Homily: The First Sunday in Lent [February 17, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

            As Lent begins, I’d like to give you a small window into the sinful consciousness of the Dean.  Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, and it featured services at which we imposed ashes on parishioners’ foreheads accompanied by the phrase, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We impose these ashes by making the sign of the cross.

            About half-way through the service, I felt my eyes wandering over to the side of the church where I had made the ash crosses on people’s foreheads, and I began to admire my own handiwork.  My, I thought to myself, those crosses are pretty good looking and symmetrical at that.  Then I looked over to the side where Gina had made the crosses, and my pride turned to envy.  Gosh, I observed, Gina’s crosses are better looking than mine. How did she get so good at this?  Then I looked over at Elizabeth Gardner’s ash crosses, and hers were even better still.  How did this happen?  I’ve been a priest for 36 years, and Elizabeth has been ordained for about 15 minutes. It just isn’t fair.

            So here I was in the middle of a Lenten liturgy focused on sin, and I found my own mental processes descending irretrievably into my own sinful, self-involved musings.  It all began with a plausible moment of self-congratulation and turned into a self-flagellating spectacle of envy and despair.

            Well, not really.  Actually, I was more amused at my own folly than depressed by the state of my ash crosses.  But you get the point.  How easily these bad ideas can grow, without our noticing, from fleeting thoughts into all-engrossing obsessions. And that leads me to something that dominated last week’s news.

            The dramatic story of Christopher Dorner—the former Los Angeles policeman who went on a murderous rampage against his former colleagues and was finally killed in a firefight in the San Bernardino mountains last week—is a compelling one. What intrigues me most about this story is the way Dorner was able to go through an interior process by which he could justify, to himself, outrageous and hateful actions.  How does a person who has served both in the military and the police get themselves to a place where they can contemplate and carry out killings in such a calculated way?  The process must have started, surely, with the real grievance he had against a department known to be still troubled by personal and institutional racism.  From the real grievance, Dorner went on to write a manifesto outlining the department’s patterns of racism and abuse.  And then he found a way to use his own manifesto as a warrant to begin killing police officers and, potentially, their families.  As we all know, the story ended last Tuesday when Dorner was cornered and finally killed in a cabin near Big Bear.

            How does someone move from being a pillar of society to its sworn enemy?  I think the process involves our innate, human ability to believe what New Testament scholar N.T. Wright calls the “plausible lie”.  Just as I momentarily got myself to believing that the quality of the ash crosses was what Wednesday’s  liturgy was about, so Christopher Dorner got himself to a place where he could justify his rampage as a “necessary evil” that he must perform both to eliminate racism in the Police Department and to clear his own name. 

            As we all begin to engage the Lenten season of self-examination, it is good to remember how many “plausible lies” we have each told ourselves over the course of our moral lives. One way to understand the Gospel for today, Luke’s account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness by Satan, is to see it as a meditation on the plausible lie.  Jesus goes alone into the desert, and a voice there—from Luke’s account, it could be an external or an internal voice--asks him to consider three things. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” “If you, then, will worship me, [all the kingdoms of the world] will be yours.” “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from [the pinnacle of the Temple].”

            To you and me, these may sound like exotic temptations, enticements not very likely to sway us.  But to Jesus, who has just been baptized and told by a voice from above that he was “God’s Son, the beloved”, they are extremely dangerous.  And they’re dangerous precisely because they’re so plausible. Surely God would not want his Son, the beloved, to suffer hunger.  Surely God wants the entire world to know and love God’s Son, the beloved.  Surely the quickest way to prove he was God’s Son, the beloved, would be by means of a spectacular, death-defying miracle. [Luke 4:1-14]

            Because you and I inhabit a culture that continually overstimulates us, we tend to think of “sin” as the kind of high voltage excess you would see in a red-light district or an adult video.  But the Bible understands sin as something much more subtle than a weekend in Las Vegas.  We human beings are wonderfully made, created in God’s own image.  But we have free minds that can imagine things as other than as they actually are.  The problem with sin isn’t that it’s so lurid.  The problem with sin is that it seems so plausible.

