Camel Music

I have a confession to make: every Epiphany I can’t wait to hear the camel music. “The camel music?” you might inquire with acute curiosity and confused wonder. Yes, the camel music. I admit that the unofficial musical term “camel music” was coined by a friend of mine to describe the somewhat campy improvisational organ interludes between stanzas of the hymn “We three kings.” And, yes, John Henry Hopkins’s Victorian hymn, which has become known all over the world, is a bit campy in a nineteenth century sort of way. But let’s at least own up to the fact that this hymn is very effective, hence its universal popularity.

From a musical perspective, “We three kings” attempts to evoke the exoticism of another land, albeit using a Western musical language that is colored with Victorian Romantic harmonies. And although the melody of this hymn avoids unusual chromatic notes and is based on a Western musical scale, its repetitive nature and simplicity somehow stirs up visions of far Eastern music, especially to a Western ear. The camel music ratchets up this evocation of a foreign land, introducing wild rhythms, hints of non-Western scales, and musical visions of Arabia.

The exotic flare of the camel music, when executed by a gifted organist, can bring us, the listeners, on the magi’s journey far from our native land to a strange country. And in that unfamiliar country, drawn by our imaginations, we suddenly discover that God’s manifestation in Christ has dawned upon our lives in the most unpredictable ways. By following the camel music, we are changed, and we are brought to an unanticipated destination from which we can only return home by another route.

The complicated thing about the camel music, though, is that its dreamy improvisations take us to places that we’re not sure are actually in the Biblical narrative itself. After all, Matthew’s story of the journey of the magi leaves more questions than answers. We know only that “wise men from the East came to Jerusalem.” Scholars have speculated that these wise men, or magi, were from ancient Persia and were perhaps Zoroastrians. But it’s anyone’s guess, really. The point is that in our modern cogitations on the origins of the magi, scholarly and unscholarly, we, too, have left our homes and entered on a journey of our imaginations fueled by the grace of God. In our mental odysseys, we no longer remained mired in the certainty of answers, or in the assured conviction that Christ’s manifestation to us is only in one particular way or in one particular language or only in one particular part of the world. Matthew’s account of the magi’s journey opens up Christ’s manifestation to people in all kinds of strange lands.

You can find in any number of Biblical commentaries further conjectures about other aspects of the magi’s journey. Scripture never tells us that there were only three magi; it’s just assumed from the mention of three gifts. And the story never mentions camels, but can’t you just picture the magi traversing moor and mountain on dromedaries? And is the point really whether or not there were camels? Because if we get caught up in whether there were actually camels or not, or whether there were three wise men, or whether the magi were definitely from Persia, we miss the point of the story. We miss how God’s epiphany to us occurs in spectacular ways borne on the wings of our imaginations. And if we resist dreaming on our life’s journeys, we may fail to behold the glory of God’s face before our eyes.

Oh, and there is that bit about a dream in Matthew’s Biblical narrative. The wise men were warned in a dream not to return to Herod. The inclination of some to demystify much of Scripture and to subject God’s Word to historical fact-checking might easily dismiss this dream business. But what if we let the camel music inspire us for just a bit? What if we imagine that God can indeed speak to us in dreams? And if God does speak to us in dreams, but we discount that as foolery, we risk overlooking Christ’s face shining upon us as light from a star.

And a star is the leader of the magi’s journey. It is this strange star that moves and stops, all to point out the exact location of Christ’s birth. Was this star of Bethlehem a comet or a supernova or a planetary conjunction of Venus and Jupiter? Perhaps. But what if it were a miracle? Or what if those magi were so receptive to God’s imaginative revelation in the world that they instinctively followed an unusual star and thereby discovered the Christ child?

All the details in Matthew’s story of the magi’s journey to Christ seem to support one fact that some scholars and skeptical minds will probably never fathom: the unveiling of God’s face to the world is grounded in mystery and wonder. And if we shut the door to mystery and wonder, we might ignore God’s epiphanies to us.

The perceptive magi are so very different from Herod. These Gentile wise men, perhaps dabbling in astrology, make a seemingly ludicrous trip to a foreign Jewish land based only on a hunch drawn from an errant star. With no clear plan for their journey, they simply appear in Jerusalem to inquire where the Messiah might be. They know not where they may end up on this path of discovery. They know not the rigor and perils of the journey ahead. They simply follow their instincts, as if accepting a call from God, and they journey to worship this newborn king.

