We are in between time right now at the International Terminal in San Francisco International Airport.  The schedule of eating, sleeping, exercise, work and thought that we spend so much of our life maintaining has been suspended.  The extraordinary interruption of distance requires a disruption of time too.

    Micah keeps singing, “South Africa, South Africa… not north, not south, not east Africa…  We’re going to South Africa.”  Melia keeps sliding up and down in her leather airport chair, looking suspiciously like she couldn’t even make a twenty minute flight as I’m preparing to go around the world.  Micah is writing and keeps asking me to spell words.  It’s a shame, the misspellings might be the best part (for both of us) I tell him.

    We are pilgrims, following the star of Epiphany.  I haven’t quite explained it quite in these terms to others.  They would have a difficult time knowing what to make of this journey.  It certainly isn’t work; it’s not a vacation.  Because my calling as a priest is hard for them to understand, the work that I accomplish on this journey is too.  The whole center of this experience is a hope that God will somehow be revealed, that we as a family will have a kind of epiphany ourselves, that the world will appear new to us through the people we meet and the places we see.

    Timkat is the Coptic Epiphany.  I want to know how much of my faith comes from an experience of the living Christ and how much can in some simple and recognizable way be attributed to the forms and history and culture of my European heritage.  I want to be surprised by Christians living parallel to me, who have different practices than the ones I observe, whose church history I do not share.  I hope that Coptic liturgies and art and legend will make my faith more lively and real.  I want to inhabit Christianity in a new way; because it is so beautiful I want to see this from a different angle of vision.  I hope so much that our children will help me to see the world in a new way too.  What the notice can give me a transformed vision if I can only pay attention to it.

    There is so much conflict among Anglicans now in Africa and America, among people who support and care for (and are) gay people, and others who believe that the faith demands their exclusion.  Perhaps they think that loyalty to the Bible demands intolerance.  There is so much more involved here: the role of democratic institutions in church, the awful legacy of colonialism, responses to modernization, etc.  I also want to know the role of Protestant missionaries to Africa in this whole conflict.

    Perhaps the most important reason that we are goingis the one that is most difficult to explain.  Despite poverty, AIDS, political repression, war, colonialism, other disease, Heidi and I feel a kind of magic in Africa.  The spirit of Africa draws us there.  Our memories of life when we were discovering what kind of adults we were going to be may give us a certain, unusual picture of Africa.  The bright colors, the music, dance, art and culture of African people, the magnificent landscapes, both the sense of antiquity and newness draw us there as if it were already a kind of home.

    Finally, I hope that this journey helps me to understand where I am from.  Perhaps it will expose my California (ending sentences with a preposition) way of looking at the world and I can become more home here.

    We arrived at the airport four hours early.  This gave us plenty of time to play freeze tag in the totally empty waiting area – this place reminds me of that zombie movie I preached about two years ago at Epiphany.  The sermon was called “The Anti-Epiphany” mentioning the movie “28 Days Later.”  The terminal is ultra-modern, so completely expressing the modern sense that in the greater scheme of the universe’s orderliness humans are small beans, that not having any people here almost perfectly makes its point.  Puppy-guarding means the tagger hovers around too close to his previous victims.  Melia keeps accusing Micah of Puffy guarding.  All this happens as the sweet recorded voice on the Public Announcement system keeps repeating that we are at “Threat Level Orange” according to the homeland security office and that we should not leave our baggage unattended, etc.  It all seems so comically incongruous.  We must look pretty silly on the closed circuit TV cameras.