The Empty Tomb Is No Joke

Several years ago I was asked to be the lay pastor of what must be called a faithful remnant at North Baptist Church in Port Chester, N.Y.

Just standing in that pulpit was an honor. The three Tiffany windows over a preacher’s shoulder and other brilliant displays of stained glass make it one of the most beautiful worship centers I've known. The church’s storied past also includes a former pastor to whom I am married, the Divine Doc M, ten inches shorter but always over me in the Lord.

By the time I came to its pulpit the church had seen better years and most Sundays the congregation barely achieved the minimal requirement for Jesus’ presence, two or three gathered faithfully. But I worked as hard on the sermons as if I was preaching in Riverside Church, and although the congregation was the size of a small prayer group, I preached from the elevated pulpit so all participants could feel like we were not just playing church.

Un-ordained and un-adorned as I was, I had never preached on Easter. When Holy Week began that first year I began pouring through scriptures and commentaries. By Saturday morning, I was leafing through dusty volumes of The American Baptist magazine for which I used to write editorial homilies. As any columnist knows, an approaching deadline puts the Muse to sleep. That must have happened in the spring of 1980, because I didn’t write an Easter message that year. I drew a cartoon instead.

The cartoon was hastily drawn and shaded with press-on screens that had to be shaped by Exacto knives and pressed on to the paper. My drawing shows a TV news van pulling up to a tomb carved out of rocks in the middle of a barren desert. A reporter with a microphone emerges from the empty hole as a videographer waits tensely from his perch atop the van.

“Just an empty tomb,” the reporter calls to the camera guy. “Signal the assignment desk. That news tip musta been a joke.”

Ha, I must have thought at the time. Irony. Very funny. But for me, the agony and ecstasy of art was still to come.

About a month after the cartoon appeared, I was one of thousands of participants in Religion Communication Congress 1980, a once-a-decade event for religious communicators. That was the year the newly elected Pope John Paul II addressed the gathering by videotape, and Harvard theologian Harvey Cox was a keynoter.

I watched Harvey from a balcony at the rear of the auditorium. He was - and is - a major American Baptist celebrity and he was idolized by a Roman Catholic chaplain I had worked for in the Air Force. Chaplain Kucharski, one of the young liberals swept into the church by the fresh air of Vatican II, quoted Harvey Cox incessantly, especially paragraphs from Harvey's best-selling book, The Secular City. Years later when I joined the American Baptist staff I met Harvey, joined him for staff coffee breaks, and even edited some of his essays for The American Baptist magazine. I made plans to casually run into Kucharski one day so I could pinch my fingers together and tell him, “Yeah, me and Harvey are like this!” Sadly, the next time I heard about Kucharski, he had dropped out of the priesthood, gotten married, and died. But I never think of Harvey without thinking of Father Kuch.

As I was settling in the rafters of the auditorium on that warm spring day in 1980, I was astonished to hear Harvey say, “I saw a cartoon recently that summarizes the state of the church.” I was stunned and then breathless as Harvey went on to describe my drawing and quote the caption as a smattering of applause broke out in the audience. Whoa, I thought. Is this my 15 minutes of fame?

I don’t remember what Harvey said after that (although I think he did conclude his speech by quoting the cartoon again). After he finished I made my way through the crowd to shake his hand. He smiled toothily at me and I thanked him for the endorsement.

“What?” he said. He lowered his ear in a quizzical manner.

I realized instantly that he had no idea what I was talking about. He had forgotten where he had seen the cartoon or the magazine that printed it.

I thanked him again and stepped back so the rest of the admiring crowd could get to him. My fifteen minutes of fame fizzled in the footlights.

It was a harsher lesson then, when I was in my early 30s, than it would be now. Three decades later I’ve accumulated a sufficient number of humbling experiences to handle them with a modicum of aplomb. Perhaps the real message back then was that there’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.

But I’d like to think that the message of that cartoon still has meaning this Easter.

The fact that Jesus’ tomb is empty is big news. But it no longer tops the news hour or appears on page one above the fold. Seasoned reporters don’t get it. It’s the most overlooked headline of our times.

That became the message I preached to the faithful remnant at North Baptist Church on Easter morning.

North Baptist Church, alas, is closed now, and this year I’m celebrating Easter as a synodical deacon at St. Paul’s ELCA Church in Rye Brook, N.Y.

But it really doesn’t make any difference where any of us greet the rising sun on Easter morning. The tomb is still empty. The Lord is still risen. And each of us it called to make sure everyone understands that this is big news.

The tomb is empty. And it's no joke.

Hallelujah.

Foot Washing - Not As Easy As It Looks

 

Preached at Saint Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y., March 20, 2022.

I joined the writing staff of The American Baptist magazine in 1972. The editor of the magazine was a lanky minister from Pennsylvania coal country, Norman R. De Puy

Over the years Norman mentored me as a writer and – when he was a pastor in Newton Centre, Massachusetts – he mentored my spouse Martha in the Baptist practice of adult baptism by immersion. As a result, Martha can dunk six-foot-tall people backwards beneath the waters of a pool and bring them back to the surface, drenched but unscathed. It’s a form of Baptist miracle working.

When he was editor, Norman would share potential magazine covers with the staff to get our reactions. One prospective cover was a photograph of a young woman’s bare foot; the reclining woman faded into the background but her foot, holding a small flower between her toes, filled the frame in sharp focus.

The staff was unanimous: we thought the image was beautiful, innocent, and perfect for a spring cover.

Indeed, most of our readers thought so, too.

But one reader was disturbed. He sent Norman a letter typed in all caps:

“THIS IS PORNOGRAPHY! CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION!”

That caught all of us by surprise. This, after all, was the seventies when naked feet were common. No one thought of feet as unnatural or enticing. 

