As the season of Carnival arrives, I am also reminded, that the vocation of light bearing requires a sense of humor as well. Carnival as you know was not founded in Mobile (although we claim it began here before it began in New Orleans), but is a very ancient custom among many cultures around the planet expressed in myriad ways…the indigenous natives of this continent during the season following the winter solstice would light torches, partake of hallucinogens (not suggesting anything here!) and process through the tribal villages and camps singing and dancing until sunrise….During the Carnival season we put on a garish display of light mocking the cold dark, perhaps even frightening it with such outlandish rollicking bravado…putting the dark on notice that the light dares to sing and dance in its midst.

This Sunday we will initiate eleven more through Baptism and Confirmation into the fellowship of light bearers, again putting the dark on notice that the light persists still. May these eleven souls bear this light of compassion, liberation, dignity and justice honorably and with whole hearts, for the world will be changed yet again, the process of creation alive and well…as we the fellowship of light bearers repeat God’s first words of creation with authority and in loud refrain… “Let there be light!”

Ironically enough it is this Holy Land, Israel/Palestine, sacred to Jews, Muslims, and Christians that is at the heart of all matters Middle Eastern. Each example of conflict I cited above has some substantial contingency to the resolution of the seemingly intractable Israel/ Palestinian deadlock. This conflict reflects the larger issue affecting the entire Arab world and that is the issue of the loss of dignity of populations in the face of oppressive power for power’s sake; and the corollary: the disparity of wealth between the elite few who garner 90+% of the wealth and the rest who struggle for a living, struggle for a dignified life. This problem of course has now made its way insidiously into our own country…..multi-millionaires paying  lower tax rates than the secretaries who work for them.

What will stabilize matters in the Middle East will be an impassioned effort by all parties to create a means of shared power and shared wealth…In the political and socio-economic rhetoric of the gospels that is exactly what is called for…when people are freed from poverty and indignity…when people have the option for a better life…then there is no need for the wars that such oppression and indignity engender. Had we, the U.S. as a nation, spent the countless billions on creating opportunities for shared wealth and power in the Middle East beginning with Israel and Palestine, the critical domino for Middle Eastern stability, instead of fighting two hyper-expensive and unwinnable wars, I believe things would look quite differently. The gospel imperative is the human imperative, that the abundance of this planet belongs to all, that every living soul has a birthright for freedom and therefore dignity….that violence is not an option….because the well-being of humanity is deeply interconnected….one organism we humans…Should our own nation in its capacity as leader take on such a predisposition in the coming critical negotiations on matters of the Middle East, I believe violence will wane, and our common humanity will become the rule of the day….May it come ever so swiftly.

If one were to observe a thousand acres on the side of a mountain of aspen trees, chances are the entire forest would technically be one organism. Aspens are stoloniferous….that is, they reproduce by producing shoots horizontal to the ground, and the shoots set down roots and then grow into a new tree…the entire forest then is intimately interdependent. All forests are interdependent, for pollination for seed bearing, for protection from disease. Forests, consummate metaphors for community. And finally in forests the living stand alongside the dead with equal dignity, in mysterious primevil communion…a cosmic metronomic pulse bringing death to make way for the living…the old making way for the new…the dead not lost but nurture for the young. We humans in truth are not so different: the wisdom of our ancestors still informing us along the way. We stand still together, the living and the dead, a great forest of souls.

I would say the same thing about Jesus of Nazareth, as Andrew Young said about Martin Luther King Jr. We must see him as a great tree among a great forest of trees. He the exemplar of the other trees of the forest. A great exemplar of same genus and species, remembered in our human lore. For us who follow him he is the pattern of what it means to be truly human…and we can only be truly human when we own the intimate interdependence for which we are made…all of us a part of the same living organism whose purpose is quite essentially to serve the good of the whole. Someone posted on Facebook one of Dr. King’s last speeches before he was assassinated. I didn’t listen to all of it, but I marvelled at its relevancy today. In the speech, which was actually a sermon in a Memphis church service, he quoted John Donne:

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Forests, trees, continents, clods, we humans of earth….we are all a part of the glorious Same.

