El Milagro Último de Jesús

           

            ¿Quién entre nosotros esta noche ha visto el agua convertida en vino?  No es el tipo de cosa que se ve todos los dias.  Entonces cuándo leemos y escuchamos una historia como esa de la boda en Caná, ¿que suponemos es el propósito?  Es posible que la historia nos llama a una adoración más grande por Jesús.  También es posible que el punto es inspirarnos a creer en el poder de Jesús, mostrado por sus milagros. 

            La epifanía de Jesucristo consiste de tres eventos.  El primero es el descubrimiento de Jesús por los tres reyes, su revelación a sus gentiles.  El segundo es el bautismo de Jesús.  Y el tercero es su primer milagro, convertir el agua en vino a la boda en Caná de Galilea.  La historia del primer milagro leemos en el evangelio de San Juan.  Los capítulos primeros se llaman “El Libro de Los Señales.”  Cada historia en estos capítulos nos muestra el poder especial de Jesús.  Cado milagro nos dirige al senñal importantísimo, la cruz.  Cuándo Jesús llega a la cruz, en las palabras de San Juan, llegado su hora.  No es imposible decir que la Santa Cruz es la epifanía más grande de todos.  El milagro de la cruz es que Dios por su amor la transforma del instrumento de muerte en medio de vida.  Entonces, el primer milagro, convirtiendo el agua en vino, empieza una procesión muy larga que sigue a la cruz y la resurrección. 

            Comoquiera importante esta historia, como muchas historias ella existe en el dominio de cielo, muy lejos de vida ordinaria, ¿no?.  Convertir agua en vino, sanar al hombre nacido ciego, sanar al hombre minusválido, multiplicar los panes y pescados:  todo pueden resultar en la formación de la idea que Dios—y Jesús—es muy lejanos de nosotros.  En este caso, el milagro no conecta con nuestras vidas.

            Pero, déjame preguntarles otra pregunta. ¿Quién sabe aún un poquito de cambio?  Cada persona aquí conoce cambio, por qué es un parte normal de vida.  Unos cambios no queremos.  Unos cambios nos dan dificultad.  Unos cambios no son evadible.  No podemos elegir si cambiamos o no. 

            La pregunta no es si cambiaremos, pero como cambiaremos.  El secreto es que Jesús es el maestro de cambio.  Él hace la posibilidad que cambiemos hacia la verdad, hacia Dios. Cada vida es agua ordinaria.  Pero tiene la potencial ser vino excelente.  ¿Qué nos falta?  El poder de Jesús con lo cual se puede cambiar y crecer. 

            Favor de examinar eso un poquito más.   Por ejemplo, un hombre tiene la adicción a juego.  Como todas las adicciones la suya le tiene con una fuerza grande.  El trate cambiarse, pero no tiene el poder.  Su vida es agua.  Una mujer tiene el hábito de chismear.  No tiene el poder o la motivación por cambiar.  Su vida es agua.  Un chico está envuelto en drogas.  No conoce el camino por la liberación.  Su vida es agua.  Una persona se pone furioso, y causa mucho daño a su familia.  No sabe como vivir diferentemente.  No es libre.  No sabe como cambiarse.  Su vida es agua.  Todas la situaciones son muy comunes, porque la norma de la vida humana es ser cautiva por las fuerzas grandes de oscuridad.  A veces ocurre en maneras pequeñas, a veces en maneras grandes.  En suma, nuestras vidas son agua.

            Necesitamos un salvador, un maestro, un héroe que es capaz para transformarnos del agua en vino.  ¿Que es vino?  Ser vino es ser libre, imitar a Dios, dar un abrazo a cosas nuevas, crecer en nuestra capacidad pensar, aceptar ayuda en el proceso de cambiar nuestro comportamiento.  Todo el punto de cristianismo es adquirir las características de Dios.  No es posible sin la gracia de Dios.  Pero con Dios, todo es posible, aún las cosas más difíciles.  Se pueden nuestras vidas convertidas en vino, el vino especial de Dios.

