Birth or Death?
Rev. Samuel Schaal
Jan. 2, 2005
Feast of the Epiphany

Matthew 2:1-12
Ephesians 3:1-12

READING
The Journey of the Magi
by T.S. Eliot

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

THE SERMON

This is the second day of the new year and I always notice in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day that newspapers and magazines run retrospectives of the ending year's recounts of what are considered the most significant events of 2004 as well as predictions of the upcoming year. So in this past week we have been sort of in-between the past and the future. Even the comic strips get into the act. Several comics in the local newspaper recently featured the recognizable old man of 2004 and young baby of 2005, that rather lighthearted way of talking about past and future, history and possibility, even, if you will, death and birth.

So here it is, the new year. Today is Epiphany, which means 'manifestation,' which celebrates the journey of the magi who discovered the birth of Christ, God become human, in that familiar story of their trek to Bethlehem to offer expensive gifts to the new King of Israel.

The story is most associated with Christmas, and it is a scene often enacted at Christmas pageants. The story, however, with its prominent depiction of non-Jewish worshipers, of the gospel opening to all people, fits most appropriately the celebration of the Epiphany.

The wise men, of course, were not Jewish; they were outsiders. They were from Persia, a part of the world now known as Iran. They were priestly sages, experts in astrology and the interpretation of dreams. Their sign of the birth of Christ was a star in the sky. The wise men go to Herod to inquire where this new-born king was to be found and Herod then inquired of his priests and scribes, who quote Micah from Hebrew scripture to signify that the child is to be born in Bethlehem of Judea. So the wise men find the first sign of the birth of God not in scripture but in the world, but it takes scripture to more clearly identify what is going on.

Herod sends them on their way, secretly wanting to find the child so he can destroy this new king and kingdom, which already threaten his own. The magi journey to the babe, paying him homage and giving him expensive gifts worthy of a king.

And so these Iranian astrologers, these pagans of old, find in their own religious system a hint of the new era, the new king and open to the journey, they seek out the Christ.

T.S. Eliot's poem is his creative speculation on how that journey could have gone, an expression of the difficulty of that journey, not just to the physical manger, but of the hard journey from one way of life to another. It is said that the poem was a reflection of EliotÅfs own spiritual journey.

T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888. His grandfather was the Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot. The elder Eliot had come from Boston to the wilds of St. Louis in 1834 to establish the First Congregational Society in that city. Eliot was a Unitarian minister, and so established what was then the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi.

In 1834, Unitarianism was still close to its Congregational Christian roots, the Unitarians having split off from the Congregationalists a few years earlier. The church he founded, the First Congregational Society, would shortly be renamed the Church of the Messiah, and finally settle on its current name in 1938: the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis. This is where I completed my ministerial internship in 1997, thus my interest in the Eliots.

W.G. Eliot was a much loved and respected clergyman, not only by his own flock, but throughout the city. He founded Washington University in that city and it would have been called Eliot University, except that he was too modest to allow that sort of thing.

His grandson, the poet T.S. Eliot, had by the 1920s established himself as a major American poet of the modernist vein. He had studied abroad as well as at Harvard, where he studied Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. In 1927, he converted to Anglican Christianity and also became a British subject. His own native Unitarian faith had, by that time in history, begun to journey outside of Christianity, seeking to find a religion of ethics and works not bound by the strictures of any one religious system.

That same year, 1927, he wrote "The Journey of the Magi." The poem has a somber tone which we donÅft usually associate with the Biblical magi. We tend to think of the magi as these incredibly faithful guys who rather easily, being led by God, follow the light to the manger.

The poem begins by talking about what a lousy time of the year it is to travel. "A cold coming we had of it / Just the worst time of the year." It is dangerously cold, it is dark, it is the dead of winter. The camels are worn out and sore footed. They recall the summer days of palace life, of women and liquor and luxury, as they weave their way through the hostile countryside and unfriendly people and dirty villages, preferring eventually to traveling alone all night.

This is not the journey that our children enact in Christmas pageants, dressed in bathrobes and paper crowns. That is suitable stuff for Christmas pageants, for our children have, hopefully, not yet encountered the lonely journeys of life, the galled experiences, the hostile cities. We who have lived longer might hear in this poem a truth about life, of the difficulties we have faced, of the difficulties we have journeyed through, to the other side.

