We missed church today.
We missed the incense, the singing, the glorious praise of God. We missed meeting Christ on the altar. We missed our family of God, the Body of Christ.
Yet God was with us as we gathered with other family members to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. He blessed the day, blessed our gathering, and poured His grace into our time together.
We gathered in the afternoon between storms as multi-gray clouds moved across broad skies under Mount Diablo. We moved outside to take a family picture on the wet lawn, the green hills rolling behind us. We laughed as we arranged ourselves, cousins with mothers, sisters with aunts, my mother sitting between her two sisters on chairs in the center. It will be a picture to remember, a day to revisit. One day these children will explain to their children who we are, why we are there, why we were gathered under the mountain.
It is these moments of celebration, I thought, that pull our disparate family together from time to time, as though pulled by a magnet to a center where we all admit our connectedness.
Is the family disappearing, I wondered. Many write that it is, that the family and the Church, the two great pillars of our civilization, are cracked and falling, as though Samson stands ready to pull them down. Without these institutions the State must step in and rule more forcefully, must decree morality, must, in the end, become tyrannical in its power. The family and the Church for centuries have counterbalanced government and that balance is now threatened with the fragmentation of the family.
The cracks are apparent in the pillar of family, to be sure. With the acceptance of birth control, particularly the pill, marriage became divorced from procreation, so that children are no longer intrinsically tied to their biological parents. The effects of birth control were reinforced by fertility treatments and creation of children in laboratories. It is a short step from these immense social changes to easy divorce, multi marriages, same-sex parents, indeed to polygamy and to incest, although the latter are still taboo in our society, probably not for long. These are major cracks in the family, and when conservative folk decry gay marriage, it should be considered there are large issues here, issues affecting the foundations of our democratic culture.
So we gladly gathered together this cold day in January. We planned, cooked, decorated. Balloons bobbed to the ceilings, tied with crepe streamers and foil, and white roses bunched in tall vases alongside white tapers. I watched the children play inside and outside, the adults swirl in chattering groups, sharing their lives with one another, their mingling a kind of incense weaving through the rooms of my house. We nibbled on appetizers, sipped bubbly drinks, took our family photo, lunched from the buffet of chili and crab and salads and sandwiches. We set out the cake and sang Happy Birthday, my mother wondering what to wish for, having forgotten.
We gathered to testify to time, to family, to the miracle of creation, and God’s Spirit wove through us. Soon each of us will reach the end of our time-journey, at least on this earth, and others will gather and witness to these moments of passage. We shall journey on, to the light, to the source of all this mingling and incense, laughter and roses. We shall journey to Love itself, to God.
Entering a church is, as anthropologist Margaret Visser says, “crossing the threshold.” We move from the secular to the sacred, yet in some mysterious way, in that space, the sacred redeems the secular. When we leave, the secular has been infused with the sacred.
Today the Gospel lesson united the two worlds, as sacramental action does, in the water that is turned to wine in the wedding feast at Cana. Thirty-gallon jars, our preacher said, were full of water for the rite of purification before the feast. Christ changes that water to wine and in the changing he purifies matter. Just so, our wine of the Eucharist, becomes his blood. Like those guests at the wedding, we too know the joy of the feast, the great banquet in Heaven, as the sacred infuses the secular, as the divine penetrates the material world.
The union of the Creator with his creation, this ongoing healing of the world, seemed appropriate for this last Sunday in Epiphanytide, this time of manifestation, of vision, of seeing. Soon we shall approach Lent with the little season of Pre-Lent. We shall follow Christ as he journeys through his time on earth, his passion, death and resurrection.
We are in mid-winter, with steely skies and icy breezes. Mount Diablo was dusted with snow this last week, following torrential rains and winds. But the days lengthen, nights contract, and a few flowers have appeared in my terra cotta pots. Time beckons us away from the Christmas crib and the astounding revelation of God come to us. Time pulls us into another year of weaving our lives with God, another year of healing and transformation, another year of discovering who we are meant to be.
During this Epiphany season I have been pondering the nature of truth, how we know what is true and what is false, what is real and what is fantasy. Is everything I see and experience simply my own dream world, my fantasy, my wishful thinking?
Clearly we live our lives as though scientific truth exists, or we could not function from day to day. We count on scientific theories about invisible realities, evaluate our experience, and trust our authorities. Just so, in the realm of faith, we count on religious theories about invisible realities, evaluate our experience, trust our authorities.
It’s been raining steadily today, and the olive trees, still leafy and full, sway in the wind as they drink in the water from the heavens. The old oaks have lost their leaves now, their craggy crooked limbs winding into the steely skies. The wind rises, turning the rain into a storm riding the green hills of the East Bay.
St. Peter’s Oakland was warm and inviting this morning, as we came in from the windy wet to the red carpeted nave and chancel, the sweet Madonna and Child with its bed of flaming votives to the left of the welcoming pulpit, the careful steps leading to the gray-and-white marble altar, the vast red brick apse, the tall flaming candles honoring the Reserved Sacrament in the tabernacle. We knelt and gave thanks.
An elderly priest celebrated the Eucharist today, his memory reaching back for each word of the Eucharistic prayers, and as I took part in the ancient liturgy, I thought how ritual helped us with truth, how it ensured the truth was preserved through two thousand years. Seeming dry and formalized to some, ritual sets boundaries on belief, so that the codifying itself passes on a reliable testimony to what happened in Palestine that first century AD. Many would try and change the account of who Jesus of Nazareth truly was, but through creed, prayer, and ceremony, the truth was preserved by the believers, the Church, the Body of Christ, year upon year.
