Nearly four thousand years ago, there was a man living in the vicinity of the ancient city of Babylon. This man heard God speak to him, and it turned out to be a major turning point in history. That might not seem like an exaggeration. After all, don’t we believe that God speaks to us on a regular basis? The answer would be, “yes, of course.” But whatever confidence we might have that we can separate out God’s voice in our hearts from the other voices clamoring for our attention, we owe very much to this man who lived so many generations ago.

I am referring, of course, to Abraham. At the time of which I am speaking, he lived in what we would call a pagan land, where there were many gods. The stars themselves were held to be divine in some way, and the wise men of Babylon were expert at mapping the heavens, watching them for divine messages. Later Jewish and Christian tradition held that Abraham was grieved by this perplexing multitude of gods and the superstition and magic that went along with them. In other words, Abraham wanted the Truth, and despaired of finding it in the paganism around him.

In Abraham, God, the One, True God, found a heart ready to hear the Truth. What Abraham heard was that to follow this Truth required of him a great sacrifice. He would need to leave his homeland and his family and travel to a place that this God would show him. But Abraham followed, because the Truth is better than make-believe, and certainly better than lies. As I said earlier, we owe a great deal to these patriarchs and their wives who heard the voice of God and obeyed, often at high cost to themselves. Through them, God was establishing a foothold in this world that had rebelled against Him. Abraham’s children, the Israelites, became a light for the nations because they worshipped the One, True God.

This vocation, to hear God’s word and follow, was often very costly, because the old gods were not about to give up their power easily. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful and successful by worldly standards were often the most dedicated to the false gods. Someone like Socrates, who had a similar thirst for Truth as Abraham, ended up being executed by those who felt threatened by him. This was a world of conflict, scarcity, fear, and mistrust. Too often, it was held together simply by the threat of violence and the predations of the stronger against the weaker. This is why God’s call to Abraham required him to renounce that world.

Today, on the Epiphany, God speaks again to a group of three men from the East. What is more, God speaks to them through one of the stars which they watched so carefully. The stars had always belonged to God, and were intended to be His messengers, but fallen man had forgotten how to read them properly. With the arrival of God’s Son, fallen nature begins to regain its true purpose, to offer us signs of God’s presence and His love. These three men do exactly what Abraham did many years before. They set off for a place unknown, following this star.

They know that a king has been born, and he is somewhere in this small country of Judea. By their obedience, by their willingness to set out, they make known the identity of this child. I said that the willingness to follow God comes at a cost. The gospel tells us that King Herod and Jerusalem were in an uproar about this news that God was sharing with them. In his famous poem “Journey of the Magi”, T.S. Eliot captures this cost well. He has one of the Magi, many years after his encounter with the baby Jesus, say this: “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods.”

Today we celebrate the fact that God did not only call Abraham’s descendants, the Jews, to know the Truth. In the Magi, we see His rescue mission reaching the Gentiles as well. God reveals Himself to us and to all. In the Incarnation of His Son, Jesus Christ, we have a perpetual point of reference to discern God’s voice in today’s world. In the Church, which is the extension of the Incarnation in space and time, we continue to enjoy the assurance that we can hear God. He speaks through nature, through stars and trees and wind and rain.  With God’s Word alive in our hearts, we can learn to read these signs. But His invitation still calls us to leave all that is fallen within us and in the world. In other words, following it will require our ongoing conversion. Not everyone welcomes this. Herod heard what the Magi had to say, and he rejected it. He was unwilling to give up that old world in which he enjoyed power and status.

Where is God speaking to me today? How can the Church help me to clarify God’s voice and His invitation to conversion? Will we set off in faith toward what is still unknown in God’s plan? Will we put it off, or even reject what God is asking, fearing the cost? Guide our hearts Lord God, to hear and heed, and to follow where so many holy men and women have gone before, believing not only that the Truth is better than make-believe and lies, but that Your Truth is greater than all we can imagine.

Dearly beloved, today our Savior is born; let us rejoice! Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness. (Pope St. Leo the Great)

“Et Incarnatus Est” is on hiatus during Twelve Days of Christmas but will return after Epiphany.  Merry Christmas to you and yours!

In days long ago, before the invention of Twitter, when kings, governors, and others occupying the highest levels of authority wished to communicate with their subjects, they relied on the spoken word. Most often, messages from the palace or capital were delivered by heralds. Upon more solemn and serious occasions, however, the monarch would make his or her own “progress” through the cities, towns, and villages of the realm. These were graver occasions not merely because of the requirements of royal pomp. Certain pressing issues at a local level were reserved for the judgment of the sovereign himself. When the sovereign was just, this was good news for those who loved peace and justice. The arrival of the king, his “advent,” was an affair of great municipal fervor. Extending several miles from the destination town, the royal route would be richly decorated. At various stations along the way, singers and dancers awaited the royal progress and celebrated the king’s or queen’s approach. When the sovereign finally arrived, the celebrations began in earnest. Then, of course, the work began, courts were drawn up, cases were heard, and judgments were dispensed. The sovereign then began the journey to the next town.

Before the institution of a hereditary  monarchy in ancient Israel, the king was God Himself. God communicated through heralds, who occupied the social positions of prophet or judge (priests, too, occasionally divined God’s will by use of the mysterious urim and thummim). God’s most memorable advent was His descent into Egypt to take Israel out from slavery and to pass judgement on Pharaoh and his army. As time went on,  such miraculous manifestations of God’s judgment became harder to discern. The great crisis was the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 B.C. and the deportation of the most important Judahites to exile in Babylon.  In spite of the high-flown and inspired rhetoric of Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55 of the book of that bears his name), the restoration of Jerusalem under the benevolent sponsorship of the Persian empire never quite took hold of the people’s imagination as had the Exodus. No wonder: many Jews opted to remain in Babylon and in Egypt, where life was decidedly less rugged than in the hills of Judea.

Most of the literary prophets of the Hebrew Bible grapple with this problem. The general solution proposed is that God will, at some future time, once again make His royal progress from His heavenly throne, and through an appointed Messiah, execute judgment on the idolatrous nations that successively dominated God’s chosen people. This “day of the Lord” was often enough a frightful event, but the goal was always the eventual restoration of justice and shalom, the peace that is “ordered tranquility [Saint Augustine’s phrase],” the world as God had intended it to be.

In the Christian proclamation, when God did make His advent, it was in a most unexpected manner. His herald, the angel Gabriel, went not into the public square, not to the courts of Herod (much less those of the faraway emperor, now in Rome), but to the humble dwelling of the Virgin Mary. God was indeed to make His solemn entry into the world, but it would be in an obscure village as a vulnerable infant. He would go unrecognized by nearly everyone until, ironically enough, His return to the Father at the Ascension. In the Incarnation, the Son of God came not to issue final judgment, but to invite all to a new way of thinking about the world. No longer is it divided into antagonized interest groups and national factions (though Israel would always remain God’s first love). Salvation and shalom (“My peace I give you—not as the world gives…”) would be offered to all peoples by the humble carpenter of Nazareth to those who would take seriously His offer to repent and undergo a change of heart.

We now wait for the ultimate advent, what is often called the Parousia or Second Coming, but each year, we call to mind this first “royal progress” of the infant King, so as to be reminded of His offer of peace and joy. “No one ever spoke like this man [John 7: 46]!” May these Final Days assist us in our preparation to celebrate the approaching Kingdom of God!