            Volvamos otra vez y miremos la cruz.  La cruz nos dice que el poder y el amor de Dios está disponible para nosotros.  No es solamente para traernos en cielo después de esta vida, pero es para hacernos como Cristo aquí y ahora.  ¡Ojala Jesús nos convierta en vino momento por momento hasta el nos trae al Dios, el mayordomo de la fiesta, y Dios nos pronuncia el mejor vino del final!

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

            

Guardrails and Grace

Luke 9:28-36

            No one knows which mountain it was on which Jesus was transfigured; but from the fourth century, the traditional site has been Mount Tabor, smack in the middle of the Valley of Jezreel.  Dome shaped, looking much as if an ethereal ice cream scoop might once have scraped it from the crust of the earth and plopped it down atop an otherwise level plain, Mount Tabor has been the destination of pilgrims and tourists for centuries.  Our bus took us from the Bedouin village at the foot of the mountain to a parking lot perhaps a quarter of a mile up.  We spilled out of the bus and into a half dozen beat-up taxis, therein to be transported up the mountain in a series of switchbacks, with nary a guardrail in sight.  Flying up the mountain at breakneck speed, our Palestinian taxi driver knew how to handle his old Mercedes, and knew as well how to give travelers fits.  At every hairpin turn exclaiming, “Hallelujah!” and chuckling, he had every one of us laughing and screeching like kids on a roller coaster.

            It didn’t do a lot for my devotional life.  By the time we reached the windswept summit, my major connection with the Transfiguration was the fact that we were white as bleached sheets.  I lamely suggested that we build three booths and avoid the trip down.  But the trip is worth the effort, white knuckles and all.  Atop the ruins of a fourth century basilica (can you imagine hauling all the stone for a church up such a peak?) twentieth century Franciscans built a magnificent edifice designed by the brilliant architect Antonio Barluzzi.  He depicted the Transfiguration with bi-level altars.  The upper altar, reached by side stairs, beams with magnificent mosaics like a jewel, symbolizing the divine nature of Christ.  Those mosaics catch the western sun just right on August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, and become totally resplendent with light.  Below, is a much simpler altar, made to recall Christ’s human nature.  And in the towers on the north and south sides of the church are two chapels, one for Moses and one for Elijah. 

            It would be easy, and maybe a little cheap, to go down the path of exploiting the irony of the church and its three naves, mirroring the rather stupid remark of Peter suggesting the building of three booths, perhaps for the Feast of Tabernacles.  But alternatively I would like to focus on how the Transfiguration of Christ, his own seminal religious experience, if you will, and how it somehow called for witnesses. 

            You have noticed, perhaps, that within the band of The Twelve disciples there was an inner circle consisting of Peter, James, and John.  The first three gospels tell several stories of how Jesus chose these three taking them with him on some occasions, of which the Transfiguration is one.  Nothing in the story suggests that Jesus was at all aware of what was about to happen to him.  What the narrative does suggest, however, is that there is a link between what had happened about a week before.  Jesus and his group had gone far out of their accustomed circuit to the headwaters of the Jordan at the foot of Mount Hermon, the highest peak in the country.  According to Mark and Matthew, at a place called Caesarea Philippi, associated with the Greek god Pan or Baneas, Caesar, and the House of Herod the Great whose son was the Philip who built the city there in honor of Caesar Augustus, Jesus asked the question, “Who do the crowds say that I am?”  The place itself, though perhaps on the much-used highway to the sea, no stranger to rumbling armies, was rather desolate and still is.  Awash in all the symbols of power and tradition—Roman, Jewish, and the waters in which Jesus himself had been baptized—Caesarea Philippi became remembered as the place where Peter confessed the answer to Jesus’ question:  “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”  And all the gospels say that Jesus heard that response and immediately—“sternly,” they say—ordered his disciples to tell no one, explaining that ahead of him lay the road of suffering and death, not the glorious kingdom expected to be assumed by Messiah.

