An Elliptical Glory: Strangers in a Strange Land (Christmas 2A)

The Adoration of the Magi (the San Lazaro Altarpiece) c. 1508/1519
National Gallery of Art

Strangers in a Strange Land
Homily delivered Second Sunday of Christmas (Year A RCL)
5 January 2020 8:00am Said and 10:00 am Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland
Readings: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84; Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a
Matthew 2:1-12
God, give us hearts to feel and love:

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was about thirteen, I went into an adolescent depression that lasted several weeks. I was unhappy with myself and the world. Like the clothes and shoes I was always growing out of, things in general just didn’t feel like they fit. My father took me aside and asked what was wrong. When I said “everything” but couldn’t point to any one specific thing, he said, “That’s alright Tony. You’re growing up, and growing up means realizing we don’t fit completely in this world. What most don’t see is that we came from God, and go back to God when we die, and as wonderful as this life is, we are made for someplace else, and won’t feel completely at home until we get there.” Since he had told me that it was OK to be not OK, it comforted me, and I came out of my blue funk.

Made for someplace else: ill at ease, and not wholly belonging here. The idea is found in the story of Israel. Exodus says that when Moses was in hiding before his call, he and his family were aliens in Midian: His son says, “I am a stranger in a strange land” (Exod 2:22).

One of the earliest liturgical fragments in the Bible summarizes the life of the people as one alien sojourn after another:

“My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labor. Then we cried out to Yahweh … [who] brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deut. 26:5-9). Again and again in the Hebrew scriptures we hear, “treat the aliens in your midst with kindness and fairly—you were once aliens in Egypt.”

Sister Joan Puls, in her exquisite little book Every Bush is Burning, tells of our spiritual need for being aliens, for going outside of our comfort zone: “We live limited lives until we ‘cross over’ into the concrete world of another country, another culture, another tradition ... I have left forever a small world to live with the tensions and the tender mercies of God’s larger family.”

I have had many such stranger-in-a-strange-land experiences in my life. As a young man, moving to France and Belgium for a couple of years; later living and working in China and then West Africa with the U.S. Foreign Service. Moving overseas and studying other languages gave me a great opportunity to break out of habits of thought and action that had become routine and constraining. I am thankful to have been so blessed in enjoying such newness and strangeness of life and culture. Crossing over—being transgressive—to something new and alien breaks the world open for us and deepens our understanding. It broadens our horizon, and gives us a larger framework from which to draw perspectives. It gives us spices for our food we never knew, smells and tastes we had never imagined, ways of thinking and viewing things that had been inconceivable.

Today’s Gospel is Matthew’s story of the strange Persian—in modern terms, Iranian—astrologers arriving in Jerusalem as strangers in a strange land. They seek to honor the child born “King of the Jews.” Matthew, that most Jewish of the four Gospels, uses them to represent the universal importance of God’s Messiah. He sees the inclusion of the gentiles as mysterious, fraught with danger. The Greek word Magoi (Latin: Magi) almost always carries a baggage of Mystery and the Occult. The magi’s appearance in Jerusalem triggers a wicked and narcissistic ruler into horror; the Massacre of Innocents is the result.

Read in the context of the other readings in today’s lectionary, the story focuses on the Magi as religious pilgrims, strangers in a strange land not just bearing gifts, but seeking treasure from God. These texts tell that being a stranger in a strange land is part of what pilgrimage is about.

We recited today Psalm 84—a psalm of ascent—a liturgical chant to be sung by pilgrims as they struggle up the grueling hills in the steep Judean countryside to Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the highest point of real estate visible, where they can worship in the Temple. It tells the right motive for going on pilgrimage: “How dear to me is the place where you dwell, of Yahweh of armies. My very being desires and yearns for Yahweh’s courts. My heart and my flesh rejoice in the God who lives!”

A pilgrimage is not tourism with religious points of interest. It is a quest to find God, to find forgiveness, confidence, and oneness. It is an arduous effort to get a glimpse however fleeting of that home for which we were made, but have never seen. We must leave where we are to set aside our normal lives, with cozy habits of familiarity, and seek alienation and strangeness in our outward lives that match the deep alienation in our souls. It is there that we seek might find a place where the veil between us and the spirit world is thinner, a place that demands that we remove our shoes, a place where a bush will burn and yet not be consumed.

Such a trip is arduous, but worth it. Again, Psalm 84: “Happy are those … whose hearts are set on the pilgrims' way. Though they go through the desert valley they will find it full of springs.” A real pilgrimage is never easy. It will have desert valleys and rough spots. Having a heart set on the pilgrim’s way—remembering the yearning that moved you to set forth, and recalling the holy place you hope to go—means that the trip will be not only endurable, but at times sweet.

There are other ways to express the idea of keeping one’s eyes fixed on the goal. In today’s Epistle, Saint Paul prays for a “spirit of wisdom and revelation” allowing us to know God, and keep the “eyes of [our] heart enlightened, that [we] may know the hope to which God” calls us.

The pilgrim journey to God is like the return from annihilation and exile described in today’s Old Testament lesson: “ With weeping they shall come, But with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not fall down.”

The fact is, though, that our journey in faith is often not a straight, direct path. Pilgrimage often appears to be a labyrinth, with turnings and twistings but always a certain an unchanging endpoint. That’s what the pillar of fire and cloud in the exodus story suggests. Wandering in the wilderness, we must not lose sight of the destination, must not become discouraged.

We can recognize many things about our own human alienated lives in these Christmas and Epiphany stories. Points of similarity, but always with a big twist. There is an out-of-wedlock pregnancy that is deeply resented and misunderstood, a desire to divorce that is reconsidered. Worries about taxes and a census only underscore a family’s poverty and marginal place in society. Undocumented aliens—Iranian intellectuals with strange ideas no less—who scare the bejesus out of the rich and powerful of the land. A family is forced to flee their homeland because of persecution and risk of death, to become refugees and immigrants in a foreign land. Slaughtered innocents. Strangers in a strange land.

Dearest ones, we live in a troubled and broken world. Our nation’s embrace of warfare and brutality as a foreign policy tool is wrong and has always been wrong. This week’s taking off even the pretense of limited use of war powers and measured proportionate response seems to risk major war putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk. Most disturbing is that it appears to be timed to shore up political support of the base, and satisfy the bloodlust and anger of a minority of our people, one that styles itself “Christian.” Despite their self-branding, these people are not evangelicals—there is no good news in their message. They do not follow our Lord, who told his disciples in Gethsemane to put away the sword with which they wanted to defend him. For this and many reasons, we should feel ill at ease here, for this is not what God intends in creating us.

I invite all of us as we enter a new year and a new decade to put aside rejection of the alien and the stranger, to find solidarity with them, by taking on ourselves the pilgrim’s cloak and staff and following that star into strange and uncharted places. May we accept that we are all strangers in a strange land. Let us walk that labyrinthine way, find in a thin place our true home, our loving Jesus who calls us beyond our small, insular world of ignorance and fear, and into the broader risks and greater mercies of God.

Amen.