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.

I was at a dinner party last week, listening contently to the lazy murmurings of my fellow guests over coffee when conversation around the table suddenly took an animated turn for the worse. Two people at the end of the table were overheard discussing the New Hampshire primary, and someone across the way threw in a pointed comment about President George Bush. Our hostess, whose actual aim in throwing this dinner party had been to begin to create a sense of community and warmth among a collection of casual acquaintances, watched with horror as everyone at the table suddenly sat up straight and leaned in to the center, their eyes snapping with sudden, renewed energy. Abruptly, she stood up and said in a cheery, 50’s Leave-it-to Beaver kind of voice, Would you like juice? The calculated weirdness of it all worked: the budding political argument died unborn, and people began to look at the time, grab their jackets, and, tucking their purses under their arms, agree that it had been a lovely party, indeed. Linda told me later that would you care for juice? was a trick her southern mama used to employ whenever politics, religion, or sex came into conversational play back when she was a young homemaker in North Florida.

The people of Jesus’ village attempted, it must be said, to keep their family reunion with Jesus on a polite and innocuous level. They were no more interested in being unfriendly than we are– and no more desirous of finding their souls shaken unexpectedly by someone who knew them too well than we are, either. And they knew, as we know, how to keep their interactions and their confrontations low key, dispassionate, polite. Oh, they exclaimed as Jesus laid his life and his revolutionary ministry bare before them, how beautifully he reads. Why, for a carpenter’s son, he certainly has some amazing observations. We do the same thing a hundred times a day, filtering out the evidence around us that does not serve to reiterate our personal sense of reality; ignoring or minimizing those internal and external confrontations which point to the deeper unease within, pushing away those encounters which threaten to expose, suddenly, how fragile our defenses and our compromises really are. We keep our lives in order by keeping the lid on, not giving play to sudden flashes of rage, the upwelling of sorrow, the irresistible desire to do something about it.

But that discomfort within presses hard on us, and it will not let us go, at least, not altogether. Thus in the same way, the citizens ofNazareth dismissed Jesus, but could not repress altogether a twinge of dismay. What was that he said about the poor? He thinks the year of Jubilee is NOW? And though they were still smiling and nodding, their faces froze as the meaning of his words began to slip like water into the cracks of the façade of their malaise; threatening their numbness with the rebirth of passion, of caring.

Here it was: the grown-up boy next store had come home for a visit. Invited to share a word or two about his hopes for the future, he reveals his passion for today. He actually believes what he learned in synagogue…he intends to live the commitments his parents and his neighbors instilled in him, never dreaming anyone would think they actually meant it. He’s not going to law school, he’s joining the Peace Corps. She graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School, but instead of joining a prestigious practice in cardiology, she’s opening a free clinic in rural West Virginia. They’re not going to get a job and join the rat race like we did…they’re going to get a life, and do something to change the world. But—we begin to say, you can’t, it won’t, why would you…and then we stop, fall quiet, lower our eyes. How can we criticize them for believing what we taught them? How can we say it won’t change anything when we ourselves scarcely tried to try? A feeling of pride begins to well up, then sudden, unfamiliar hope spills out of the corners of our eyes, and then Oh, well, we think, he’ll find out like we did, the hard way.

The biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann says: the gospel … is a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. The gospel is an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. How long had it been, do you think, since the people of Nazareth, worn down by occupation and distanced from their own traditions, centered in indifferent Jerusalem far to the south, had really believed what they read in synagogue? How long since their prayers got any higher than the ceiling? I have come to preach deliverance to captives. Recovery of sight to the blind. To let the imprisoned go free. To proclaim jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor. It wasn’t, for him, a dry and dusty history, rolled up in a scroll. It wasn’t , for him, a wistful, far-off someday, but a powerful, passionate today. It’s like the old Native American prayer says:

We pray that someday an arrow will be broken,
not in something or someone, but by each of humankind,
to indicate peace, not violence. Someday, oneness with creation,
rather than domination over creation, will be the goal to be respected.
Someday fearlessness to love and make a difference will be experienced by all people. Then the eagle will carry our prayer for peace and love, and the people of the red, white, yellow, brown, and black communities can sit in the same circle together to communicate in love and experience the presence of the Great Mystery in their midst. Someday can be today for you and me. Amen

How long has it been since we really believed our lives, our passion, our faith could, can make a difference? For us, for others, waiting down at the bottom of the list? How high do our prayers ascend? Such are the confrontations between our civility and those truths that would unsettle us, but then, perhaps, set us free. We try to play the innocent, get along, keep the barriers intact; but sometimes, by grace, something or someone happens along in our lives who will just not let well enough alone. Back in Nazareth, Jesus saw his family and his friends slipping by; passing off the power of his word with shallow platitudes and distant hearts—and he could not let it go, for he knew them…and he loved them. Silently, Jesus wqatched the parade of history, hope, and habit play over the faces of his teachers, his family, his friends. He sees the beginning of possibility, and then, just as quickly, he sees it die. He had them for a minute—but, numbed by the habit of malaise, they have slipped away. Digging in, he tries harder: if hope will not awaken them, perhaps rage will. And it does.

Because so much was at stake, Jesus shoveled it on: doubtless you will expect some miracle of me such as I have done elsewhere. Certainly you expect, that if God has come among you in me, that God will prove it. Surely you must remember your history: how God always leaves the hometown folks in the dust, while saving grace happens among those strangers and outcasts whom you so love to disregard. I know what you are: and I know how shallow your "niceness" really is. Sneering, almost, goading, offending, Jesus pressed in on his neighbors, seeking that honest flash point–even of rage– that he might have a prayer of touching them as they really were.

And he did touch them: so intimately that he found that dark place where their prejudices and their fears lived; that angry place where their jealous guarding of their prerogatives and their hopeless abandonment of their dreams could not make room for any Other, even for God; touched them with a truth so painful and personal that, as one, they rose up right out of the pews in the middle of worship and ran him out of town, intent upon murder, so angry were they that he had found them out.

The saddest part of the story comes next.
And he passed through the midst of them, and went on his way.

Was all that passion for nothing? Was all that rage awakened, only to be buried again under an avalanche of indifference, and suffocate? Is that the end of the story for Nazareth, for us; that Jesus passes right on through them, and goes on his way, never to be seen or heard from again, and the good people of Nazareth go back to their weary, habitual lives, having added one more old story, one more tired once-upon-a-time to the dusty collection in the back of the church library? Someday can be today for you and me.

It was for Jesus, who listened to his tradition and believed, and acted. It is for countless others, who feel the flash of rage at injustice…and decide to do something about it. Who notice their hearts break with the sadness of one more homeless man huddled in the rain under the overpass, and do something about it. Who pray, and give, and work, as if God’s promise of Jubilee is for us: not someday, but now. Someday can be today for you and me.

Would you care for juice? It is not the juice of politeness that Jesus offers today; but the juice of a life that matters, the juiciness of a passion that awakens unexpectedly and stays to change our tired ways, the juice that comes, conveniently, in the cup which we drink: this is My Blood, the life-force of the new covenant, the NOW covenant: drink it, all of you.

Amen.