From the Pulpit:

 
                                                                                     The Gift of Mystery
  

It seems like months ago, but right before Christmas John Bennet and I got to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at Bass Concert Hall. I know several of you got to see it too, and it was great fun, with the Rockettes dressed as tin soldiers and Santa and rag dolls, all the Christmas songs and the dancing, but at the end, after all the kick-lines were done, there was a distinct change of mood, a hush fell over the audience, and we saw the most magnificent Christmas pageant.

No apology was made for the expression of the specifically Christian story, and we saw the Holy Family, angels, shepherds with real sheep, and at the end the wise men. Actually, if you ask me, the wise men stole the show. They were not just three guys from far away, but had huge retinues of servants and attendants, all dressed in exotic and elaborate costumes carrying banners and canopies and massive treasure chests, and the whole audience gasped when the two real camels walked through our midst  towards the stable. What struck me was how truly exotic these kings were, these enigmatic visitors to an unwed peasant couple in a dusty little no-count village in the middle of nowhere. I tried to imagine an analogy…maybe if the Pope and the Dalai Lama dropped in on a teenaged pregnant couple in a trailer in Dime Box.

I have all manner of manger scenes all over my house – they don’t get put away until after Epiphany – and when my boys were little, they were the real sticklers for propriety. Our main nativity set is a carved wooden one from Germany, and it got set up in the living room, but the Wise Men didn’t get to join everybody else until January 6, so they had to start at the far end of the dining room and make their slow progress a couple of feet a day across the dining room table, down onto the carpets and hardwood floors and tabletops until they got to the manger just in time to present their gifts before everybody  got wrapped in tissue and boxed up for another year.

Only Matthew tells us this story, which is, by the way, devoid of shepherds. If we remember back a couple of weeks, we’ll remember that in Matthew’s gospel the angel comes to Joseph rather than Mary, and that God’s will is made clear again and again in dreams. Dreams are taken very seriously. But what strikes me this year especially having seen the extravaganza is all the questions that ring in the air unanswered. What I am left with this year is the profound mystery 
of it all.

In fact we are told very little. Not even how many of them there were. It’s logical to make the leap from the three gifts to three kings, and we sing about it as if it were gospel. It wasn’t until the sixth century in Greece that the wise men acquired the names Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, and people began to speak with authority about their home countries as if they knew. Babylon, India, China. All the text tells us is that they came from the east. How long did it take them to get to the stable? Maybe as long as two years given that King Herod orders the murder of all male children two years old and younger, and if that were the case, why were Mary and Joseph still in Bethlehem?

And what happened to the gifts? I don’t think it is at all an accident on Matthew’s part that we are left dumbfounded, speechless, observers of a scene that when we think about it, makes practically no sense at all.

Freeze that image.

I want to share with you something I heard this week that at first glance seems light years away. I was listening to a CD in my car, an interview of Krista Tippet with Sir John Pulkinghorne, who is both a quantum physicist and an Anglican priest. In 2002 he won the prestigious Templeton Prize, “for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities including research in love, creativity, purpose, infinity, intelligence, thanksgiving and prayer.” What an awesome list of subjects to do research on.

Tippet was asking him about the issue of reconciling religious belief with science, the commonly held assumption – the one that seems to dominate the ruminations of the Texas Textbook Commission -- that one must choose one or the other, stake your claim on evolution or Genesis, sign your name under the creed of discovery or tradition. Pulkinghorne had this to say: “If the physical world surprises us, it wouldn’t be at all odd  to find out that God surprises us even more… Whatever is easy to believe is not the whole story. There is always a deeper and more satisfying story to be heard.”

He says that when we receive a story,  be it biblical or scientific, our call is not to dissect it into fragments that are easy to handle, to reduce it to the level of our present capacity to comprehend, but to stand before it in awe, asking it to take us to a new place, a new dimension of experience and awe.

He points out that a chemist  can take a painting like Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal, which hangs in the foyer of our Parish Life Center – well a print does; the original is in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia – a chemist could take the original and scrape every particle of paint from the canvas and analyze it under a microscope and dissolve it in test tubes  and tell us precisely what it is made of, but in doing so destroy the painting, which was never about the paint in the first place.

When  we approach holy scripture or science in this way we miss the whole point. The point, Pulkinghorne says, is wonder. He goes on to speak about the nature of light, which can be experienced at both wave and particle, but not at the same time. He says, “When you ask light a wave-like question, you get a wave-like answer. You get a particle-like answer when you ask a particle-like question.”

So return with me to where we were, unseen witnesses to this tableau where the humble mother and father and their child receive the honor and the gifts of these most remarkable visitors. What are the questions we should ask? I don’t think we need names or dates. We don’t need to ask to see their passports or discuss how it is that they understand each other’s languages or got the news in the first place that the new King of the Jews was being born or where they came from or why they cared enough to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles.

Strange as it seems, those would be the easy answers. Oh, yes, and to Mary and Joseph, What did you do with all that gold? No. The answers to those questions, if we got them and trusted them, would put an end to our engagement when in fact Matthew’s purpose for writing the gospel is to draw us into ever deepening relationship with this child who is the object of such wonder that exotic kings risk their lives to get to his crib and lay at his feet gifts that are of sacrificial value even to the richest and mightiest rulers of nations.

We are meant to gasp and stand there rapt. We are meant to be unable to formulate the questions. We are meant to find ourselves stunned into silence and incapable of turning away.

It was another scientist, none other than Albert Einstein, who said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” And so today I hope we can accept the gift of mystery, the inexplicable presence of these astrologers or magicians or kings or whoever they were, wherever they were from, and that we can accept the invitation that years later Jesus left with his dearest friends and that they have handed down to us. He said, just before he ascended into heaven, that we are now the heirs of his power to love on earth, the radical power to forgive, and that it is up to us to share the mysterious story, to ask the important questions, and to enter into ever deeper relationship with him in the communion he came to give us, a communion that is for everyone.

“And remember,” Jesus said, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

Amen.