As I gaze out from the height of my perch – 7 feet above contradiction – I spy many familiar faces. Yet, what draws me are the faces of those I have not met, you who are visitors and our guests. Maybe you are drawn to wanting to come to a place of worship where you know you will get a good show. I don’t mean to be flippant about the need for a good show on Christmas eve, a time loaded with memories and associations from the past, where your hearts are lifted by the beauty of the music, your spirits resonate to the dignified rhythms of the liturgy, perhaps even where your  minds are engaged by the quality of the preaching – although you may want to reserve judgment on that for a moment. I want to say to you all, visitors, annually returning old friends, spiritual seekers, the Episcopal Church welcomes you!  Whoever you are, what- ever you think you believe or don’t believe, know that you are in good company here. SO welcome all, to Downton Abbey a world of bewildering, yet magnetic traditions.

For the Episcopal Church and in particular this Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, is the closest we shall come in the Phoenix of the 21st Century, to the spirit of Downton Abbey. If you have watched  Downton Abbey, now entering its third season you will have been drawn into a great drama. Downton Abbey, is an intersection in time and place where the ancient traditions moulded over centuries of English life are brought into a tension-filled engagement with the pressures and demands of a changing world.

In this place of tension between traditions handed-on and the demands of life as it is actually being lived, the inhabitants of Downton struggle to find a way of living that gives  new impetus and new energy to the traditions that have shaped them and from which it is impossible to escape.

The Episcopal Church,  the American expression of Anglican Tradition,  a transmission of the ancient catholic faith shaped by exposure to 1000 years of English culture, like Downton Abbey sits in the tension between the traditions we receive, which appear to have been crafted for another age, and the demands of life as we are actually living it in 21st century America.

America as a nation sits in the tension between the tradition known as the American Dream and the challenges of a rapidly changing world. The Episcopal Church, America’s best kept secret, welcomes you to life in the tension where the gritty struggle between faith and doubt, hope and fear, nostalgia for the past and terror of the future, continues producing the pearl that is God’s love for us.

Luke is the great historian of the New Testament. His Gospel places the birth of Jesus in historical time and place, yet it also comes to us across 2000 years of transmission. It depicts an enchanted world where God communicates through angels to shepherds, those who are on the margins of social acceptability. This is an enchanted world where the Creator of the Universe can be born as a baby, in a stable, in the most marginal of circumstances, and not only survive but be visited by wise men from the east.

For much of Christian history this story resonated so closely with the precarious vulnerability of the lives people actually lived, most in a similar rural poverty. It also resonated with the enchanted mindset in which God was experienced to be magically and mysteriously present in every aspect of the material world that surrounded human life. In this world of enchantment, God was never absent and people were never alone.

So how does this story resonate with us whose lives are lived amidst the urban and technological complexities of 21st century America? How does this story communicate to a people whose disenchanted mindset no-longer has room for the magical and mysterious presence of God at the level of material reality? In this disenchanted world, God seems to us largely absent. 300 years of Scientific progress has left us feeling alone, in a lonely, and potentially hostile universe.

It’s impossible for us to return to that enchanted mindset, no-matter how much we might wish to do so. Ours is not a world filled with the magical presence of God – 300 years of scientific rationalism has unalterably changed the way we think. Yet, human beings are still capable of imagination, we still dream.

The birth of Jesus is significant, not in the biographical details of Luke’s narrative, but because it still resonates with the deeper, imaginative dreaming parts of our lives.  The birth of Jesus is God’s dream coming to rest through its incarnation into the limitations of the world of human reality. It’s significance poses us with the question:- so what do we dream  that will not rest until it becomes incarnated in us?

We feel presently, that it is difficult to allow ourselves the luxury to hope and dream the answer to that question. All around us we see the signs of the world we once trusted and relied upon – disintegrating before our eyes.

We pull back in fear, no longer born on by the optimism that technological and economic progress will take us into a better world.  We live increasingly in fear that the Environment, which for so long has been seen by us as something to be tamed and mastered. Yet, as hurricane Sandy has just shown us the environment, now increasingly delivers what seems to us, a revengeful punishment as Sandy, struck at the heart of the country’s most urban and technologically sophisticated region. We seem newly vulnerability in the face of the power of nature.

It’s a striking coincidence that the name Sandy features also in the place Sandyhook. Here, we could be anywhere in America  and so recent events have plunged not only those intimately affected, but the whole nation into a deep collective suffering, the like of which has not been known in several generations.

We all live in this uncomfortable tension between the world that we came to trust and a newly uncertain future. Yet, the message of the Incarnation is that Dreams are nevertheless made real within the context of limitation and uncertainty.

God calls us to embrace the dream that is seeking to incarnate in us. Like God’s dream incarnated in the birth of Jesus, incarnation of our dreams happens within the limitations of our imperfect human lives. Propitious circumstances are not required for the incarnation of dreams.

Dreams are incarnated in us when we connect with our passions and dedicate ourselves to living passionately, with a compassion born from the realization we are interconnected and interdependent within the ebb and flow of a universe that is responsive to our dreams.

Our dreams are the most accurate reflection of the way the divine universe really functions. Life is not a plan – fixed and finished. Life is more like a dream, always evolving and in the process of becoming. Life is fluid ebbing and flowing around and in response to events and experience.

This is how it works. When we make all the resources of our dreams, our loving, our relating, our hoping and longing, our determination and our courage and especially our suffering and our fearfulness available for living, –  the resources of life flow to meet us. At points of suffering and disillusionment the tide ebbs only to gather and return with flowing fullness towards us.

The message of the Incarnation is that God operates within the limitations of human nature and human society. So then must we. When we allow ourselves to dream and give ourselves over to the pursuit of our dream then abundance is the gift of life to us who pursue the courage to live abundantly.

