Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

After years and years of preaching on this text–and regularly talking about how Jesus obviously did not require remission of sins, making his baptism different from ours–I recently discovered a new way of understanding what is happening in this reading. I say “new” but its really only new to me, and dates back to at least the Fourth Century. St. Ambrose of Milan, one of the most important theologians of his era, said, essentially, that in his Baptism, Christ is not cleansed and purified (being perfect and sinless and God himself he didn’t need that) but rather that he cleanses and purifies water, imbuing it with the power to cleanse and purify us.

I love this reading, because it gets to a truth about the Sacraments– namely, that they use ordinary things which have been transformed into the means of extraordinary grace by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This, I think, is something unique and wonderful about the Christian faith. It’s not all about some mental or spiritual transcendence whereby we leave the world and live on some different plane of existence. Rather, God is made known in ordinary, tangible stuff.

The mystery of the Trinity is made real when Jesus, a man, stepped into regular old water. Our relationship with the Trinity is effected with regular old water which, by the Grace of God, becomes something extraordinary. The Mystery of Salvation, of Christ’s death and resurrection, is made known to us not through mental gymnastics, but through ordinary water and ordinary bread and ordinary wine which by the Grace of God becomes something extraordinary.

We learn from this morning’s lesson from Acts that the presence of the Holy Spirit is effected not by some sort of transcendental meditation, but through the laying on of physical apostolic hands onto a flesh and blood person, just as today, the Grace of the Holy Spirit is made real when the successors of those first apostles lay their hands, ordinary old hands, onto an ordinary head to confirm or ordain someone. (One of the effects of having an ecumenical lectionary, as I’ve mentioned before, is that sometimes we get lessons that don’t necessarily comport with what we believe the thematic “through-line” of a particular day is; I don’t think this reading from Acts is about Baptism, but rather about Confirmation, though it does relate to this larger point about sacramental theology.)

Anywat, Baptism is about more than just the remission of sins, though for us sinners that’s part of the story. Baptism is also about the ability of God to create a relationship with flesh-and-blood people in the material world, the washing away of the stain of original sin being but the first step. It’s about Christ being known not primarily by spiritual athletes who stay in their studies or their cells and just think a lot (as edifying and gratifying as that practice can be from time to time). Nor is it about having some grand “spiritual” experience (again, not a bad thing, but not the point). Rather, the power and glory of God is made present in the midst of remarkably ordinary things: water, bread, wine, flesh, and blood. The Grace of God is made present in the gathering of flesh-and-blood people, who’ve been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and maintain holy relationships with God and each other.

We as Anglican Christians are said to have a particularly Incarnational view of the faith, which is to say that the reality of God becoming human in Christ Jesus makes all the difference for how we view the world. The world is no longer just a place for “stumbling blocks”, but has become the very locus of God’s saving work. Christ’s Incarnation, His Baptism at the Jordan, His whole life of woe, and his physical, bodily Resurrection all point to the fact that the way to holiness is not by some kind of world-denying levitation, but by being Christians in the material world, among ordinary stuff, acknowledging reality, and watching God make his presence known around us in the midst of that which is commonplace, whether it be ordinary water, ordinary bread and wine, or ordinary people. It is ordinary things that serve as the vessels God uses to make His Grace known and felt. God does this for us all the time, but how much more wonderful it is when we recognize it: in plain old water, in tasteless bread, and admittedly cheap wine, in that person sitting next to you, in the midst of ordinary stuff. It takes a great God to forgo thunderbolts and a booming voice and the like to make Himself known in the quotidian; it takes a God who values us, who values our experience, who wants to be in a relationship with us all the time.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What I loved about studying philosophy in college is that the way to succeed, it seemed, was to be clever. Of course, if you tell an undergraduate that he’s clever, he’ll probably take offence, because he doesn’t mean to be clever, he means to be brilliant. And yet, it’s more fun to be merely clever. It’s kind of like a game. Cleverness can impress people, can impress oneself, and being clever isn’t nearly as time consuming as pursuing something so lofty and oblique as what those old, meddlesome sages in the theology department called “wisdom”.

