Three executives were enjoying a drink at the hotel bar after a long day of meetings and presentations. These high-paid, hard-working corporate executives were defining what success means, and how to know when you have really arrived.
One said: "I'll tell you what real success is. It's being invited to the White House for a personal conversation with the President."
Another replied: "No, that's not it. You know you have arrived when you've been invited to the White House for a personal conversation with the President, the hot line rings, and he just looks at it and decides not to answer it."
The third executive said: "You both have it all wrong. Real success is when you are invited to the White House for a personal conversation with the President, the hot line rings, the President answers it and says, 'Here, it's for you.' "
Unless I’ve missed my guess, the majority of us grew up with this idea of success as a destination, a place you wanted to go in life, and that it was better to be there then in the poor house broke. Money, power, prestige, success are part of thing-oriented behavior; it is a behavior that places more importance on acquiring the things of the world above all else. But is that it? Is that all there is? Where do you look for success? Where do you look for God?
How many of us try to find God and solve the problems of life through logical, calculated schemes that insure we receive our share; we get what we deserve. This is nothing new. We are selfish creatures who are drawn to what is shiny and flashy over what is plain and ordinary. We think we know what is important to God.
What did the wise men do? They come to Jerusalem first, not Bethlehem, to the royal palace of King Herod. It is reasonably fair to say that this is where a king would be. These wise men are Gentiles who most likely don’t know the God of the star they are following. They come to look for the child who has been born King of the Jews in the royal palace of Jerusalem, in the “Washingtons” and “Wall Streets” of the world rather than somewhere off the beaten track, a sleepy little town just off the interstate. Like Bethlehem, the Messiah of God is not in a place of prominence, but rather can be found in a place of obscurity in the world’s eyes. The wise men seek the light of God in the most likely of places, but it is the wrong place.
Where do we look for God? When we look for God all around us, we realize that God is to be found in receiving, not grasping; in giving, not claiming our rights. God calls us to live love into the world based on life-oriented behavior over and above thing-oriented behavior. God moves us to celebrate spiritual graces over positional goods.
Theologian/Psychotherapist/Professor Ann Belford Ulanov, in her fascinating study of unconscious images entitled The Wisdom of the Psyche, gives an example of someone "living love into the world," someone who celebrates spiritual graces, "in whose presence ... you feel the capacity to be born." She tells the story of a woman in Harlem who for forty years had been taking into her home the infants of drug-addicted prostitutes and raising them as her own. "She is now in her eighties and very well known in Harlem. Women come and leave their babies on her doorstep. The babies they bring are addicted. She does not treat them with drugs, which is the usual medical way with children. She said in one interview: 'I love them back into being.' That means holding the infants and walking up and down with them, singing and talking to them as they suffer withdrawal from the drugs. If the babies are made well, and the mothers have kicked their own habits, she gives the babies back to their mothers. Recently, she has added to her family babies afflicted with AIDS. There, in her, is the love we have been talking about, love pulled into the world, love brought almost violently back into circulation."[1] Life-oriented behavior is living love into our fallen world.
All of us as Christ’s disciples have a light to shine in the darkness, an illumination from God that can raise the roof of the world's kings and princes, presidents and prime ministers. As we turn over a new year, one thing is sure: more and more people are trying to find a way to God by climbing the ladders of success and power and respectability. The pursuit of money and power has become one of the most powerful mystery religions ever to show its face in the history of humanity.
This makes it all the more imperative that the Good News of Epiphany is that God is found in incarnation, in the humility of birth in a stable. It is the Christian message that the vulnerability found in a life of homelessness, in a life of sacrifice and the suffering of death on a cross, are heralded as marks of God's most powerful work in the human life. We are reminded that light has come upon the "little ones" to share with the "learned," a light more brilliant than the pillar of cloud by day or the pillar of fire by night, more brilliant than the "thousand points of light" shining in the darkness. Christians are called to offer a ministry of light and a message of illumination to those in power. In the words of Carl F. H. Henry, "The divine mandate is to beam light, sprinkle salt, knead leaven into an otherwise hopeless world" (Christianity Today, 18 November 89, 26).
And what is this message? "Arise, shine, for your light has come." From what direction does it come? Not from economics or the wealth of nations. Not from education or the wisdom of the world. Not from science or technology. The magi point us to where the world's best hope, the world's only salvation comes from the Christ who is found and served: on the backstreets and dirt roads far from view, in the dark places where light rarely shines. The wise men show us even today where we will find the light of Christ, the light that overcomes the darkness.
[1]
The Wisdom of the Psyche. Ann Belford
Ulanov (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1988), 99-100.
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