from Nowheresville, the One who stood on the banks with outcasts and sinners, the One who faced chaos, pain, shame, and death so that we might know of his Love. We are baptized into a Love that is anything but weak, into a Love that is anything but safe. Bishop Curry writes just this week about this kind of love, the kind of love into which we are reborn in baptism, the kind of love which we are called to proclaim in this chaotic world of ours:

“This way of unselfish, sacrificial love, it is the way to redeem a nation, to save a world. It is the way of hope for us all. But do not make the mistake of thinking that I speak of a sentimental and emotional love.

... This way of love is the way of sacrifice, the way of unselfishness, the way of selflessness, that seeks the good of the other as well as the self. And that is the way of the cross, which is the way of life.”[4]

With our Lord and Savior, we too are baptized into the way of the Cross, which is also the way of Life.

When I was looking up the photo of the water-gun priest at the other St. Ambrose, I found out that clever folks across the Internet had a field day with this water-gun baptism, with a little help from Photoshop. We see our masked priest standing on top of Doom monsters with his neon-green water pistol, like Jesus stands on top of the sea-monsters in those ancient icons. We see him standing with Clint Eastwood on a movie poster titled, “The Good, The Bad, and The Holy Spirit.” And perhaps my favorite: we see him standing before a blazing fire, surrounded by firemen with powerful hoses. Courageously, he aims that little plastic gun at the fiery inferno, as if he knows its hidden strength. As we stand before the infernos of hatred and the monsters of injustice, may we too remember the power and the strength of the new life of love into which we are baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.

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[1] Priest Goes Viral After Using Squirt Gun Full Of Holy Water To Bless Churchgoers | HuffPost

[2] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 128.

[3] Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 3.

[4] Presiding Bishop Curry’s Word to the Church: Who shall we be? – Episcopal News Service

Searching the Heavens

 

The story of the magi speaks to me in a whole new way now that I’ve experienced my own celestial event. On December 21, in the darkness of a worldwide pandemic, everyone turned their eyes to the heavens. Don and I went to Davidson Mesa in the hopes of watching Jupiter and Saturn align. By the time we arrived, we were too late to see anything. Clouds were already in our way. But the clouds didn’t stop the crowds of people who filled the fields, all searching, all desperately seeking the star. Cars were lined up all the way up and down McCaslin. Bundled in coats and gloves, people young and old stared up at the sky, determined to see something. No one wanted to miss a heavenly message so rare that it comes only once in 800 years. Is that how it was on that first Christmas? Come with me as we join the magi, through the story of my friend Hannah.

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Good morning! My name is Hannah, and I was King Herod’s spy. I wasn’t trained as a spy, of course. A woman would never be trained as a spy. And I hate King Herod. Everyone does. He’s cruel and paranoid and can turn on anyone at a whim. I was just looking for a way out. You see, I’m a Parthian Jew. Not everyone trooped back from Exile in Babylon all those hundreds of years ago. Some Jews chose to stay in the East where everything was settled and civilized. We stayed away from the desolate ruins of Jerusalem. My family was one of them--until my crazy father brought his rug trade back here last year. I have spent the last 6 months determined to get back home, away from this dark land. I can’t stand it here. It’s a land where loutish Roman soldiers leer at women in the streets. It’s a land where Judeans cower in the shadows, hiding from the wrath of King and soldier, and dreaming that God is going to save them.

          I gave up on God a long time ago. I was determined to get myself away from here before my father married me off to some old merchant. I heard that caravans from the East often stopped by Herod’s palace. So I hid away in an order of carpets from my father’s shop that was bound for the palace. When I got there, guess what I saw? There was a whole Parthian caravan milling around inside the palace gates! It was my lucky day! There must have been at least 12 magi with their camels and servants, goats and carts of food and supplies.

Magi, by the way, are not kings. If you think that they are kings, you are getting confused with Isaiah’s old prophecy from Scripture. Isaiah was writing way back during the Exile, trying to convince people like my ancestors to come back to Jerusalem and start over. No, magi are wise students of the stars in the heavens and of the deep dreams within. They know things—mysterious things. Of course, good Jews aren’t supposed to believe in idolatrous star-gazing and magic-making. But I’ve always found the claims of magi intriguing.  

          I heard these magi asking Herod about a new Jewish king, a child, that their star-studies had revealed to them. In Parthia, they had seen a special star in the heavens and had taken off in search of it. Imagine—to have the freedom and the resources and the fierce curiosity to set off on a journey like that, just to figure out some heavenly message. That’s exactly the kind of freedom that I longed for. The magi must have been traveling for months in the wilderness to get here.     

