The Hanging of the Green Card: Second Sunday of Christmastide, Year A, January 5, 2014, Matthew 2.13-15

            Get up! Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt.

            UNICEF reports that some one hundred thousand Syrian children shiver in the snows of refugee camps on the Lebanese border. They skitter across urine-soaked ice in plastic sandals and risk immolation as their families burn garbage to fend off the cold.

            Asylum seekers from Sudan and Iritrea recently bolted from their detention center in Israel's Negev desert and swarmed into Jerusalem where they besieged the Parliament building to plead for legal status. They bore signs emblazoned with Exodus 22.21, You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

           In November the United States Senate passed a bi-partisan bill that sketches a thirteen-year path to citizenship for eleven million illegal immigrants. It has sufficient support to clear the House and become law. House speaker John Boehner refuses to let it come to a vote.

            So Joseph got up and took the Child and His mother while it was still night, and left for Egypt.

            We make much at Christmas of Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem. Manger scenes grace homes and altars. We hear less about the Holy Family's Runaway Scrape to the south. Yet Stage Two of this reverse-Exodus has all the same elements: mother and child, angels and kings. Granted, the infant is now a toddler, and reasonably hot property into the bargain; instead of singing, "Go and see," the angel now hollers, "Run for your life!"; and the king brings death squads instead of offerings. Perhaps most troubling of all, the child wants to pass through a border checkpoint.

            It seems that the older he gets, the more trouble Jesus causes. The song says that the "little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes," but a hundred thousand starving kids put up quite a racket.

            Poet Malcolm Guite  frames the issue with disturbing clarity in his sonnet "Refugee", which he and Steve Bell have expanded as a song. It begins:

We think of him as safe beneath the steeple

Or cozy in a crib beside the font

But he is with a million displaced people

On the long road of weariness and want.

            Too often Christians loudly demand that society put Christ back in Christmas. Too seldom does that slogan include the difficult, risky, and expensive task of springing him from the razor-wired no man's land of hobo jungles and Hoovervilles. Before we condemn that mythical innkeeper who hung a No Vacancy sign on the Motel 6, we should ponder the Keep Out placards that protect our own turf. Once again, Malcolm Guite reminds us:

For even as we sing our final carol

The hounded child is up and on that road

Fleeing from the wrath of someone else's quarrel

Glancing behind

And shouldering their load.

Away in a Prison Cell, no Roof for His Head,

Doug

           

            

In The Flesh: First Sunday of Christmastide, Year A December 29, 2013 John 1.1-18

            "The fact that we have bodies," C. S. Lewis once quipped, "is the oldest joke there is." The miracle of Christmas is that God gets in on the joke.

            "In the beginning was the Word." John gets off to a great start! Any first-century Jew would recognize the riff on Genesis 1.1 and the idea of a do-over for Adam's fall. Even Greek philosophers could relate to the "word," the ultimate truth behind all visible creation, into which the wisdom-seeker desired to disappear.

            "And the Word became flesh." That sentence screeches like a phonograph needle scratched across the wax grooves of this majestic philosophical symphony.

            This idea jars the Jew and grosses out the Greek! The faithful Israelite could conceive a God manifested among men in a gold-guilt ark, safely ensconced behind purple curtains embroidered with seraphic guards. God in a skin-box draped in homespun cloth that any menstruating woman could touch at will - that was a bit much. Plotinus, a couple of centuries or so after Jesus, summed up the Greek idea when he described the search for wisdom as "the flight of the alone into the alone." The idea of that it really involved the plunge of the Together into the mass of humanity would have had Plato reaching for the Pepto-Bismol.

            God in a body, a body that for thirty-three years delivered the punch line to its own joke as it doubtless did perfectly normal things at perfectly awful times; a body whose DNA may have overdone the ears or underdone the hairline; a body bathed at birth in his mother's blood and soaked at death in his own. And this Jesus Christ in this body, John says, has "explained" in inexplicable Almighty.

            Malcolm Guite, in the poem "Descent," from his book Sounding the Seasons, has captured the contrast between the decencies of theology and philosophy on the one hand, and the intolerable grace of the Incarnation:

They sought to soar into the skies

Those classic gods of high renown

For lofty pride aspires to rise

But you came down.

You dropped down from the mountains sheer

Forsook the eagle for the dove

The other Gods demanded fear

But you gave love

Where chiselled marble seemed to freeze

Their abstract and perfected form

Compassion brought you to your knees

Your blood was warm

They called for blood in sacrifice

Their victims on an altar bled

When no one else could pay the price

You died instead

They towered above our mortal plain,

Dismissed this restless flesh with scorn,

Aloof from birth and death and pain,

But you were born.

Born to these burdens, borne by all

Born with us all ‘astride the grave’

Weak, to be with us when we fall,

And strong to save.

No Joking!

Doug

           

            

"And" is Better: Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A, December 22, 2013, Matthew 1.18-25

            You've probably seen the TV bits for the Ford Focus. The ad campaign touts the car as having great handling along with great gas mileage, and riffs on the contrast between "both/and" on the one hand and "either/or" on the other. Actors compare having only one of the two features to being either large or in charge, using either nuts or bolts, and being either loud or clear.