But Herod, unlike these open-hearted magi, has closed himself off to God’s manifestation in his life because of his fear. Because of his fear, he proceeds in secrecy. With scientific precision, he wants to know the exact time of the star’s appearing. And in his quest to preserve his own power, he becomes mired in a technical plan to destroy the threat he perceives in an infant child. Herod seems immune to the mystery and wonder of God’s humble revelation to the world. Herod himself cannot be enticed by the camel music and led to undertake the journey to Jesus himself. Herod leaves this rigorous work to the wondering magi, who wander by the light of a strange star to encounter Christ and thereby are blessed by him.

The magi follow the camel music. Willing to be led on a wild, exotic trip to a foreign land, they are brought to the face of God himself. This unpredictable journey and seemingly futile expedition leaves them changed forever. And when we, too, allow ourselves to be opened up to the camel music and be led to strange and exotic places in our spiritual lives, we may just find God there waiting to greet us. We will find that we can only return home by another route, for we can never be the same again.

And, oh, how our modern world could benefit from following the camel music! The camel music’s unpredictable harmonies and meandering melodies will likely disturb our Western harmonic sensibilities. Its alien musical language will stretch the limits of our well-trained ears. And the musical journey we undertake will, at times, be difficult. But if we heed our dreams and brave a wild adventure lured by some mysterious call from God, we will not regret the journey.

Like the magi, if we offer the gifts of ourselves in openness, imagination, and wonder, we will in turn receive the gift of Christ in wholly unexpected ways. And then, the rigid, human-imposed boundaries of this world will dissolve in awe before God’s boundary-shattering might. Then, the regulations and rules that we levy to protect ourselves from the unanticipated will dissipate before the force of a God who must re-order this world by surprise.

The camel music enables us to believe that God still works miracles. The camel music draws us into incredible journeys in which we submit ourselves to the fruits of wild dreams that renew our souls again and again. Campy and ahistorical though it may be, the camel music reminds us that in desperate times, in times that devalue mystery and imagination, God can break into human stagnation and complacency and captivate us. When we let go, dream, and saddle ourselves up for the journey, led by the star of a crazy instinct, we discover the glory of Christ’s constant epiphanies today. Yes, even today.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
6 January 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Yonder and Among Us

Christmas is a great time for name dropping, so here goes.  Do you know that I am connected to Richard Burton by a mere two degrees of separation?  I once spoke on the telephone with Elizabeth Taylor, who was married to Richard Burton - twice.  So that’s a double-barreled name drop any way you look at it.

Some time ago a friend sent me a link to a recording of Richard Burton reciting a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  It was staggering to hear.  Hopkins is not a poet I know much, or thought I had much time for.  Then I heard Richard Burton read this poem... and it was sort of jaw dropping, to tell you the truth.  But although I was staggered by Burton’s mellifluous recitation of the words, I had no idea what to do with the poem.  I was captivated by Burton’s mastery of the language and bedazzled by the tempo at which he delivered the lines, which transformed them with a sense of urgency and significance.  But, as I say, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with the poem; I’m not sure I could have told you what the poem is about.

The poem in question is actually a pair of poems: “The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo.”  To be crass, I could say that they are a reflection on beauty, age, and despair, paired with a declaration of hope in divine providence, whence all beauty finds its origin and its final home.  I guess....  Listen:

Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.

I wish you could hear Burton say these lines, which, on the page, do not look the way they sound when they are spoken by him.  They just look like words on the page.  But from his lips, the words sound like music.  You should go home and listen to him deliver these lines.  But not right now.

Anyway, you heard some of the despair from the first poem, “The Leaden Echo,” but the hope is in the second poem, “The Golden Echo.”  Listen again:

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.  

And later...

... O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

I am no Richard Burton, and from my own mouth these lines sound like a cheap imitation of the poem he recites.  Take my word for it.  But I hope you will try to imagine the poem as the words tumble perfectly from his lips.  It’s dazzling. 

Every year, just days after Christmas, when we heard on Christmas morning the glorious first lines of John’s Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….") we repeat those dazzling lines, which tumble with a certain perfection from the pages of the Gospel, and we sit here, captivated for a while in the majesty of this mystery that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld its glory, full of grace and truth.”  We can tell that the words themselves have a kind of urgency and significance, but I suspect that we haven’t the faintest idea of what to do with them.  I’m not at all sure we know what these words are about.  We only know that we find them beautiful.  But as soon as we are out the door, we leave them behind, and return to the prosaic world where beauty is “vanishing away” (in Hopkins’ terms) and we are tempted to despair, despair, despair.  Poetry evaporates into the air.