We set the angry letter aside and made mental notes to ourselves to be more careful in the future. If nothing else, it was a reminder that not everyone is comfortable with bare feet.

Not so with Jesus, of course. He showed his comfort when he removed his outer robe, tied a towel around himself, grabbed his apostle’s feet and began washing them.

And when he was finished he said,

“So if I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you should also do as I have done to you.” (John 18:14-15)

That’s pretty clear: We should be doing this, too. It’s as clear as his instructions following his last meal with his disciples:

“Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘this is body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:14-21)

Two rituals Jesus told us to perform: wash one another’s feet and eat and drink the bread and wine. And yet two thousand years later, it’s the Eucharist that is commonly reenacted in Christian worship, and foot washing is rare.

Be that as it may, in the 1990’s, when I was on the New York staff of the World Council of Churches, I felt the frustration of my colleagues whenever we tried to have joint worship services with Orthodox Christians. The patriarchs and priests said they were prevented by thousands of years of practice and tradition from joining non-Orthodox in Holy Eucharist. That was supremely frustrating to my colleagues who believed the whole purpose of the Council was to unite all Christians at the same communion table.

After years of disappointment, the World Council staff person for Faith and Order asked a random Patriarch if the Orthodox had any objection to washing “one another’s feet” as prescribed by Jesus in John’s gospel.

“Of course not,” the Patriarch said. “It is the Gospel.”

This assurance was greeted with mild rejoicing because it seemed we had at last been able to cross the divide between East and West. 

The next time the Central Committee gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, a special worship service was on the docket: a ritual of foot washing in which Protestants and Orthodox could join together in mutual expressions of Christ’s love.

It did not go well.

We were divided into groups of four that were gathered around a small basin of water. As the scripture was read – the same scripture we read this morning – we stared awkwardly at one another. In my group there were two women, one a pastor from the U.S. and the other a professor from Norway; a 70-year-old Russian Orthodox priest; and me.

As a member of the staff I tried to show leadership by removing my shoes. Hesitating only briefly, the two women slipped out of their flats. The priest frowned and knitted his thick eyebrows together in a scowl.

“I do not undress in public,” he said.

The professor from Norway spoke up. “Would it be better if we two women washed each other’s feet,” she said soothingly. “And you and Philip washed each other’s feet?”

The priest scowled and may have been frowning beneath his tangled gray beard. But he leaned over and pulled at his shoe strings. 

With a grunt he kicked off his shoes, revealing faded black socks that had large holes caused by long pointed toe nails. It occurred to me that these might be the only socks he owned.

“Wash,” he said, thrusting a foot between my knees. When it was my turn to get my feet washed, he shook his head and walked away in silence.

So. Foot washing is not for everyone.

This may be particularly true in the age of good-touch, bad-touch, when children are cautioned about circles that should not be invaded, about who has a right to touch you and who does not. We are all aware of many anecdotes about politicians and celebrities who touched when they should not and invaded circles they should have avoided. We have all become naturally cautious about approaching one another. Garrison Keillor was probably right when he said if a Lutheran has to stand closer than two feet from you his chest hurts.

Aversion to foot washing was also intensified during the months of pandemic when we were cautioned to avoid shaking hands and to stand six-feet apart. That, if you’re still. Worried about it, is one of the reasons we won’t be asking you to remove your shoes this morning.

But whether we actually perform the ritual, we still hear the words of Jesus with blinding clarity.

Craig R. Koester, New Testament professor at Luther seminary, puts it like this:

Jesus unexpected action to wash his disciple’s feet “is simple, yet its significance is revolutionary. Using the most ordinary means, Jesus conveys the most extraordinary love and commands his disciples to do the same.”

Foot washing is an act of subservience usually relegated to slaves or lowly servants, and Jesus is assuming the role of a slave to show his love.

“The jaw-dropping act of love that Jesus performs by washing feet can all too quickly become a moral platitude,” Koester writes. “Yet one has to wonder whether it was really necessary for Jesus to take the part of a slave at the last supper, and then to suffer the kind of execution that the Romans used for slaves and rebels, if he was simply out to encourage a little more civic-mindedness.”

The point Jesus is making, of course, is this:

“For I have set an example, that you also should do as I have done to you . . .

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

That is the main lesson here: Love. Extraordinary love. Jaw-dropping love. When Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, he showed how far we should be willing to go to express unconditional love.

And whenever we remember that, we are remembering the reason Jesus came to us in the fullness of history:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believed in him will never perish but have life eternal.

The Nicodemus Dialogue

Preached January 23 at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y.

“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

My own encounter with Nicodemus goes back a long ways. I think it was about 1966 when I was 19 years old. 

I was an airman with two stripes stationed in England, a member of a group of Americans who called ourselves the “Christian Vocation Group.” On Sunday evenings we brought worship services to vicarless Anglican churches. We took turns leading the hymns, reading the scriptures, leading the litanies, and preaching the message. One night in November it was my turn to preach.

I have to cringe a little at my teen-age presumption that I had something to say to a tiny congregation of mostly elderly women. But lack of experience didn’t stop me. Back then most of my sermons were Billy Graham imitations consisting of hoisting my bible and shouting, “The BIBLE says …”

That night I was preaching on Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus as it is told in the King James Version.

“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

Whatever that means.

My exegetical insights were limited at 19, but I knew enough to cover my ignorance by shouting.

Our group members were mostly Southern Baptists so we concluded each worship service in evangelical style: we extended an invitation to the elderly congregants to come forward and be “born again.” Most nights the ladies stared at us in polite silence and remained in their pews.

On this night however, a young man – possibly the son of one of the women – walked toward me with tears in his eyes and collapsed at my feet.

“You said just what was in my heart tonight,” he said.

