Monday, January 9, 2017

Feast of the Epiphany, 2017

Matthew 2:1-12
I once visited a dying hospice patient. He belonged to no religion and never had. He was married to a Catholic lady and his children had all been raised in the Church. In the course of my getting to know him he revealed that in his younger days he had done a lot of things he wasn't proud of, and had hurt his wife and family over and over again by his actions. And although he had very little in the way of a spiritual life, he knew he was going to hell. And he meant it; he was extremely saddened by this.
In separate conversations with his wife and one of his daughters, it seemed as though allthough they corraborated his history of alcoholism, abuse and abandonment, over the past fifteen years he had been an exempliary father and husband. They couldn't figure out why he was so despondent, or why he believed he was going to hell. He soon passed away, still unconverted, still in despair.
Today we hear about two kinds of people. The Magi, of course. They are restless – they know something is missing – or they would never leave their homes and their place in society to travel to a little backwater capital of an insignificant people to seek out their king. They knew nothing of the Hebrew scriptures, but somehow their studies back in their pagan land led them to believe their restlessness would be relieved if they could come into the presence of the newborn King of the Jews. They traveled probably for at least a few weeks braving various dangers and discomforts. They followed a star, whatever that means, and whenever we see this re-enacted in movies, the star stops leading them when they hit Jerusalem. The GPS fails and they have to look at a map; they have to consult with the locals. And eventually they find what they are looking for, they do him homage, they give him gold because he is a king, incense because he is holy, and myrrh because he will have to suffer and die. And they are finally satisfied; they do not continue to search, they go home, having accomplished what they set out to do, having found a savior.
The other group of people include King Herod and his advisors. When asked, the advisors reply that the king will be born in Bethlehem, its right there in the prophecies. And in fact, if they were to spend a little more time with their scriptures, and who is to say they didn't, they could have told you that right now was about the right time for this to happen. And they go back to their scrolls and prayer books and continue to study how far you could walk on the Sabbath day and how you could tell whether an animal was unblemished enough to be used in a sacrifice. The momentous event was to take place 8 miles away, but for them it was too much trouble. And Herod's reaction is worse. He does not deny that the baby will be the King of the Jews; he does all in his power to make sure that it doesn't happen. And later he will murder all the boys under two years of age, as we know. Herod and his advisors all know something predicted by the prophets, something ordained by God himself, is happening – and they ignore it, or in Herod's case, actively oppose it.
I think we human beings can see ourselves in one of the two camps, sometimes even if we are members of a church, if we are religious. It's quite possible to be a pillar of the church and at the same time have no sense of restlessness, of incompleteness. And it's quite possible for people who aren't religious at all to feel that restlessness and incompleteness, and to look for ways to reduce those troubling feelings.
Some of us learn that we need a savior. Some of us never learn that. The man I told you about would probably have agreed that he needed a savior; or perhaps if told that a savior existed (and he was told that many times) he might have answered that he did not need a savior, he did not want one.
Christianity, of course, tells us that all human beings need a savior. All of us have a sense that we are not complete, that we are lacking something or someone to be complete. I think if we are honest we can say with the Apostle Paul, “but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?” If we are honest we know that only through God's grace have we been spared what so many human beings suffer – hunger, oppression, discrimination, torture, poverty – and only through his grace are we spared from serious sin and its consequences. Deep inside, I know that I cannot make it on my own; and we learn as we get older that there are many things we wish we had done, had learned, had avoided; and now there is no hope of doing them. We need a savior, because it isn't just the fact that we are prone to sin, it is that we are made up of sin, because at the root, sin is incompleteness, it is missing the mark. The greatest saints, who sometimes seem almost morbid in their sense of their own sinfulness, were concerned not about great sins – murder, robbery, slander – but about things so small that most of us would consider them minor faults. They were concerned because they loved God so much that they wanted to be exactly what he wanted them to be, and they knew they were not, and could never be, by themselves. And so they learned that they needed a savior, someone who would make up for wherever they missed the mark. And when they realized that they had a savior, that did not stop them from struggling to become what they were meant to be, but they also became light-hearted, joyful – because they knew that with Jesus they would in the end be exactly what God had meant for them to be.
The man from hospice knew he needed a savior. He was looking back on his life and seeing the terrible things he'd done, and granted, he was probably clinically depressed. Saint Faustina said that even at the point of death God gives the soul a moment so that if the soul is willing, it may return to God. I hope and pray that he found his savior.