8 January 2006

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture:  Matthew 2:1-12

Stars “R” Us

The three magicians, these magi-kings, don’t see Jesus at first.  They see a star and they have a wise intuition, a vision, as to its cosmic magnitude.  The shepherds, remember them?, mainly hear singing angels with good news.  But they also go to see, listen, look, stop!  Other people in the expanding loop of those who see Jesus are the lead actors in last week’s drama—where the religious parents, Joseph and Mary, take the newly circumcised baby to the Temple for some important rituals for mother and child.  There the ancient man Simeon and the prophetess Anna are providentially brought to see Jesus and to bless and proclaim what they see:  the future of world history in Christ and the redemption and consolation of God’s people Israel.  That’s how they see it all.

What can all this looking at Jesus mean for us and our community, this beloved community, here and now, in the throes of this and that?!

These people looked at Jesus.  Probably in our life-time the most we can ever do is to look to Jesus.

I want you to look at the “looking thing” first for a minute.  Two of my favorite books on my library shelf on preaching have these titles:  The Playful Eye and Visual Explanations.  My third favorite book is Visual Images in Sermons.  But I wrote that and it isn’t published yet.

To look at the thing about looking, this phenomenology of perception, I want to tell you about the stardust man.  But I have to tell you about the subway man first.  This is so weird, yet useful!

When I was in graduate school in New York City, one year I worked for a group of black gang leaders on the lower East Side but lived on the upper West Side.  I took the subway.  15 cents.

Here!  The doors shut behind me.  The subway is pretty empty.  There is an almost sacred pause after the doors shut before the lurch and the rumble begin.  In that fluorescent sanctuary we are all very aware of each other’s presence.  The silence is intense, church-like.  The hunch-backed man with one eye catches the eye of the young attractive Puerto Rican woman who entered the subway when I did.

“You sit here.  It’s OK.  You’re cute,” he says to her in the split second of our silence.  The lurch and rumble mercifully start.  She looks away at the advertising strips—like bulletins.  Visual escape.  He sees that I see all this.  His eye is for all the world like that one-eyed turreted character recently in the new Harry Potter movie.

The train stops again.  It’s a local.  He says to the person sitting on the other side of him, “She’s afraid of me because of my one eye!”

Well this group therapy session that he’s now conducting goes on for another few local stops.  He is the master of our car because he sees everything and tells all about what everybody is seeing, thinking and feeling in our shared moment in history.

You and I see so much but say so little.  Whole worlds and lives flash before our eyes.  Such is the power of visual perception.  He just happened to hot wire his mouth to his optic nerve!

But the stardust man is more appropriate to a sermon than the entertaining subway man, and more to the point.

The stardust man was my first “patient” when I was a hospice volunteer a few years ago.  I think of him as one of the epiphany wise men.  Now you’d think as a therapist and minister I’d know how to visit a dying man in the hospital.    But I’m in my polyester green jacket there to do whatever he wants.  Sippy cup?  Change the channel.  Schooch up?!  I’ve been trained to follow his lead.

“Hi, I’m Duncan.  How are you today?”

“Well, I’m OK.  I’m dying and I’m not afraid to.  We all come from stardust and I’ll just be going back.”

I turned around and saw my volunteer trainer quietly exiting, closing the door behind us, leaving “us” together.

Not unlike the subway.  A moment of silence.  Not unlike the subway man, this gentleman saw what was going on and had a vision and a voice by which to live it.

I was impressed into silence.  This retired electrician had a faith and a real peace of mind.  Who was I to argue with that?  My theological education minimized as I sat down next to him and listened as he told me about his good life.

Now I’ve read, perhaps you have to, some of those books that try to bridge the gap between science and religion.  And there are cosmologists, even astro-physicists, who will talk about the spiritual significance of the carbon molecule and our common heritage with the stars of the universe.  Heritage, maybe even parentage.

But, if I go to a star, or just return to stardust I’d miss a few things.  I’d want Nancy to still see “my beautiful brown eyes and my eyebrows”!  I’d miss her face in the star dust.

But, I do affirm, myself, the star-like thing that happened between me and the hospice stardust man.  What that is, that star-like thing, is that we saw each other.  And there is a lot of God in that.  A lot of God in the mutuality of human looking. 

The I-Thou of it all.  I know I saw myself in him and in his place.  Would I be so calm?  So real?  I knew also, as the subway man had revealed, that instantaneous global perception we all have of each other.  In other words, I saw that the stardust man saw me looking at him.  And I saw that he saw that his faithful reality was being seen.  He would not have told me “his truth” if he did not somewhere have that common human need we all have:  to have our truth, our very being, recognized, seen.

Now I’m not as sure as he was what it is we can see in a star, but I am sure of what I knew he could see in me, especially what I was reflecting back to him.

While I’m thinking “gee, I wonder if I’m being a good green-jacketed hospice volunteer here?”, he’s thinking, “How am I dying?  How am holding up here?  What’s my stardust faith looking like to this man in the green jacket?”