In the former 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the one many of us grew up with, there was very little room for varying the way we worship; and though I still love the “old” prayerbook which used King James English, there was no room in it for fresh expression, and in some ways its theology over decades of its use had become tired and outdated. After Vatican II in the Roman Catholic Church in 1964 at which it was decided that the Mass would no longer be said in Latin, but that the Mass would be said in the native tongue of the worshiper; the Episcopal Church decided also it was time to revise its Prayer Book as well. Language was changed to modern idiom, but more than that important change the church was given much more flexibility in the manner in which we worship, more options to make more relevant and resonant our public expression of faith….we liturgists call that “the permissive rubric” for example from the Prayer Book: “here an anthem or some other suitable hymn may be sung” or, the rubric preceding the time honored “Gloria” early in the service of the Holy Eucharist, “When appointed, the following hymn or some other song of praise is sung or said.” In the 1928 Prayer Book no such flexibility existed, and there was not much opportunity for the laity to participate in worship either. Now there are ample ways laity are meaningful participants in worship. Now the work we do demands planning, creativity and relevancy…we are encouraged by the Book of Common Prayer, as well as later supplemental texts produced by the Standing Liturgical Commission of the Episcopal Church to expand our expressions of worship to be beautiful and resonant, inclusive and presently relevant….as theology evolves, and indeed it does; it is not static…so must our expressions of faith.

The Book of Common Prayer is the template of our worship, always will be, but we have imaginative and beautiful new resources for our use. You may have noticed lately, while using the traditional format including one of the traditional Eucharistic Prayers; we are also using a new set of collects that I find fresh and meaningful (one parishioner used the word expansive…good word) They were written by Steven Shakespeare, a priest and scholar in the Church of England, and they follow the thematic ebb and flow of the lectionary; again striving to give our worship a seamlessness, a connectedness from beginning to end. These collects are published by Church Publishing Co., the official publishing house of the Episcopal Church. Also we are using as the Prayers of the People a collection of prayers compiled by now retired Bishop Jeffrey Rowthorne, a noted scholar and musician in the Episcopal Church who has many contributions to the Hymnal 1982. These prayers also follow the lectionary cycles, making them more relevant to the occasion.

We make these changes from time to time, not for the sake of change, but to make our worship meaningful, relevant, resonant and most of all beautiful. We worship beautifully (or certainly try our best to) because our imaginations and therefore our souls are informed as to the truth and efficacy of our faith. We of course welcome your compliments, comments and critiques, because this is the work given to all of us as a community of faith….the beautiful practice of the faith in worship which will inform our actions and belief….and send us out empowered for the work in the world to which our liturgical work models for us and calls us.

Improvisation takes courage, because improvisation involves risk and uncertainty. What struck me most in this experience was the wholeheartedness with which James and Corey gave themselves to the process. I’m sure they were frightened, but they gave themselves over to the enlightened awareness of what will be will be. Wholeheartness…indeed finds its linguistic roots in the word courage….coeur, which means heart makes the word courage connote something like heart-ness….to live and act from the heart….Courage and bravery mean different things….bravery is the result of being whole hearted…the willing ourselves, fears and doubts notwithstanding, to the what is next…willing the necessity, as the theologian Charles Williams puts it…embracing the circumstance that unfolds before us.

Courage is essential to faith….faith being acting as if this vision we celebrate as a people of faith is true…acting as if… On our way home, we passed a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read, “Real men Love Jesus.” All my buttons were pushed by this of course…but it got me thinking yet again that we have made an idol of Jesus, an icon ensconced long ago…a magician who answers some prayers but not others.

Jesus is the way, the writer of the Gospel of John tells us…Jesus is a way of life, the life that empowers us with whole hearts willing to live into the improvisation of creation, into the necessities of life… Jesus the way of giving ourselves wholeheartedly to the world for the good of all, which was what his life and ministry was all about, and the life and ministry of the ones who follow him….May we find in this risky, painful and joyful birth this Christmastide, and in all other risky, painful and joyful births, for such is the way of birth….May we find in the pangs of birth the wholeheartedness and the courage it engenders…for such a gift is greater than all others….. the way and the truth and the life.

Perhaps the reason anxiety in our culture spikes at this dark time of year (psychiatry tells us as much), is not so much due to our busyness, but because of our ancient innate fear of the dark and the uncertainty it engenders…. the dark juxtaposed with a seemingly tenuous promise that the light will have the last word, a tenuous promise that flickers candle-like against the coming winds of winter….that as the signs of death in nature are all around us, we recall the promise of new life which will spring forth from the dark in its time….I’m saying perhaps it is this profound ambiguity, this cosmic ambiguity that is forever with us that causes us to feel faint at heart especially as we approach the darkest time of the year, and in the dark times of our lives. The point obviously was not lost on the ancient religious practitioners setting the celebration of the nativity of Jesus just after the winter solstice, staking a claim of the certain return of light to the world in spite of the dark. I would say that the most creative way to cope with the season and for that matter, life itself, is to be open to the dark and the promise of the light….the life of faith involves both.