I was dumbfounded. Something I had said had led someone to Christ? And, if so, what did I say? And how would I know to say it again?

I stood aside as the older members of our group surrounded the young man to tell him about Jesus. That was just as well because I really had nothing more to say to him.

But I confess all this because it is so typical of evangelical interpretations of what Jesus meant when he said, “You must be born again.”

In my brief flirtation with Southern Baptists I understood that being born again was my own responsibility. Jesus wasn’t going to do it for me. If I was going to spend eternity with Jesus I had to decide that on my own. If I didn’t profess my faith in Jesus I was lost for all time, and God would cast me into the eternal darkness.

That seems harsh but I have known many evangelicals who grieved that their spouses or siblings or children were not “born again” and would not be joining them in Heaven.

The thought of eternal darkness was also a terror for me. I sat through many an invitation at evangelical services, swells of “Just As I Am” in my ears, frozen in my pew, unable to rise to my feet to accept Jesus as my personal Savior. I couldn’t wrap my brain on what it would feel like to be saved. I saw others going forward, smiling through their tears, to profess their certainty they had been saved. But how did they really know? And would they feel the same way when the euphoria passed?

I wonder if Nicodemus felt the same confusion, the same uncertainty about what it would mean to follow Jesus?

Nicodemus is a prominent figure in John’s Gospel, but that is the only Gospel in which he appears. We know he is a Pharisee, an influential religious leader in the turbulent times in which he and Jesus lived.

Beyond that we don’t know very much about him. But one thing is clear whenever he makes an appearance: he loves Jesus very much. He has perceived that this charismatic teacher has much to say about the mysteries of God. He approaches Jesus with apparent shyness, perhaps even awe. We know that his love for Jesus continued to the end when he took custody of Jesus’ body after the Crucifixion.

In today’s reading Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night to have a secret dialogue with him. 

In my drawing above I have pictured him as perplexed and confused by what Jesus is saying: “You must be born again.” 

But Nicodemus may not have been confused at all. Theologian Charles Ellicott writes that “after the method of Rabbinic dialogue, [Nicodemus] presses the impossible meaning of the words in order to exclude it, and to draw forth the true meaning. ‘You cannot mean that a man is to enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born. What is it, then, that you do mean?’” 

Jesus may have feigned surprise, perhaps ironically, that “a teacher of Israel” does not understand the concept of spiritual rebirth: “Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness,” (KJV John 3:10–11.)

As we read about Nicodemus’ struggle to receive Jesus’ witness, it’s easy enough for us to conclude that it is Nicodemus’ responsibility to “get it.” Jesus is not going to do it for him. This is the interpretation of many evangelicals over the centuries: You must be born again. Your choice.

But look again at Jesus own interpretation:

“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

Yes, we must be born again. But we are not in control of how or when that happens. Just as we cannot control where the wind blows, we are not in charge of when and how the Holy Spirit moves in our lives. It is the Spirit – grace, as we Lutherans say – that brings us to faith. It’s not up to us. 

One of the instructors in the Diakonia classes I attended said she has a simple Lutheran answer when evangelicals ask her, “Have you found Jesus?” 

“No,” she says, “Jesus has found me.”

This is most certainly true.

It is this powerful insight – salvation not by our own decision but through the Grace of the Holy Spirit – that I find most attractive about our Lutheran faith. 

Carolyn Winfrey Gillette is a Presbyterian theologian know for writing new verses for well-known hymns to highlight different themes. She has written powerful hymns expressing God’s presence amid natural disasters such as the Haitian earthquake, in times of national grief, in times of national celebration, and throughout many holidays and highlights of the church year. Her hymns are available free of charge, with appropriate accreditation, to any congregation that is a member of a denomination that is a member of the National Council of Churches. Her website is https://www.carolynshymns.com/

Carolyn has written a wonderful hymn, “Nicodemus Sought Out Jesus,” that can be sung to the tune of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”

I won’t attempt to sing it, but I will recite her beautiful lyrics that hold so much spiritual truth:

Nicodemus sought out Jesus at a lonely quite hour.

He said, “Teacher, God is with you! For in you we  see God’s power.”

Jesus turned and gave an answer filled with challenge and with love,

“You can never see God’s kingdom till you’re born from heav’n above.”

“Born again!” said Nicodemus. “Is that something one can do?”

Jesus said, “Don’t be surprised now that you must be born anew.

And it’s not by your own doing: wind and spirit will blow free!

They are not for your controlling; trust in God for what will be.”

God, your spirit still surprises like an ever-changing wind,

Bringing life and love and justice where despair and death have been.

May we see your Spirit working as a gift from heav’n above.

Blest, may we then be a blessing to this world that you so love.

Selah.

Savior on the Edge

Note: This sermon was prepared for delivery - on Zoom, because of the sub-freezing temperatures and the Omicron virus that kept us safe in our homes - at,  Saint Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y., on January 16, 2022. 

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ John 2:13-16

Turn the other cheek? Please.

Jesus is so incensed when he sees entrepreneurs in the temple that he starts smacking them upside their heads.

Interestingly, the dealers turn tail and run. It makes you wonder if Jesus was bigger and meaner than he is generally portrayed, or perhaps the vendors simply knew better than to get in the way of a messiah on the edge.

The cleansing of the temple is told in all four Gospels and it is the sole instance of Jesus using physical violence to make a point. In John’s account, Jesus barks out orders to clarify the point: “Get out. Stop making my Father’s house a market place.”

Obviously Jesus felt strongly enough about the issue to start flailing at miscreant traders with stinging ropes. That in itself would place the tenet among Jesus’ Big Three: love your neighbor, forgive your enemy, and don’t you dare make my Father’s house a market place.

