Epiphany II                                     Seminarian Robert Hendrickson,

Isaiah 49:1-7                                   Solemn High Mass

I Corinthians 1:1-9                           January 20, 2008

John 1: 29-41                          

 

  "What are you looking for?" They said to him, "Rabbi" (which translated means Teacher), "where are you staying?" He said to them, "Come and see."

 

Today's Psalm reads, “He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; he set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure.”

 

  “He lifted me out of the desolate pit.” Where is our desolate pit? Where are we staying, where is Christ staying in the world today? How can we come and see?

 

In India, the Bhangis are from the Dalit caste and are those who serve as scavengers and rummagers at best, most often working as transporters of the dead, toilet cleaners, and trash haulers. They live lives of unthinkable depravation. The very name of the group, Bhangi comes from the word bhanga or broken. One Bhangi , Leelaben, describes his days as follows,

 

“In the rainy season, it is really bad. Water mixes with the crap and when we carry it on our heads, it drips from the baskets on to our clothes, our bodies, our faces. When I return home, I find it difficult to eat food sometimes. The smell never gets out of my clothes, my hair. But then in summer there is often no water to wash your hands before eating. It is difficult to say which is worse.”

 

  In Judeo-Christian tradition, we find the term Gehenna used as an antecedent to the more fully developed later concepts of Hell. Gehenna was the constantly burning rubbish-dumps outside Jerusalem , a place where children were once sacrificed. Yet, for a man like Leelaben, where is Gehenna ? Where are children still being sacrificed?

 

The largest Christian communities in India are among the Dalit classes and among the Bhangi in particular. Perhaps it is the enduring image of Christ harrowing Hell, descending into Hell to be among the lost and the desolate that rings true to them. Perhaps it is the man on the cross, the definition of bhanga , broken, who rose again that gives hope. Yet there has been an epiphany among these people. For them, a hand that brings them from the desolate pit of mire and the clay is dreamed of.

 

So where is the pit for us? It is easy to see in the life of someone who literally carries the waste of a slum on his shoulders to earn his meal. Yet can we see the walls of our own pit?

 

We live in a culture where deep meaning is mortgaged for borrowed identities that we try on for a fortnight. Our very self seems rent-to-own as we search for something we know feels missing. The evidence might be found in the $280 billion we spend on beauty products every year in the U.S. or the $40 billion we spend on pet accessories or the $88 billion we spend on cigarettes or the (the tobacco industry spends $36 million per day on advertising) or the $48 billion per year spent by “pathological drinkers.”

 

It is its own pit and perhaps, in some ways, a more soul destroying one than the life of privation for we are convinced that we need something that society gives to define, shape, and amplify us. This inner dialogue is paired with a pulsating national narcissism. Today's Psalm says “Happy are they who trust in the LORD! * they do not turn to false gods.” Yet, where are we looking for direction, affirmation, and comfort today in a society that puts greed upon the high altar? “Happy are they who trust in the Lord.”

 

  The crisis of abundance is the crisis of self. This is not simply the middle class musings of the comfortably afflicted, it is something deeper, something pernicious that speaks to a lack of cultural vision. A lack of genuine hope. A lack of an Epiphany that shines a light on our full potential as individuals and as a wider community. There is a sense of emptiness amid the glitz of the day. It feels, to me, like that loneliness on a crowded street in Manhattan. Where you can amble along in a mad press of humanity and feel utterly abandoned….lost among the numbers…

The richest 225 people in the world have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the world's population (over 2 billion people). The richest 3 people in the world have assets combined that surpass the combined GDP on of the 48 poorest nations. Half the human race subsists on less than $2 per day. This may seem like a discourse on economics, and in a way it is, yet it is on the economics of grace versus the economics of scarcity. It is about finding the Psalmist's “sure footing” in a world of complex disparities.

 

In such a world of wide gaps, it seems like we have two Epiphanies. People such as India's Bhangi see Christ lifting them up, giving meaning, and giving them a broken man who helps them to fix their gaze heavenward, over the haze of abject poverty and degradation. They understand that Epiphany leads toward the cross.

 

In a society of plenty, we have an Epiphany that also calls our eyes upward and our hearts outward, through the brass and bright lights of our national definitions of success and abundance, which degrade us in their own pernicious way.