In the second section of the poem Eliot speaks of finding the baby, of approaching the temperate valley, and one can then sense relief from the darkness of the journey. There is the smell of vegetation, there is a running stream. There are also several allusions to the Christian story, notably the "three trees on the low sky," referring to the cross where Jesus will be executed. They arrive at evening, he says, finding the place "satisfactory," a tongue-in-cheek reference to the satisfaction of the crucifixion of Christ for humanity's sins.

As the poem ends, the magi speculates on the meaning of that event so long ago: "were we lead all that way for Birth or Death?" This is a stark ending to this poem of the celebrated journey of the magi to the Christ child. It strikes me that the power of this poem is found in how Eliot weaves images of death along with images of birth. We might find that unusual, we might even find that offensive, but in the scriptural telling, we find a veil of death hanging over the story. Notably, one of the gifts of the wise men is myrrh, which is used in preparing a body for burial, a foreshadowing of ChristÅfs tomb.

On this feast of the Epiphany, what can we say of this? Why are we speaking of death on the brightness of this Epiphany season? What are we celebrating today, after all, birth or death?

***

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul or someone writing under this name recounts aspects of his ministry in the context of the mystery of Christ. He says that in the present time this mystery is revealed which had previously not been known. "That is, how the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel."

So now, being in God's family is no longer a consideration of ethnicity, of birthright. God's covenant has been enlarged. So this is the mystery hidden for ages, he says, now known in Christ Jesus: that God's love is open to all, that God's love is universal; that we are all of one body; that divisions no longer matter.

Paul elsewhere gives this provocative description of the new life in Christ, in Galatians 3: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

And so in today's text from Ephesians, though Paul is not speaking explicitly of the birth of Christ, we see the themes of Epiphany. Because with the birth of Christ, there is now God born in the world and the divisions fall away.

We might also think of this mystery as a mystery that not only tears down the walls between people, but that also tears down the walls between humanity and God; that tears down the walls between death and life; between death and birth. Today we celebrate the birth of a new reality of eternity overcoming temporality, of light overcoming darkness, of life (true life; eternal life; life beyond mere human life) overcoming death itself.

So is this birth or death? It is both.

It is the death of one way of being and the birth of another. It is the close of one era and the opening of another, and Eliot's somber poem I think approaches the depth of that, for it was more than two thousand years ago that an event changed history, and it is today an event that, when it happens in our hearts, changes us.

It is the death of living in the world only materially. It is the birth of understanding that God is with us ''Immanuel" in ways not known previous to the coming of Christ. It is an awareness that in our ongoing journey, in our journey of faith, in our evolutionary approach to spiritual growth, that we will be asked, time and again, to let some structures of our lives die so that we might again and again face new birth.

It is about birth and death and yet it is something more than birth and death.

You may recall the old Ben Casey show on television, an early medical drama that ran in the 1960s. I use to watch it weekly (as a very small child, I might add), as my mother who was a Registered Nurse loved medical dramas. Do you remember how the show opened each week? You saw a hand on a blackboard writing ancient symbols as the voice of old Dr. Zorba, Ben CaseyÅfs mentor, intoned: "Man, woman, birth, death, infinity."

Infinity. This birth of the Christ child, I think, is an invitation to move from the little categories we usually operate in and to move to infinity: to something beyond our lives, our deaths, our material experiences. This birth of the baby is testament to a reality that the living God is here, among us. The birth of the baby is testament to the eternal breaking in to the temporal. A religion without infinity, without transcendence, is a religion without true hope.

And so this mystery Paul speaks of is the mystery discovered by the magi; that in this dawning new age there is living among us eternity; the light of Christ. A reality that draws all humanity, Jew and Gentile and all, into one body, into one common experience.

It constitutes a death of our old way, of the old dispensation. And we are to some degree living in-between two worlds and it is that which Eliot's magi refers to when he says that though they returned to these places they were "no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation." We live, still, amid the old dispensation, and yet also amid the new creation. Or more accurately, we are in the world but not fully of it, living also in a spiritual reality testified by scripture and tradition and history, and yet also experienced in our daily living. Experienced especially in our congregational setting. Experienced when God's people gather to worship God.

And so in this dawn of the year, as are invited to journey from the death of our lives to the birth of true life, the birth of true divinity, the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. As this year dawns, may be move from fear to faith, from darkness to light, from emptiness to love, and take the risk of moving from comfort to discipleship.

Amen.