January 5, 2020

Gregory Thorn

Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2: 1-12

Good morning. Are you all happy to be here? …. Well that’s a good start.

I am Gregory, I’m an Anglican priest and I’m married to an angel …. anything else I might say about myself may be prejudicial so I’ll leave it at that.

Today’s Gospel is the story of the Three Kings or three Wise Men. I’m sure you’ve heard this story a myriad of times and seen church pantomimes about it, ad nauseam.

Apart from the feel-good factor, ‘though, I wonder what you have taken from it all? Of course, traditionally, this story underlies, in the Christian calendar, the feast of The Epiphany, epiphany meaning the manifestation.  That is, the occasion that Jesus Christ is made manifest or revealed to the gentiles. Gentile, again, meaning nations and people who are not Jewish. The feast originated sometime in the 4th century in both the Byzantine and Roman churches.

So far so good; are you still with me … or has the pew sheet suddenly become more interesting?

Today, let’s take this story in a slightly different perspective than the usual and more traditional perspective. Let’s see if this text can open up some new and different possibilities for us, possibilities that are a bit more useful in our contemporary climate than this story being just some sort of annual pantomime concoction.

Before going further, I’d like to draw out a difference between a Jewish approach to scripture and the Christian approach to scripture.  In Judaism there is a strong current of scriptural appreciation that is interpretive, that is dynamic, allegorical and flexible whereas, in Christianity, interpretation tends towards the dogmatic and the doctrinal. Today I am taking a leaf out of that Jewish stream and asking the text to show us something new, something relevant to our contemporary context and situation.

What we have with this story is a convergence of two quite different streams of social and religious understanding. That is we have the worldview of Judaism and the worldview of Persian seers or astrologers, magi. Both are important to the story and both are necessary to birth the new understanding that was to take shape through the ministry and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jewish people provided the raw material, the resource in the form of an auspicious child and the three kings provided a worldview that gave the child the recognition of his future stature, i.e. he was to be spiritual royalty, something Judaism was disinclined to endorse as was eventually played out in the execution of Jesus some thirty odd years later.

Today, we are in unprecedented times!

Wars and famines have always been with us but the awareness of possible global extinction is a new ingredient in the mix of human history, notwithstanding the aberrant fantasies that have been concocted over time through fear-induced scrutiny of the Book of Revelation and the like.

Christianity, as we know it, is stuck, or worse, irrelevant in it’s response to this global situation. Church Christianity simply doesn't have the necessary functional apparatus to meaningfully engage in conversation and activity that will contribute to the sort of change necessary to effectively induce the humanitarian response needed to become globally sustainable and regenerative. This is because the shift needed for human survival is a change, a paradigm shift of consciousness, of worldview and church Christianity lacks the ingredients and imagination to be instrumental in this.

I think popular Christianity has three significant limitations.

One, is that it reads and has read its own headlines for centuries and has come to unequivocally believe them and think that they are inextricably and self-dependently true. In other words Christian church thinks that it is right, that it has the correct answer and the only truth, even 'though that truth is not overly clear. This is not the case. Christian doctrine, for this is the form these headlines take, is a bunch of ideas that people have had at particular times in history and we, for a variety of reasons, some quite deeply rooted, are reticent to radically change them.

The second limitation I see is that church theology, language and liturgy is primarily self-referencing. It’s lexicon is entirely limited for an age such as ours in the 21st century and our shop-fronts, our liturgies, often lack structural integrity and/or real-time meaning. An Anglican liturgy can convey many differing theological perspectives in one sitting, some of which directly contradict others and some are just plain confusing and/or nonsensical.

Thirdly, traditional Christianity has, and promotes, a dualistic understanding of God. That is, we understand God as another and separate to ourselves. Unfortunately, or you might say, fortunately, we don't have time to unpack this today but this dualistic appreciation of God, that is to have an understanding of God that is other than the phenomenal world, including ourselves, is neither rational nor theologically sound. It just doesn’t make logical or faithful sense and it completely disenfranchises the Church to be an effective contributor to the global crisis we face.

