Candlemas 2022

 

To Be The Light - Candlemas 2022- Luke 2: 22-40

 

It began forty days after the baby was born: born to be light. Or, maybe it began when the angel first told Mary of her special calling. Or, during the reign of King David. Or, when our people were slaves in Egypt. Or, when our ancestor Abraham set out from his home town of Ur on the Chaldes to become the father of more than all the stars in the heavens and all the grains of sand on the seashore. To be a blessing to all the peoples of God’s creation. Or, when God first said, “Let there be light.”

 

Mary and Joseph traveled to Jerusalem to observe the Purification of Mary the Mother of God, and to dedicate their first son to God forty days after his birth. To offer the appointed sacrifice at the Temple to redeem the child. They did so to remind themselves that their child belongs to God. It was a reminder that God has a genuine claim on the best we have to offer.

 

The required sacrifice was a lamb, but those too poor to buy a lamb could offer a lesser sacrifice of the two birds. The crowds in the Temple precincts would know who they were: bird people were poor people. They hoped they could get in and get out quickly.

 

They were not alone. Many people were out of work. The land was occupied by Rome. Taxes were high. The government unstable. There was resistance throughout the land. Common folk had trouble making ends meet. The lines in front of the pigeon sellers were very long.

 

Mary and Joseph were faithful to the custom of the forty days. The number of days and nights of the flood. The number of years his people had wandered in the wilderness becoming God’s people escaping from Egypt. The number of days this child would walk in the wilderness tempted by the devil. The offering of these birds would be a memorial to all the first-born males ordered killed by Pharaoh in that first Holocaust which only Moses survived. The custom binds them to their people and their history.

 

They had come to make a sacrifice and a commitment. Which are really the same thing.

Every commitment comes with a cost. Little did they know the offering they were making. Not only to God, but for the whole world. Nor were they prepared for the old man.

 

Simeon had been praying and waiting. God had promised he would see the light of the world before he died. Simeon was waiting to be released. Waiting for his people to be released. Waiting to see what we all hope to see but are too busy to remember to look for: a glimpse of God’s future. A glimpse of the truth.

 

Simeon, we can imagine, had grown weary. Weary of the occupation. Weary of failed policies and failed programs. Weary of the failure of religious and political leaders. Just weary of being weary. Everything and everyone who had promised life only yielded weariness and death. So, he was waiting to die. Waiting to see if God really keeps promises.

 

Simeon takes the child out of Mary’s arms. Imagine that! Who is he, she must wonder? What is he doing with my child? Why doesn’t Joseph stop him? Suddenly, Simeon becomes a poet for the ages: announcing for all who care to listen that this is not her child, but God’s very own anointed. That this child was born to be light. Light for all peoples. Everywhere and throughout all time. Simeon sees the light.

 

Can you see it, he cries out? Here is the light which will withstand all darkness, any darkness. Even death upon a Roman cross. Then quietly he hands the child back to his mother, and he is gone. Released. God’s promise fulfilled. Simeon returns to God as the mother and father look on. Joseph with the birds in his hands. Mary with the child born to be a light. All the other mothers and fathers looking on. Do we see the light?

 

Once upon a time we lived next door to an old man: Em Tramposch. He had devoted his life to propagating life with his hands: he was a nurseryman. From his fingers new life seemingly would spring forth every day. He had a deep sense of where that life comes from. You could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice, but most of all in his hands.

 

I would spend days and nights in his greenhouse, watching his hands work: cutting, dipping, planting the cuttings, listening to what he had to say about life, the economy, politics and … Patsy Kline. He was always listening to Patsy Kline.

 

Em had cancer. Some days were better than others, some not so good at all, but nearly every day he was in the greenhouse propagating life, until one summer he became bed ridden. His wife Jane found ways with her camcorder to let him see what was happening down in the greenhouse. Each day he watched and waited. That August, our daughter Cerny was born. Her first day out of the house, we wheeled her in the pram right into the living room, right up to the side of Em’s hospital bed.