 

Yet that is the miracle, the same Epiphany, the same Christ calls us all. God translates into all languages and gives all of us the currency of hope and the same Great Commandment. Just as Christ calls the Bhangi out of the mire, he calls us into it, to join with others, to share with the broken. To be witnesses to the faith in love.

 

Paul wrote to the Galatians “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” That is the faith of the Bhangi of India and it must be our faith as well.

When our minds clamor that we are not enough, when our hearts ache from loneliness, when our eyes dry up because we have no more tears, when we don't know if we have another day left in us without someone we've lost, when we simply don't measure up…when the shadows of the soul come to dance… there is Christ, there is God, there is humanity.

Our humanity and our relationship, one and all, to God are what make us precious and special. Epiphany is found when we see the Spirit descending on the other; when we go and see the Christ living among us and in one another. The moments that touch us, that bind us, are moments where the barrier between one another and God become translucent and the opacity of distrust and disbelief is cleared away for a vivid moment. Those points of meaning and generosity are everlasting instants that remain and nourish us.

 

When we don't search for that Spirit in others, when we don't live lives of open love for the other, we end up in dangerous places for we deny the grace that God has given to all of us and we lose respect for the dignity of all around us and slide deeper into that mire…the star of the Epiphany is blotted out by the haze of narcissism…

 

16,475 college students nationwide completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006. The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' scores indicating narcissism have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

 

"Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," the study asserts. Narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors." Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others. The academic patina of this study has real societal costs underneath it that we are just beginning to understand.

 

Gandhi once said of societies that there are seven deadly social sins: politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.

All of these are marks of cultural narcissism whispering or shouting or cajoling that it can fill, that it can fix, that it can bridge over the emptiness that we feel…

 

The resounding answer and our joy are found in the Epiphany, in the realization that Christ is in the world, in the joy of finding Christ among those around you, in the bhanga , the broken...in the homeless…in the angry teenager…The emptiness is not only the gap within us; it is measured by the gaps between us.

 

Yet, our opportunity every day is to serve Christ in others and to recognize that Christ is risen, still among us. Francis Cardinal Spellman once said that the Christian duty is to “ Pray as if everything depended upon God and work as if everything depended upon man. ” The future of Christianity, the answer to the blind and mundane viciousness of the status quo is to be found all around us and in others. It is held in moments of transition that will be born in moments of revelation.

 

It is those moments, when we can open ourselves, risk ourselves and lower our barriers that we can find our true and better natures. It requires that we trust ourselves enough to lower those defenses, that we love ourselves enough to allow others to see the real us, it requires real people speaking, holding, and learning from real people, not projections talking past holograms.

The hope of the faith is not in us, being perfect Christians, who have sparkling lives sharing with others the joys of our effervescent perfection. The hope of the faith is in our willingness to share our brokenness with others. To open up to others when faith and fear swap sides in our minds. That is truly good news, Christ makes use of imperfect vessels, cracked pottery, to pour out his love. So the pain, fear, anguish, and inadequacies all make us more than we were, they make us able to understand the pain of others and to truly serve, but only if we can quiet the paranoid storyteller in our minds who weaves a meandering tale of our judgment and rejection by others.

 

Those are the red coals, the cruel fuel of cultural narcissism; that we will be judged inadequate and are thus paralyzed against risking true love that demands openness. Christ calls us to be judged inadequate and rejoice, for we share that inadequacy with all of humanity. Once we welcome Christ's love in to harrow that fear and silence the monologue of self-doubt that feeds false projections, we will be ready to risk going and seeing Christ in others, for we will be ready to dare their seeing us.

 

In so many ways, the work of Christ depends on our willingness to suspend our disbelief in our own and others' capacities for good. It requires that we believe in the Heavenly good of Earthly work. Where is Christ staying today, how can we go and see?

 

It can seem hard to find Christ today. It is hard to come and see Christ in those whom we most wish were not around. It is hard to forgive ourselves enough so that we can forgive others. It is hard to follow Christ in an age of fear. Yet the work of the cross is always around us, for the work of the cross is love and our enduring knowledge that faith can span the unbridgeable gaps of the world. It is at once the hardest and the easiest thing to achieve. To simply love is no simple matter; it is the stuff of a Great Commandment and a Great Commission. Yet that love is surely the only thing that can truly carry us out of the pit and make our footing sure.