            My friend Harvey Guthrie tells the story of hearing Desmond Tutu interviewed once by a rather plain-minded journalist during the days of the South African struggle against apartheid.  The journalist asked Tutu if he was afraid of being killed, and the Archbishop responded by saying that there are things worse than death.  The journalist was stunned by this answer, and asked, “What, possibly, could be worse than death?”  Desmond Tutu responded, “If I were to get up some morning and say to myself, you know, Desmond, apartheid really isn’t so bad: that would be worse than death.”

            Here, turn this rock into a loaf of bread. Throw yourself off the top of the Temple.  Apartheid isn’t so bad.  It is these plausible lies, and not the more obvious temptations we face, that are the root causes of our problem.  And just as Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days to consider and reject the plausible lies in his life, so you and I have this forty-day Lenten season in which to examine the plausible lies in ours.

            As we begin this shared walk toward Easter, the question for each of us is this: what are the plausible lies that can claim and direct your life?  One big plausible lie in our culture is that we will never have enough and so must keep everything we get to ourselves.  Another plausible lie is that we are somehow more special than others.  Still another plausible lie is that we should give over the entirety of our waking lives to our work. Yet another is that I will be truly happy once I have X. (Fill in the blank.)  A big plausible lie for us religious people is that we should hand over our intellects to some magisterial system that will tell us what to think and how to live. Each of us receives hundreds, perhaps thousands, of messages packed with plausible lies every day.  That’s the curse of expanding information technology.  Jesus only had to wrestle with three plausible lies.  Now, thanks to your iPhone, you can battle 60 per hour.

            Jesus could say “No” to the plausible lies because he knew who he was:  God’s Son, the beloved.  You and I will never be able to say “No” to those lies until we know who we are, too.  Lent is not about feeling guilty or sinful. Lent is about coming to terms with who you really, finally are.  You too are God’s child.  You too are beloved.  We have this forty day season as a time to turn our attention away from the world’s plausible lies and to fix our eyes on Jesus, the one who models for us what authentic, meaningful, joyous human life can be. We have Lent as a time live into our authentic selves.   It doesn’t matter who makes the most perfect ash crosses.  There really still are some things worse than death.  Not living is one of them.  Not living as who you are is another.  Let us use these 40 precious days to clear our heads, open our hearts, and say “Yes” to who God really calls us to be.  Amen.

The Temptation of Jesus

Homily: The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany [February 3, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

Today is the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, a day commonly observed as Peace Sunday in the Episcopal Church.  That's because our collect for today addresses God as the One who governs “all things both in heaven and earth” and asks that we be granted God’s peace in God’s time.

Talking about peace in church may seem like a no-brainer, but actually to do so is a challenging task. For example, although we Episcopalians are a peaceful lot, it's probably a bad idea to try to preach about peace in church on Super Bowl Sunday.  And as the 49ers face off against the Ravens, it's probably an even worse idea for a Californian to do so in the presence of a large number of mid-Atlantic football fans.  But before you jump to conclusions, please remember that I'm from Los Angeles, not San Francisco, and we Angelenos have never happily rooted for Bay Area teams especially since the Raiders hightailed it back to Oakland in 1994.  The only way I'd pull for the 49ers, Raiders, Giants, or Athletics is if they were playing the Taliban.  And I assume Washingtonians would say much the same about Baltimore and the Ravens, especially since they’re really still the Cleveland Browns in disguise.

We all probably agree that there will never be peace on the gridiron.  In fact, peace on the playing field is the last thing we want. Something about us loves loyalties, rivalries, and contests.  I can’t imagine a satisfactory way in which the playing of the Super Bowl could end with a group hug and the singing of “Kumbayah”.  But as closely as sports mirror reality, they are not the thing itself.  Some atavistic part of us yearns for blood on the playing field. But another part of us yearns for an end to war in all of its forms. Even as we prepare to watch the Super Bowl, on this Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, the church urgently prays for God’s peace to obtain in the world.

