We have the phrase, “in the loop.”  It is a good thing to be “in the loop,” in the middle of things, to be in the know, to be an insider instead of an outsider.  Now, in Chicago to be “in the Loop,” capital “L,” has a unique meaning.  The heart of the city has been known as “The Loop” for as long as the elevated train tracks have circled this downtown area.  That is my understanding of the derivation of the term.  The trains loop around the city center.  If you want to situate your movie in Chicago you just show the el passing overhead. 

Reginald Gibbons, a Chicago-loving poet originally from Houston but teaching at Northwestern University since 1981, will be coming out with a new collection this spring, “Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories.”  He describes the el in the Loop “shrieking/ and drumming,/ lit by explosions of sparks/ that harm no one.”  Gibbons thinks that we live in terribly ominous times but being in the Loop gives him the “profoundly good feeling of being connected with the generations.”  Here in the Loop he feels centered.  (Chicago Tribune, 12/27/09).

So, here we are – a church that is “in the Loop,” a Loop that is getting stronger, a Loop that is expanding beyond the original boundaries of the overhead tracks.  There is the South Loop down as far as Roosevelt Road, the West Loop along Halsted, the North Loop across the river . . . there really is no East Loop, I think.  That already has a name –“the lake.”  Everyone wants to be in the Loop.

There are now about 90,000 people living permanently within a fifteen-minute walk of the Chicago Temple.  It used to be up until 10 years ago that the minister and family living upstairs in the steeple were the only residents of the immediate Loop.  Not anymore.  There are 65,000 college students going to classes in and around the Loop, not counting UIC and IIT, mainly along Michigan Avenue and Congress, 20,000 of them living scattered throughout the Loop.  Hundreds of thousands of people come to the Loop every day to work, and thousands more after work for theater, opera, dining, and the symphony.  We all want to be “in the loop.” 

And that is what is happening in our gospel reading for today, such a familiar one that we often overlook what actually is going on.  The magi, the wise men, the kings . . . who were they?  “Magi” is a direct borrowing from the Greek; Martin Luther called them the “professors.”  They were the ones who were studying the skies for astrological signs of significant human events and saw a telltale star.  For them the star would have been in the west since they started somewhere in Persia (they would have been Iranians or Iraqis today, I guess), and they headed toward Jerusalem.  Bethlehem was not even on their map.

But the point is that they were outsiders, not insiders; they were Gentiles.  And all of us who are Gentiles in our generational history, which is all of us who do not have Jewish ancestry, they represent us in the Christmas story.  In our cherished tableau there are Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, a unique family to history.  There are the shepherds, the “insiders” of a sort, “locals,” but despised because of their poverty and their unpleasant work.  And then, here come the three foreigners from the east, aliens, the “other,” clearly outsiders.

But, who are the real insiders in the Christmas story?  Herod and the palace guard; the priests and the temple hierarchy.  They were in the insiders when it came to power and authority and information.  They had their spies, their network, they were “in the know,” “in the loop.”  Except when God shifts the scene from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, from the palace to a stable out behind the inn, then the insiders are left out of the loop, and the outsiders, here let us think “magi,” let us think “ourselves,” brought into the loop.

If we are Christians today it is because somewhere in the past God ushered outsiders into the center of things, welcoming their devotion.  If we are Christians today it is because the early Church, the first generation of Peter and Paul and Stephen and Dorcas and Priscilla and all the rest, carried out a mission among the Gentiles to invite them into the faith, making Christianity a worldwide religion, not just a sect within another religion.  If we are Christians today it is because people carried on the tradition . . . popes and reformers (Luther, Calvin, and Wesley) and devoted laity . . .refining, reimagining, revivifying the faith to keep it lively among people seeking meaning and purpose.  If we are Christians today it is because we, each one of us, fervently or tentatively, has said “yes” to God, “Yes, I want to be in the loop of the Christian faith.”

And it all started with the outsiders being summoned into the loop and the insiders being left out of the loop.  We ought to be grateful and humbled by it.

In Matthew’s infancy narrative we have what is similar to an overture of a Broadway musical.  We hear the main themes of the songs to come.  We already have identified the first theme of Matthew’s overture – the inclusion of Gentiles in the community of faith.  Already we would have read in Chapter 1 his genealogy of Jesus, where there are Gentile women included, Ruth being the most recognizable.  Now in the second chapter here come the magi, clearly those from beyond the boundaries of familiarity, who are welcomed at the crib of the baby Jesus.

Another theme, if we have the courage to read on in Matthew, is the foreshadowing of the Passion, Jesus’ death on the cross.  Usually, we try to skip from the birth of Jesus to his baptism, what we will celebrate next week.  But in-between comes the murderous wrath of Herod as he orders that all the children of the realm under the age of two be killed.  That is why some biblical scholars suggest that it may have taken the magi two years to get to the Holy Family instead of twelve days – Herod had all children up to the age of two killed.

