How powerful is this need to see with our own eyes, to feel, to taste, to hear, to smell. Though the aural evidence of the presence of peepers was overwhelming, a sound I’ve welcomed every spring of my life, the urge to actually see one and – better still – to hold one for a few seconds was strong. It was strong enough to compel me to get my shoes and jeans soaking wet in the chill of a spring evening.
As I contemplated in awe the beauty of the little girl’s innocence, a horrifying thought suddenly came to my mind: “where are her parents?” I was not the only one to wonder where they were; within seconds the little child also realized that she was alone in the midst of strangers. Immediately the smile was erased from her face, and I she began to yell “Mommy, Mommy!”
On Maundy Thursday we had a service in the evening. So I decided to try the Thursday morning spin class instead. Little did I know, the Thursday morning class is “Devotion in Motion,” an hour-long spin class during which the instructor plays praise and worship music and talks about God, using the idea of a bike ride as a metaphor for the spiritual life.
It is easy for us to say that we love our neighbor, and in fact, many of us repeat those verses every Sunday. It is easy to strike our chests and claim we have given a certain amount of our money to the local shelter, a hospice in Guatemala or even for the Millenium Development Goals, but would we be willing to leave the ease of modern life and share all we have with the miserable? No, we would not.
It seems to me that if we are going to make sense out of Jesus’ silence, if we claim any right to play at the empty tomb on Easter morning, we need to remember his companions in suffering. We cannot in good faith re-encounter the silence of Jesus in these latter days without encountering the silence of the victims who came after him.
Wisdom commends that without our own effort at discipleship – our own effort to become mature disciples – our faith is almost certainly dead. In other words, disciples are called to unite our will, thought and action with God’s for the sake of our own growing up — for the sake of the world’s good — for the sake of the lost, oppressed, poor, hungry, sick and alone.
Martin Luther King was a lot of things to a lot of people, and at this late date his memory has been mythologized and sterilized and romanticized past all recognition. But he knew how to answer Jesus’ question—he knew what it meant to come out of hiding as a Christian. He knew what it meant to be sought. What are you looking for, Martin? I’m looking for justice.
Rilke said: Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
We don’t know who the magi really were, but we know who they represent: you and me. We are seekers after God too – right? And I believe that like them, you and I have been made to know by Grace where the King of Love is – and he’s in our midst. Christ is born by all who bear him – and Christ is within us as we are within him.
In this new year, how I wish that we Episcopalians could focus on the gifts so freely and lavishly given to each of us by God: our capacity to love and our freedom to commit ourselves to whomever we choose; the thousands of opportunities available to serve those without a voice in our society and in the wider world.