 

When he saw Cerny, without a word, Em pulled together what little strength he had left, and held his arms up in the air. He wanted to hold her. I put her in his arms, and he held her by his side. For ten or fifteen minutes she slept cradled in his arms, Jane sitting beside him. He watched. He looked at the baby. It was a picture of life coming in and life going out. But mostly it was a vision of life and light. For that period of time, there we were in the Jerusalem Temple. Simeon was holding our baby. As it turned out, Em, like Simeon before him, was released. He died a few days later.

 

Like Mary and Joseph, we come to remember our past and God’s saving actions. To commit our lives to God, and like Simeon and Em, to catch a glimpse of the light so we can tell others what we have seen. So that we can feel the release. So that like the boy who was born to be a light, we too can become a light for others. So that we can be propagators of light and life for the whole world.

 

We have only this time to see The Light and live accordingly: people of light and life. Amen.

All of Life is a Homecoming: Part Two Epiphany 4C 2022

 

Good News, Bad News, Good News: Part Two

 My formative Bible teacher in college was a hometown boy from Baltimore, Professor John Gettier. He would frequently remind us that all scripture is a mixture of History, Literature and Theology – which is particularly important to remember when reading the peculiar genre of literature we call “gospel.” Luke has story to tell about Jesus, as do Matthew, Mark and John.

Luke 4:14-32 as literature can be seen as the entire “gospel in miniature,” a sort of summary of the whole story that follows. It is bracketed by announcements that Jesus is teaching in towns and synagogues, and that people are “astonished” at his teaching.[i] Between these twin announcements Jesus proclaims the Good News that, as the prophet Isaiah proclaimed, God promises a Jubilee Year of release from debts and oppression, and that this promise, this hope, is fulfilled “in your hearing.” This is followed by what is heard as Bad News – that the Day of the Lord’s favor may come to those outside Israel before coming to Israel, seemingly enraging the hometown crowd to drive Jesus out of the synagogue, out of the town, and they attempt to toss Jesus over a cliff. And yet, in the unexpected way in which the God of Israel often operates, the Good News is that Jesus escapes unharmed, and once again sets off to another town, Capernaum, where people are astonished at his teaching.

It seems strange that Jesus appears to intentionally rile up the crowd with his interpretation of the Elijah and Elisha sagas – whose prophetic activities did begin among Gentiles, and were often unappreciated by the respective kings under which they served their prophetic lives. Yet, most of their vocations were served in Israel as critics of those in power.

It seems that Luke wants us to see, in this otherwise perplexing episode that swings from astonishment to rage for reasons that only those familiar with the sort of “inside baseball” knowledge that a Jewish audience would understand. They know that God’s “faithfulness always includes God’s freedom to make good on God’s promises in unexpected – and even unwanted – ways.”[ii] That is, from a literary and theological perspective, in this one story, Luke foreshadows the rest of the Jesus saga, from Astonishment to Resistance to Resurrection in which, we often forget, God, not Jesus, is the main character. That would appear to be the very point Jesus himself is always trying to make.

That is, just as the hometown crowd cannot get rid of Jesus, crucifixion will also fail to have the last word. As Paul might say, the Principalities and Powers resident in Jerusalem and Rome are ultimately no match for the likes of Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah and Jesus. This is always Good News!

Yet, we need to acknowledge that more typical Christian interpretations of this, and stories like it scattered throughout the four gospels, fail to see God as the central character, and that Luke ends the episode on the note of Good News that Jesus Lives. This has caused much mischief and tragedy as interpreters often see this as a story of Jewish rejection of Jesus and Christianity, which in turn has led to and fueled Christian anti-Semitism right up to the present day.

This week The International Holocaust Remembrance Day was observed, January 27^th, the day in 1945 the Auschwitz Concentration and Death Camp was liberated by allied troops. During this week there was yet another synagogue attack in Colleyville, Texas; swastikas were graffitied all over Union Station; Robert Kennedy, Jr. likened public health measures for the current pandemic as more prohibitive than Nazi restrictions during the Holocaust; a woman in New York City made anti-Semitic slurs and spit on several 8-year-old Jewish Children; Arthur Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, a true Holocaust tale, was banned in a Tennessee school district; we were reminded that in the United States, Europe and elsewhere around the world anti-Semitic attacks and activities are on the rise. It was only four years ago that Unite the Right protesters were carrying torches and chanting the Nazi “Blood and Soil” slogan along with “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, VA.

