The older I get, the more I love art
museums. A few years ago a clergy group
I was taking part in did a get-to-know-you exercise. We were asked to complete the sentence, “I
never saw a blank I didn’t like.” I
had to go first, so I said, “museum”. As
we went around the room, everyone else said something really pious like
“church” or “icon” or “sacrament” or “book of the Bible”. It didn’t take long to figure out who was the
secular humanist in the room.
One of the delights of living in
Washington is its museums. When I have a
day off, you can usually find me at one of them. And one of my very favorite
paintings hangs in the National Gallery of Art here in Washington. When you walk down the hallways of the first
floor there, you can't help but see it. It’s a huge circular painting, called
in Italian a tondo, and it rests
inside an ornate gold-painted frame: Fra Angelico’s and Fra Filippo Lippi’s
15th century depiction of The Adoration
of the Magi. It pictures the event
we celebrate today, the feast of the Epiphany. On this day, we hear the story,
told in Matthew’s Gospel, that tells us how wise men came from the east bearing
symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the cradle of the infant
Jesus.
When you go to the National Gallery,
I hope you will stop and look at this remarkable painting. What arrests me most
about The Adoration of the Magi is
the startling profusion of human beings who come to adore the infant Jesus.
They seem to be streaming in from all over the place. But standing atop a wall apart from the
crowds is a line of five pale men wearing loincloths. These men are emaciated
and gaunt. Yet they raise their hands in
a gesture of astonishment and praise.
That they are nearly naked suggests that they are probably beggars. That
their skin is so whitishly pale suggests that they are lepers. Whoever they
are, they are cut off from the rest of the people, therefore excluded from
society. Yet as lonely and miserable as they must be, they cannot help but be
caught up in the joy of the moment. As do the Magi and the crowd around them,
these leprous paupers look toward the infant Jesus with expectation and respond
to him with praise.
One of the ways to understand the
Epiphany is to listen to what the writer of the letter to the Ephesians tells
us this morning. He suggests that, in Jesus, something previously hidden is now
being revealed. As he says,
In
former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now
been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the
Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the
promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
[Ephesians 3: 5-6]
In other words: there are no longer
any insiders or outsiders. Even Gentiles can become Christians! In the life and
ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus, a divine mystery is being worked
out. The categories “Jew” and “Gentile”
no longer make any sense. The human family and its divisions are being healed.
We are, all of us, on a path from our separate places into a new way of being.
The Magi’s pilgrimage reminds us how
important journeys are in the life of faith. In the earliest days of the Jesus
movement, the group simply called itself hodos,
the Way. (See Acts 9.2) In Greek, hodos
means “way” in the sense of a travelled way, a road. But like all words, hodos soon took on metaphorical connotations. Just as today we talk of the "spiritual
path or journey", so then "The Way" meant a faith process, a
course of conduct, a manner of thinking or feeling or acting or deciding. In
the very earliest days Christians got it right:
they thought of themselves not as a religious system but as a group of
people on a shared journey, a path with ethical and spiritual and behavioral
implications.
So here we have the confluence of a
couple of ideas. One of them is
represented in the Fra Angelico/Fra Lippo Lippi painting: the whole human community--from oriental
potentates to leprous beggars and everybody in between--joins in praise of the
one born in the stable. The second
involves our talk of ways and roads and paths and journeys. The whole world is drawn to this human
manifestation of what God is up to. And
they respond not with a doctrine but with a pilgrimage. Taken together, they
lead me to say—and this may sound strange at first--that Christianity is not a
religion. It is a Way; it is a mode of being toward the world, toward others,
toward God.
“Christianity is not a religion?”
says the preacher. If Christianity (and
Islam and Buddhism and Judaism) are not religions, what are they?
Well, what do we mean by the word,
“religion”? I think what we mean these days by “religion” is a set of
propositions about the universe to which its adherents assent. That’s the way
we use the term, but it is a very recent notion. In a Fresh Air interview a few years ago, Terry Gross asked the writer
Karen Armstrong, "what do you think religion is for?" Here is how Armstrong answered:
Religion
is about helping us to deal with the sorrow that we see in life, helping us to
find meaning in life, and helping us to live in relation to . . . transcendence. . . . Religious people are
ambitious. They want to feel enhanced. They want to feel at peace within
themselves. They want to live generous lives. They want to live beyond
selfishness, beyond ego.
For Karen Armstrong, who lived a
good part of her life in a monastic community, the life of faith is about
living in a new way--a way that involves not only self-awareness but making
common cause with others. Here's how she
concludes:
All
the world religions say that the way to find what we call God or Brahman,
Nirvana, or Tao is to get beyond the prism of egotism, of selfishness which
holds us in a little deadlock and limits our vision. That if we can get beyond
that, especially in the practice of compassion, when we dethrone ourselves from
the center of our world and put another there, we live much more richly and
intensely. [Fresh Air 9/21/09]
As I think about The Adoration of the Magi in the
National Gallery and what it represents, as I think about the Letter to the
Ephesians and its declaration that we're in the middle of a great mystery
working itself out, as I think about those Magi making their way to Bethlehem
from the east surrounded at the stable by the fullness of the human community,
I believe something big and hopeful and universal and deep is going on
here. God is bringing together
categories of people you normally wouldn't mention in the same breath. And in bringing people together beyond category,
God is destroying the idea of all human categories, forever. To say that we are all one in Christ is
neither aspirationally sentimental nor triumphalistically arrogant. To say that we are all one in Christ
transcends all ideas of race or ethnicity or sexual orientation or gender or
class. To say that we are all one in
Christ transcends even the idea of religion.
It’s not just us Christians who are all one. It is everybody.
Following Jesus is not about getting
it right. Being in relationship with God
is not about others being damned so that I can be saved. Living the life of faith is not about one
exclusivistic way to be holy. All of
us--the Magi, the lepers, the Gentiles, the Jews, those who have followed Jesus
from the earliest days, those who don’t know Jesus at all yet--are on a
journey. So are the countless women and
children and men from other cultures who follow different teachers. As followers of Jesus, the crucial issues for
us are the same issues that people everywhere in the world have to
confront. In Karen Armstrong's words,
"Religion is about helping us to deal with the sorrow that we see in life,
helping us to find meaning in life, and helping us to live in relation to . .
. transcendence." It's about dethroning ourselves from the
center of our worlds and engaging in practices of generosity and compassion as
the cosmic mystery unfolds.
Today is the Epiphany. On this day
when we proclaim and enjoy the manifestation of God's glory in Jesus, let us,
like the Magi, commit ourselves to being his companions. The Way that Jesus walked is the way of hope
and blessing and peace. If you are
anxious or nervous or depressed or grieving or sick; if you are enraged about
the persistence of violence and suffering in the world; if you are eager for a
life of abundance and peace: join the
Magi and the disciples and your brother and sister Christians and make common
cause with your fellow Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and Jews to take on
practices of generosity and compassion. We
don’t think our way into holiness. We
take up holy practices and discover that the big mystery works itself out in us
over time.
The Wise Men and lepers and crowds
who make their way to Bethlehem remind us that Christianity is not a religion
and that salvation is not about who wins and who loses. Like all great faith traditions, Christianity
is a way. It is my way. It is our way. It is a call into prayer and action. But there are other ways, too, and our job is
to walk with others in the shared direction of God’s future. God is up to something
big, something bigger even than religion itself. The Magi pursued it and so can you. As we
walk that road with the Magi and with Jesus, you and I can become wise people,
too. Amen.
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