This is a difficult road, this life of faith…It requires all that we are and all that we have. It requires profound trust. Many years ago we (Nativity Dothan, my home parish) hosted a noted speaker to present a two day program in a retreat style setting. At one point in the program he asked us to write a prayer for ourselves…for each of us to jot down on a piece of paper a prayer we wished to say for ourselves…I’ve long since lost the piece of paper, but I still remember the prayer, and often in my days in the dark I repeat it: “O God, grant me the courage to be.” To live into our humanity, to truly be, we must muster the courage, ask for the courage to stand with integrity amid the dark with the knowledge that the light will come. In the beginning was the dark, until the creator said, let there be light…may it ever so swiftly come; let us trust whole-heartedly that it will.

James Joyce reminds us in his masterpiece Ulysses, a modern retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, that the heroic is also manifest even in the most mundane circumstances of life; that the heroic is not limited to grand feats of the seemingly impossible, but that the potential for the heroic exists in the everyday life of each of us….perhaps as simple as an act of kindness, mustering the will to forgive, choosing tenderness….Rearing children calls for acts of the heroic almost on a daily basis….speaking out and acting for the good, in whatever context, requires our calling on the heroic with which we are endowed as people of God.

Heroism requires consciousness, the ability to put things in perspective, and it requires learning from each other in community…I would argue that the figure of the hero throughout the world’s mythology is a representation of enlightened community…communities empowered and emboldened to overcome the slings and arrows of life that we surely will encounter….Certainly Jesus is one such hero… Jesus who represents a heroic community that understands, has the perspective that love is greater than death, that compassion will thwart injustice, that mercy will undermine oppression, that inclusion and hospitality will engender dignity. These virtues of the Jesus movement found in the followers of Jesus over the centuries are heroic. They stand against the evil in our world on a day to day basis, often unseen, but also sometimes in startling ways.

The light that is coming into the world is the light of the heroic….bear it with honor dear brave and strong people of God, for the world needs the hero, the heroine…always has, and always will.

We walked further down Government Street and passed two men in dingy clothing carrying worn backpacks. Their faces and hands made leathery, tanned and chapped, by the brute force of living from day to day in the outdoors. They were walking at a steady pace as if for some purpose…what purpose they could be about I could scarcely imagine….but it crossed my mind that each had a mother and a father, like me…that both of them had a story, like me….perhaps they had siblings….children…maybe they were on their way home….maybe just trying to escape the impending cold….perhaps being on the move, traveling persistently the road of life, quite literally keeps one open to survival….Perhaps that was what I saw in their earnest singularity…the will to live…They traveled as if they saw a hidden road unseen to the rest of us leading them to someplace or some thing….and that it was of dire importance that they arrive there…maybe there was hope between them.

I’ve noticed over the years that the homeless among us usually travel accompanied. I imagine it is because of safety, but perhaps more importantly, it is just being able to simply take care of each other. The light that gutters against the dark is the light of community, even if only two. No matter our wealth or lack thereof…no matter the stories of our lives, all part comedy and all part tragedy, we cannot make it down the road without each other…that is our singular purpose: to take care of each other…to bear each other’s burdens…We are our brothers and our sister’s keepers….It is at the heart of the teaching of Jesus and of all the world’s religions that for the world’s sake we must love our neighbor…Love the ones given to us along the way.

I imagine that each of those two men on their seemingly despairing  journey, are most thankful for the company of each other…and we should be as well…We should be thankful to have companions along the perilous journey we call life. Surely hope is engendered in our relationships, in our companionship; and surely some meaningful purpose as well….if nothing more than to just love one another….and perhaps that is just enough purpose, enough light by which to travel the dark….Let us hope, as we hope always this time of year…. that it is enough.

The doctor is a solitary man, hardened by the brute force of life, as sadly happens to many of us. His quest is to scatter his son’s ashes along the five hundred mile camino….a solitary man on a solitary and solemn journey. But soon upon his departure he encounters other pilgrims along the way…pilgrims from all over the world bearing their own stories, their own burdens…Soon, because they just happen to be at the same point along the road, an unlikely fellowship forms between the doctor, a Canadian woman, a Dutchman and an Irish writer…At first the doctor merely tolerates their company, but as the miles wear on, the stories of each become known to each other, and the walls between the doctor and his companions wear down, and the fellowship becomes one of love and trust, and the doctor in the end rediscovers his humanity.