To interpret Luke chapter four to justify such anti-Semitism is to ignore the core elements of the story as Luke tells it. Jesus is Jewish as is everyone in his hometown synagogue. It was his “custom” to publicly identify himself as Jewish, observing all Jewish customs and rituals. Jesus was never a Christian. Christianity did not even exist yet, so the townspeople are not rejecting Christianity. Jesus, like the townspeople, had preserved and cherished the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus, like the townspeople, holds onto the hope for the Year of the Lord’s favor, a year of redemption and release from the brutality of Rome. They are astonished that Jesus speaks as one with authority even though he is simply one of them, the son of a tradesman in their town. There is true pride in who this hometown boy has become. This is a family matter, not an interfaith story.

Too often Gentile Christians define ourselves by what Richard Swanson calls our “over-against-ness” – that somehow, we are utterly unlike any other ethnic, cultural or religious group on God’s green earth.[iii] We often defend our “over-against-ness” by setting up straw-figures, in this case the Jewish people, and distort stories like this one which after two weeks can begin to sound anti-Semitic. We need to admit that such anti-Semitism was preached in the very earliest days of the Church and has been right down to this very day. And, we need to repent of such distortions of the story of Jesus the Jew. Jesus, who teaches all who will listen that the Love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.[iv] That perfect Love casts out fear, fear which so often turns to hate.[v]

Several days a week, I walk the grounds of the Shrine of Saint Anthony, a Franciscan Friary. There is a memorial to Saint Maximillian Kolbe, a Catholic priest who died voluntarily in a Nazi death camp, taking the place of another prisoner. On the outer wall of the Kolbe memorial it says, “Hate Destroys, Love Alone Creates.”[vi]

In these challenging times in which we live, we need to remember this truth, and live this truth, calling out distortions of the Gospel whenever we encounter them. Our very survival depends on the careful reading and handling of our sacred texts. Amen.

 

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[i] Luke 4:14-15, 31-32

[ii] Sharon Ringe, Luke (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville:1995) p.70-71

[iii] Richard Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Luke, (Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, OH: 2006) p.95

[iv] Romans 5:5

[v] 1 John 4:18

[vi] Martin Luther King, Jr: “By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature love creates and builds up.”

All of Life is a Homecoming: Part One Epiphany 3C

All of Life is a Homecoming: Part One

“…I suppose it is not so easy to go home,

and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.” -  Albert Camus

 

Jesus returns home. After being baptized by John in the River Jordan, and 40 days being tested in the wilderness, he returns to Nazareth in the region of Galilee, and we are told that the power of the Spirit is resting upon him.  [Luke 4:14-30] This is the same Spirit-Breath that was brooding over the face of the waters in creation, and more recently descended upon him, bodily, “like a dove” – perhaps recalling the Dove of Peace returning to the Ark after the Great Flood had reset and restored a world of persons who had become self-centered back into a community of persons committed to the Common Good and Welfare of all. Once God’s Spirit-Breath had landed, a voice declares, “This is my Beloved Son; I am well pleased with him.”

 

At General Convention 2000, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold asked us to “Notice that at that shattering moment, no task is assigned, no agenda given, no test prescribed. Jesus is simply loved by God wildly and with divine abandon. Nothing … is asked for or required of Jesus other than to accept God’s delight and pleasure at his very being.”[i] 

 

Filled with this Spirit of divine affection and delight, news about Jesus began to spread like wildfire throughout the towns and villages, for he was teaching in synagogues, literally “gathering places,” and the people were giving him much honor. One Sabbath Day of Rest in the village where he grew up, Jesus, as was his tradition, entered the gathering place and stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He rolled through the scroll until he came to these words:

 

“The Spirit of the Creator has come to rest on me. He has chosen me to tell the good story to the ones who are poor. He has sent me to mend broken hearts, tell prisoners they have been set free, to make the blind see again, and to lift up the ones who have been pushed down – and to make it known that the Creator’s time of Jubilee, of Setting Free, has come at last.”[ii]

 

He rolls up the scroll and sits down. The eyes of the hometown crowd are riveted on him. Jesus says, “Today, these words you have heard have found their full meaning. They are fulfilled in your hearing.”