            So what is that all about?  It seems to me that Jesus was struggling with identity and vocation, a somewhat familiar struggle to many of us.  Who are we and what does our life mean?  If you read the gospels, especially the first three, you can see how deeply Jesus wrestles with those questions, although many of us miss that, imagining that he was somehow immune to human struggles.  In Luke’s narrative, although Caesarea Philippi is absent from the tale, Jesus is praying with his disciples near him when he asks that question, suggesting that the question itself might have been the subject of his prayer.  Who am I?  And if I am Messiah, the Chosen One, how does that square with this sense of destiny I have to suffer, to be rejected, to be killed, and to rise again?  There are no maps telling me how to get there, and I am not sure how to do it.

           

            After this episode of prayer, as happens in both Mark and Matthew, Jesus selects the inner three and takes them with him to a high mountain, apart.  And there something very strange happens.  We call it the Transfiguration, but in many ways it was Jesus’ confirmation.  It was his own unique spiritual experience that springs from the roots of this question, “Who am I?”  Christian theology takes the route of understanding Christ as one person of two natures, divine and human.  Do with that what you will.  The struggle of the self, his Self, is in some sense the struggle of the world of the crowds, Caesars, and gods of the nations wrestling with and against the divine world of God.  The scriptures today remind us that transfiguration is something that had happened before, to Moses, for example.  And Christian history contains other examples of similar, if not identical, experiences of ordinary people, St. Seraphim of Sarov being one.  Be that as it may, when they arrive on the mountaintop, Jesus enters into prayer again, and in that moment his appearance changes and even his clothes become radiant.  The story tells us that not only Jesus is different but that somehow the veil separating the world of the crowds from the world of the divine is pierced.  So Moses and Elijah appear, not to Jesus only, but to the on-looking disciples.  It is the realm of eternity, not time, where past and future have no meaning.  Moses and Elijah are speaking of what we would call future—the “departure” that Jesus was to accomplish in Jerusalem—but they know as much about the future as they do the past, which is to say that they belong to that timeless realm that is then and there on the mountaintop colliding with the realm of flesh and blood that is generally ignorant of any other realm than that of common, everyday goings-on.

            There are lots of things to be learned and gleaned from the story of the Transfiguration.  Almost always we naturally focus on Jesus, which is doubtless the point of the whole episode.  But notice the obvious.  Jesus took with him three disciples.  Thus there is an audience for this great epiphany, and a community to share it.  Why did he take them?  Perhaps for company—reason enough if you are going to hike all the way up Mount Tabor or some similar peak.  But the story is reminiscent of Mark’s account (which Luke had read) in which Jesus called these three out from among the others and took them with him deeper into the Garden of Gethsemane where he prayed in his agony to be spared his time of trial.  Jesus felt the need for company during critical hours.   And simply because they are there on the mountain, Peter, James, and John themselves get swept up in the overshadowing cloud, terrified as they find themselves in that awful space where time runs into eternity and flesh is saturated with glory.  The voice that comes out of the cloud, unmistakably the same voice that spoke on the day of that other epiphany, Jesus’ baptism, speaks not to him but to them.  “This is my Son, my Chosen.  Listen to him!”  Listen to him.  Open your hearts, your minds, your souls so that you can not only hear but pay attention, and follow.  The road downhill will be harder than the climb, because it leads to suffering and rejection, denial and cross.  The Chosen One is chosen not for domination but for submission, not as ruler but as servant.  And if the Chosen One chooses you, it is so that you may be like him.  Get your cross and take it up and follow him.  Listen to him.

            They kept silent and told no one in those days anything that they had seen.  What else could they have done?  Those whose minds are sealed in the world of the crowds and crows and Caesars are seldom impressed with tales of glory.  And even if they be enchanted, they ponder the unearthly, rarely imagining that transfiguration or any such thing could be for them.  Peter, James, John, their fellow disciples, and countless others were soon to come to see something more magnificent than the Transfiguration, namely Jesus’ Easter, his spring, his Resurrection.  They would only get there by listening to him and following him on the road that led through Gethsemane to Calvary, through agony and death.  But they would catch on in due time to the fact that what had happened to Jesus on the mountain was their destiny too.  Time would come when they would tell freely what they had seen there, convinced that the world of the divine penetrates the world of the crowds on every level.  The day would dawn when they and their sisters and brothers would be the community showing what could happen to the world when it but listens to the Chosen One, takes up its cross, and follows him in the way that seeks Love in an exhilarating journey where there are no guardrails, only grace.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

Become an Epiphany

            Why Baptism?

            Baptism is one of those things that started out being fairly simple and became increasingly complex.   Nothing could have been much simpler than John the Baptist’s program of reform and commitment.  The Messiah was coming, ushering in a new age.  John called on people to get ready for the great Day of the Lord.  Be baptized, he said.  But let the outward baptism signify an inner change of heart and life.  What could be plainer?

           

            Jesus identified with John’s movement.  It was not a mystery as to why he was baptized.  He believed in the message that John was preaching and either saw himself as the fulfillment of it or supportive enough of it to engage in what John’s community clearly saw as the rite that glued them together.

            According to the New Testament, Jesus did not baptize, but only his disciples.  Even after the Jesus Movement became distinct from the Movement of John the Baptist, Jesus’ disciples continued to practice baptism, which, so far as we know, continued to mean what it had meant when John and his disciples had done it. 

            But then there came the death and resurrection of Jesus.  One can imagine the first baptism that someone tried to administer after that.  Going underneath the water and coming back up again—or having oneself thoroughly soused with poured water—all just looks too much like a death and a resurrection to be ignored.  So very early on, Early Christians practiced baptism not just as an outward cleansing symbolizing an inner reformation, but as a kind of ritual death and rebirth.  Candidates for baptism went down into the water nude, like babies from the womb or like corpses, take your pick.  Down into the dark waters of death they went, crossing a river, as it were, that separated them from everything in the old life that they had left behind. They came up out of the water, were clothed in white, were anointed with oil, and were accepted into the fellowship of the New Community.

            That, of course, was not the stopping place for the development of baptism.  It was to go through numbers of changes through the ensuing centuries.  But that point was the single most definitive stage in the history of baptism.  From then on, it would be impossible to see baptism as essentially an individual thing.  It was clearly an act of initiation into a community. 

            If the Church had remembered and believed that, Christian history would have gone quite differently from how it has.  Baptism has been, at one time or another, tied up in ideas about sin and salvation, about heaven and hell, about who does and who does not get to receive Communion.  I would argue that the single most important development in the last century in the Church was a thorough re-thinking of baptism.  We pulled it from the realm of a precious little private ceremony done with fancy dresses and candles on a Saturday afternoon or some other such time, into the full, public liturgy of assembled Christians.  We began reworking what it meant to be initiated into Christian community.  We started imagining how we might become more conscious of baptism as a way of life, one that is ever-unfolding.  We moved away from thinking of baptism as a discrete event, over and done with and soon forgotten.  So it is possible today, at least among Episcopal congregations, to talk about “our baptismal covenant” and have a great many people actually know what you are talking about. 

            A part of this whole story was the emergence of the Baptism of Christ as a major festival, which we celebrate today.  The Book of Common Prayer recognizes Epiphany as a season, not simply as “ordinary time.”  The season is defined by two poles, both of which have to do with the revelation of the two natures of Christ, human and divine.  One is the Baptism of Christ, always the First Sunday after the Epiphany, and the other is the Transfiguration of Christ, always the Last.  Put it that way and suddenly the lights come on.  What Jesus models for us is how human and divine natures can (and should) coexist in the same person and be at peace with one another.  Without at all depreciating the specialness of Jesus, Eastern Christianity has always gotten that.  The purpose of the whole process of salvation, they see, is theosis, or the divinization of the human being.  One way of looking at that is to see that the whole point of membership in the Church is that we together take on the characteristics of God.  Some of this is behavioral.  But it is not merely behavioral.  We don’t become like God just by being on our best behavior, but by allowing our minds to be changed, our spirits to be opened to mystery, our souls to be stretched.  We are engaged in a process of continual transformation, a process that begins with baptism and extends into the life beyond death.  It is not time-bound or body-bound.  It is eternal.  And every bit of us is caught up in the transformation brought about by the indescribable grace of God.