And a third theme that Matthew makes clear from the start – Jesus will be a real threat to kingdoms as they now are.  If Herod thinks that the baby Jesus is a competitor now, wait until Pontius Pilate confronts him as an adult.  Herod is a kingdom builder, and Matthew starts by telling us that Jesus is born into Herod’s time.  This is about a dynasty, and it is that entrenched political power that Jesus will challenge.

Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches at Duke, writes about this in his commentary on Matthew, “Too often the political significance of Jesus’ birth, a significance that Herod understood all too well, is lost because the church, particularly the church in America, reads the birth as a confirmation of the assumed position that religion has within the larger framework of politics.  That is, the birth of Jesus is not seen as a threat to thrones and empires because religion concerns the private.”  (Here he is referring to personal morality.) . . . “The gospel of Matthew, however, knows no distinction between the public (the political) and the private.  Jesus is born into time, threatening the time of Herod and Rome.” (p.38, Brazos Press, 2006) So, to say that politics and religion do not mix is to misread the Gospel of Matthew and to misunderstand the birth of Jesus.

So, it is into that “loop” that we are drawn as Christians.  According to Matthew’s overture, it is a loop that inclusive of outsiders (thanks be to God since we are among them), a loop that cannot focus only on the manger scene but must also see the crucifixion on the horizon, the “three trees on a low sky” of T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” (to keep Jesus an infant makes our faith infantile), and a loop that is necessarily public, and thereby, political.

The magi enter the manger and bow humbly before Jesus.  They are just happy to be there.  And so are we, humbled and happy to be here. 

But here is a problem.  We do not see it in the magi; in fact, we never see them again in the gospels.  But, we must confess that we see it in ourselves: too often the outsiders who are brought in become the insiders who try to keep others out.  That is, there always is the danger that we become like Herod or the religious hierarchy, that we build our own little kingdoms, our own little worlds.  Do we have enough faith to confess that?

Father Francis Clooney, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, writes in a book review about the necessity for the Church to welcome “others.” Who are the others, those outside the loop?  “Those who have been perceived as alien, excluded, unrecognized, co-opted, colonized; including, in various ways, women, racial and ethnic minorities, people of different religions, even Christians more conservative or liberal than ourselves.” (Commonweal, 9/11/09) 

The moral of this story: we who have been brought in from the cold by God’s grace must not slam the door on others.  The good news is that we cannot do it anyway.  God’s grace is more powerful than our prohibitions.

A miracle in the making – first, what you already know.  We have a sculpture now temporarily displayed on the second floor of the Temple that depicts the crucifixion.  This work of art has a very special meaning for this congregation.  The cross is a charred wooden cross burned by the Ku Klux Klan on the campus of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, in the fall of 1963.  Ed King, the campus minister, a white man, had been leading delegations of Tougaloo students, predominantly African-Americans, down the hill on Sunday mornings to seek entrance to Galloway Methodist Church.  Each week parishioners stood on the steps of the church and turned the students away.  Ministers from this conference went to Jackson to support Ed King and the students.  They were jailed in Jackson. 

The efforts continued into 1964, and the Rev. King brought the cross to the General Conference of the Methodist Church in Pittsburgh.  Laity and clergy marched behind it around the assembly hall.  A picture of that procession appeared on the front page of the New York Times.  The delegates to that conference voted to desegregate the denomination, to be effective at the next General Conference in 1968 meeting in Dallas.

Ed King gave the cross to Jerry Forshey, one of the Chicago clergy who had been jailed in Jackson.  Jerry brought it back to Chicago, took it to a local sculptor, Jack Kearney, who covered the burned wood with a metal skin and placed a dramatically distressed, truncated, African-American Christ on it.  Jerry had the sculpture in his home for forty years until just before he died from cancer a year and a half ago when he gave it to this congregation because he trusted that we would carry on the ministry which that statue represents.  It is worth a trip to the second floor to see.  Some day I hope that we can more prominently display it on the ground floor.

But you know all of that.  Now, the miracle in the making.  The people of Galloway United Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, have asked us if they could display the cross in their church this spring while they have a public seminar on what happened in their city in 1963 and 1964.  Their guest of honor?  Ed King.  But wait, there is more.  The Mississippi Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church has requested that later in the spring they have possession of the cross to use it as the centerpiece of their worship for the duration of their conference.

Can you see?  What the Church tries to exclude out of its own fearful self-righteousness God’s grace includes.  It may take awhile, but God’s grace will prevail.  So, for all of us insiders who used to be outsiders, beware!  Where we close doors to keep people out God will blast holes in the walls to let people in.

Let us rejoice over what God has done.  God has drawn us into the loop through Jesus Christ.  Once we were no people; now we are counted among God’s people.  The Hebrew image is that we have been grafted onto the main stem; the metaphor of the disciples is that we have been adopted by God.  That should be enough for us to stay humble, to give thanks, and to share with others what we have seen and heard in the stable behind the inn.  It is good to be in the loop.  Let us go out to spread the word so that others may enter in and give thanks.  Amen.