The popularity of the Magi story in Christian art and imagination is because it includes a journey following a star, it has the intrigue of king—ruthless enough to kill his father-in-law, several wives, and two sons—now wanting to kill a newborn child, revelation from an angel, and the decision not to go back to Herod. Look at the crèche and many others; they frequently include the three wise men or magi. The magi denote people with specialized and superior knowledge, magic, astrology, and astronomy. But the Magi are true seekers of truth of God’s presence and compassion in the world. Two characteristics that jump out magi are: 1) They embark upon a journey to discover the truth about life, even crossing religious boundaries to engage the mystery of incarnational inclusivity. 2) They are changed by their journey and live with more openness to radical inclusive love.

Incarnational Christian spirituality is about God’s wild and radical inclusive love, breaking down barriers and removing obstacles. It means God entering created life, embodying an openness to overcome human exclusive categories and obstacles. Jesus, God’s Christ, has been used exclusively to deny and beat down other peoples and their religious.

Incarnational spirituality for Christian is betrayed by exclusive engagement with other religions. Christian exclusivism asserts that there is no salvation outside of Christ,

Here are some of the lines thrown at me by Christian excluivists: Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) In the book of Acts 4:12, Peter preaches, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” This makes it perfectly clear to some there is no salvation outside the church or outside of Christ. What it breeds is Christian arrogance, exclusivism, intolerance, judgmentalism, violence, and just bad behavior towards other religious traditions.

Christian exclusivism fails to listen to the Holy Spirit and fails to understand the true nature of Christ as God’s incarnate one. I would suggest that “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:14) indicates a certain flexibility and fluidity of God’s gracious revelation in Christ. Tents are mobile, and if I am raising the tent, it may not look the same a second time—even further mobility. This image of incarnational mobility resists tendencies towards Christian dogmatism, for God’s incarnation is not about constructing boundaries but the dissolution of barriers, and that includes between the followers of Christ and people of good and sometimes great faith in other religions.

There is an example of St. Francis of Assisi. He is patron saint of nature, a lover nature. But he practiced an extraordinary reverence for life, and this, in my opinion, places him as magi.

While popes and kings of Christendom in the Middle Ages called for Christians to take up arms to rescue the Holy Land from Muslim control, to die holy deaths for Christ against Muslim infidels, there was a singular counter voice. It was Francis who followed in Christ’s footsteps as a peacemaker. The crusades were terrible wars inflicted upon Muslims. To this day, there is a vivid remembrance of the Christian crusades as a war upon Islam. There was much Islamophobia, born of fear of Muslims in the Middle Ages, as there is today in 21st century America.

But one single man, Francis, who did not believe in war and sickened by the slaughter, decided to visit the Sultan of Egypt, Malik-al-Kamil. His initial goal was to convert the sultan to Christ and even face death and martyrdom. But his attitude was significantly different from the Christian crusaders who killed Muslims rather engaging in conversation with them. The difference for Francis from the crusaders was: He neither considered Muslims as his enemy nor the enemy of Christianity. He considered them as brothers and sisters of Christ.

Francis approached the Muslim sultan as approached all peoples, whether lepers or a pope, or animals or God’s creation. Francis approached all his brothers and sisters with love and careful attentiveness. He met the sultan with the attitude that here was my brother. Francis asked himself “how would Christ engage the sultan?” He did not insult the sultan, Islam, or the prophet Muhammad. He talked why he was a Christian and listened to the sultan about his religion. We don’t the exact conversation that Francis had, but we do know that he did not insult the sultan or his religion. He would not have come out their meeting alive. He respected him as a brother, a fellow seeker of God and truth. It was probably the first time the sultan met a real follower of Christ.

Francis learned some new things about Islam. And I imagined that he joined his brother the sultan in prayer because Muslims piously pray at least five times a day. When he returned to Assisi, one Franciscan commentator mentions, he encourages Christians to pray as often as Muslims. He understood and respected how Islam created in its culture and practice, a daily awareness of God through its rhythms of prayer.

Francis of Assisi encouraged Christians to learn how to live peacefully with Muslims. He took the model of Christ as a way to engaged the sultan and Muslims—the way of non-violence and peace. Here is the first Magi that I want to share. He treats an enemy demonized by popes, cardinals, and kings.

The second Magi is the Dalai Lama. He is understood by Tibetan Buddhists to be the incarnation of the bodhisattva Avolakiteshvara or Chen-re-zig in Tibetan. He is a prophet of compassion in the 20th and early 21st century. He has publicly maintained that “kindness is my religion.”

