This past week our Connection Circle from the church came together to prepare a feast for the homeless youth in Vancouver. Sally Schaeferle and Marian Robson put together little gifts bags for every young person, which they collected before they left. After the meal, the kids were slouching around in their chairs, as youth do after they’ve eaten three platefuls of food! One of them had collected their gift bag, and took out the New Year cracker. Pop! His eyes lit up like a five year old. Others heard the sound. “Hey, where’d you get that? Where’s mine?” they buzzed. It was truly delightful seeing a little bit of light return to their eyes. In my mind, I imagined that it reignited in them the light of a lost promise. This is what life was supposed to be like: plenty of food, warm-hearted human beings who are absolutely delighted to give you what you need, and unexpected gifts to surprise the soul.
This charming story of the Magi arriving from a distant land to pay homage to the birth of Christ captures our imagination once a year on the occasion of Epiphany. Epiphany means light—the light of revelation. At Christmas, the story goes that Jesus is the divine light that shines in the darkness. On Epiphany, the question put to us is whether we intend to follow that light. Will we do whatever it takes to be stewards of the promise of life for ourselves and for our world?
We have always imagined the wise men to be astrologers from Persia, although we’re not told so in the story. It’s a pretty safe bet that this is what the author intended as these were men who followed the pattern of the stars, and discerned in their alignment, future potentials and possibilities for life on Earth. And what they saw in the stars, according to this legend, was the fulfillment of promise.
The stars shone with the light of hope. One was about to be born who would embody the future of the human species. In him, the promise of the whole, evolving cosmos, took flesh. He was the fulfillment of the promise that lit the stars—the dream for a new humanity and a down payment for what was possible for our species in the future.
The universe, the Magi realized, was doing a new thing in Jesus, laying down a new template for what it meant to live whole-heartedly. His life would make it possible for our entire species to follow his light, and more than this, to become themselves the light, in order to save the world from all the distracting projects of that breed in the dark of ignorance and foolishness. God came through on the divine promise in Jesus. That’s the story of Christmas. The story of Epiphany asks us whether we are willing with the wise men and wise women of the world to follow that light wherever it shines. The Magi’s journey was lit by a star, symbolizing the promise that lit up their heart—their dream for a new humanity, at one with Earth, the cosmos, with God, and with all our relations, human and other than human.
The spiritual journey can be understood as joyful consent to hold fast to the divine promise—especially when evidence mounts suggesting that disillusionment and cynicism might be the more credible path. But let’s not go there, for just a minute, shall we? Let’s track for a moment the deep and compelling promises that light our path in life. These promises are hard-wired at a cellular level into our body/mind/heart. And if we are not lit up by the inherent promise of life, it is tragic. It is tragic because this is a sign that somewhere along the line, or perhaps many places along the line, the star of promise, our divine birthright, was snuffed out and we haven’t been able to awaken it. Our modest offering as a Connection Circle to offer a meal for the youth was all about this—helping these kids to not give up on the intrinsic promise of life.
We come into this world filled with promise. Infants come blazing into life, filled with yearning to collect on a promise. Every baby ever born into the world—human or other than human—represents the hope of the universe after 13.7 billion years. We represent the yearning of Spirit to manifest and experience the world in form. We become the eyes, the ears, the beating heart, and the imagination of Spirit-in-flesh. In us, Spirit is literally exploding with the promise of the whole universe. We want to lay claim to that promise.
When an infant gazes into her mother’s eyes, she is lost in wonder. What is this “other” before me? This “other” emerges before our eyes as an objective fact of existence to be pondered. There is an “other” to contend with. How about that?! Who would have thunk it?! The infant studies the other at first like a detached scientist. This state is a precursor to deep curiosity about life. And then, if all goes well, the joy of it, the sheer ecstasy and delight is almost too much for the little body and the mother to bear. Love floods over the two of them, as the infant drinks in the sheer, unquestionable goodness of life. The light in their eyes is as bright as a galaxy. It could light up deep space.
At an unconscious, intuitive level, the infant makes a decision to stick around for a full-bodied, full-hearted journey. This is the promise of life that we all show up for. Maybe the reason that we’re given the story of the birth in Matthew and Luke’s gospel is because the ecstasy between mother and child is where the divine promise is first experienced.
This ecstatic reciprocity defines for us, and becomes the measure of, the deep promise that life holds. We live for this thick relational bliss. It becomes the milk we want to drink in our childhood and adult relationships. It is what pulls us forward, drives us onward. The quality of life depends on whether this promise is alive in us. If the circumstances of our life can’t deliver on this deep promise, we will either change our life, or become sick.