            What does it mean for us to pray and stand for peace?  As an Episcopalian, I start by admitting that we inhabit a comprehensive church, one characterized by a wide range of views on the subject.  There are Episcopalian pacifists.  There are Episcopalians in uniform.  As the inheritors of the Church of England’s established church tradition, American Episcopalians have long understood the important role of the military in our national life and have supported ministries to men and women in uniform since the nation’s founding.  At the same time, we have consistently raised up leaders who have opposed war in some or all its forms, many sharing the pacifist views of our Quaker brothers and sisters.  Anglicanism will never be of one mind on questions of war and peace.  But that does not mean we have nothing to say on the subject.

            One way in to thinking about peace is to attend to what Jesus says as he returns to his hometown of Nazareth in this morning’s Gospel.  As Luke tells the story, Jesus has gone home to Nazareth after an early series of amazing public healings around Galilee.  As he reads and speaks in the Nazareth synagogue, Jesus is challenged by his former neighbors. Luke tells us that “they were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” and asked, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”  Translation:  We know this man. Others may think him a powerful healer and teacher, but we know that he’s really just little Jesus from the carpenter’s shop.  Who does he think he is?

            Jesus responds with one of his most famous sayings:  “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.”  And then he goes on to say something which sounds pretty benign to us but actually enrages his listeners:

But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. [Luke 4:21-30]

Jesus’s reference to the Sidonian widow and the Syrian leper makes the people of Nazareth so angry that they drive him out of town to the brow of a hill so that they might hurl him off a cliff. “Sidonian” and “Syrian” don’t sound like fighting words to me. What is the big deal with those names?

The big deal, of course, is that Jesus is speaking positively about people the Israelites have identified as “the enemy”.  The prophet Elijah came to the widow of Zaretphath in Sidon, the home town of the Philistines.  Elijah’s successor, Elisha, cured Naaman of leprosy, and he was a General in the Syrian army.  The Philistines oppressed Israel in its early days, the Syrians later on. For the Israelites, both the Philistines and the Syrians were the enemy, the oppressor, the collective representation of evil. To say that God accepted them was an insult.  To say that God might have preferred them was an outrage.

Jesus then compounds the offense by tacitly comparing himself to the prophet Elijah, whose ministry was seen as a pattern for the Messiah, the hoped-for king who many believed would return and restore Israel to its greatness and banish Israel’s enemies—Philistines and Syrians then, Romans now--forever.  Here was Jesus telling them that the real Messiah would exercise compassion, not vengeance, that messianic ministry might even include reaching out to and embracing the enemy. It’s a short step from saying “God loves Philistines” to “God loves Romans” to who knows what that would be today.

Jesus’s experience in Nazareth has much to teach us about our own attitudes to war and peace. For those of us who follow Jesus, the primary problem is neither with the technology nor the tactics of warfare.  For those of us who follow Jesus, the real problem is our human tendency to define others as our “enemies”.  For Christian people, there can never be an “us” and a “them”. For Christian people, even the people who oppose us and our values continue to share our humanity.  We are under orders never to stigmatize them as evil or less than human.  We are under orders to love them as we love our neighbors and ourselves.

 The great Reinhold Niebuhr once observed that in questions of justice and mercy, we tend to ask God for mercy for ourselves and justice for others. We can hear in Jesus’s synagogue remarks a similar critique of human folly.  The popular messianic hope of his day expected the intervention of a God who would be merciful to Israel and cruel to everybody else.  Before we smugly nod in knowing judgment of them, couldn’t we say the same thing about ourselves?  The basic tribal loyalties that bind us together as human beings—religious, ethnic, racial, class—are the same ones that betray us in our larger social connections.  Niebuhr also said that human beings are better in their intimate relationships than they are in their social ones.  I’m a lot more compassionate with my family and friends than I am with the people “out there”.  We empathize with those we know.  We distrust those we don’t.