 

Jubilee is an ancient promise described in Leviticus chapter 25 as a full Reset and Rebalancing for Israel – every seven years the clans, tribes and all families return to the original balance and interconnectedness of the community. They do this by removing changes that have altered the balance, especially indebtedness. All debts are canceled, and all lands return to the original clan owners. Jubilee signals a return to God’s Wilderness Manna Economy of daily bread – a world in which everyone gets enough, no one gets too much, and if you try to hoard the manna, it spoils – it spoils the manna, but even more so it spoils life throughout the community.  It destroys the Common Good. Those present would recognize and remember that the text Jesus selects to read rings this note of Jubilee, and that this old practice promises and offers the hope of the restoration and recovery of all that has been lost.[iii]

 

And much had been lost. If it wasn’t lost ancestral lands to rapacious urban, elite land owners, there was the indebtedness resulting from the taxation and loss of resources to fuel the Empire of Caesar’s Rome. Living in Israel had become the equivalent of returning to Pharaoh’s Egypt, or Exile in Babylon. Now this son of the carpenter, Jesus, is saying the time for Jubilee is near. The time to heal the world, to turn the world right-side-up is approaching.

 

If this was Good News that Sabbath Day in Jesus’s hometown, most of us would likely agree that this would be Good News today. Amidst economic instability, a widening of the gap between haves and have-nots, threats of war, violence at home and abroad, threats to democracies around the world, and a seemingly never-ending global pandemic, these words of restoration and recovery of all that has been lost, and a return to a world committed to the Common Good and Welfare of all, ought to sound as hopeful today as they did in Nazareth.

 

This is just Part One of this story. Next Sunday we hear the surprising conclusion. In the meantime, we would do well to remember that like Jesus, we are loved by God wildly and with divine abandon, that we are to accept God’s invitation to Jubilee and a restoration of our commitments to the Common Good and the Welfare of all – all people, all creatures, and the Earth itself! Amen.

 

 

 

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[i] Griswold, Frank T., Going Home, (Cowley Publications: Cambridge, MA, 2000) p. 15

[ii] Isaiah 61, First Nation’s Version of the New Testament, (Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove: 2021) p. 111

[iii] Swanson, Richard, Provoking the Gospel of Luke, (The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, 2006) p.93,95

It's Not About the Wine Epiphany 2C

 

Epiphany 2C 2022 - John 2: 1-11

It’s Not About the Wine

It was Kurt Vonnegut in a Palm Sunday Sermon years ago who observed, “Leave it to people to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.”

 

This is true of the wedding at Cana in Galilee. As Father Guido Sarducci observed, it should be called the wedding reception at Cana. Wedding receptions in ancient Israel could carry on for as much as a week-long celebration.

 

Jesus’s mother nudges him, “They have no wine.” Jesus essentially says, “So, what? This does not concern us. Besides, it’s not time” Mary then tells the servants, “Just do whatever he tells you.” They do, and the results are off the charts!

 

A lot of wine can be consumed at a week-long party. This suggests that the family is probably pretty well off. And they have six large, expensive stone water jars holding 20 to 30 gallons each. Unlike healing and feeding people, this is less about addressing a need. It’s more of a luxury. We’re talking roughly 180 gallons of wine. Good wine at that!

 

The chief steward thinks the bridegroom arranged this, saying, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This is pretty funny, making this more in the vein of Henny Youngman than say Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr! The bridegroom thinks he just hit the lottery! What is the steward talking about? This is the first moment, writes John, that Jesus has done anything to reveal just who he is. And he does this?  