In a conversation on compassion between himself and another Magi, the Anglican bishop, Desmond Tutu—both recipients of the Noble Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama spoke. Let me excerpt a section of a book The Wisdom about Compassion, Victor Chan:

“I myself, I’m believer, I’m Buddhist monk. So for my own improvement, I utilize as much as I can Buddhist approach. But I never touch this when I talk with others. Buddhism is my business. Not business of other people. Frankly speaking”—he stole a glance at the archbishop and declared firmly—“when you and our brothers and sisters talk about God, creator, I’m nonbeliever.” He laughed, perhaps a little self-consciously…..

Tutu replied, “Let me just say that one of the things we need to establish is that”—long pause—“God is not a Christian.” He paused again and turned to look at the Dalai Lama with a mischievous glint in his eyes….

Tutu continued, “The glory about God is that God is a mystery. God is actually quite incredible in many ways. But God allows us to misunderstand her”—at this, the audience went wild; the applause was loud and spontaneous—“but also to understand her….”

“I’ve frequently said I’m glad I’m not God,” Tutu continued. “But I’m also glad God is God. She can watch us speak, spread hatred, in her name. Apartheid was for a long time justified by the church. We do the same when we say all those awful things we say about gays and lesbians. We speak on behalf of a God of love.”

“The God that I worship is an omnipotent God,” Tutu intoned, opening his arms wide. He paused to let this sink in. Then he said, sotto voce, “He is also incredibly, totally impotent. The God that I worship is almighty, and also incredibly weak.”

“But the glory of God is actually mind-blowing. He can sit and not intervene because he has such an incredible, incredible reverence for my autonomy. He is prepared to let me go to hell. Freely. rather than compel me to go to heaven.”

“He weeps when he sees us do the things that we do to one another. But he does not send lightning bolts to destroy the ungodly. And that is fantastic. God says, ‘I can’t force you. I beg you, please for your own sake, make the right choice. I beg you.’

“When you do the right thing, God forgets about God’s divine dignity and he rushes and embraces you. ‘You came back, you came back. I love you. Oh how wonderful, you came back.’”

The dialogue between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama is a shared conversation of mutual respect between two great magi, sometimes with mischievous engagement, but profound attentiveness to each other. One of the highlights that Desmond Tutu shares is his comment , “God is not a Christian.” I would imagine that Jesus would have easily spoken the words, “Abba God is not Jewish.” Two prophets of compassion, fellow Magi—one a Buddhist non-theist and the other a Christian Trinitarian—find common religious ground in searching for the truth of non-violent compassion and forgiveness. They can even find agreement about mischievous God language of compassion and kindness.

The final Magi or so-journer I want to speak about is myself. During my college years and then in seminary, I was deeply influence by The Way of All the Earth by the theologian John Dunne.

Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call back “coming back,” coming back with new insight into one’s own culture, one’s own life, one’s own religion.

Dunne’s notion of passing over into the stories of religious figures such as the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Dorothy Day, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, Troy Perry, Rev. John McNeill, Thich Nhat Hanh and Aung San Suu Kyi and many more and then coming back to one’s one life and religion meant that if you engaged religious figures and their insights, you would come back transformed—changed by the engagement. I was transformed by the above mentioned religious figures and more. It was an inevitable that I became a religious hybrid—a magi and seeker of compassion.
Over time, I became a Buddhist Christian or rather a Bodhisattva Christian. A bodhisattva takes a vow similar to the following:

By the virtue collected through all that I have done, may the pain of every living creature be completely cleaned away. May I be the doctor and the medicine and may I be a nurse for all sick beings in the world until everyone is healed. May a rain of food and drink descend to clear away the pain of thirst and hunger, and during the aeon of famine may I myself change into food and drink. May I be a protector for those without one, and a guide to all travelers on the way; may I be a bridge, a boat and a ship for who those who wish to cross (the water). (from the Buddhist poet Shantideva)

I took a similar vow years ago. Rev. John McNeill also took the bodhisattva vow in his dedication and fight for justice for LGBT folks within the Catholic church. It is a vow to live compassionately in the world, to care for other life and to maintain a true reverence for life as taught by experience of God in numerous incarnations of compassionate action.

In my passage and engagement of the incarnational Christ, I have fallen in love with the Earth and all Life. I try through my contemplative practice to see life through the eyes of Christ as Francis did. I attempt to live the non-violent compassion of the Dalai Lama, and I tried to take the reconciliation program of Desmond Tutu to built bridges between racist supporters in South African and the oppressed peoples of color. I try to build bridges wherever possible.

What I have done in my sermon today is to show how God’s incarnational inclusivity in Christ breaks down barriers between religious communities and how people of faith can find incarnational values of our God in each community or perhaps scandalously in all religious communities dedicated to the truth of compassion, non-violence, and loving care.