           

            So what happens when we baptize an Oscar Malec, for example? Is there a way of understanding the event at the center of our liturgy today that brings all this stuff about baptism down to the piece of earth that Oscar and we occupy?  Well, let’s talk about Oscar for a minute.  First of all, Oscar was born into the human family a relatively short while ago.  I remember it well.  I went to see him and told Alys that even at a few days of age he was a son that Danny couldn’t deny.  Oscar was a complete little human being, not defective at all.  From the moment of birth he possessed the fullness of human nature, the same as everyone else.  It happened that Oscar got sick last May when Pentecost rolled around and thus missed his baptism.  But Oscar didn’t miss out on God’s love one mite by missing his baptism that day.   He has continued to grow, to develop a distinct personality, and in his second year now, is beginning to evince more and more the characteristics of his parents.  In fact Oscar has been very much a member of this community, despite the fact that he has not been baptized.  No one would doubt that in practical terms.  Indeed his Christian formation has already begun.  Then why baptize him, you might ask.  For the same reason that sometimes a couple who have shared quite a life together, sometimes for years, choose to get married formally and officially.  They want to make public and explicit what has been informal and assumed.  Baptism is the way that we formally initiate Oscar into the fellowship of Christ’s Body, the Church.  In bringing him to baptism, his parents are specifically saying to us that Oscar now is ours as much as theirs, in a spiritual and pastoral sense.  Their parental duties are not discharged fully.  But our responsibility to a fellow member, Oscar, have now officially begun.

            So how does this process of transformation, or theosis, or divinization take place in Oscar?  And how can we tell that it is happening?  Well, let’s be honest about it.  Danny and Alys, his godparents, and the rest of us will do our best to bring him up to know and to love God.  We’ll do that by giving him the opportunity to take his place in the assembly of Christians.  By learning the Big Story of creation, fall, and redemption, Oscar will likely come to view his life in terms of that story.  Through Godly Play, involvement in the liturgy, through interactions with others in the community, he will learn to meditate, to pray, to recognize when he falls short and to mark it with appropriate confession and repentance.  He will learn little by little to live the story, perhaps first by trying on the costume of a shepherd or a sheep during a Christmas Eve liturgy, later by lighting and carrying candles, perhaps later still by reading lessons or, if he is musical, playing an instrument or singing.  So it will go, and in the process, we hope, Oscar will learn some things about Jesus, and be attracted to Jesus enough to imitate him in his relationships.  He will begin to observe and copy the behavior of his community and that of his family, so that striving for justice and peace will be for him a reality, not just an airy idea.  With luck (we call it “grace,”) by the time Oscar is, say, eighteen or twenty, we will be able to look at him and say, “Oscar you are a real person.  And we see Jesus’ life really living in you.” 

            Now, I am no prophet.  But I am intuitive.  And I suspect that there will be days in Oscar’s life when he will be anything but divine, or even cheaply angelic.  I suspect that there may be in his future a suspension, a heartache, perhaps a heart-to-heart talk from his parents.  That will be because Oscar is a real person, not because he is necessarily flawed (any more than any of us is flawed).  But it won’t matter in the long run, because Oscar will be engaged in a process of taking on the characteristics of God.  And one of those characteristics, perhaps the basic one, is being honest, being truthful.  Living the life of God (being “divinized”) is not putting on an act and pretending a level of holiness that is not real.  You can't have the Truth without God, and you can't have God without Truth.  So becoming like God is being honest, being truthful, being totally without pretense, precisely because there is nothing to gain by pretending anything. 