These limit Christianity’s ability to engage in meaningful and beneficial activity that will assist a global change in human consciousness. However, I might add, Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on introversion, elitism and self-referencing, other religions are just as good at it. Church, in whatever form or religion it takes can be, socially, a blessing or a curse. It is a blessing when it holds open inclusive sanctioned and sacramental space. It is a curse when it is prescriptive, exclusive and elitist.

However, as we are all aware, globally, we are running out of time. And religious institutions no longer have the luxury of being self-serving, introspective social clubs with their own self-interests at heart.

This does not seem to be what Jesus of Nazareth had in mind, nor did he apparently teach or live this way.

And so, allegorically, let’s go back to a Bethlehem with a star over an auspicious manger. The church of the time, that is institutional Judaism, is stuck in many ways. It is factional, oppressed, elitist and not able to address the crises of the time. Nevertheless it is still a rich and powerful resource.

In our allegory, or Three Kings story, two things happened on that auspicious day. One was that a powerful energy entered human history and the other was that a worldview or perspective from an alternate narrative, a narrative brought by three Persian holy men, gave it a language, lexicon and theological nuance to address the dire needs of the time. Also, the worldview and wisdom of the Magi was co-equal to the holy birth, both were necessary to establish a new consciousness needed for the age.

Scrolling forward to 2020 and wondering how this ancient allegory might help us now, we might ask who the Wise Men might represent today to institutional Christianity. Who are the alternate voices necessary to loosen church Christianity’s limitations?

Let’s take one of the examples above to reflect on, let’s take the idea of a God separate from the created universe. This idea induces and endorses in us also, as human beings, a sense of separateness. The ‘I’ that I seem to know as who I am looks upon the world and people around me as separate to me. That is there is me and it, me and you.

In the religions of the Asian East, and particularly in some Buddhist schools there is a teaching about no-self. In other words, if we really try to find that ‘I’, that self, that I perceive myself to be as a separate, permanent, unchanging and substantial reality we are doomed to failure, it simply doesn’t exist. Sometime, when you are bored and have nothing to do, have a go at finding such an ‘I’. You might be interested in what you do find.

This is a difficult notion for materialists at all levels to get our heads around. For us it runs very close to nihilism, which it is not and which, by all accounts, is rather an uncomfortable place to be.

The Vietnamese, contemporary Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh realised this, particularly for his Western students and he invented another term that had a more positive sense to it. He called the Buddhist notion of no-self, interbeing, we, and all around us, inter-are. For Christians this could be a Three Kings phenomenon. It is a piece from an alternate narrative that assists us to experience ourselves as an integral part of all that exists. In other words the universe, nature and creation isn’t separate from us but we are all part of the one being. Whatever we do to any aspect of the universe or phenomena immediately impacts on ourselves because all that exists is part of who I am. We are in a dynamic process of interbeing. We have no separate self apart from this.

None of this is foreign to Christianity, it is all in our history. We have just lost sight of some of it over the centuries.

Epiphany, then, in this sense, isn't about including the outsider, the foreigner, the gentile as is traditionally understood. Epiphany is about going out and becoming part of that gentile world, a nation among nations, coequal and codependent. Recognising that there are things in this world, in the other religions and in all human thinking that Christianity desperately needs in order to become a real-time force in changing human consciousness for global survival, in the same way that Jesus of Nazareth, aided and abetted by the Magi, became a real-time force in changing the consciousness of his time.

Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t belong to, or is owned by, the Christian Church.  Jesus of Nazareth belongs to everyone. It is our responsibility to allow that to happen.

Finally a postscript: And what about God? Where does that leave God?

Perhaps we can leave God to look after and manage God-self. Perhaps Divinity doesn’t need our rules and prescriptions to feel good about Themself or have a good sense of identity. Perhaps Divinity is perfectly able to have a healthy self-esteem in spite of us as well as because of us. This is good …. because it frees us to get on with the work that is ours to do, what we are called to do, and to let God get on with being the business that is for us all to do.