 

Of course he does. After all, he is The One everyone has been waiting for. He is the bridegroom who comes at an unexpected hour. He’s The One who will eventually tell us that drinking wine makes us one of his disciples for ever and ever. That is, the salvation God gives us in Christ is more than just redemption and healing, but is also meant to be about enjoying the fullness of life and the extravagant Love of God! God in Christ who says, “I come that you may have life and have it abundantly!” [John 10: 10]

 

This is surprising good news: God saves the best for last! You’ve heard Elijah. You’ve heard Isaiah. You have been down to the river with John. But our God has saved the best for last! The party is his. He’s the bridegroom. It’s our time to be wedded to God. No one is excluded from this party. And there is enough of everything for everyone!!

 

There have been those who look at the contemporary life of the church and question whether or not we really understand this and other gospel stories of extravagance. Soren Kierkegaard Once wrote, “Whereas Jesus turned water into wine, the church has managed to do something even more remarkable; it has turned wine back into water.” That’s pretty funny for Kierkegaard, who was not known for his humor.

 

The point being: Jesus comes to make all things new, and issues a radical call to change one’s life and get about the business of sharing this new extravagant, abundant, life of God’s Faith, Hope and Charity with the whole world, everyone, with “all!” The Church, on the other hand,  often behaves as if Christianity is about being comfortable and happy with the way things are and have been. This is a problem.

 

 

A problem that prompted C.S. Lewis to say, “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want religion to make you really feel comfortable, I certainly do not recommend Christianity.” Lewis wants us to remember that Jesus, the night before he dies, calls us to a deeper understanding of the good news when he says, “Pick up your cross and follow me… You will do the things I do, and greater things than these you will do.” [John 14:12]

 

The Gospel, the Good News, is about transformation and service, both of which take hard work. Christians are meant to be those people who sustain the virtue of Hope in a world that rarely provides much evidence that such Hope is justified.

 

This is why at Noonday Prayer, Monday thru Friday, we are reading The Book of Hope, in which Jane Goodall says this about Hope: "Hope is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so."[1]

 

To remind me what this hope, this future, and this hard work looks like, I have kept the following text pasted in the back of my Book of Common Prayer as a constant reminder:

 

Les Arbres dans la Mer by Father Didier Rimaud, SJ

Look, the virgin has a child, a man from God, Heaven is with us,

mankind is not alone any longer. If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, beggars become kings, the powerful made low, the treasures that we share.

 

Look, the water changes into wine, the wine becomes blood, the bread multiplies,

the people aren’t starving any more. If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, the desert full of flowers, harvests in winter, granaries overflow.

 

Look, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, the people aren’t ill any longer.

If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, executioners without work,

handcuffs rusty, prisons useless.

 

Look, the cross is empty and bare, your tombs have fallen and man stands. The people are not afraid any longer. If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, guns buried, arms put away, mountains dance.

 

This is what Christianity is meant to look like. Our Hope is about what we desire to happen; that which we must be prepared to work hard at to make it so. It’s not about 180 gallons of good wine – it is about the extravagance of God’s Faith, Hope and Love, in Christ offered to all. Everyone. Now. Forever. And ever! Amen!  

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[1] Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams, The Book of Hope, Celadon Books, 2021: p.8.

Feast of Our Lord's Baptism C 2022

 

Feast of the Baptism C 2022

Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, Have Mercy on Us, Your Beloved.

 

Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior.

 

Jesus prayed after he was baptized by John. Today we pray to keep our baptismal covenant, and to become confessors of his name. Names, really. Throughout the New Testament Jesus accrues so many names. No doubt because whoever really meets Jesus has one’s own experience of what that is like. And of course, there were those who had ideas about him before he really comes onto the scene down by the River Jordan. As did John.

 

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." Luke 3:15-17

 

People were looking for a Messiah, a Christos, whatever they might think that means: a judge, a warrior, a king, all of whom would restore Israel and free them from being an occupied backwater colony of the Roman Empire. Or, perhaps a prophetic figure like John who reminds them of earlier prophets in their history, like Elijah and Elisha. John, on the other hand, suggests a powerful almost Satanic figure – a winnowing fork in hand, separating us out and burning the “chaff” with unquenchable fire. Instead, he gets a gardener and a shepherd who tends to the lost, the lonely, the blind and the lame – a new kind of Messiah who teaches us to love everyone, even our enemies. How will we get Rome off our backs by loving them, they must be thinking?