As followers of Jesus, you and I will always be called to stand for peace.  For some of us that will mean questioning, perhaps opposing, war in its many forms.  For others of us that will mean faithful military service.  The real question for all of us who follow Jesus is this:  how do we live expansively into Jesus’s vision of God’s love and mercy and grace?  As Jesus implied in the synagogue, so he proclaims today:  God’s love and mercy and grace are for everybody.  You may have an adversary on the playing field, but there are no real “enemies” in life.  God loves Israelite, Philistine, Syrian, and Roman alike.  God loves American, Taliban, Palestinian, and Israeli alike.  There are no special categories of human being, good or bad.  The root of our war and peace problem lies in our tendency to try to put people into categories in the first place. But no category ultimately describes the complexity of any human being.  “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” says Paul. [Romans 3.23]  And all are precious, created in God’s image and redeemed on the cross.  Only the vision of divine love and grace as lived and proclaimed by Jesus has room to accommodate what seems to us a paradox. We’re all sinners and we’re all beloved.  One statement can be true only if both are true. That is the case without exception.

Later today many of us will watch what happens on the playing field.  Right now we prepare to share this meal, the Eucharist.  It is the sign and symbol of something deeper going on in the world than what we see on a surface of labels and categories.  At his table, Jesus gathers everyone in unquestioning, radical hospitality.  As we come together around Jesus’s table, let’s remember that the one who calls us to this meal is the same one who forgave those who took him to the cross.  God’s mercy and grace are finally bigger than our ability to comprehend them.  All we can do in response is resolve to accept and extend them, and then gather at this table to give thanks. Amen.

Homily: The Third Sunday after the Epiphany [January 20, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

   

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent,

and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest,

until her vindication shines out like the dawn,

and her salvation like a burning torch.[ Isaiah 62.1]

There are eight steps that lead up into this pulpit.  Every time I ascend these steps I remember that, on March 31, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his final sermon from this very place. Four days after he preached here at Washington National Cathedral, Dr. King was killed by an assassin wielding a gun.

The sermon Dr. King preached that morning was a call to the faith community to wake up to the world around us.  He titled the sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”, and he asked that all Christians join in the ongoing struggles against racism, poverty, and especially violence.   As he said, ”It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.” He also said, “We must find an alternative to war and bloodshed.” As a student of Gandhi and a follower of Jesus, Dr. King had made nonviolence central to both his theology and his practice as a Civil Rights leader.  Four days before he died by means of gunfire, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in this pulpit and asked that we all reject violence.

I remember King’s assassination very well.  It happened in Holy Week, and it’s one of the events that first compelled me, as a college freshman, to go to church at Easter to try and make sense of it.  I’ve always had an aversion to guns, even though I have been pretty much sheltered from them and no real sense of what it feels like to be faced with one.  As I was driving to a meeting last week, I heard NPR’s Terry Gross interview the actor Dustin Hoffman, and I was surprised to learn that Hoffman has refused for a very long time to carry a gun on screen.  His refusal comes as a result of having been threatened at gunpoint when he was a younger man.  Here is part of what he said:

I don’t think people understand what it’s like to have a gun pointed at you.  I remember when it happened to me . . . Every split second you’re feeling the bullet go right through you.. . . I was aware of how easy that finger is to just touch this thing called a trigger and it’s all over.  [Fresh Air January 17, 2013]

            As I listened to Hoffman talk about his experience at the wrong end of a gun, I thought of this season of Epiphany and our gospel reading for today.  The season of Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of God’s glory in the world. Today’s Gospel is the story of Jesus’s changing water into wine at a marriage feast in Cana of Galilee.  There are many possible ways to interpret this story, but to me it has always been about the way everyday stuff can reveal the transcendent glory of the divine hidden within it.  In the presence of Jesus, water becomes wine.  The ordinary becomes a window in to the extraordinary. Here’s how John puts it at the end of the passage: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” [John 2.11]

            The point of our Gospel today is not that Jesus is a magician.  The point is that the glory that Jesus reveals in himself is God’s glory, and the big truth on offer here is that not only Jesus but all God’s precious human creatures similarly reflect and reveal that divine glory.  Like water being transformed into wine, we are all, all of us, windows into the glory of God.  That’s what we mean when we say that human beings are created in God’s image.  That’s what we mean when we say that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  What Jesus reveals to us is that we are each particular incarnations, enfleshments of the divine.  And so one thing today’s Gospel leads me to understand is the way in which every abuse or terrorization or threat or assault on a human being is also an attack on God. 