For me, the third tenet is hardest to accept. I was a church bureaucrat for 40 years. My bread and butter was mined in the market place of God’s house. I’ve sold bibles and books, begged money for special offerings, and designed ecclesiastical tchotchkes to sell at church meetings.  I was a money changer in the temple.

What was it the money changers were doing that was so bad? They were simply changing Greek and Roman coins to the currency required in the Temple gift shop. Others were selling doves to people who couldn’t afford the more expensive sacrifices of sheep and goats. All of these transactions earned a slight profit for the retailers, which enabled them to return day after day to provide a necessary and holy service to the faithful. We call it the cost of doing business.

But these bygone Temple hawkers were pikers compared to the genius of Christian marketers. Sales kiosks identical to the stalls that annoyed Jesus lined the paths to medieval churches and cathedrals. Priests and popes added to church coffers by selling indulgences required for the cleansing of souls, essentially high-priced tickets to heaven. Long after church reforms and the Protestant Reformation put an end to such practices, vendors were still charging the faithful for spiritual thrills, such as touching the wood of the True Cross or caressing the spear alleged to have pierced the Savior’s side. 

These dubious practices survive in modern times, as anyone knows who watches television evangelists. Over the centuries, the most useful Latin phrase uttered in the church has been caveat emptor: let the buyer beware.

Jesus clearly felt the hawking of wares and high-profit currency exchanges were demeaning to God’s house. And if we know Jesus as well as we think we do, we might also guess that he was angered by the exploitation of poor people, and especially women and widows, who were forced to pay dearly to carry out their religious duties.

This, I think, may be a central message of Jesus’ Temple rage. It was an anger aimed at the patrons of privilege, the rich, the priests, the scribes who lived off the sweat and deprivation of the poor. Jesus entered the temple in the name of the 99 percent who had so little and swung ropes at the agents of the 1 percent who had so much.

Jesus had a weak spot for the poor and so, usually, does the church. But, truth be told, the church also has a weak spot for the rich. For many congregations, the tithes of a humble membership are not sufficient to keep the pastor in comfortable accommodations. For many denominations, for which the Great Recession of 2008 never stopped, congregational mission giving falls short of supporting missionaries, staff and important ministries. Budgets and staff have been slashed to the bone, and some church bodies are in danger of fading away completely.

That’s why the churches love rich donors, who we prefer to call “high net worth friends” because “rich” sounds so tacky. 

Unfortunately, there are few biblical anecdotes to suggest God ordained the rich as the savior of the church. Jesus said – with apparent humor and gentleness – that it will be easier for a camel to slide through the eye of a needle than for the rich to get into heaven. Dorothy Parker said it less charitably: “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Parker also spoke for most of us when she said, “I don’t know much about being a millionaire, but I’ll bet I’d be darling at it.”

Most of us don’t know much about being millionaires and, I suspect, most millionaires don’t know what it’s like to live one job or health crisis away from poverty. I have interviewed a billionaire heiress, for example, who complains that people don’t understand the heavy burdens of privilege or appreciate how very rich women are not admired for their talent or intellect. Most people listen politely to her grievance (people are often polite to the very rich), but when the woman steps out of the room they shake their heads and say, “Boy, I wish I had her problem.” 

None of this is to say, of course, that rich people can’t be good souls or faithful Christians. Much of American Protestantism owes much to the largesse of the Rockefellers (I daren’t suggest that the Robber Baron John D. Senior might have been buying himself a few indulgences) and there are scores of philanthropic enterprises that put even the dirtiest of fortunes to good use. 

Perhaps one of the things that enraged Jesus when he entered the Temple was a system that established barriers between the rich and the poor and deprived both groups of the fundamental humanity that made them one people.

Barriers in the temple between the rich and poor, and barriers anywhere in society, are godless devices that prevent us from acknowledging that we are all the same, that there are no “others,” that God has called us to love all our neighbors as we love ourselves. It’s the barriers that prevent us from suspending judgment about other people until we can imagine what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes or live another’s life.

When Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem, he expected to see a system that welcomed all the faithful to blessed encounters with the loving God.

Instead, he found the money changers standing in the way of the people God loved the most, the poor, the women, the widows.

The situation deprived everyone, money changers and widows alike, of their common humanity, and Jesus reaction was swift, righteous, godly and quintessentially human.

He picked up a whip and flailed away.

Selah.

 

A Magnus in Morrisville

 

I’ve told this story many times and I can't resist telling it again. It helps me understand the awe that must have been generated by the three magi when they traversed rural Palestine to stand so ostentatiously before the ragged occupants of a stinking stable.

Yes, awe. Awe in the purest sense. That must have been how the residents of the hamlet of Morrisville, N.Y. my hometown, reacted to a brief manifestation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1930.

Morrisville is not completely isolated.  Its location on U.S. route 20, which connects Albany with Utica, Syracuse, and points west, places it directly in the flow of intellectual and cultural currents. In 1930, Governor Roosevelt motored up route 20 to pay his respects to I.M. Charleton (standing right in the photograph below), the director of the Morrisville Institute (now Morrisville State College).

This little known event suggests Morrisville was not the least among the hamlets of Upstate New York. A future world leader discerned the importance of cultivating village intellectuals like I.M. (who, if not a Republican, was one of the few persons in the village who wasn’t.) History does not say whether Morrisville was at the top of FDR’s itinerary, or why he appears to have left the engine running as he sat in his car and charmed the local gentry. The important thing is, he came.

The family of Julie FitzSimmons Bookhout, one of my classmates at Morrisville-Eaton Central School in the early 1960s, had a special involvement in FDR’s visit. “Since my grandfather, George FitzSimmons, was a car dealer in town, he had the best car with which to fetch FDR at the train station in Utica and bring him back to Morrisville,” Julie told me last year. “My Aunt Anne FitzSimmons Kelley, who must have been 9 at the time, and is now 94, got to ride along in the car with FDR himself!”