            This is, of course, just a sketch of what Oscar’s life will be like.  The sketch is far less interesting than the real work of art will be, and that is already in progress.  But the sketch does have this value:  it reveals, even in rough form, that Oscar, like all of us, is peculiarly created with the capacity of becoming something more than just the Oscar we see on the outside.  There is a dimension to Oscar that we cannot see, though we know it is there because we have that dimension too.  It is the dimension of surprising himself, and perhaps others, by exercising a love beyond ordinary expectations, care exceeding reasonable bounds, passion surpassing what human animals might be supposed to manifest, and a hope that only the courageous would dare exercise.  Those things add up to a divine nature that, little by little, even rough-and-tumble little boys take on, to the point that they become themselves epiphanies of God, sons of the Most High in whom God is well pleased.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

Farthest Out

 

“And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not:  for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.'” Luke 2:17

            It could be that I have gotten one every year, though I don’t think so.  I opened an envelope last week containing a beautiful card picturing three Persian wise men visiting and bringing gifts to Holy Mary for the birth of Jesus.  “Congratulations on the birth of Jesus, the messiah and wishing you peace and blessing this New Year!”  All of that, plus some Arabic script which I could not read, were on the front of the card.  Inside, The Islamic Education Center had written that the Quran has only one chapter named after a woman, Chapter 19 entitled, “Mary,” or “Maryam” in Arabic.  They continue, “While Muslims don’t partake in Christmas celebrations, we believe in the awesome and miraculous birth of Jesus, in the miracles he performed by God’s Grace, and in the message of love and peace Jesus brought to the world.”

            None of this was news to me.  Although I consider myself as knowing very little about Islam, despite my efforts to learn more in recent years, I am fully aware of everything that the card told me.  Still I was impressed by this very laudable public relations effort on the part of the Islamic Education Center.  In a day when many Christians seem to be nearly hysterical about a supposed War on Christmas, and very eager to make distinctions between true Christianity and other faiths that seem to be competing with or antagonistic to Jesus, here is a group of Muslims obviously articulating some common ground they share with us.  Before you discount their card or deem me naïve for thinking that it was a lovely gesture (or think that I don’t realize that Muslim evangelism is just as self-serving as Christian evangelism, no more and no less so), take the message at face value.  Jesus, it says, is not the property of Christians only.  Jesus is for the world.

            And that, I do believe, is in the Bible.  “For behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.”  It’s a bit odd, don’t you think, that a popular distillation of the Good News of Jesus Christ is that he died on the cross to save you from your sins, and that all of the benefits of his precious death are yours provided that you accept him as your personal savior.  I have nothing to say against any of that, except that like most distillations of the complex, it leaves a great deal to be desired.  But the thing so odd about it is that the accent falls so clearly on what you and I as individuals do with Jesus.  There is little notion that Jesus is the universal savior, let alone the cosmic Christ, reigning from before time and to the ages of ages.  The “personal” Jesus crowds all that out.  It is odd only because, for most of Christian history, up to and including the modern period, Jesus was seen to be the Savior of the world, not just the savior of a subset of individuals in the world.  To the extent that it doesn’t seem odd to us, we bear witness to just how pervasive the “personal Jesus” is.

            Rather than get on the defensive about Jesus and about how much I know he loves you and me because we adore him and follow him, I am in the mood tonight to celebrate.  Maybe you are too, because I doubt that you came to church on Christmas Eve wanting to do high-test theology.  What better a thing to celebrate than the truth that this birth, this messianic arrival, is something so unimaginably grand that we could not conceivably cheapen it by imagining that we somehow own it.  It makes no more sense to try to own Jesus than it makes sense to claim that we own the sun or the moon or the stars.  The salvation which was for all people, born that day in the City of David, was not then, is not now, nor ever shall be a parochial event meant only for the initiated or the qualified.  For, long before Jesus was born, God spoke through the prophet Isaiah, saying about the people of Israel, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” [Isaiah 49:6]  A light to the nations!  That is what Israel was created for and re-created for! And that is what, through Jesus, Israel became:  a means through which God’s salvation might reach to the ends of the earth.

Afghan young woman

            No one would have supposed that night in Bethlehem that the birth of this child would be of cosmic significance, or even of much interest.  In Luke’s story, Mary had known even before conception that the baby she would bear would be holy, Son of God Most High; that he would be great; that he would rule from the throne of his ancestor David a kingdom that would have no end.  Well, Luke may have understood the meaning of those words, but you may be sure that his character, the little virgin of Nazareth, had no idea what the angel Gabriel meant when he spoke them to her.   And certainly a bunch of shepherds in the middle of the night had no earthly idea of what the heavenly host meant by singing “Glory to God in the highest” or what these good tidings of great joy might mean to all people.  But this is just the point, in a way.  The way the salvation of Christ gets to be for the entire world—to all people, and even to all things animate and inanimate in the universe—is that little by little, beginning in Bethlehem, people tell each other about what has happened.  Just like those shepherds who (some say) started broadcasting what they had seen and heard, people tell each other the news about this special birth, and about their own birth to a new life through him.  A story begins to develop, and a community begins to tell it as its own.  Jesus calls people—at first a few fisher folk, then a few more—and first news you know, he has a community gathered around him, including women.  He dies and is raised from the dead and within a few years, not only women and Jews, but Gentiles and foreigners, Ethiopians and Greeks, slaves and freedmen, rich and poor, intellectuals and illiterate people, city dwellers and country folk, are a part something bigger even than a community, a movement in fact.  So the good news first told to the shepherds gets to be truly good tidings of great joy for all people.

... in all cultures and faiths

            Imagine what would happen if instead of trying to possess Jesus in stained glass and on dashboards, Christians on a huge scale determined to look for Jesus in all the unlikely places and people.  Imagine what might happen if we began to see Jesus not only in the Quran but also, as the Church Fathers did, in the Hebrew scriptures.  Suppose we made the leap, if we haven’t already, from seeing Jesus as a particular baby lying in a particular manger in a particular story, and began to see his footprints all over creation, his spirit in stories of gods and heroes of other faiths and cultures, his beauty in the music and art that knows nothing of the historical Jesus as such, his truth in patterns of living that express his teachings even unawares.  You will recognize, of course, that none of this is particularly radical, because Christian missionaries at their best have been doing all these things for centuries.  They have been recognizing the reality of Jesus implicit in cultures and beliefs that have not known him.  They have named Christ when they have seen him appear in places that have had no name for him, much as Paul did in the Book of Acts when encountering a shrine on the Athenian acropolis inscribed “To an Unknown God.”  Suppose our job were simply to make Christ known by acknowledging that in many cases he is already known if not named, present if not worshiped and obeyed to the ends of the earth.

            God is not about to lose the universe, not to evil, not to ignorance, and not to hate.  God is Truth, and that Truth will outlast the most stubborn and virulent of its opponents.  God does not need armies, either political or rhetorical, to defend God’s cause.  But God does need Marys who will say, “Be it unto me according to your word.”  God does need Josephs who will make the long trek from wherever they are to Bethlehem.  God does need shepherds, apparently, who are minding their own business but who have time to behold the heavens opened and a stunning intrusion of glory into an ordinary night of watching.  God seems to rejoice and applaud when people get up and go searching for the thing they have been told has happened that will bring unutterable joy to the world.   And God, who by definition should need nothing, needs a community of people who will adopt as their own the ways of the Christ who continually sees enemies as those to be loved and who says of potential competitors, “if they are not against us, they are for us.”

            So, Good Christian friends, rejoice, with heart and soul and voice.  The Good News that Christ is for the world is better than anything we could have imagined.  All people have tasted or can taste the Bread of his life and the Wine of his joy.  And it won’t stop until all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012