 

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." Luke 3: 21-22

 

The first thing one might notice is that for such a momentous moment in the overall narrative, the description is rather brief. But be not deceived. For instance, notice that this is one of the few occasions when all three main characters are on stage at once: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Whatever the people and John might have been expecting, surely it was not this! YHWH, the God of creation, whose spirit-breath blew across the chaotic waters of creation speaks, sends the spirit-breath again, and declares this country boy from Nazareth to be God’s Beloved Son. This would have been an awful lot to take in. Let alone have any idea just what that means.

 

Rather than someone who might cast Romans and any other bad actors into unquenchable fire, we hear about nothing but Love, with a capital “L”. It’s embedded in the Father’s very name for his Son: Be-loved. You are my Beloved. I am well pleased with you.

 

This is where our baptism and the covenant we pray to keep comes in. As our Prayer Book states, “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body, the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluable.”  (BCP 298)

 

Like the story of Christ’s baptism, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all present as we are incorporated into Christ’s Body.

 

I have long imagined that seraphim and cherubim are also present, singing in our ears, “You are God’s Beloved! God is well pleased with you!” over and over again. It is the first thing we hear as the Holy Spirit and water incorporate us into the Body of Christ – that is, we hear what Christ heard that day in the River Jordan.

 

As we grow up, as we navigate good times and bad times, joyful moments and challenging moments, it is easy for us to forget what God said to us: You are my Beloved; I am well pleased with you! We are the Body of Christ as we emerge from the waters of Baptism. We are all God’s Sons and Daughters. We are Sisters and Brothers in Christ. We are God’s Beloved.

 

Whatever else Luke, Matthew, Mark and John might mean as they narrate the story of Christ’s baptism by John, we need only remember this: I am God’s Beloved; God is well pleased with me! Say it when you wake up in the morning. Say it when you go to bed.

 

We must do whatever it takes to remember and accept our Belovedness. It is who we are. It is who we are meant to be, created in the image of a Loving and Compassionate God.

 

Oh yes, down by the river, whenever he saw Jesus walking by, John would turn to anyone who would listen and describe Jesus in these words, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

 

Which is why I usually begin every day with the words,

 

Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, Have Mercy on Us, Your Beloved.

 

For we are God’s Beloved. God is well pleased with us.

 

Amen.

Whose Voice Do We Hear? Christmas 2C

 

Whose Voice Do We Hear?

Christmas 2C  -  Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Amidst all the packages, wrappings, ribbons, get togethers, cookies and whatever is left of the puddings and roast beast, Matthew’s story of the first Christmas turns suddenly dark and foreboding. Above all the comings and goings of Magi and shepherds, Matthew, and only Matthew, calls us to pause in our celebrations and listen to a voice wailing and weeping throughout the ages. There is an urgency in how Matthew tells the tale that calls the listener to stop and listen. And yet, we can see that something is missing. Part of the story has been left out that means to connect this infant Jesus to the long history of his people, Israel.

 

In a dream, Joseph is warned that the infant Mary named Jesus, “He who saves,” is in grave danger. Herod is going to seek out the child to destroy him whom the Magi said is born to be King of the Jews, the very title Herod carries on behalf of Caesar.  Joseph is to take his family to Egypt, where the story of Israel began. Egypt, where Pharaoh ordered the murder of all male Hebrew babies. Egypt, where Moses was the only survivor of that first genocide to save God’s people.  We note the irony that Egypt is now seen as a safe haven as Jesus and his family become refugees, immigrants, seeking asylum from the violence and danger about to take place in their home town of Bethlehem.

 

It is no coincidence that the stories of Moses and Jesus have sustained the hope of oppressed peoples throughout the centuries: the hope that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus will act once again on behalf of endangered persons. Suddenly, however, we go directly from the Holy Family fleeing danger to receiving a new message to leave Egypt and return home. An angel of the Lord issues the “all-clear” signal. It ought to concern us when some invisible-hand edits the story – in this case to remove the part we most need to hear: the story of the danger they are fleeing in the first place:

 

“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled,

because they are no more.”

