IN THESE TIMES

“So teach us to number our days that we apply our hearts to wisdom” — Psalm 90: 12

In the Ash Wednesday liturgy, we are reminded that we are formed out of the dust of the earth and that unto that dust we shall return. Even when we live our lives in faith, trusting God each and every day, we cannot know the exact hour of our death. One day, your life and mine will end. That is not idle speculation, but a truth we cannot avoid.

It is possible, of course, to live much of our lives blissfully unaware of our own mortality, that is until someone close to us dies and we are harshly reminded of our own finitude.  We live in a culture that, for the most part, acts as if life goes on and on forever. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argues that the fear of death is the mainspring of human activity. The rush of our activity is the very mechanism that we employ to deny the reality of our own mortality.

Ten or twelve years ago as I was reading, an unexpected quote from the French literary theorist Roland Barthes struck a chord within me. I still remember it. In a lecture Barthes gave in 1978, he remarked:

The middle of my life is nothing other than the moment when I discover death as real.  And then all of a sudden is produced this evidence, on the one hand, that I no longer have time to try several lives.  I have to choose my last life, my new life, my vita nuova; and on the other hand, I must leave this tenebrous state where the wear and tear of repeated work and mourning have conducted me.

Barthes’ words spoke to me in a number of ways. The first was to remind me that I am beyond middle-aged. To this time, I have lived the life of parish priest and professor and, like most people I know, I still wonder at times what it might be like to try a completely different profession. When I was young, I could dream of all my possible futures, now in the years past middle-age I must endeavor to live the life I now have — the only life I have — to its fullest.

Second, I realized how important is it to take time to reflect on the life we now are living. When we purposely remind ourselves of our own mortality, it helps us to become better stewards of the life that we have been given.  Because we have a limited life on this earth, we must learn, as the psalmist says, “to number our days,” striving each day to live the best life that we can with what we have been given.

The good news of the gospel is that death is not our final end.  The resurrection of Jesus from the dead inaugurates the possibility of both a “vita nuova,” a new life, in the present and of eternal life with God in our future.  St. Paul recognized this when he wrote, “…If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”(2 Cor. 5:17).

What would it look like if you were to claim the new life that God has in store for you? What would it take for you to live the life that God has given you to the fullest? “

“Awake O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light” (Eph. 5: 14) and life.

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you….”      Ephesians 1:18

When I was an elementary school student in Westchester County, NY, where I lived for 9 years as a child, I had my own daily subscription to the New York Herald Tribune. It was delivered to me at my school each and every weekday. So, at an early age, I learned the pleasures of reading the newspaper.

No matter how hard I try to get with digital editions of newspapers, I still prefer reading the printed page, over which I can scan my eyes all over the page or pages to find and read what interests me. It’s harder to do that when you have to hit a link for each article to show up.

One of my favorite things to do is to read newspapers from other cities and countries. When friends ask if there is something they can pick up for me on their overseas trips, I usually say, “please, bring a newspaper.” Most of the papers are in languages I can read or at least muddle through. Once, however, when I was a teenager, my father returning from a business trip bought me a Turkish paper that I was unable to read; I just looked at the pictures.

Now, of course, most newspapers from around the world can be read online. I look at the New York Times and the Washington Post nearly every day. But at night, some time before bed, I regularly look at online editions of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zürich), Die Zeit (Hamburg), Le Monde and Le Figaro (Paris), The Irish Times (Dublin), Frankfurter Allgemeine (Frankfurt), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), The Guardian (Manchester), The Daily Telegraph (London), and The Independent (UK), along with a few papers in languages that I do not read much at all but enjoy for the challenge of parsing out the language. These include papers from Italy, Holland, and Sweden.

I’m sure that reading newspapers from around the world is a form of vicarious travel but I think it is much more than that.

The novelty of the new and the difference in perspectives is something I value. What seems so important to daily life in the metropolitan Washington, D. C. area isn’t even mentioned in the Boston, Chicago, or London papers.

At the same time, it is a chance to see that everyone doesn’t see the world just the way I do or the way most Americans do. It opens our eyes and widens our perspectives. We need that sometimes because it is so hard to get out of one’s own narrow view of things. Different perspectives challenge us to think again about our ideas, our cherished notions of how things work.

Newspapers report the context of our daily life. They often focus on things that terrify us, from acts of terrorism and violent crime to natural disasters and human frailty and corruption. There also are many heart-warming stories of human self-giving, sharing, and understanding.

When you read the papers from around the world, it becomes apparent that we all share a few things. We share the earth and we share a need for meaning and purpose.

Sometimes when we read the news it is difficult to discern the presence of  God in it. There is so much bad news. While helping the newspapers sell subscriptions, reading the news can at times be pretty depressing. It may be difficult for us to recognize the epiphanies or manifestations of God in our world.* That may be because we may be looking in the wrong places. The epiphanies of God that occur in the lives of individuals and are easy to miss.  St. Paul’s prayer for his fellow Christians is that “our inner eyes may be enlightened” so that we will be able to see the marvelous grace of God at work in the world. As we read or hear the news, we too may need to pray that our inner eyes be opened so that we may see the manifestations of God in our midst and trust in the hope to which God has called us.

With your eyes opened, who knows what you might see?

*In the season of Epiphany, we tell the story of the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the world, first to his own people and then to all the nations, that is, to the Gentiles.

In the late evening of January 2nd, some years ago, I was driving a rental car to Tampa, Florida, from which my family and I were scheduled to take a flight home the next morning.  We were traveling on a barren stretch of road between U.S. 41 and Interstate 75 near Bonita Springs, a city on the southwest coast of Florida. Up ahead we saw the flashing lights of what appeared to be a police car. At first, we thought that there must have been an accident or that someone had been pulled over for a traffic violation.  We slowed down a bit but kept moving forward. When we got closer we saw two police vehicles, with lights flashing, blocking our lane of traffic and a pickup truck, also with lights flashing, moving towards us in the opposite direction.

The pickup truck pulled up beside us and the driver rolled down his window and said straightforwardly to me, “Turn on your flashing lights and pull over, we’ve got a couple of elephants coming through.” Although puzzled by the meaning of his words, I did as he asked and stopped the car, turned on the flashing lights, and waited to see just what he was talking about. We all peered through the front window of the car trying to see what was ahead of us. Out of the darkness of the night emerged a long string of elephants. The elephants—we counted 13 to 14 of them— were linked, trunks to tail in one long and impressive procession. Handlers walked alongside the elephants guiding them in a straight line with the ropes attached to them. We could not believe what we were seeing.

I rolled down the window on the driver’s side to get a better look. One of the elephants, perhaps hearing the noise of my car engine or perhaps scared by me and the others in the car peering at him/her lifted up his front foot, and made a loud noise—the kind that elephants make— and moved towards our rental car. The handler pulled on the ropes to calm the elephant down. I, for my part, quickly rolled up the window.

The elephants were followed by 20 of more zebras, one mule, and then 20 to 30 horses.   In no time the animals and handlers passed us by and I drove off wondering what in the world had just happened.

We quickly began to talk amongst ourselves, telling and retelling the story of what had just happened. We wondered aloud just how we might have explained it to our auto rental company if that disturbed elephant had stepped on top of our car.  Realizing the utter absurdity of the story, and the likelihood that we would all be judged quite insane had something like that actually happened, we laughed with utter joy and frivolity.

The most remarkable thing about this experience was that it was completely unexpected.  Nothing we had done that day could have prepared us for this event. It came as a complete surprise.

I’m sure that the earliest followers of Jesus must have sounded crazy to others when they claimed that they had found the Messiah, or when they later claimed that this Messiah, who had been crucified by the Romans, had been raised by God from the dead.

Although others may have thought that these followers of Jesus had gone off the deep end, those surprised by God’s glorious and unexpected actions, I’m sure, experienced a complete and utter joy when they told others about what they had seen and heard.

In the season of Epiphany, we tell and retell the stories of the manifestation of God’s goodness and love to the nations, particularly in the person of Jesus Christ.

These epiphanies of God’s grace and goodness, however, are not limited to the past. God’s mercy and goodness are new every day. Pay attention this season to the ways in which God moves in your life. Take time to share with others the joy and wonder of those unexpected moments in which you, perhaps for a moment, become aware of God’s grace in your life.

The canonical gospels tell the Christmas story in two different ways. The one more familiar to us is that of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem in Judea as told in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  (The gospel of Mark doesn’t tell this story at all.) The second is the one told in the gospel of John. Here we find the story of how Jesus, the word of God, became fully incarnate in human flesh. It is the story of how God entered into the world in splendid light. The writer of the gospel of John writes of Jesus, “in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”(John 1:4-5).

Later in the same gospel, Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world”(John 9:5). And, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Jesus is the light of the world. He is “God from God” and “Light from Light” as we affirm in the Nicene Creed.

The central Christmas message is that God became incarnate in Jesus. That is true whether it is told as the narrative of the birth of a child as in Matthew and Luke or in a more symbolic way as in John.

In the worship services of the Episcopal Church we read and tell the story of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem at our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services. We read and tell the story of Jesus, as the light that enters a darkened world, being born in human flesh, on the first Sunday after Christmas. Both stories are read and proclaimed during the twelve days of the Christmas season.

We find many references to light and darkness in the gospel of John. In the first chapter of John, Jesus, the light of the world, enters a world full of darkness. The darkness now threatened by that brightness of that light is not able to overcome the power of that light, a light that comes from the very being of God (John 1: 4-5).

We can understand the darkness of the world in two ways —the first, in historical, political and social terms, and the second, in personal terms.

That world is a place full of darkness. Darkness is a metaphor for human sin, greed, corruption, and all of the things that are not in accord with the purposes for which God created them. [1]  We see the darkness of the world in crime and lawlessness. We see it in political institutions and governments. We see it in social inequality and injustice.

We also find darkness within our own selves. We see it in the sinful and self-indulgent appetites that make ourselves the center of the universe, often to the detriment of others. We see it in our quickness to find fault with others without realizing that those same faults are found in us. We see it in the dishonesty of the little things in daily life that we just let slide, saying that it is someone else’s problem and not ours. We see it in the lack of concern for the welfare of others. And we see it in our failure to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

At the same time, we find this darkness even deeper within us, in our loneliness and lack of hope. The world can be a dark and hopeless place. Sometimes, we are just a breath or two away from despair.  That is when we need to hear the good news of Christmas most of all. “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).

When hope is thin and frail, Jesus comes to us in our own dark night. He comes into the world to be near to us, to bring light into our darkness — to console us, and to save us. He comes to us in our weakness and our frailty, to enlighten the darkness within us, to bring hope. And when he comes, he brings light and peace that all may be well.

With the Mary and Joseph, the humble shepherds, and the heavenly host of angels let us give thanks to God for the gift God has given us at Christmas, the gift of God’s own self, in the person of Jesus. Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Footnotes

[1]‘Light’ and ‘dark’ are guiding metaphors for John’s gospel.  They have attracted overtones of racial bias that are inappropriate and have no place in the good news of Christ, who brings salvation to all people, light-skinned and dark-skinned alike.