Our preacher this morning spoke of the manifestation of Christ in his baptism by John as told in the Gospel lesson today. Jesus, baptized for and as mankind, allowed all of human nature to participate in His baptism. We partake individually in Christ in our own baptisms, he said, and now it is our turn to make Him manifest to the world. For in Christ, we can do all things, as the Epistle tells us today.
The lessons too were part of the ritual, were designated for this Sunday, and in general the preacher preaches on the lessons. More codifying, discipline, structure. But in the fifty-two weeks of the year, I know I shall hear all of the major lessons, experience the major epiphanies, the truths, the manifestations of God to Man. And I am thankful.
I am thankful once again for the Church, the Body of Christ, that has preserved these truths about the Son of God coming among us. Loving us. Redeeming us. Through time two thousand years ago, year by year, to the present, on the altar.
St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Eucharist and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/; http://www.anglicanpck.org/.
I once took piano lessons. I recall placing my fingers on the white keys, readying myself for the first notes. Now I place my fingers on the black keys of my keyboard and ready myself for the first letters. Notes and letters are both signs, symbols that link us, communicate to us, through our hearing, our seeing, our thinking, our feeling. They are manifestations of something outside ourselves. They are the tools of art, for they manifest and interpret our world and man’s place in it.
I was thinking this week about truth and what it is and how it is communicated and how one discerns the notes, the letters, the meanings. History is a compilation of signs, written accounts, oral accounts, often a mystery to be solved. What actually happened? Why? How? When?
Epiphany is the celebration of Christ’s manifestation to the world, and today, the First Sunday after Epiphany, our Gospel reading was about his manifestation in the Jerusalem temple at age twelve, when he astounded the priests with his wisdom. Wednesday’s reading, on the actual Festival of Epiphany, told of the Wise Men visiting the Christ Child, bringing him gifts. They were the scientists of the day, those who studied the universe, the stars, for signs in the heavens. Heaven reflected earth; the star that appeared in the East was portentous, a sign of a great event. A king was born. These magi brought gold for his kingship, frankincense for his Godhead, and myrrh for his burial. We too honor his royalty and his divinity. But most of all we are thankful for his death, for his suffering and dying could only occur by taking on our humanity. God became one of us in human history; he knows the suffering of the flesh; we suffer too in our flesh. With his resurrection we rise, our own wounds are his.
Epiphanytide includes other manifestations of Christ’s appearance among men: his baptism in the River Jordan by John; the water turned to wine at the wedding in Cana. The portrait of Christ takes shape as broad strokes reveal him.
Such love to come among us like this. And not only two thousand years ago in Bethlehem, but today he comes among us as well, suffers with us, heals our wounds. He lives.
How do we read the signs? How do we interpret history? The evidence is plentiful for those who can see, but why do some see and some remain blind? Why do some hear the music and others remain deaf? I do not know. Free will. The Fall. The activity of evil in our world, blinding us.
We can only witness to our own lives. I know that faithfulness brings vision. Weekly worship and the Eucharist, with all of its marvelous signs and wonders, feeds and strengthens, gives sight and hearing.
Today at St. Peter’s we removed the red poinsettias from the altar. We packed away the crèche figures and the green wreathes and swags. We have been given Christ in the Festival of Christmas. Now we must proclaim his signs and wonders in the Festival of Epiphany.
We joined one another afterwards to celebrate two birthdays in our Body of Christ, signs in themselves of life and death, as we mark our passage through time with these happy yearly rituals. For birthdays are signs of the gift of life and the time given to each of us on this earth. They are manifestations of the love of God, personal Epiphanies.
As St. Paul writes in the Epistle for today, “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Indeed. We left St. Peter’s transformed, our minds renewed by the many epiphanies of Christ, by the signs of God’s great love.
Valley fog was slipping up the canyon between flanks of green, soon to surround us. The puffy white mist glistened in the sun and I watched it draw closer, creeping and displacing the colors of the hills with whiteness, dimming the light. The miracle of weather played out before me, the changing of molecules and temperature, as time slipped too, time moving unstoppable just like the fog.
Today, the tenth day of Christmas 2009, the third of January, 2010. We enter another year, another decade, and as I stepped into Saint Peter’s Church I felt the presence of time and eternity, as though they collided in this sanctuary. I sensed the greater Church as well – all those worshiping throughout our world, on this good earth, in past, present, and future – as we gathered to offer ourselves to the Baby in Bethlehem, to receive his gift.
For, as our preacher said this morning, the Christ Child is the great gift of Christmas. God became man that man might become God, participate in the Divine. God became a child so that we might become children of God. God gives himself to us so that we might become His children by becoming one with the Babe in the manger. God acts. God gives. We respond. We receive.
We offer ourselves, this hour, this day, this year, this decade, so that we might partake of eternity with him. So that time disappears and at yet also, mysteriously becomes more real, more intense, more full of the pulse of life. God gives himself in Bethlehem. He gives himself on the altar today.
This is the mystery and miracle of Christmas. This is God with us, incarnate, in us. Such joy.
St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/; http://www.anglicanpck.org/.