 

Rachel is the second wife of Jacob, named Israel by YHWH. She bears two of Jacob’s sons: Joseph, who plays a key role in helping Jacob and all his children and tribes to seek refuge in Egypt from a long drought and famine. They arrive as refugees and remain as slaves. And Benjamin, whose tribe is later carried off to Babylon as servants and slaves after the Assyrians destroy the First Jerusalem Temple. Jeremiah imagines Rachel as the classic mother who mourns and intercedes for her children, praying for an end to her descendants’ sufferings and exiles.

 

Matthew, then, reimagines Rachel wailing in loud lamentation for all infant descendants mercilessly and needlessly slaughtered by Herod’s Roman Legions in Bethlehem to keep the infant Jesus from usurping his job as King of the Jews. Rachel continues to wail in loud lamentation for all persons throughout history right up to our own time who suffer similar genocidal violence and brutality of history’s endless succession of “Herods” who are desperate to preserve their personal stranglehold on power: the Hitlers, Stalins, Khemer Rouge, and all who continue to brutalize the “others” who, in their paranoic rage, they believe threaten them.

 

Matthew does not shy away from telling the whole story, as does our lectionary version of the story this Second Sunday after Christmas. Matthew relates this tale to both connect the baby Jesus to the long and storied history of his ancestors, and to foreshadow the rest of the story in his version of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

 

It seems that Matthew means for us not only to hear Rachel’s weeping, but to stop whatever we are doing and join in her lament – to weep for all refugee and asylum seekers who today, at this very moment are in mortal danger, like Joseph and Benjamin and Jesus before them, and for all those who are “no more.”

 

As Joseph, Mary and the baby return, finding Bethlehem to still be dangerous, they resettle in Nazareth in Galilee. It is easy to imagine that as Jesus grows up, he will at some point ask why he never meets his cousins and aunts and uncles in Joseph’s hometown. Surely, the story of Herod’s slaughter of innocent children, and the adults who got in the way trying to protect their infants, is told over and over again among whatever might remain of his earthly family. Jesus, like Moses before him, was saved by the hand of YHWH, a survivor of the Bethlehem genocide, so as to save us all from a sinful, broken and dangerous world.

 

Each child under the age of two represents a poem never written, music never composed, a book never written, new discoveries never made. We will never know how many children actually died in Bethlehem in an effort to thwart the will of God’s saving grace, love and compassion in the person of Jesus, while more die in refugee camps every day all over the world. That is a lot of human potential, culture and imagination mercilessly destroyed.

 

Matthew wrote this part of the story so that those children might not ever be forgotten. That Rachel’s children might never be forgotten. And to remember, that it is humans like Herod and Hitler who commit such atrocities, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. Just as God intervened on behalf of Rachel’s descendant Jesus, so God intervened after the Crucifixion by raising Jesus from the dead. Matthew, and only Matthew, reminds us that the wood of the manger is the hard wood of the Cross.

 

We need to thank Matthew for not holding back the whole story. In telling us what happened in Bethlehem, we are called to stop whatever else we are busy with these Twelve Days of Christmas, to listen. When we do, we can still hear Rachel’s lament; Rachel’s weeping for those who are no more; wailing for all God’s children everywhere. Above the din of our holiday activities, we can hear Jesus’s voice calling us to follow and join him as he saves those who are still at risk. He promises us that we will do the works he does, and greater things than these we will do, in his name. This is the Good News of Christmas.

 

May we hear our Lord and Savior call us to take the time to stop, and in the silence, to listen. Here and now, listen. What do you hear? Amen.

 

Genocide Watch

 

The Star Was the Father's Stare Christmas 1C 2021

 

The Star Was The Father’s Stare                          Christmas 1 C 2021

I was driving up the Jarrettsville Pike on my way to Christ Church Forest Hill, Rock Spring Parish for my first Christmas morning there. Just past Hess Road and Royal Farms, in a field on my left, sitting on the ground and facing me – watching as if somehow expecting me to drive by at just that instants – was an American Bald Eagle. I slowed down. We sized one another up.

