Tuesday January 4th , the 11th day of Christmas

I will listen 

to what the Lord God

is saying, 

for he is speaking peace

 to his faithful people 

and to those 

who turn 

their hearts to him. 

Psalm 85:8

The second psalm at Morning Prayer today was 87. For years and years (until very recently, actually) I  unknowingly applied to this particular psalm the AA/AlAnon adage: “Take what you like and leave the rest.”  The whole thing was impenetrable to me except the last line, which I loved and used often:  The singers and the dancers say, “All my fresh springs are in you.”  The rest, I left. Then one day, after plodding through the verses once again just because they were there, it leapt out at me: this psalm is incredibly, scandalously inclusive, and so quietly so! 

Remember the slavery in Egypt and the Babylonian exile? The psalmist is saying that those hated Egyptians and Babylonians, the Philistines and Ethiopians, and the people from Tyre, the ancient Phoenician city (now in Lebanon)  are all beloved children of God, enrolled as if born in the Holy City, itself.  “God is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him.”  This truth is encapsulated in the Christmas story, though we often miss it for its very familiarity, in the shepherds (who were Jewish) and the magi, who were Gentiles. But it goes much farther than that. “Our people,” as Christians, (and Jews!)   “our kind of people,” are God’s people and God’s people are all people. We see a reflection of this - or maybe both are a reflection of the Eternal Being  - in a quote somewhere in the readings recently where Jesus says that he has other sheep that we don’t know about and that the goal is that there will be a single fold... Sounds cozy but getting there is not. It’s like saying that we Americans must love the North Koreans and that the Iranians are counted as beloved as well. It means the Palestinians are on a par with the Israelis. It destroys the dividing lines of religion, of race and class, the line between us all, rich and poor, conservative and progressive, you and me. 

At the “greening” of the church for Christmas after the morning services on the 4th Sunday of Advent, Suzanne, our priest, suggested that the Magi be put up over the lintel above the windows on the south side of the church. Each year the magi had been hidden away until after Christmas, when they arrive at Epiphany, bringing their gifts to the newborn King whose star they had followed. But this year we could watch them journeying toward the creche set up behind the altar. Across the facing lintel are the words, “Their eyes were opened” You sweep past the altar and encounter the words “And they recognized him.” The well known biblical phrase ends “in the breaking of bread.” In this case, the magi’s eyes were opened as they traveled to Beth-Lehem, the house of bread, to the Christ who is Bread for the life of the world. May our eyes be opened as well, that “we may share the divine life of Him humbled himself to share our humanity.”