(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Jan 10, 2016, Epiphany Sunday)
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“Listen to Your Food!”
One of my good friends in Sheffield, Barbora, is just now finishing her PhD in neuroscience. As you perhaps would expect of a neuroscience doctoral student, she is an extremely attentive, thoughtful, and diligent person. About a year ago, she decided to enhance her experiential knowledge of the mind by taking a mindfulness class. Her first report about the class has become the stuff of legend among our circle of friends.
The class began, she said, with the teacher ceremonially passing out raisins among the students. Then the teacher solemnly took a raisin in the palm of her own hand. She lifted the raisin to her ear, tilted her head attentively in its direction, knitted her brow…and asked, “Can you hear your raisin? Listen! What do you hear? What is your raisin saying to you?”
To this day, Barbora cannot help but laugh when she tells the story. And she will quickly admit that her first impression of this exercise was a mixture of doubt and dismissal. It seemed a bit hippyish, or new-agey. But even so, she persisted with the practice of listening to her food, and a little while later, she would admit that, actually, she sort of liked it. It made her eat more slowly. More deeply. More appreciatively. Food was no longer simply food, a mechanical necessity, something she took for granted. It became a gift, a treasure, a reminder of life in all its fragile beauty.
Nature’s Deep Eyes and Ears
I hope you won’t mistake me for a hippy or a new-ager, but…there’s something to be said for having “deep eyes” and “deep ears,” for attending deeply to the world around us. Winter makes a great case for the value of deep attentiveness.
We all know that the weather channel is hardly ever right. I learned this the hard way. As a child, I would be glued to the weather channel practically 24/7 in the winter, feeding my desperate hope for snow and school cancellations. In the evening, it would promise a 100% chance of heavy snow. The next morning? Nothing.
And yet it seems that, while humanity has somehow lost touch with the natural world, our furry and feathered friends around us remain particularly attuned.
The sky might be impassively blue, the air might be warm and still. There might not be a single thing on the horizon to suggest a storm. But if you see birds rushing to their nests and squirrels scurrying about more frantically than usual, then you know. They have “deep” eyes and ears. They see more than a blue sky. They hear more than silence. Somewhere beyond the surface of things, they sense a winter storm.
"Do You See What I See?"
There’s a beautiful song we sing at Christmastide that ponders nature’s deep eyes, its awareness of things unseen:
Said the night wind to the little lamb, ‘Do you see what I see?In this song, it is the night wind and a little lamb who see with deep eyes. They see not just a cold, indifferent star, but rather a star dancing for joy. And within that star a mysterious and wonderful story about a newborn child, a story that will charge the heart of a hurting world with hope.
Way up in the sky, little lamb: do you see what I see?
A star, a star, dancing in the night,
With a tail as big as a kite, with a tail as big as a kite.’ [1]
Which brings us to our scripture, to the “wise men from the East” who “observed” that dancing star “at its rising” (2:1-2). If the night wind had asked them, “Do you see what I see?”—and who’s to say it didn’t?—I imagine they would have responded enthusiastically, “You see it too? How it dances!”
Real Magic
But there’s more to the story than simply a handful of wise men who pay special attention to a star. In the Greek, Matthew calls these men magi, from which we get the English word “magician.” Which suggests that we should really rethink our understanding of magic. According to our story in Matthew, true magic is not creating something out of nothing or altering reality with the wave of a wand and an “abracadabra.” Rather, it is seeing deeply. Seeing more. A magi is someone who sees beyond the surface of the world, who treasures every molecule as evidence of something more, a sort of holy forensics expert who sees the trace of the divine in things as ordinary as a grassy sand dune or an elderly person shuffling down the hallway. A magi is someone who sees not simply a star but a star-touched child, and not simply a child but a future king. Which is why a single star and a simple child can bring the magi to their knees, falling down before an infant who, if you set it on its feet, would just as soon fall down before them.[2]
If today’s story is any indication, real magic is not the ability to change reality. Real magic is the ability to see reality for what it really is: a divine playground. A magi is none other than someone playing a divine game of hide-and-seek, searching for a God who is “hidden deep” within creation, “yet hoping to be found.”[3]
Following the Magi Outside the Church
It would be easy enough to draw the simple lesson, then, that we should be like the magi, that we should keep our eyes peeled and our ears to the ground for signs of God in our world. Which, by the way, is what we’re doing here at church, right? We’re here to encounter God.
But there’s another twist in the story. These divinely attuned magicians are not Israelites. They do not practice the Jewish faith. To translate that into our own setting: these magi are not part of the church. They are strangers from afar, with different prayers on their lips and perhaps different names for God. Yet in this story, it is they—not the Judean king Herod, not even the chief priests and scribes—who detect the joyous trace of God in our world.
The magi, then, are a beautiful and gentle reminder that while the story of God might be contained in the church, it is certainly not contained by the church. In fact, sometimes the church gets in its own way, which is really to say, it gets in the way of God. So it is that another Barbara, the thoughtful theologian Barbara Brown Taylor, muses:
I worry about what happens when we build a house for God. … Do we build God a house so that we can choose when to see God? Do we build God a house in lieu of having God stay at ours? Plus, what happens to the rest of the world when we build four walls—even four gorgeous walls—cap them with a steepled roof, and designate that as the House of God? What happens to the riverbanks, the mountaintops, the deserts, and the trees?[4]And we might add: what happens to that solitary star, singing for joy in the night sky, or that gurgling infant?
As Simple and As Crazy as Paying Attention
Just to be clear, the magi’s story is not a criticism of the church. Rather, the gospel of the magi is the good news that, while we may occasionally limit church to certain times and places, God does not. The whole world is holy; the whole world is a sanctuary, filled with dancing stars, singing rivers, infants whose gurgles grow into gospel.
According to the ancient rabbis, “every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.’”[5]
How do we see these gardening angels? How do we see the stars divinely dancing in the night? How do we find God in our world? We follow the magi. The secret of the magi, remember, is neither some secret knowledge nor some cold scientific method. It is simply having deep eyes and ears. It is as simple and as crazy as paying attention—even to your food! It is as plain “as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore.”[6]
The saw a star dancing in the night. But as the mystics and poets and lovers of the world will tell you, God is dancing in much more than just a single star. So it is that Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet and minister whose spirit was tenderly attuned to the divine dance in our world, writes about the real magic of creation: “The world,” he says, “is charged with the grandeur of God”[7]—“Christ plays in ten thousand places.”[8]
Prayer
Your creation, God, dances to a tune and a vision that our ears and eyes so often suppress. Even so, you insist that the song continue, that the dream not be relinquished. Grant us the patience and faith and attentiveness of the magi, that we too might see glimpses and hear echoes of your saving grace, in things as simple as an honest word or a cup of tea or shining star; that we too might be overwhelmed with a joy that we cannot help but share with the world. Amen.
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[1] “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne, 1962.
[2] The word for “pay homage” (NRSV) in the Greek is proskuneo, more literally rendered “to fall down to worship.”
[3] This image was inspired by a passage from Haruki Marukami, South of the Border, West of the Sun (trans. Philip Gabriel; New York: Vintage, 1998), 6: “But I detected something else—something warm and fragile just below the surface. Something very much like a child playing hide-and-seek, hidden deep within her, yet hoping to be found.”
[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 9.
[5] Taylor, An Altar in the World, 14.
[6] Taylor, An Altar in the World, 33.
[7] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” in “God’s Grandeur” and Other Poems (New York: Dover, 1995), 15.
[8] Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” in “God’s Grandeur,” 36.
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