This morning, I want to explore these two different sorts of intelligence—wisdom and cleverness—as we encounter in this morning’s Gospel, as they are personified in two different sets of characters. Let’s start with the former, namely wisdom.

The magi from the East are often called “wise men”, and their wisdom is that which enables them to read the signs in the stars to reckon the time and location of the Messiah’s birth. We can easily miss the significance of the Magi’s inclusion in Matthew’s Gospel because our popular image of “we three kings” glosses over the true identity of these men.

There are, of course, plenty of traditions that have popped up through pious legend over the course of the Church’s history, which do not necessarily have a biblical basis. The names of the magi—Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar—come from a sixth century Coptic (or Egyptian Christian) legend. There are, in fact, countervailing traditions from Eastern Christianity, my favorite being from the Syriac tradition, if only because the names sound so funny: in Near Eastern Christian churches, the wise men are still called Larvandad, Gushnasaph, and Hormisdas. Furthermore, that they were kings is dubious at best.

Even the number of the magi to which we’ve become accustomed is an assumption that’s not based on the text itself. Nowhere does Matthew’s account suggest that there were only three wise men. We know that there were three gifts, and at least two treasure chests in which the gifts were kept (the Greek thesaurous or “treasure chest” being in the plural), but there could have been a dozen magi.

So, a lot of what we think we know about the magi is questionable. What we can discern from the text, however, is significant, and perhaps a bit shocking. You see, the Greek magous, or magi, doesn’t just mean “wise men”. It means a very specific caste within the religion of Zoroastrianism. It was, in fact, the highest caste, into which Zoroaster himself was born: the priestly caste, as it were.

Now, what I know about Zoroastrianism can be conveyed in about two minutes. What’s important for our purposes is that astrology is central to the religion, and this high priestly caste was primarily concerned with figuring out what messages could be gleaned from studying the stars. What most certainly set the magi on their journey was some obscure prophecy that they had read in the stars. Indeed, the biblical account doesn’t have an angel, God’s preferred method of communication, telling the magi to set out for Bethlehem, but a star, what would have been from the Jewish perspective, a backward, pagan means of discerning messages from idols.

And yet, these men are portrayed as wise and, indeed, reverent. They are filled with joy upon entering the house in which the Holy Family had lodged. They paid homage to the Christ Child. They were, in the end, smart enough to be put off of Herod’s trickery. Somehow, the fact that they came to Christ through means we might find (and Jesus’ contemporaries surely would have found) theologically suspect, didn’t matter so much. It was what they did when they got there, when they arrived in Bethlehem and saw the Christ Child, by which they were justified.

So, the wisdom of the Wise Men, was ultimately not that they were really good at discerning messages in the stars, but that they were open to the truth of Christ and the direction of God when they finally experienced them. Now keep all this in mind for a couple minutes as we turn to Herod.

I said at the outset that we see two different kinds of intelligence in the morning’s Gospel. The magi personify wisdom, and Herod personifies cleverness. Now Herod was, by all accounts, a bad egg. The Roman Emperor Augustus, who was for all intents and purposes Herod’s boss, said that he’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son, which turned out to be a pretty accurate assessment seeing as how Herod ended up killing his own son.

But one thing that can be said of Herod is that he was awfully clever. He knows how to play the good guy. “Go and search diligently for the child,” he tells the magi, “and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” Of course we know Herod’s real intentions; we know that when the magi never showed he flew into a rage and had all the children in Bethlehem and the surrounding countryside under two-years-old killed in the hopes that Jesus would be among them. We know that, but the magi apparently don’t get it at first. They don’t get it unti God’s angel warns them. This probably isn’t because the magi were dense, but because Herod was so crafty, so clever, that he knew how to keep his real motivations hidden.

And yet, Herod has closed himself off because of fear. He fears that this child stands as a challenge to his rule. For all his cleverness, Herod had not the wisdom to see how great a thing this child’s coming could be. So important was the little bit of power he had as a puppet king that he could not leave himself open to experience the power given a child of God.

And this is the real distinction between cleverness and wisdom. A clever person knows the rules of the game, but a wise person will recognize that it’s not a game at all. The wise will be open to experience that for which his dogma does not account, just as the dogma of the magi—the very means by which they found the Christ Child—was turned on its ear by the experience of Him once found. The merely clever cannot break out of his dogma, be it religious dogma or the myth of power to which Herod clung so tightly or any other set of misdirected values which we grasp so tightly.

In the final analysis, wisdom is found by being open to its source, the divine Word, the logos of God which we encountered last week in John’s prologue. The only way we’ll ever be able to give up those petty assumptions which we all permit to rule our lives is by being open to the radical reorientation of values we experience when we abide in that Word, in Christ himself. Opening ourselves to this transformation is foolish by the world’s standards, it’s not clever, but it’s the only way to wisdom.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

You all probably know that Christmas is a twelve day season which concludes on the eve of the Epiphany, but when precisely does the season start? Sundown on the 24^th? As soon as the liturgy of that evening starts? When you pop your Christmas crackers and light the pudding on fire? For some of us who love hymnody, there is a different, though admittedly highly subjective answer: The Chord. I’m referring here to the famous chord played in the last verse of Sir David Willcocks’ arrangement of Adeste Fidelis, “O Come All Ye Faithful.” For you musicologists out there it is a “B half-diminished seventh.” For those who aren’t musicologists, it’s that strange yet stirring sound, played at the word “Word.” (I’ve requested each organist I’ve ever had to make sure to pencil it into their hymnal, and Neil did yeoman’s work with it this year, unsurprisingly!) Some organists studiously (and perhaps a bit superstitiously) avoid using the chord at any moment during the year other than at the Christmas Eve mass.

I think it’s so popular because it’s so haunting and otherworldly. How appropriate that it is played over the word “Word”, for the divine Logos becoming flesh is a haunting and otherworldly event, that which is eternal–outside of history–invading our temporal, material universe. As an aside, I chose this Sunday’s bulletin cover image by my favorite modern artist, Joan Miró, because I think it does something in the visual medium that Sir David’s arrangement does in the musical medium. It baffles us and draws out an affective rather than intellectual response, and it might even disquiet us a bit. And it should, because we cannot completely integrate concepts like divinity and infinity into a purely rationalistic view of the created order. The same entering the created order is, thus, a shock to the system.

This isn’t to say we can’t say anything, at least analogically, about the relationship between the divine Word and the universe created and ordered by means of his eternal existence. This reading comes up every year, and I usually do try to say something about what a Christian metaphysics looks like. To merely say “it’s a mystery” is rather unsatisfying and dismissive, and it would surely lead to a failing grade on a systematic theology exam. But this year I want us simply to ponder this in our hearts, as our Lady did in response to the Annunciation when the Word of God actually became incarnate nine months prior to the Nativity. In order to appreciate the magnitude of the birth we must grapple with Christ’s eternal generation, his preëxistence from before time.

The church father and “hammer of the Arians,” St. Hilary of Poitiers, wrote “I will not endure to hear that Christ was born of Mary unless I also hear ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.’” You see, without this, what we heard on Christmas Eve was just a sweet story about a woman giving birth under less than ideal circumstances. When we acknowledge that this little baby is nothing less than the Lord of the Universe, that our very existence is contingent on his creative will, then what we’re talking about is the single most disruptive event in all of history.

So, today let us with gladness ponder this truth and all it means for us. He who made the world came into it as a child. The world which was made good and fell has been remade. Christ remains in his glorious, risen body, the first-fruits of all bodies which will be redeemed, and he comes to us still, his very body present on this altar. Let us go then, even unto Bethlehem, for today begins the work which is fulfilled on Calvary and in the empty tomb and which will find its consummation on that last great day when the trumpet shall sound and we shall all be raised incorruptible.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.