 

The Eagle is the sign, the symbol, for John the Evangelist, he of the Fourth Gospel – a story of Jesus unlike the other three in so many ways. I will be reading the opening cadences of John in just a short while, I thought. And he seems to be asking, in the surprise appearance of this majestic bird, if I am up to the task. It was intimidating and exhilarating all at once. The eagle in the field seemed to possess an ancient wisdom. Just like the storyteller of the Fourth Gospel who means to take us back to a time before time itself. “In the beginning…”

 

We have heard this before. They are the opening words of Hebrew Scripture, and thus of the Bible itself: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

 

John is a poet, and is pointing us all the way back to the time before time, a place before there was space. There was formlessness, emptiness, a void, lurking in the darkness that covered everything, when all of a sudden, the breath, the wind, the spirit from God hovered, swept, was brooding over the face of the deep waters of chaos.

 

John’s first audience recognizes this. Their world was factions against factions; a foreign presence of brutality sucking all the resources and money out of the local economy; Roman crosses lining the sides of the famous Roman roadways, via Romana, as reminders of what happens to anyone who challenges the Imperial God Caesar and his bureaucratic and military minions. The world as it had been was broken. Formless. Without sense. So utterly unlike the resulting world God had imagined and created “in the beginning.” A world of light.

 

This is poetry. John imagines it is time to begin again. To start over. To go back to the beginning. John imagines that Jesus is the new beginning. Jesus is the light. That Jesus sets out on a mission of what the Jewish people would call tikkun olam – repair of the world. It is at times like those which John inhabited, and times like these which we inhabit, that the world needs the poetic imagination – which is why enormous swaths of Hebrew and Christian scriptures are written in poetry. It is why the entire Quran is one long poem. All this sacred poetry is meant to be recited in public, often sung, in the original languages so that it sounds like poetry once again.

 

We need not understand the original Hebrew, Koine Greek and Arabic – for just the sound is enough to work on our imaginations; to inspire us to find new ways, better ways to repair the world. As we heard on Christmas Eve, Jesus leaves us with only one job to repair the world: Love. Love God. Love Neighbors. Love Ourselves.

 

Poets, poetry, and repair of the world. Joseph Brodsky, self-exiled from the Soviet Union, the first U.S. poet to become a Nobel Laureate in Literature, and then Poet Laureate of the United States, used to write a Christmas poem every year:

In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than

to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,

a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;

it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.

 

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast,

                                                                                    the steam

out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior – the team

of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.

He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.

 

Keenly without blinking, through pallid stray

Clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away –

From the depth of the universe, from its opposite end – the star

was looking into the cave. And the star was the Father’s stare.

                        December 24, 1987/translated by the author

 

Somehow Brodsky captures what John is urging us to imagine: before there was anything at all, Jesus, the word become flesh was always there – the strange way in which God the Father from 14 billion light years across the universe looking into the cave as the star. Stars – from which we are all made – we are stardust. The starlight travels from the source of all creation to see its story begin again as a baby. A story of setting out to repair the world with one singular strategy: Love.

 

When sentenced to five years in a Siberian labor camp, Brodsky was asked by a judge what his profession was? Brodsky responded: a poet. Who recognizes you as a poet? No one. Did you study this? This? How did you become a poet? You didn’t even finish high school? I didn’t think you could get this from school. How then? Brodsky: I think that it…comes from God.

 

This is what John was saying nearly 2000 years ago: it all comes from the Word, from God, from the Word become flesh to dwell among us. It’s not a matter of how this happens, but rather what does it mean. It means to repair the world we have only one singular job: Love.

 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. … From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” From the depths of the universe, from its opposite end, the star looks into the cave of our hearts. The star is the Father’s stare. Does it find the Love God’s Son gave us to tend? To share?

To give away with abandon? John imagined this is what we would all be doing by now. Perhaps that’s what the Eagle I saw that first Christmas morning wanted to know: Where’s the love John and the Word become flesh came to announce? The eagle seems to know: like poetry, Love comes from God. It only needs to be accepted into our hearts. Amen.