In 1930, no one knew what Franklin Roosevelt’s future held. Still, he was important enough that I.M. Charleton thought it good to stand on the curb and chat with the Gov as he sat in the luxurious car. We know now, of course, that FDR’s paralyzed legs made it necessary for him to sit while I.M. stood, but in 1930 no one thought it was odd. The governor had perfected the art of charismatic sitting.

FDR’s visit may have been the most historic thing that happened in Morrisville during the Depression and possibly for all time.  My mother said the whole town turned out to watch South Pole explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd role special ice breaking equipment up Main street (and, as Central New Yorkers know, the harsh winters of Morrisville make it a good place to test out arctic gear). Some say they glimpsed Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson at Sautter’s Diner in 1964, but Wilson is virtually unknown except to those who crossed the erstwhile  Tappanzee Bridge which was named for Wilson until it was torn down this year. The new and improved bridge is named for Governor Mario Cuomo. 

I surmise that FDR’s visit was unequaled by anything else that happened in Morrisville and someday a plaque may be placed in the pavement where his oil pan leaked 92 years ago.

I surmise all this for two reasons. One, FDR’s visit was as memorable to Morrisvillians as if exotic kings from the east had dropped by for coffee and pie. It gives chronic bible readers an emotional point of reference for what it must have been like to wake up in a barn in Bethlehem and see three kings stepping delicately over sheep poo.

And, two, I like to make it clear that my home town was not intellectually or culturally isolated, despite our Central New York accents that make us sound like lethargic North Dakotans. This stems from my frequent discomfort, decades after leaving Morrisville, to discover no one else pronounces words the way I was taught. One teacher pronounced the name of the ancient queen of Egypt as Klayo-PAY-tra, and also said the name of the Communist leader of China was pronounced his name the way it was spelled: Mayo Tissie Tongue. 

Also in the seventh grade, when we were introduced to the short stories of William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the name of O. Henry, I was entranced by a story I thought was entitled, “The Gift of the Magee.”

In my defense (and on behalf of Morrisvillians), I assert that it is very difficult to see the word m-a-g-i and quickly grasp that it is pronounced with a long a and a long i. The dictionary pronouncing hint is even less clear and looks like a logo for a foreign car: mæda. Moreover, the word magi was never used in the United Church of Morrisville. We knew about the itinerant kings, of course, because each year we built a manger scene on the front lawn of the church. But I was 10 before I realized they weren’t from a place called Orientar. And I was 15 before I realized they were magi, not magees.

Ideally, my digression should end here, but I’m still transfixed by the unexpected visit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to my home town. Like FDR’s visit to the Morrisville Ag and Tech institute, the visit of three kings to Bethlehem was calculated to make everyone feel important. If something was happening that warranted the appearance of the future president or the ancient kings, it had to be taken seriously.

On January 6, Christians around the world celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas that, along with twelve drummers drumming, marks the arrival of the Magi at the manger where Jesus was born. In our household, we observe the traditional Latino celebration of El Día de los Reyes and exchange small gifts in honor of their kingly largesse. But this is not a practice I grew up with in Morrisville, and it is not a universal observance.

Views as to who the kings were, in fact, are as varied as the Christian church itself. Some sects, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, excise references to the Kings because they were regarded as sorcerers of Satan. That’s a minority viewpoint, but it does tempt you to look a little closer at these guys.

A handful of scholars believe los tres reyes were precocious astronomers who mapped the stars and studied the passage of planets, but that would have placed them several hundred years ahead of their time. Most observers are convinced the kings were garden variety astrologers, a possibility supported by the fact that they not only looked at stars but believed that celestial bodies had something to tell them – and, more than that, they  followed one star for hundreds of miles to find out what it wanted them to know. 

Of course, the moving star of Bethlehem was more likely a migrating planet than a fixed star, but who knew about such realities of astrophysics back then? One thing seems certain: the first thing the kings would have checked in Entertainment Weekly was their horoscope.

The term magi, from magus, is a reference to the priests of Zoroastrianism, who studied the stars and planets and made elaborate charts to work out what their movements portended in the currents of human life below. The three magicians from the east didn’t become “wise men” until the 16th and 17th century, when scholars who wrote the King James Version of the bible decided to call the magi “Wise Men.” Elsewhere, the drafters of the bible used the same word to denote “sorcerer” or “sorcery,” notably in reference to Elymas in Acts 13:6-11, or Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-13.

Matthew does not identify the three kings, or magicians, or wise men, but thanks to long standing church tradition, we call them by name: Melchior a Babylonian scholar; Caspar (also Gaspar, Jaspar, Jaspas, Gathaspa, and other variations), a Persian scholar; and Balthazar (also Balthasar, Balthassar, and Bithisarea), an Arab scholar.

Everything else we know about the kings is circumstantial. One reason we know they were important is that when they dropped by the palace to pay their respects to King Herod, the King took time to meet with them. This was either a professional courtesy to his fellow kings, or – as Matthew tells it – Herod had heard the rumors that a king of the Jews was about to the born and he invited the three sorcerers in to find out what they knew. The wily Herod asked the three to let him know when they found the lad, “so that I may go and pay him homage.” 

Matthew states explicitly that when the triumvirate found the baby Jesus laying in the manger, they gave him three symbolic gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. But the kings were smart enough to know Herod was setting a trap for the baby – Matthew says they were warned in a dream – and they “left for their own country by another road,” evading Herod and his agents. Herod realized he had been duped by the kings and, according to Matthew, ordered the death of every new born male child in Bethlehem.