The lead character, the doctor, is played by Martin Sheen (and directed by his son Emilio Estevez) and he said in a recent interview about the film that it is chiefly concerned with the integrity with which we bear our burdens, our baggage, our wounds, the weight life puts upon us, especially as we grow older…but that to do so one is able to discover, or rediscover new life and purpose in decidedly unexpected ways…and finally he says that one can only do this in community…there is no way to walk life’s journey alone, he said…Preach on brother, I thought.

What is it about the journey? Clearly throughout  literary history in every culture I know of, the journey amid vibrant fellowship is an archetype…In scripture, all the narratives take place amid a journey…the road to Emmaus…the escape of the people Israel from Egypt and the sojourn in the desert, crossing the Jordan, the Jabbok, the Galilean lake…In the literature of our own tradition: The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, McCarthy’s the Road, on and on… the best told tales happen on the journey.

Why so? Certainly the journey is a metaphor for life, but there is more. Perhaps because there is increased danger on a journey, we are more aware of our vulnerability. Our adrenaline, our imaginations quicken, our senses heightened out of necessity on the road… I know that in our family travels our most ardent conversations and memories occurred there. We are required to be more open to each other…maybe some ancient memory of our tribal roots wherein the survival depends on each other in the solidarity of fellowship. And, we are never the same after a journey. T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets says “Fare forward travelers; you are not the same people who left the station”,  so the journey is also about transformation and renewal, something for which our souls ache. The doctor in the film finds himself not through a herculean effort of his own, but he finds himself, his human citizenship, his transformation in the stranger become friend, in the vulnerabilities of strangers become friends…Perhaps we might be so lucky as to encounter our true selves, our human citizenship along this journey we call life….don’t fear the journey as dangerous as it may seem…don’t fear the stranger….because there among the stories of other lives lived, we will surely find our own, a glowing epic tale, and we will know it is one worth telling. 

During this past lectionary cycle in which we have been reading Matthew, we have heard a great deal about the dark that pervades our world…Matthew’s phrase, “the outer darkness in which there is weeping and gnashing of teeth” appears quite regularly in his gospel; but I believe Matthew is not condemning the faithless (although to not follow the way of Christ bearing mercy and hope to the abased of our world would certainly render one bereft of the joy found in a life of faith) no, I believe Matthew is describing the world as it is, a world in which there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth (Koine Greek trans: rage); He is describing a world shrouded with the dark of indignity.

There is an important book written by Deidra Goode of General Theological Seminary, in which she describes the requisite attributes of a king in the ancient Greco-Roman world, the world that occupies and influences Palestine, the world of the Bible. She does not describe a king as all powerful, ruling aloof from the realm, empowering an elite few, but she describes the king as meek, which doesn’t mean what our modern connotation of meek means(passive, shy, unassertive, etc.), but meek in the world she describes, means mindful, quietly and discerningly courageous, and mainly self-giving… serving the realm above self …serving the greater good of all subjects, even the ones cast out into the dark……that takes courage and discernment and imagination.

We are the legates of the meek king, we are the meek king’s embodiment….we are sent into the dark with courage and compassion and discernment to reclaim the lost, the cast out, in order to make the kingdom whole again. This Sunday in Matthew’s gospel, we are given a glance into the land of the dark into which we must go, where there is weeping and rage: the hungry, the naked, the sick and infirm, the prisoner, the poor…all markers, symbols of the indignity of the dark and they are with us, cast out from us still, in Mobile, in our nation, in the world…As God’s faithful we are to claim our kingly and queenly heritage and go find the cast out of our world and reclaim them…to search out indignity in whatever form it is manifest, and banish it. The sad denizens of Mathew 25 are the ones that must be saved lest the king himself languishes in dispossession as well, an intimate symbiosis, king and subject… Serving our wounded neighbor then is the means of healing for ourselves, healing for the world entire… the realm set right and whole.

In our post-modern fractured and nihilistic world today, it is time to live into our royal legacies, to step up to assume our true personhood, our Christlikeness…be the Christ  in whose image we are made….kings and queens for the world’s sake… Until the outer dark is aglow with light.