We both had a lot of confirmation to give each other, in our looking, and our talking.

And there is a lot of God in Christ to that—at least as I’ve learned to look at it.  Seeing God in Christ is what our collected Christmas scriptures are all about.  How did the three wise magicians, the shepherds, Mary and Joseph, even the animals, see God in Christ?  How did Simeon and Anna from the Temple scene see God in Christ?  And how do we look to God in Christ here, and at each other?

In this beloved community one way we do that, you do that, is about race.  There is something about race I want to say here.  You all have imagined, had the vision, that race is not a barrier in the community of God’s people.  There is healing in that vision, that way of looking at each other.  Part of the mission of this church is to be an interracial community.

My testimony here is that in my life how I looked at black people and how black people look at me has been crucial to any possibility of Christian faith for me.  Since I won’t be here forever, I want to share this testimony as a part of “the looking thing” in this sermon.

My mother was a southern woman through and through.  As a Christian she was a benevolent racist.  She saw the benevolent part.  She must have been afraid that the sin of racism might continue in me.  So in her awkward benevolently-intentioned racist way she asked me as a 4-5 year old child if I liked either of the two people we saw playing the yard next to the church more than the other.  She would delight in telling her friends, and me as I grew, that I said I much preferred the crayoned one to the other one.

So I had a bias I guess.  I liked people of color more.  When I married a black woman from the south my mother was not so delighted.  But the Martin Luther King Jr. dream was my American Dream, and my Christian vision.  When that marriage ended 7-8 years later so did my dream about America, about race, and about Christ.

My faith did not survive my divorce.  And I only talked to one black woman, face to face, for the next 10 years or more.  She was a professor of mine in Chicago and everything we tried to say to each other went wrong.  Her wounds, personal and social, at the hands and with the eyes of white people, and my wounds, personal and gender-based, at the hands of a black woman simply crushed any successful talk between us.  We were nice, we just couldn’t hear each other.

The resuscitation of my faith, and my idealism, has been a work in progress for the past 15 years.  But the resuscitation gained inspiration when I came into this beloved community.

I apologize if this was too personal.  I do believe I’m ready for the Oprah show now, however!  And the short of this is:  how we see each other, and can come to see each other, is crucial to how we can see God in Christ.

It was, after all, God in Christ that the three wise men came to see.  It was not the star.  We do not in our religion end up worshipping the epiphany, the pointing star.  We end up worshipping and following who that star pointed to!

In the beloved community we are neither star-gazers, nor navel-gazers.  Who else is it that is looking for the God-in-Jesus-Christ community?  Don’t be too sure you know!

It is astonishing how Christian community is formed;  and how the first Christian community was formed.

I guess if you were looking for the elite core of those who first saw God in Christ Jesus you’d have to say it was God and Gabriel first, then Gabriel and Mary.  She was in the know.  Maybe her cousin Elizabeth.  Her to-be husband gets included in a dream. Inner vision.  Maybe he and Mary talked.  And then the shepherd, the animals, the angels.  That would be the inner circle of those who saw who Jesus was.  And saw him.

But some things are going on outside the loop here.  One of the reasons Mary and Joseph, last week, were so shocked at Simeon and Anna’s recognition, blessing, and proclaiming, is this:  how did they know?  Who told them?

Mary and Joseph could well have thought this Christ child was their secret, at least for the moment their blessed little secret!  But no!  The Holy Spirit has been alive and well in these two devotional souls.  God’s been working outside the loop, creating the first beloved Christian group.

And then these three men.  Not even Jews.  Not in-temple worshippers at all.  Magical foreign astronomers.  So in a totally separate loop three more are added in a whole new way to come to see God in Jesus Christ.

So from our original three, then four, five, and the shepherds, come five others:  Simeon and Anna and the oriental three, from different communities, different traditions.  But the same revelation.  But the same revelation—this person Jesus is God in Christ.

Who else outside of our loop knows Jesus, knows God the way God is revealed in our story?  This is why we are an open church.  Not because we are friendly or welcoming, but because our God is open.  Openly revealing God’s divinity, here and there.

Image the first annual meeting of the first beloved community.  Imagine Mary chairing the meeting.  Calling for the shepherds’ annual report.  Then the report from Simeon.  My guess is that ancient Anna would sing or dance her report.  And then the three foreign guys.  Their report.

How would these sub-group loops understand each other and understand how each saw Jesus?

We can conclude it’s easier for us to look at or to Jesus Christ than it is to look at or to each other!

Oh.  I left out someone from the new loops of those who knew and saw Jesus as God in Christ:  the star!  So that makes thirteen.  God.  Gabriel.  Mary.  Elizabeth.  Joseph.  Angels as a unit.  Shepherds too.  Simeon.  Anna.  The three wise men and the star. 

Of course this star knew what it was doing!  This star moved and moved in a new, specific, and unique way.  A star can know what it is doing.  A star can see a baby in a basket. A star can watch three wise men.  After all, as the star-dust man said, “We are all made from star dust.”  We can see God is in stars too.

Amen.