No one knows what happened to the kings after they returned home, although there are many interesting legends. Some believe one of the magi was baptized by St. Thomas, the “doubting Thomas” of Scripture, while he was en route to his missionary tasks in India. Both the Mar Thoma Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India trace their origins to the first century visit of St. Thomas to South Asia.

But it was Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned as pope from 590 to 604 A.D., who placed the traveling wise men in their proper historic perspective. In one of those rare sermons that is remembered for 1,500 years, Gregory stressed the fact that the wise men, having searched for and discovered the Christ, took a different road and never retraced their route.  “Having come to know Jesus,” he said, “we are forbidden to return by the way we came.”

Despite all the mystery and speculation about whom they really were, the three magi continue to preach a powerful message across the millennia. They were three non-Jews whose minds and spirits were open to powerful spiritual currents, including cryptic indications that a powerful monarch was about to be born to the Jews, a group they might have dismissed as a relatively minor sect in the Roman and eastern worlds.

When the three sorcerers perceived a unique sign in the heavens, a bright object that appeared to move ahead of them, they followed it out of intellectual and metaphysical curiosity.

As they pondered the heavenly sign that moved before them, they consulted their charts and concluded it was leading them to a rendezvous with a infant whose power and significance exceeded all they ever knew.

En route to Bethlehem, they decided to mark the occasion with significant gifts to the baby king: gold as a symbol of kingship on earth, frankincense as a reminder of God’s presence, and myrrh, an embalming oil, as a symbol of the death that would be required to bring the prophecy to fruition.

When they arrived at the end of their journey, these wise men born to riches did not hesitate to enter a rude, odiferous barn, because they knew the power and glory that resided in the human baby resting in an old feeding troth.

They came from afar and they knew who they were seeking and when they arrived, they worshipped the baby in the troth.

When they had met Jesus, they knew their lives must be changed forever. And they chose a new road for passage, having decided that they must never again retrace the steps that had brought them to this radical encounter with the son of a God they were only just beginning to know.

The very presence of these three splendid strangers must have amazed the parents of Jesus and astonished other witnesses in area. The visit of the obviously important Magi would have been regarded as a sign that something big was happening – just as Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930 appearance in Morrisville was a sign of something big.

But the glistening kings knew something that may have temporarily eluded others: they knew the magi were not the most important presence in the tiny barn.

That honor belonged to the smallest person in the room, the feeble infant still struggling to find the strength to lift his head.

It was the baby that the wise men came to see, and once they had seen him, their lives were changed forever.

And as we watch them in our minds eye, three kings stepping out on history’s stage, choosing a new route of enlightenment and understanding, may we all be eager to follow them and the star that brought them to God’s salvation,

westward leading,
still proceeding,
guide us to thy perfect light.

Jesus From the Block

NOTE: This sermon was prepared for delivery at United Lutheran Chuirch on the Wartburg Rehabilitation Center campus in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on December 26, 2021. Thanks to Pastor Kimberli Lile for the opportunity.

LUKE 2:41-52 

We have spent the last few days celebrating Jesus’ birth and infancy.

Suddenly – literally overnight, on the day after Christmas – Jesus is a precocious 12 year old worrying his parents by disappearing amid the Passover crowds. 

And before we can tell each other how fast kids grow up, we have to wonder what the boy had been doing for twelve years. More than that: now we will lose sight of the young adolescent until he is a man in his thirties.

“The largest part of Jesus’ life was hidden,” writes Henri Nouwen. “Jesus lived with his parents in Nazareth, ‘under their authority’ (Luke 2:51), and there ‘increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favor with God and with people’ (Luke 2:52).  

“When we think about Jesus we mostly think about his words and miracles, his passion, death, and resurrection, but we should never forget that before all of that Jesus lived a simple, hidden life in a small town, far away from all the great people, great cities, and great events.  Jesus’ hidden life is very important for our own spiritual journeys.  If we want to follow Jesus by words and deeds in the service of his Kingdom, we must first of all strive to follow Jesus in his simple, unspectacular, and very ordinary hidden life.”

Jesus had a hidden life. Of course he did. The Gospels are accounts of the special moments in Jesus’ life, observed by many, and passed along by oral tradition for decades until someone decided to write them down. The gospel writers are not so much inspired stenographers of God’s dictation as they are the beneficiaries of Middle Eastern Griots – oral historians and story tellers – whose job it is to pass the same basic story to succeeding generations. We know from African oral traditions that Griots have been remarkably reliable in preserving great truths over many centuries, so the basic veracity of the gospel stories is not in question. 

There are perhaps three decades in Jesus’ life about which we know nothing, but which we must assume to have been – in Nouwen’s words – simple, unspectacular, and very ordinary.

Why is this revelation so exciting?

Maybe it’s just the element of mystery, the idea that we know almost nothing about 90 percent of Jesus’ life on earth. By that measurement, we are stunned that we know so little about the most famous person who ever lived.  And, too, we are amazed that so much of what we think we know about Jesus is based on information we can’t have. 

No where in the gospels, for example, are we told precisely how Jesus dressed. One account is that he wore a seamless robe of undetermined color. The gospel writers make no mention that he wore a tallit, or prayer shawl. Artists occasionally portray Jesus with a scarf over his head, but the artists leave out the corner fringes that would have been prescribed in Numbers 15:38 or Deuteronomy 22:12. 

Our most likely image of Jesus is of a brown skinned man with long black hair and a beard, which is what most Jewish men looked like in Palestine in the first century. But this image omits curly uncut sideburns that Jesus almost certainly wore with most of his male contemporaries. 

