How many kings were there? (Someone replies, “Three.”) ... No! If
you were over in the Eastern Church, there would be.... Who said
twelve? Oh, you heard me talking about it earlier. Didn’t you? At
least you’re listening. That’s good. It’s in the bulletin? Oh, I
should read that, huh? (laughter!) You know, I want you to help me
out here. You know that Father Brian and I have a little thing going
on sometimes. Have you noticed? Oh, come on... He gets me. I get him.
Well, I’m getting him today. It’s his birthday this weekend. So,
after he does his little shtick (That’s a good way of putting it!) at
the end of Mass when he comes out and does the announcements, it’ll
come up on the screen in red and it will go, “The congregation will
say, ‘Whose birthday is it?’ “ Don’t read the part that says “The
congregation will say.” Just, “Whose birthday is it?” and then we
will all sing “Happy Birthday” to our pastor. (In a whisper, “He’s
69!... ”)

Last week, I really.... (And this is not brown-nosing him after
trying to get him back.) But last week, the homily touched me really
deeply because I really found that the way he took Carl Sagan’s year
from the great flurry forth to this moment in time and put us as
contemporaries with Jesus made me realize that there actually is a
lot of hope, that there’s a lot of good going on in the world and
that the hope that’s there is that we are just in the beginning. And
we, humanity, at times haven’t done a great job but we’re doing OK.
And a lot of wonderful things are happening in science and lots of
great things are happening in life, in terms of health and our
ability to live and function. So, I came out of the week and it came
up in my prayer a lot that this was a moment of hope. And I was happy
for that.

Today is a moment of hope as well because you think of the Magi in
the sense of traveling. The Church is traveling as we are traveling
from one moment to the next and in this traveling experience, this
journey of faith, we are a pilgrim church. Did you know that the
Cathedral in Cologne, Germany, claims that the Three Kings are buried
in there? What are their names? If you’re really good Catholics you
would know this. What are their names? (long pause here) Did you
all hear that? Balthasar, Gaspar, and Melchior. And the Cathedral
Church at Cologne claims them to be lying at rest there. So, whoever
those dudes are, they are at rest. But those names didn’t come til
the sixth century. Today is also known as Old Christmas Day or it is
Christmas for our Eastern brothers and sisters.

I wanted to show you a picture. This picture is.... Guido Rene
painted it in the seventeenth century and it’s Matthew being told by
the angel, whispering in his ear, and Matthew is frantically writing
the gospel down. It’s kind of strange because Matthew is the gospel
that’s most Jewish. And yet it’s kind of strange that he brings Magi
all the way from the East, from Persia, over to proclaim the birth of
Christ and to pay him homage. I think what Matthew is saying is that
God’s love rains down on all of creation, every single person on the
planet and all of humanity, all of the time. And sometimes that’s
really hard for us to swallow. Bishop Desmond Tutu, when he was
giving his address to the Nobel people when he got his Nobel Peace
Prize, even suggests that we love our enemies. We have heard this
before and how difficult that can be for us. And he writes, “Dear
Child of God, If we are truly to understand that God loves all of us,
we must recognize that he loves our enemies too. God does not share
our hatred and our prejudices, regardless of whether they are based
on religion, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or
anything else. (They) are absolutely and utterly ridiculous in the
eyes of God.” So everyone is included, even though parts of us want
to exclude. It’s kind of natural. You can think of all of the big
things, apartheid and world peace and hunger and all of the different
issues that are going on in the world.

When I was thinking about this, I tried to think about it and what
has happened in my life. I remember as a twenty-two year old
seminarian in Ireland, sent by the Redemptorists for the summer to
work and we went to a Daughters of Charity Hospital outside Bath.
Chris was sent, was native, from the Falls Road in Belfast. And if
that means anything to you, between the Falls and the Shankhill in
Belfast, the Falls is a Catholic road. The Shankhill, parallel to it,
is the Protestant road, and there’s a thirty foot wall running all
the way up the road so the Catholics and the Protestants never meet.
And so, Chris had never met a Protestant in his life. He wouldn’t
even know what one looked like. So, here are the two of us, being
sent to go look for a church in Bath, on our first Sunday there. And
so we go down and we find this great big Gothic structure and it had
holy water fonts. We opened the door to see candles, confessionals
down the side, statues, all the trappings of Roman Popery. And so, we
got in. The only thing that was different was the kneelers were soft,
big cushions, and the seats upholstered. So we thought these English
Catholic people must really like their comforts. We didn’t have soft
kneelers in Ireland. That was OK. So we sat down to say our prayers
and the church filled up. I really wasn’t paying much attention. The
music started and the minister came out onto the altar. He wasn’t a
priest. Well, he was a priest for them. But he came out in that sort
of Church of England robes. Well, Chris nearly had a heart attack.
And he gives me this big dig and says, “Get out quick! It’s a
Protestant Church!” Well, I was in a state of shock because it all
looked like what we were supposed to be doing. All I could see was
him high-tailing out the door. And I sat there because I am nosey and
inquisitive, and I thought “Wow!” Well, my mother had always told me
that it was a sin to go into a Protestant Church, and so I had grown
up with that traditional Northern Irish Catholicism, and so I stayed.
The whole thing was really very intriguing to me because I realized
the structure was the same as ours. I knew, instinctively, not to go
to communion, although in my youthfulness, I was tempted. But, apart
from all of that, everything seemed very much the same, and I stayed
afterwards, had a chat with the priest. Ended up that they were going
to Our Lady of Walsingham the next Sunday, which is a Catholic/
Protestant/ Anglican/ Catholic shrine where Our Lady was supposed to
have appeared in the middle of England. And so, I got Chris to come
along with me the next Sunday. We went along and celebrated with them
over at Walsingham. So, to me, it was the first time that I had sort
of opened the door in my life to the prejudices that I had. And then
I realized actually they have a lot of what we have. Even though, I
believe that we, in our faith, have the whole of what God has
communicated to us in Jesus Christ, I think we can look at other
faith traditions and other ways of praising God and allow them to
inform us and nourish us. So, this experience ended up really
strengthening my faith in a positive way. And I realized that there
are many other things as you go along in life that we have prejudices
(about) and it’s really good to recognize them and to realize that
“Here comes Everybody” as James Joyce says. Everybody comes into the
Church, no matter where you are in this life.

So there are three different levels. This morning I am looking at
these foreigners, these people from the outside. They come and they
represent all of us. The second part is that they are people of
faith. They are faith-seekers. They are coming from a great distance.
They are seeking God as each one of us comes into this church today
for a whole range of different reasons that bring us here. But we are
seeking faith. And we have doubts sometimes. There’s no doubt. I do!
There are moments with doubts and I just have to offer that doubt up
to God and say, “It’s me searching.” It’s you searching and there
aren’t all of the answers here in this place, even in our Church.

And lastly, the Three Kings brought gifts. Each one of us here is
unique and brings our own gifts and the reality of who we are. And we
bring our own gold, frankencense and myrrh as gifts and lay them
before the infant Christ, no matter whether it be our talents, our
time, or our love for one another and our caring. And so,
collectively, all of us through these three events, these people who
are outsiders, seeking faith and bringers of gifts, all together
collectively, we follow the star. Outsiders, faith-seekers and gift-
bearers, all together collectively, and so the three kings. .... Let
us all stand and pray.