LIVING FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

Today's texts talk a lot about proclaiming, about announcing to the world God’s beneficent rule in the Old Testament readings or proclaiming his imminent arrival as with John the Baptist. Scripture does this I think because it is not enough to have a private belief or spiritual life – it is not enough to have a private view or to seek God by having Jesus in your heart as your personal savior. We need to make our faith public. We need to share it with one another. And we do so not only to convince others and to make the kingdom of love manifest to them but also because in so doing we convince ourselves and make it manifest to us.

We do this because we live not only from the inside out but also from the outside in.

Many years ago when I taught anthropology I would talk about people as being social and symboling animals. We are pack animals and we have an impact on one another when we get together whether we’re conscious of it or not. It is shocking to many to learn how dependent our individual bodies are on what is happening to the bodies of the people around us. I remember how shocked some of my female students were to learn that if they went to a dormitory and lived there long enough their periods would all slowly come to coincide with one another and that often they would even synchronize by floor  - all entirely out of the consciousness of any of the individuals involved. Similarly 10 years or so ago researchers found among men playing football that blood measures of their testosterone levels would go up if they were winning, surpassing levels of the members of the team they were playing against. Even more striking was that the fans in the stands reproduced the same dynamic. The testosterone levels of fans of the winning team similarly rose in response to the score and the play of people they were watching on the field hundreds of yards away.

We live from the outside in as well as from the inside out.

If our bodies change out of consciousness in response to the states of the bodies of those around us how much more powerful then is the way our minds and spirits change in response to those around us and what they are doing and what they are saying. To fully tune into the message of the Advent baby, we need one another. As Peter Berger says in a Rumor of Angels we may not feel like praying at a particular moment but if we simply begin, kneel and clasp our hands and begin to pray through the doing of the prayer we find ourselves truly praying by prayer’s end. How much more powerful then it is to share in prayer together, in tune with our nature as pack animals. To be moved by the prayers of those around us. To be moved by the proclamations of those around us. In our community prayer together I'm often made aware of the way the spirit has broken into the life of one of my fellow members. They show me the face of God that God has chosen to share with that person at that point in his or her life whether it's through a crisis in health of a family member or friend or a new conviction of shared pain and solidarity with brothers and sisters in a distant land. At the end of our shared prayer time I am a different person. And not just through a process of adding others experience of God to my own. But through God's selection of those people to reveal parts of himself to them and tthrough their prayers to all of us. 

Even in the intensely personal experience of prayer, we live from the outside in as well as from the inside out.

So why are we gathered here together this morning to tell the old old stories? Because, we are not New Agers scuba-diving into our individual minds in search of an individual salvation.  Because we are not Old Age Bibliolaters seeking to nail down a truth that was and will always be nailed up.  Because our faith comes from the outside in, crashing into our world and disrupting business as usual in the form of a baby born in the Badlands of the Roman Empire.  Because we recognize that we are social and symboling animals who need the revealed truths embedded in these stories to empower us, in Isaiah’s words, “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.”   

Jo Jo’s pregnant fom gives us all a powerful physical reminder of the incarnation of spirit and flesh that visited us 2000 years ago. When we share the story of John the Baptist and the promise of the coming Kingdom we share it with all those joined together in the United States, in Hebron and Zimbabwe and eastern Congo, and all over the planet telling the same story at the same time. Sharing the promise that despite the pain and suffering we feel and see in us and around us we can be saved, or as Dunstan explicated salvation in a long-ago homily, we - and our broken selves and world - can be made whole.  We also join the telling of the story to our parents telling it and before them to our grandparents and to their parents before them - the same stories repeated over centuries. Time and space and the tiny insignificant decisions we make day-to-day melt away under the power of this one soul and spirit-freeing narrative of God’s breaking in, his disruption of our world through a child and that child’s living out of a love that knows no bounds. We live under that narrative’s retentive power. And in telling and proclaiming it, In praying for it, In singing of it we make it live not only for others but just as importantly for the others and The Other in us, for ourselves.

Amen.