I don’t always read Dear Abby in the paper, but for some reason, a letter caught my eye earlier this week. It was from a young man in his late twenties, who described himself as a typically educated, caring, spiritual person, well connected with family and friends. He described how he felt a great sense of concern for those he perceived as disadvantaged—particularly the homeless folks who gathered at a local shelter and church for meals and support services in his city—and told how their difficulties weighed on him, often disturbing his sleep and occupying his anxious thoughts while waiting.

He was willing and able to donate money, but told Abby he felt he should do something more, something connected with these people he knew were his neighbors. His problem, he said, was this: he was paralyzed by anxiety when he contemplated walking over to someone at a shelter or a meal hall and striking up a conversation. He just couldn’t make himself do it; and he wondered why, and confessed to feeling bad about himself because he put this fearful distance between himself and “them.” What could he do?

Abby suggested that he might begin in the kitchen of a feeding program, out of sight on the “back lines” and over time, work his way toward the front room and more direct relationship. She thought that might alleviate his anxiety and give him a way to engage with the neighbor, the Other, in the way he thought he ought to. I thought that was pretty decent advice, and it caused me to take a second, and then a third look at this old, well worn and oft-told story in the gospel of Matthew, of the Magi who came from the East to seek the Child…whose closer-to-home threat caused him and his parents to flee for a season into the very arms of Israel’s archetypal Other—Egypt.

In A Year to Live, John Bowker describes the psychology which examines a phenomenon known as “gap-induced relatedness.” Simply put, it studies how we humans create the kinds of relationships we think are appropriate according to the way we understand the gap between ourselves and some other person.

In social and public situations, we do this unconsciously, self-protectively, by how we arrange the space between ourselves and, say, a menacing stranger on a metro stop late at night or in a deserted elevator…or how we position ourself at a party, the office, or even church, relative to someone, an acquaintance or stranger, who is intrusive, boring, obnoxious, or strange to us. We know how to behave in order to enhance, restore, or keep the distance. And we feel when we are being distanced, as well. We close that gap with strangers when we have to: with a doctor, a nurse, an emergency professional… and maintain it when and how we can.

When the renovation committee was shopping for chairs to buy for our new sanctuary, it was this gap-induced relatedness theory we considered, and how it tended to cause people to skip a seat or seven when getting settled at church to preserve their comfort range and personal space…and we bought wider chairs so that the space necessary or preferred might not require the demilitarized zone of a set of empty chairs between ourselves and the neighbor…and the core of the gospel message: that we are all one, necessarily connected, family with God—might be demonstrated in our Sunday gathering with a minimum of psychic discomfort.

We close the gap between ourselves and the Other in certain moments and seasons when we perceive a need, or when we discern that, in reality, there is no gap between us and them. Thus, with intimates, with family and friends, we snuggle up, we sit close, we do not mind being crowded or near. As Bowker says, we close the gap in the company of the one whom we love to the point that we are not two, but one flesh. He also says: what Christmas achieves and Epiphany makes manifest is the initiative of God in closing the gap between us, by closing it first in the person of Christ.¹

So, the readings that Sandy Barrow and Jim Mulder shared this morning present an alternative view from the Wisemen: The Wise who followed the star brought useful gifts, stayed nearby while Mary suffered her travail, supported her….and the wise who sensed Herod’s threat against the young Christ brought not just gold, frankincense and myrrh, but shared warnings, maps, a protective community, a way out of war. Give us a break, he says. Would the wise present a baby with outlandish gifts then ride off into the sunset and leave those kids to their own devices. Give us a break! We are intellectuals, true, but we’re not stupid!

When you read Matthew’s entire story of the nativity of Jesus the Christ—not just the part about the Magi, but also the part about the flight into Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents at Herod’s hands, you grasp both the magnificent possibility and the terrible threat that are the mirror images of Epiphany and Christmas. The people who should have understood, who should have gotten it, became afraid, induced a greater gap between us and them, and created the deadly threat that forced Joseph, Mary and Jesus to flee their homeland and refugee to the land of their ancestral enemies. And at the same time, the Others—the menacing stranger, the boorish and overbearing acquaintance, the long-time enemy—came from afar, and, following their own weird and pagan religious practices, recognized our God in the face of an enemy child; gifted him, warned him and opened their arms to give him shelter and refuge—in Egypt, the very place that represented all that was evil in the world. The Gap is closed; the difference between friend and foe is obscured, erased, and the epiphany that is revealed is this: we are all one.

I watch television, and, with the sound turned down, I cannot tell the difference between a Palestinian child weeping in Gaza City and an Israeli mother cradling her boy near a school across the border. Without a script, the accusations of Iraqi extremists against the US don’t read much different than the charges read at Guantanamo. The person I cross the street to avoid on a dark night downtown could be the man who fixes my flat tire on a deserted, rainy street. When I think about our great friend and former interim pastor, Mike Elligan, this is what I have learned from his life. That there is no distance between any of us, in color, economic circumstance, or faith, that has not been already bridged by the love of God and should not be bridged by each of us, every day committing personal and persistent actions of friendship, justice, and connection. Mike always was in my personal space, and once I stopped backing up, I learned to bless him for it, and to bless God for the gift of the Wise that was Mike. The gaps we have induced are an affront to the love of God; they are nothing more than our own warped imagination. This is Epiphany: what is revealed among us after Christ becomes God-in-flesh is how the gaps we have carefully maintained between ourselves and those others are illusory; the distance crumbles in the face of the radical action that God willingly and recklessly took, closing the gap between godself and mortal, flawed humankind in the child Jesus. We are related, close enough for kin and even too close for comfort: it is what we believe, what we claim, when we reflect the path of Christ. Amen.