            Mary's pregnancy landed Joseph in what seemed a stark either/or dilemma. Matthew writes that being a righteous man, the bewildered fiance sought to terminate the marriage on the down-low. The New International Version says that he did this "because" he was a righteous man. But the original language allows for a different translation: "in spite of being a righteous man."

            The "righteous" action, according to Joseph's society and theology, was open exposure and public disgrace. Religion read it as the only way to avoid God's displeasure (Dt 22.23-24) and Roman custom viewed it as the only way to keep other women in line. And Joseph was a righteous man, a straight-shooter, a by-the-book kind of guy. At the same time, it appears he held a deep desire to offer what help he could to the woman he had sworn to care for. It seemed he had to be righteous or merciful.

            Then an angel shows up and tells him he can do both/and instead of either/or. God, as it turns out, has a way of reading Isaiah 7.14 that no one ever anticipated. Mary can be both pregnant and pure, so Joseph can be both righteous and redemptive. The angel lays down a new hermeneutic: When in doubt, relationships trump rules.

            Joseph's son becomes the ultimate practitioner of this method. Yes, the law says to stone an adulteress; it also says a lot of other things to those holding the stones (Jo 8.7). Yes, the law says don't murder; restored relationships provide the preventative for that sin (Mt 5.21-24). Yes, the law says to love your neighbor; it also says you make neighbors by loving people (Lk 10.25-37).

            Verse twenty says that all of this happened when Joseph "had considered this." The Message translation is very good here: "While he ways trying to figure a way out." Joseph felt himself boxed in, locked down, shut up to the unacceptable alternatives of either being kind to Mary or true to the Bible, of either obeying the righteousness of his religion or seeking to make peace with the woman he loved. Then God says to him, "Joseph, you don't have to choose." Psalm 85.10 promises us that when God's kingdom comes, lovingkindness and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. The good news, the gospel, for us today is that we can be both loving and true, both righteous and peacemakers.

            At this Advent season we await with joy the coming of a Christ whose arrival opens more doors than it closes, builds more bridges than moats, and embraces more than it excludes. Ponder your relationships from God's both/and perspective and watch your dreams come true.

Inclusively,

Doug

The Patron Saint of Disappointment: Third Sunday of Advent, Year A, December 15, 2013, Matthew 11.2-11

            John the Baptist reigns as the official patron saint of, among other things, baptism, converts, hailstorms, highways and – for reasons that escape me – birds. But I want to nominate Old Locust Breath for another honor: Patron saint of the disappointed.

            While Jesus roamed around Galilee preaching peace, Herod had jugged John and now this ersatz Elijah sat in his cell strumming “Folsom Prison Blues” and wondering when the Messiah would cut loose with a little wrath-of-God kind of stuff, starting with a jail break. He’d read his Old Testament and majored in Malachi and knew exactly the job description of a messiah.

            But Jesus reads him a different resume: bottom rail on top, outsiders getting in, and a blessing on anyone who outlasts despair until faith makes sense.

            Far from being offended, Jesus seems pretty sure John has the right stuff. This, he assures the crowd, is no spin-doctor bending to the political breeze. This is no dressmaker’s dummy whose dolled-up theology can’t take the wear and tear of belief’s hard toil. Honest doubt is the callouses on the hands of a hard working faith. The prayer of protest is the weathered skin of a laborer’s heart.

            “John,” writes Thomas Long, “represents, of course, all who are disappointed in Jesus because he fails to meet their expectations.”

            At Advent we wait for Christ. Part of the waiting is the honest admission that there remains something to wait for: Syrian refugees die in their hundreds; the earth runs a fever, sickened to cool the overheated lust for wealth; a Christian pastor faces torture in Tehran while the powerful negotiate economics and oil.

In his mighty Advent song “Keening for the Dawn,” poet Steve Bell complains to the still-coming Christ, “Hardened shards of broken bread/Small consolations in your stead/Soured wine a tonic for the pain./Dutifully we take our fill/Still we long to see your face again.”

            May Jesus’ commendation of John’s example inspire us to howl our spiritual hunger during Advent. We may, like John, get a lot of things wrong, expect actions contrary to Our Lord’s true character or, at least, not the first item on the divine agenda. We may misunderstand our own role in the rolling flood of justice. But Jesus will appreciate the oaken refusal to buy the easy explanations, the coarse-fibred faith that stands up to the desert drought of doubt.

            I know Baptists don’t pray to saints, but we share a last name with John, and if I could get away with offering one up to him, it would run along these lines:

O glorious Saint John the Baptist, greatest prophet among those born of woman, you dared to ask Our Lord just exactly what he thought he was doing. Obtain for us of thy Lord the grace to be wholly dissatisfied with easy answers, to stiffen our spiritual spines to the bewildering winds of the Spirit who blows where He will, and to dress warmly rather than fashionably for the blue norther that blows the Kingdom in.

Disappointedly,

Doug