It’s the first time I have really noticed that with the conclusion of Mark:6, a cycle completes. From beginning with the Jesus’ baptism by John, Mark moves very quickly into the nitty-gritty of Jesus’ ministry with a focus on how Jesus’ healing action alerts us to the power and operation of God in the world. Mark brings the cycle of Jesus’ actions to a fitting conclusion with King Herod’s political murder of John in the final section of chapter 6. However, there is more of that bit of the story next week.

If it’s not too crass an analogy,  Jesus’ tour through the Galilean countryside: calming storms, casting-out demons, healing the sick is the envy of the current presidential election bus tours being made by President Obama and Governor Romney. Oh, how they each might wish to make such an impact on the crowds as Mark reports Jesus making.

After a ‘successful’ tour  Jesus returns to his hometown where his family and former neighbors are scandalized by, what seems to them, his grandiosity. They are determined to put him back in his place so as not to have their small world disturbed. Is it their unconscious envy that causes them to react like this? Quite probably!

Yet, I think there is something else motivating them as well as their being driven by their unconscious envy. Jesus’ family and their neighbors seem encapsulated within a prison of the familiar. Jesus presents them with an experience that does not fit within the limitations of their world view.  They are open to miracles performed by prophets so long as they are happening elsewhere. They do not have the psychic space to recognize one of their own to be a prophet capable of revealing God’s power in the world. They are trapped within the limits of their own imaginations.

How are our imaginations limited? I invite us to take a deeper look at our lives. Can we notice how our attachment to what is familiar  inhibits and limits our imaginations? We live lives limited by our need for predictability and our minds seem only to recognize what they are somehow already looking for. My own experience is that it is not difficult for us to recognize this state of affairs.

However, let me invite us once more, this time, to take a broader look at our lives. Can we begin to notice those turning points of life where we  have somehow become open to something beyond the familiar?  We have  taken a risk and stepped out there! Maybe this has been a wonderful experience. Maybe it’s also been a difficult and possibly painful step to have taken. Yet, has taking this step not always resulted in an expansion of our living and imagining?

When our lives take an unexpected turn we are rewarded with an enrichment to our living. This enrichment results when we become open to the promise of there being more than we, if left to our own impoverished expectations, expectations carefully tailored by our need to stay within predictable limits, can imagine for ourselves.

We live in a world strongly influenced by something called the Human Potential Movement. Everywhere we see advertisements inviting us to realize our human potential by running with the wolves and diving with the dolphins. This approach to life tells us there are no limits to what and who we can become. The unspoken hitch is that we just need the money to do it. The picture of life extolled by the Human Potential Movement is to realize our fullest happiness and satisfaction. We are enjoined to become all that we have the potential to be. Fortunately, this is not the message of the Gospel.

God’s invitation to us is to risk opening to the process of becoming the person we were created to be. This looks dangerously similar to the invitation to realize our fullest human potential. However, God is not inviting us to throw caution to the winds and run-off to find ourselves. God invites us to step-out and to take a risk. The hallmark of this experience is facing up-to, and struggling within, the boundaries of natural limitations.

God invites us to move beyond the mere achievement of our own human potential. God’s dream for us is that we open ourselves to becoming more than we can imagine for ourselves through struggling within our experience of limitation. The Epistle and the Gospel  for today give us two quite different examples of how this works in our own lives.

The first example is an example of struggling within limitation. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks about his struggle with his ‘thorn in the flesh’, which he tells them God has given him. I am not interested in wondering what the thorn actually was. How can we know? However, the example Paul offers us is one of struggling with a problem, a difficulty, a painful aspect of life that does not go away. The cause of Paul’s pain does not go away despite his fervent prayer that God take it away. This results in Paul coming to realize that it is through his weakness, his experience of painful limitation, that God’s grace fulfills and blesses him. He is healed through his being wounded. He is given strength to persevere, i.e. put up with hardship. He experiences an expansion of imagination, an expansion of the horizons that boundary his experience, i.e. some kind of mystical experience of acceptance.  Paul’s stepping-out and risking results in both strength and ecstasy transmitted through God’s gracing his suffering.

Taken alone we might think that Paul’s example is the only approach. However, Jesus in Mark’s Gospel offers a counterbalance. The limitation here is less personal and more situational.  When he goes home Jesus is not struggling with his own experience of limitation. He is facing the limitation of his situation caused by the lack of openness of others. What does he do? He does not use his unique access to God to overwhelm the limits of imagination in his hearers, i.e. blow their minds. He does not wow them with mighty acts.

Jesus accepts that the failure of imagination among his family and their neighbors places a complete road block to his ability to be a conduit for divine action. He recognizes the hopelessness of the situation and he redirects himself, taking a completely different direction. He sends his disciples out on the road. What has been his ministry alone up until this point now becomes theirs as well. Mark tells us that they work the same miracles as Jesus had been working.

Sometimes the need is to persevere and become opened-up through our acceptance of limitation thus allowing God to do in us, and for us, and through us, that which we cannot do for, or by, ourselves.  However, there are some situations where our capacity for living is limited and the needed response here is to walk away. We cease trying to change the unchangeable  and creatively move in another direction. The experience of being blocked opens up a new channel . As we begin to move in that direction, something beyond our imagining expands and enriches our reality.

The trick of knowing how to recognize which kind of limitation we are facing is one of spiritual discernment. Spiritual discernment is a process that involves asking for, and listening to, the wise counsel of others. We then take our own perceptions alongside the perceptions of others into a place of deep prayerfulness before God. This is a place both of openness and felt risk. Openness does not come without that disconcerting sense of risk. A sense of risk is one of the indicators that we are opening. Here we encounter a God who is always dreaming us into becoming more than we can possiblly imagine for ourselves.