Biblically, this implicit promise shows up in both the Old (First) Testament, and the Second (New) Testament. We’re not told why Abraham and Sarah left their home city. But this much we can be sure about. That city, and their particular circumstances, did not hold out promise for them, or they would have stayed. Rather, they heard a divine promise that if they set out—and followed their particular star—then they would be the progenitors of a great nation. Moses was lit up by the promise of justice for the Hebrews. Other prophets would follow in his path, roused by the indignity of oppression, of just how far the injustice being enacted upon the poor and humble was from this deep promise of reciprocity and ecstatic delight in life. Jesus himself was lit up by the promise that he called the Kingdom of God, or the realm of God. He was one who never lost sight of the promise, and who himself became the prime promise-keeper.
Have you seen those TV commercials that are meant to expose the unfairness of the small print in competitor’s contracts? A businessman asks a little girl if she would like a pony. Yes, she would. He hands her a plastic pony. Then he asks another little girl is she would like a pony. Of course, she would like a pony. He makes a clicking sound, and out walks a real pony. The first little girl says, “You didn’t say I could have a real pony.” He looks at her and say, “Well, you didn’t ask.” The look that she gives him is one of sheer indignation. There is something clearly, morally, wrong and unfair about what just happened, and they both know it. She conveys the sentiment of the Jewish prophet. This is dead wrong. This is an abrogation of the promise that I showed up for in this life. You, buddy, are twisted.
And this, of course, is the problem. People lose touch with the promise, and their own lives become a lie in the service of projects of the small self. We live in a twisted world. Not all infants experience unmitigated and uncomplicated love. Promises are broken in a thousand different ways to children. Marriages don’t work out the way we expected. We didn’t show up for a twisted world. We showed up for joy, for love, for the give and take, and the beauty of it all. And if the promise of life is broken once too often, the light goes out. And we’re not all as resilient as that little girl, who knew the problem was with the businessman and not her. We stop following the star of promise to the stable of fulfillment. We develop philosophies and psychologies that make compromises with twisted “reality”. We come to believe that life is meaningless, that we’re not important, that it doesn’t matter. We stop hoping for too much because we’ve been hurt by hope. Our eyes don’t light up like they used to when we see our loved ones. Our life becomes a fortress, guarding us against the very things that make life worth living.
Here’s a description of a man in late adulthood, reflecting back on this life, and realizing that too soon he gave up on the promise. It’s from the novel, The Sense of An Ending, by Julian Barnes, the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner. The protagonist, Anthony, writes: “I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life to not bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.” He had lost the light of the promise of life.
Jesus emerged on to the scene precisely in service to those who have every reason to give up on the divine promise of abundant life—the poor, the cast offs, the sinners, the despised and the disappointed. He becomes the star for those who had lost the light. He invites all who recognize in him, the promise that had been broken once too often for them. He tells them that God has not abandoned them, and if they want proof, spend a little time looking into his eyes. Fall into that pool of love and rest; rest in the promise that is exchanged in silent delight between mothers and infants, that causes the eyes of a 20 year old youth to light up when the cracker is popped; that lights the night sky with bright and meaningful patterns, for the wise who have eyes to see; rest in the good news, Jesus proclaims, that I am personally delivering on the ancient promise. I Am Reality. I Am the promise of the Universe. Hope in me. Hope with me. Do not give up. Rather stand up. Stand up and be contended with. Stand up and bring down an Empire with love and compassion as your only weapons. Because this is the future that the powerful have given up on and stiff-necked ones have traded in for fear and insecurity. Follow me, as the Magi followed their star promise to where I was born. I am the light of the world.
The practice of evolutionary Christianity consists to a large degree in remembering a time in your life when the light in your eyes shone with the promise—a time before you quietly made the compromise that caused you to settle for merely not being bothered by life, rather than surrendering to its Mystery and Beauty. Access this promise. Dare to allow it to rise up in you. Bring it with you to work. Bring it to your relationships, to your marriage; take it with you to the voting booth. Let it light up your dreams of the future, for yourself and our planet. Let this promise of abundant life draw you forward. Allow it to be stronger than disappointment and disillusionment. This is the very definition of faith: allowing yourself to be apprehended by the promise of life, and finding God in that promise. This is Epiphany—to be lit up by that flaring promise and to decide to follow that star wherever it may lead. When you follow this star, your spiritual evolution is guaranteed. When the world follows this star, the Kingdom of God shall be realized.