Since Herod didn’t have any new sons, he paled when he heard what the magi were saying about a new baby king. You could have heard a pin drop in the throne room. When the scribes sent the magi off to Bethlehem, I leaped at my chance. Sidling up to one of the King’s ministers, I suggested to him that, with my knowledge of Hebrew and Parthian, I could join the magi’s caravan as translator. I could find this dangerous child-king for Herod. Of course, I didn’t really plan to come back to Jerusalem with the news. I figured that I could hide away and sneak back East with the magi.

So off we went! The star beckoned us forward each night, glittering like a jewel that you could grab if you could just get close enough. When we reached the town of Bethlehem, the star seemed to glow more brilliantly. It seemed to drop in the sky, too, sending streams of light right into the middle of town. The magi, who had been chasing this thing for months, of course, began to talk excitedly among themselves. They were waving their hands and acting like little boys who had won at a game.

The streets of Bethlehem are pretty narrow, though, so as we entered the town, it became clear that the carts and camels couldn’t come with us. Without a second thought, the magi paid an innkeeper to take care of them. They didn’t even haggle over the price, they were in such a hurry to find this child. They only took out a few sacks from their supply chest and gave them to a servant to carry. “Presents for the new king,” I thought. “You can’t visit royalty without gifts.”    

The beams of light seemed to be carrying us into the center of the old town, and the streets began to narrow into alleys. The stench of human bodies became over-powering, and the ramshackle buildings began to lean into one another. Ragged men were peering around corners at our finery. This wasn’t good. What if God had caught me in a trap, a trap of punishment for a disobedient daughter who runs away from her father? What if the rabbis were right, and astrology calls forth only fallen angels? Fear and doom and disappointment crept up from the dark alleys like a fog until the starlight was almost invisible.

Suddenly, one of the wise men grabbed my arm and pointed. A thin beam of light fell on the flat roof of a tiny house, cutting clearly through the thick darkness. We heard a baby cry inside. “Well, if it’s not a king, at least it is a child,” was all that I could think. Nothing about this was making sense anymore. Before I knew it, we were in the house, all squeezed into one tiny, low-ceilinged room. The magi had to bend over just to come in. On the bed by a small window, a young woman just my own age was holding a squirming child. Her tired eyes looked up at us expectantly, as if she had already seen so many strange things in her life that nothing could surprise her anymore. I felt sorry for her. This was no great king, no messiah. This was a poor young mother with a crying baby. I remember thinking that she was exactly what I was trying to avoid becoming.

Before I could translate anything for the magi, a beam of light from that strange star fell through the window and onto the unhappy baby. Was he ill? His blankets were gray with dust. “Poverty and sickness,” I shuddered. “What are we doing here following poverty and sickness as if they were precious jewels?!”

Suddenly, as the light slanted in upon the child, he quieted. He looked up at us with piercing eyes. His gaze made me warm inside, like a glass of strong wine. My fear melted away. All of a sudden, I saw something moving in the light, angels perhaps? It looked like angels were walking from the child up into heaven on the beam of starlight. But they weren’t angels. They were human beings. I saw Roman soldiers hand in hand with Jews. There were Parthians and Medes and many from Asia. There were strange-looking people with yellow hair. There were crippled beggars, even prostitutes in their gaudy robes. There were people (criminals, surely) carrying what looked like golden crosses, although they couldn’t be Roman crosses—it would be ridiculous to make a shameful cross out of gold. This mix of people were all singing and rejoicing and glowing, almost as if they were on fire with the light.[1] I started to burn, too, as the light grew to take me in.

“You are the light of the world,” I heard. Did the voice come from the baby? “Let your light shine before others, so that they may… give glory to your father in heaven.” In that moment, all of my resentment, my hatred, my drive to flee … they all caught fire and burned, and I fell on my face before the light. The magi must have seen the Glory, too, for there they were like me, noses pressed to the earthen floor, foreheads in the dust, prostrate as before the Lord himself. Then somehow, we rose, lifted by the sad, wise gaze of the mother and the loving, burning gaze of the child. The magi pushed their sacks of gifts toward the bed and backed out, bowing low.

We stood in the street as dawn began to break and people began to stir. The ordinariness of daylight was strange, compared to our nighttime epiphany. I heard the wail of a mourner, crying for someone who must have just died. “Poverty and sickness are still with us,” I sighed. And yet, everything is different now. What I saw last night--in what must have been just a few seconds--has made the world a different place. “Go get your camels and head back East,” I warned the Parthians. “Go home and figure out what we have seen here today. Don’t return to Herod—he must not know about this.” I watched them turn and head toward the sun. As for me, I turned back home to tell this story, forever captive to the light in the baby’s eyes.

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          In our world, people are seeking, too. Like Hannah, we are desperately searching for a meaning beyond ourselves. That much was clear in Davidson Mesa. Like Hannah, we may be surprised at the places in which we find that meaning. But God’s promise to us burns as brightly as two planets that unite, again and again: “When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.” [2]

[1]  With apologies to Flannery O'Connor for borrowing an image from her short story, "Revelation."

[2] Jeremiah 29:13