We Christians follow someone who incarnated God perfectly on earth.  We follow that same one who died at human hands by means of violence.  The first thing I get as a preacher occupying Dr. King’s pulpit space on this Sunday is the link between Jesus and Dr. King and Newtown and you and me.  Jesus was precious and he died because of violence.  Dr. King was precious and he died because of violence.  The first graders and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School were precious and they died because of violence.  The urban kids who shoot each other on our streets are precious and they die by means of violence every day. You and I are precious, too, and we have the opportunity to resist violence, to stand with its victims and say “No more,”to call others into work and action to stop it, and to help heal the wounds of a nation that has already suffered too much because of it. 

            So in the spirit of Dr. King, I want to say that opposing gun violence may have political implications, but it is not primarily a political issue.  It is a religious issue, a theological issue.  Human beings are precious, unique, unrepeatable icons of God. We stand with God and for God’s values when we stand with and for the human beings who bear God’s glory into the world. And one of the ways we stand with and for them is to proclaim their dignity and worth and oppose all forces that threaten or oppress them.  And right now one of the chief oppressive threats to human dignity in our world is the obscene proliferation of guns in America. If we want to stand with Jesus and with Martin Luther King, we’ve also got to stand with those who, like them, die by means of violence.  And that means we who follow Jesus and stand with King have to stand against guns. That may sound like a hard truth, but for a Christian, there’s no way around it.

Christianity is not primarily about thinking good thoughts about God or admiring Jesus.  It’s about loving God and following Jesus.  And that means that as Christians we have not only blessings but obligations.  If you don’t believe me, listen again to what Dr. King said right here:

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.  . . . Nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference. [Martin Luther King, Jr. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”, WNC 3/31/68]

We at Washington National Cathedral have come to the end of the first part of our work, the preaching part; and that’s the easy part.  Now we are entering the next phase of our work, the organizing part; and that’s the harder part.  Bishop Budde and I and our staff colleagues have spent the last month getting connected to other faith community and gun control leaders, many of whom have been doing this work far longer than we have.  We have learned a lot from them.  We also have something to contribute.

I believe we at the Cathedral need to get behind the President and Vice President’s recommendations on gun control legislation, supporting a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, supporting universal background checks, and supporting stiffer criminal penalties for those engaged in gun trafficking. We are joining with our interfaith partners to shape a strategy by which all of us can bring pressure to bear on legislators around the country to support these three common sense, consensual, middle of the road goals.  As that strategy emerges, we will ask that you join in that work of moving the legislation forward.  As President Obama said last week,

This will not happen unless the American people demand it.  If parents and teachers, police officers and pastors, if hunters and sportsmen, if responsible gun owners, if Americans of every background stand up and say, enough; we’ve suffered too much pain and care too much about our children to allow this to continue — then change will come.  That’s what it’s going to take. . . .The only way we can change is if the American people demand it. [Presidential Press Conference on Gun Control 1/16/13]

As the National Cathedral, we are a visible faith community in a symbolic building.  We have a unique role in American religious life.  We represent what is best in American civic life—we stand at the intersection of faithful and civic values.  It is vital that we use our visibility and our symbolic role to keep the need for gun control squarely in the public eye.  As the leader of this wonderful place, I commit myself to that work and ask you to join me as the legislative process moves forward.  We can make Washington National Cathedral a visible focus of our shared commitment and so help end our national tragic scourge of gun violence.

Tomorrow is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  It is also the day on which we inaugurate the president and vice president.  The day after tomorrow the Cathedral will host the 57^th Inaugural Prayer Service.  As President Obama begins his second term, I can think of no better way for this Cathedral to support him in this work than to reaffirm our commitment to Dr. King’s vision of an America characterized by justice, equality, and peace.

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent,

and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest,

until her vindication shines out like the dawn,

and her salvation like a burning torch.[ Isaiah 62.1]

Amen.

Homily: The Epiphany [January 6, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

             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.