It turns out that Elizabeth Taylor had this pair of Hopkins’ poems read at her funeral.  She must have loved the way Richard Burton read them, too.  He probably practiced reciting them in front of her.  When I think of how easily I can connect myself to Elizabeth Taylor, and (by only two degrees of separation) to Richard Burton and, therefore, to the way he recites these fabulous lines, …for some reason it makes me feel foolish for feeling so often, as though I am so far removed from God, and from the Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us.  It makes it seem as though Christmas was already long ago.  It makes it seem as though beauty is vanishing away.

Why are we so haggard at the heart?  When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care, yonder, where we now follow?  Why do I sometimes feel that there are fewer degrees of separation between me and Richard Burton than there are between me and God?   Why do I so freely forfeit the urgency and significance of the Word made flesh?

Without Richard Burton reciting those lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I’d have never thought twice about them.  They’d have remained close to gibberish to me.  But he made them present, real, important, and began to show me that they have real meaning.

Without God’s gift of his Son, I suppose the same would be true of the divine Word.  No mere performer; no mere interpreter of God’s word, he is the Word itself made flesh.  Because God knows how easily we dismiss him as gibberish.  God knows that we have felt separated from him by too many degrees to count.  So God speaks, so to speak, he speaks by sending us his incarnate Word.  And the chasm between God and us is closed; the degree of separation between God and us is narrowed to only a tiny distance, a number of less than One.

I love the question that Hopkins poses in the second poem, “O why are we so haggard at the heart?”  And it is ironic that I should invoke this poem, I suppose, in any way at all to refer to the good news of the incarnate Word, since Hopkins concludes that God keeps with “fonder care” “the thing we freely forfeit,” which is his Word, his Love, his Beauty, his Truth, I suppose, ... that God keeps all this “yonder, yonder, yonder,” far from us, where it is safe from our forfeiture.  But “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth,” and we are always free to forfeit his Word, his Love, his Beauty, and his Truth. 

O why are we so haggard at the heart, as though we had never heard, as though we had never known, as though we would freely forfeit, what once God kept to himself with fonder a care, fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder a care kept. - Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where…?

Not yonder, yonder, yonder; but the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
30 December 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

In Our Camp

There is perhaps no more appropriate point in the Church year to revel in the ordinary things of life than on this great Feast of the Incarnation. And so, at a party I was recently attending, I found myself musing on a slogan emblazoned on a T-shirt that someone was wearing. Its words of wisdom were not immediately theological; they were more inspirational, at least to the Boy Scout or avid camper. The words of wisdom offered by this T-shirt slogan were that “home is wherever I can pitch my tent.”

Now, if I had seen this slogan in any other context and at any other time of year, it would most likely have escaped my attention. But reflecting on this seemingly nondescript statement, it dawned on me that for some in the room in which I was standing, houses of brick, mortar, and wood were most likely fraught with anxiety and stress. I wondered how many people in that room were presently concerned about whether there was enough heat in their houses or whether they would lose their homes. And I realized that in this particular setting, a T-shirt bearing a camping slogan had indeed made a hopeful theological statement, because it had expanded the notion of what a home can be. A home can be wherever one might pitch a tent, for wherever one might pitch a tent, God himself has already pitched a tent there.

And so, John tells us in the climax of the Prologue to his Gospel. The eternal Word existing with God and as God when all things came into being through him at the dawn of creation—this Word made flesh in Christ lived among us for a short lifetime, dwelling with the human race, breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, leaving real human footprints in the dust of the Middle East. This Word made flesh tabernacled among us. This Word pitched his tent in our camp.

Of course, the camp was at first a localized one, a camp in the little town of Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph took up temporary residence, pitching their tent in a stable or cave, whichever it was, we may never know. This Holy Family’s makeshift camp was nearly a hundred miles from their more permanent camp, the home they had established in Nazareth. But on that night of our Savior’s birth, home was not in Nazareth. Home was temporarily in Bethlehem, because that’s where Mary and Joseph had pitched their tent, so they could be counted in the census in the town of Joseph’s lineage.

And Matthew the evangelist tells us that after God was born into human time and space and tested his lungs in the incipient cries of a babe, Mary and Joseph pitched their tent elsewhere, far away in Egypt, as they fled the wrath of Herod and sought to protect the life of their newborn son. In many ways, the wanderings of Jesus’s earliest days would foreshadow his later life. In the intense fervor of his earthly ministry in Galilee and beyond, Jesus pitched his tent in many, many camps.