We have also come to think of Jesus as an ascetic bachelor who eschewed married life in order to devote himself to God and to his flock. Perhaps so. Certainly large doctrines and time-honored practices have been based on this assumption, including the celibate priesthood. But that notion, too, is based on information lost in the thirty years of Jesus’ life we know nothing about. And if Jesus had broken so radically from the Jewish tradition that the husband-led family was God’s basic unit of society, why wouldn’t the Griots have said something about it?

Perhaps the Griots didn’t mention it because women were akin to slaves in Jesus’ day, and they saw no reason to mention wives as appendages to the public lives of the disciples. We wouldn’t know Peter was married if his mother-in-law had not fallen ill and required a miraculous cure by Jesus. Did the other disciples have wives who were not deemed to be worth mentioning because they didn’t get sick? 

We know Jesus was apprenticed to his father, a carpenter.

Anthropologists have a pretty good notion what other Palestinian carpenters did in the thirty mysterious years when Jesus lived under Joseph’s authority. According to the Christianity Today Library:

“As carpenters, Joseph and Jesus would have created mainly farm tools (carts, plows, winnowing forks, and yokes), house parts (doors, frames, posts, and beams), furniture, and kitchen utensils.”

Almost 2,000 years before electric power tools, that would have been hard isometric exercise. Apart from providing daily development of the carpenters’ pects and delts, it was also the kind of work that would have placed Joseph and Jesus on friendly business terms with most of their neighbors. Jesus grew to adulthood providing most of the residents of Nazareth with the tools and wooden paraphernalia they needed to live. We must assume his products were of excellent quality and that he did not overcharge.

Archeologists who study first century Palestinian settlements make it clear that Jesus would have grown up in intimate proximity with his neighbors. According to JesusCentral.com, an excellent website “where people of all backgrounds learn about Jesus,” the standard living arrangements provided little privacy.

“There are no records or apocryphal gospels that give us a clear idea what Jesus’ hidden years were like. We can only speculate that he lived like everyone he knew when he was growing up: a nice Jewish boy raised in the law and tradition of his ancestors, living and working and often sleeping with relatives and neighbors he saw every day of his life.

It was a life of extreme ordinariness. He came into the world in a barn, surrounded by the redolence of fetid hay and farting animals, and we shake our heads that God’s son, the world’s savior, got such an inauspicious start. But even more staggering is the probability that Jesus grew up in mundane, commonplace, everyday surroundings, where he looked and acted like everyone else. The good people of Nazareth knew him as Jesus from the block, not Jesus Christ.

It’s no wonder, then, that when Jesus finally assumed his messianic mode, his intimate acquaintances and other observers looked at him like he’d grown a new nose. 

“‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” (John 6:51-52)

Granted, the ensuing passage with its references to eating flesh and drinking blood is difficult for anyone to understand. Jesus’ friends and neighbors are particularly befuddled because they knew Jesus before he was Jesus. 

After thirty years of a hidden life among them, Jesus abruptly emerged from the shadows as the light of the world. That’s an unexpected and dazzling transition to behold.

But Jesus made the transition with power and ease, in part because he had put the hidden years to good use. He knew what none of his neighbors knew: that he was the anointed one of God, sent to take away the sins of the world. But he also knew that in order to accomplish his mission, years of preparation would be necessary: years of hiddenness.

“Hiddenness,” Nouwen wrote, “is an essential quality of the spiritual life. Solitude, silence, ordinary tasks, being with people without great agendas, sleeping, eating, working, playing ... all of that without being different from others, that is the life that Jesus lived and the life he asks us to live.  It is in hiddenness that we, like Jesus, can increase ‘in wisdom, in stature, and in favor with God and with people’ (Luke 2:51).  It is in hiddenness that we can find a true intimacy with God and a true love for people.”

Jesus could not have accomplished his goal if he had spent all his time on earth above the fray, floating like a twilight sprite above the mud and the dust and the suffering. In the thirty years of his life we know so little about, he lived – literally – as one of us. He got to know all our needs, our foibles, our temptations, our quirks, our sins. He got to know us, in a sense, more completely than God the Creator who counts the hairs on our head. The experiences and insights Jesus gained during his hidden years took on a mighty power when he began his formal ministry. 

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” he declared in terms that the literary minded found cannibalistic.

But Jesus had hit upon the perfect metaphor to describe the sacrifice he was to make to atone for the sins of the world – the sacrifice that opens the door to life for all who accept it.

Neither Jesus’ understanding of his role or the metaphor he used to describe it sprung up over night. Both were the product of long years discovering “a true intimacy with God and a true love for people” when no one was writing down what he said or did.

It is, after all, precisely what developed in the hidden years that would make the declaration true: 

“This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Magi, Excrement, and Lobsters

One of the traditions of our wide-spread family is to sit in front of various screens around the country to watch favorite holiday films ranging from the 1992 Muppet Christmas Carol to the 1983 classic, A Christmas Story.

One film hated by some members of the family, because it is about amoral people pursuing unequal relationships, and loved by others as a guilty pleasure, is the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually. 

For the ecclesial nerds in the family, the best scenes in the movie relate to preparations for the local church Christmas pageant. In one scene, Emma Thompson’s screen daughter announces she will play a lobster at the Nativity scene. When Emma asks incredulously if there were lobsters at the birth of Jesus, the daughter - expressing the condescension recognized by every parent - replies impatiently, “Yeah!”

The lack of specific scriptural detail about who was present at Jesus’ birth, and when, leaves the scene wide open to our imaginations. If lobsters were not specifically excluded from the dramatis personae, than who can say they weren’t there? I insist on imagining the lobster sitting to the right of the manger being sniffed by our two dogs, Usnavi and Iggy. The more the merrier.

One extra-biblical detail we can all agree on is that Jesus’ birth place smelled like excretion.

 As a denizen of rural Central New York, I have to remind myself that many of our Westchester County neighbors have no idea what barns smell like.

The television barns portrayed in Green Acres, Mayberry RFD, Mr. Ed, or Hee Haw, were well swept rustic structures smelling of fresh hay and Ava Gabor’s French perfume.

Even factual documentaries on farm life – one of my favorites is Brother’s Keeper about three bathless brothers whose rickety barn stood a few miles from where I grew up – do not have the benefit of smell-o-vision. In this particular film, one can only imagine the stench in the unwashed brothers’ cramped sitting room.

As far as authentic barn smell goes, you have to experience it yourself. The combination of fresh and stale manure, fermenting hay, and smoldering covens of cats is unimaginable to city folk and suburbanites. Eau de Merde doesn’t even come close to describing it.

Even so, millions around the globe are not only familiar with the smell but find it unobjectionable. I remember visiting the Philadelphia Zoo after years of relatively odor-free living in barracks, dormitories, and apartments, and being taken aback by a whiff of elephant droppings. My eyes filled with tears, mostly because of the sting of the stench, but also because of the sweet nostalgia of the smell, so much like the tang of Leon Korzeniewski’s cow barn on the outskirts of Morrisville, N.Y. There’s something bonding about barn bouquet. It not only unites billions of noses in common cause, it also brings us closer to the thousands of generations that came before us. 

That’s one reason we can praise God that Jesus was born in a barn. It puts the incarnation in perspective. Contrary to depictions in Renaissance art, Jesus did not enter the world in a sterile lean-to adorned with lights, freshly bathed shepherds, and streaming gold ribbons. He was born in a stable replete with rotting hay and fetid sheep. 

As we strive to understand the Christ event, the stench of excrement should be as evocative as the Eucharist. Every time we walk into a barn, a still small voice should whisper in our ears: “Smell this in remembrance of me.”

Much of Christian art seeks to glorify some of the ruder elements of the gospels. Mangers are radiant. Lepers and beggars greet Jesus in well-pressed robes. Jesus walks the dusty paths of Palestine wearing a bleached robe and, often, carrying a snowy white lamb on his shoulder. Brass crosses on our communion tables shimmer with jewels so bright that one theologian suggested that to be affixed to one would be a beatific experience. 

I sometimes think that the Magi – the three mysterious kings from OrienTARR – were added to the manger story to clean it up a bit.  Certainly this smelly little barn would seem more like the proper birthing room of a king if other kings in silken robes dropped by to pay homage.

It may seem a bit sacrilegious to suggest that anything about these three kings was made up to improve the story. Then again, so much of what we think we know about them has been made up.

Matthew’s gospel says nothing, for example, about who they were, how many they were, what their names were, where they came from, what their racial background was, what they were king of, or what they were wise about. There is certainly no mention of their dromedary conveyances. And yet over the years we have managed to fill in all those blanks. Lobsters waiting in the wings.

How did scholars do that? Easy. They make it up. 

Thanks to long standing church tradition, we call them by name: Melchior a Babylonian scholar; Caspar (also Gaspar, Jaspar, Jaspas, Gathaspa, and other variations), a Persian scholar; and Balthazar (also Balthasar, Balthassar, and Bithisarea), an Arab scholar. One was black and two were not.

It is also long standing church tradition that the travelers were three in number. Some scholars say church tradition jumped to that conclusion because it corresponded with the number of gifts they brought the Christ child: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. There are those who believe there may have been more magi than that.

According to an article in biblicalarchaeology.org, an eighth century Syriac manuscript in the Vatican Library suggests the Magi may have numbered as many as 12 and perhaps there were scores of them. 

The dubious manuscript, entitled Revelation of the Magi and allegedly written by the Magi themselves, has been translated into English by Dr. Brent Landau, professor of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Landau writes:

The magi (defined in this text as those who “pray in silence”) are a group . . . of monk-like mystics from a far-off, mythical land called Shir, possibly China. They are descendants of Seth, the righteous third son of Adam, and the guardians of an age-old prophecy that a star of indescribable brightness would someday appear “heralding the birth of God in human form. When the long-prophesied star finally appears, the star is not simply sighted at its rising, as described in Matthew, but rather descends to earth, ultimately transforming into a luminous “star-child” that instructs the magi to travel to Bethlehem to witness its birth in human form. The star then guides the magi along their journey, miraculously clearing their path of all obstacles and providing them with unlimited stamina and provisions. Finally, inside a cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem, the star reappears to the magi as a luminous human child—the Christ child—and commissions them to become witnesses to Christ in the lands of the east. 

Landau gives little credence to this apocryphal document but it highlights how far church tradition has gone to fill in the blanks left by Matthew’s gospel. And chances are good that the notion of 12 or 60 Magi descending on the manger will not soon catch on in churches. It would overwhelm the Christmas bathrobe pageants in most congregations.

But regardless of all the mystery surrounding the Magi, one thing seems clear: the gospel writer saw them as a dramatic way of illustrating the profound significance of the incarnation in Bethlehem.

There could be no greater miracle than this:

That on a dark night in an isolated hamlet on the edge of an already declining empire, surrounded by poverty and mud and the stench of animals, the Creator of the Universe took the form of a helpless baby boy who was lain in the accumulated debris of a feeding trough. 

Any story teller would feel challenged to tell the story in such a way as to attract a maximum of attention.  And who could doubt that such a miracle would be – must be – accompanied by a descending star, a chorus of angels, and gilded kings wandering in from eastern climes?

Whoever and whatever the Magi were, they understood their role in the miracle of incarnation.

Magi, they stooped to see your splendor, Led by a star to light supreme; Promised Messiah, Lord eternal, Glory and peace are in your name. Joy of each day, our song by night, Shine on our path your holy light. - Christopher Idle