And there were times, we know, when our Lord himself had to redefine what home was. Home wasn’t always what one might expect. A world darkened by human sin could not always contain the everlasting Light. Yes, even in his hometown of Nazareth, our Lord faced rejection when its citizens were unable to receive his prophetic words and were incapable of welcoming him as God’s Messiah. So, the Son of God could only shake the Palestinian dust from his sandals and move on and pitch his tent in other locations.

In a human body, which knew all the trials of earthly loss and undoubtedly experienced the aches of strained sinews from long days of walking—in this human body, God dwelled as close to humankind as was humanly possible in order to bring us salvation. In this human body that also bore in equal measure the divine glory, God pitched his tent in our camp. And this tent was more than a pillar of cloud or of fire accompanying the Israelites in their wilderness journey. This tent was God with us, Emmanuel, in human flesh and blood.

But I imagine that in those strange and mysterious days following our Lord’s death, resurrection, and ascension, it must have felt to many like the tent that had been pitched in our camp was a bygone memory. To those who had known and loved Jesus, to those who had embraced him as a friend, to those who had grasped his rough hands worn by a carpenter’s work, Jesus’s seeming disappearance from the earth must have been a devastating blow. I suppose it was only natural that the human mind, in its limited capacity, would seek to make God too small by assuming that God’s earthly tent could only last for the duration of his Son’s lifetime.

But “our God, heav’n cannot hold him/Nor earth sustain.”[1] The divine glory shining in the life of Christ, the glory that pitched its tent in Nazareth and Bethlehem, still sets up camp hour by hour, minute by minute, and second by second in our lives. The Incarnation is not a closed chapter in a history book. God has pitched his tent and continues to pitch his tent among us until he comes again in glory. Because God has come as close to humankind as possible, he is forever setting up camp in our lives, no matter where we may be. For home is wherever we can pitch our tents, and wherever we pitch our tents, God has already beat us to it and established a home for us.

There is no human home too lonely or darkened by tragedy and despair in which God has not already set up camp. There is no seedy district of town, no blood-soaked battleground, no tsunami-wracked coast, no graffiti-riddled school playground, and no bleak prison cell in which God has not already pitched his tent and in which God does not still pitch his tent. For God has promised not to leave us comfortless, and this is the meaning of today’s great Feast. The Incarnation is not simply about the birth of a baby boy in the little town of Bethlehem. It is also about the birth of this baby into our hearts, every second of every day in every corner of the world. God is constantly on the move, and wherever we set up camp, God has already pitched his tent there and prepared for us a home.

In his great subversion of human pride and control, God took the world by surprise in the Incarnation. By pitching his tent in every camp on this earth, God was determined to re-order this creation back into relationship with him, so that “nothing could get between us and his love,” to quote words from last week’s Advent pageant.[2] The revelation of God’s greatness was inaugurated by becoming localized in human space and time so that ultimately no space and time could hold him hostage.

If only the feeble human mind could see this. If only the human mind could see that there is indeed enough of God for everyone and that no one has a monopoly on God. There is enough love for everyone because God pitches his tents in places across the world, no matter how disparate the locations and how wide the distances between them. And so there is no need for what a seminary professor of mine called the original fear, the fear that there is never enough. Because of the Incarnation, there is always enough in God’s gracious providence.

In one modern Bible translation, the apex of John’s Prologue is translated as “[t]he Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”[3] But God didn’t just move into gated communities or subdivisions with manicured lawns. God moved into the neighborhoods neglected by broken city governments, where gunshots are routinely heard. God moved into the unheated homes on the brink of foreclosure. God moved into the traveling camps of refugees fleeing oppressive governments. For home can be wherever you might pitch your tent, and wherever that might be, God has already pitched his tent there.

And so we can rightly say, “Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ on his throne of glory in heaven, in the most holy Sacrament of the Altar, and in the hearts of his faithful people.” And so, too, we can say, “Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ in his tents over grates in city sidewalks.” Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ in his tents set up among those whose pillow is a dirt floor. Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be Christ in all the tabernacles of the world and in the camps of all people who find their true homes where God has already pitched his tent.

[1] Christina Rossetti, “In the bleak midwinter”

[2] Adapted from Simone Graham, An Unexpected Christmas.

[3] Eugene Peterson, The Message Bible.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
25 December 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia