Tag: christmas

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Make Way

Make Way  |  Mark 1:1-8

The Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four gospels, does not begin with angels or shepherds. There’s no virgin birth, no wise men, no manger, no stable, no Mary and Joseph.

Instead, Mark jumps thirty years ahead to begin with a wild man preaching in the wilderness. John the baptizer appeared, Mark tells us. The word he uses might be translated differently: John the baptizer happened in the wilderness.

Some people are like that. They don’t just show up, or hang out, or arrive. They happen.

Mark tells us that John happened, and then Jesus happened. As Christmas stories go, it isn’t much. If we had only Mark’s Gospel, our Christmas celebrations would be different, and the narrative would be short. We might receive ‘Jesus Happened’ cards. Santa might wear a camel hair jacket, feeling no need to compete with the rich attire of a wise king. Children would stare at candy covered locusts on their plates and wonder what they were supposed to do with them. (So would I.)

WhitewaterFor Mark, John the baptizer is a messenger, a prophet, a human being trying to smooth our way to thinking about God. Why would God use people for that anyway? This bottom-up approach can’t be as effective as the top-down one—the word of God booming from the clouds or being handed over by an angel, radiant, glowing, awe-inspiring. Why use human messengers to point to God when God surely has more immediate ways to get our attention?

If Mark were the only Gospel, we would no doubt still miss the irony of his quote from Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Never mind that Isaiah was clinging to masculine images of God: these things take time. What about this odd idea that people are to make a straight path for God? Isn’t that backwards thinking? Isn’t the Lord supposed to straighten our paths, make our way smoother? Isn’t that what God is for?

How would we even go about making the God-path straight and smooth anyway?

We send rockets into space. Engineers and scientists talk about how the rockets work, what the mission is about. We can watch video of the launch, and we can see photos from space—so many that it starts to seem commonplace. None of it is the same as seeing it happen in person, watching the launchpad covered in smoke and steam, feeling the power of it make the ground tremble, seeing a rocket soar across the sky in an arc of fire and light.

FireworksEverything we’re told about it is junk compared to the seeing the real thing. It’s more than we imagined.

If we experience the presence of God in some way, it likely will not happen as we think. We’ve got the God-stories of the gospels, the prophets, all the rest of scripture, and all of it is at least as true as the video feed of a rocket launch. It’s still not the real thing.

That’s the meaning of Advent. We choose to believe that someone is coming. Not a thing, not an asteroid from space, not a card in the mailbox or a box on the doorstep. We have the child-like notion that there is a God, not an idea but a real entity, who has been coming into our world, into our lives, for as long as human beings have looked around and wondered. We can settle for the ideas we have, the pictures in our heads, or we can open up to the possibility that we don’t know everything. Even the most determined atheist could agree to that notion—we don’t know everything. And by opening our minds, just a little, to a real encounter with someone that we do not completely know, someone new, some possibility of God coming into our world, we are celebrating the season of Advent in the truest sense.

Meanwhile, there is some preparation to do. We need to get rid of the junk in the road. Fill in the holes. We can move our preconceptions out of the way. We can entertain the possibility that the most basic Gospel message is true, that God is always coming into our world. Mark doesn’t tell of a God who breaks down our walls or kicks in our doors. This is the story of a God who uses the strangest people and the oddest methods, and who comes to us in the most unexpected ways. This Gospel tells of a God who calls us out of our normal paths and into the wild places. This is a God who waits until we straighten a path to our souls.

Make way. God might happen.

WhitewaterWide

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Suddenly

First Sunday of Advent  |  Mark 13:24-37

Suddenly

This Sunday marks the beginning of Advent. We are all waiting for Christmas. For some, it’s the season to remember the coming of the Messiah. For others, it’s a time of waiting for Santa, or for the food and gifts of Hanukkah. Some people, let’s call them the Grinch faction, just wait for it to be over.Mary and Joseph 001

And soon it will be. We’ll hear Christmas carols, shop for presents and wonder whether we’ll receive any, and one day, suddenly, it will be over. We’ll take down the decorations and wait for spring.

Most things are suddenly over. Birthdays are like that. Holidays. Stories.

Mark’s Gospel is like that. Originally it ended with this:

And having gone out, they fled from the tomb, for trembling and ecstasy held them, and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.

It’s a sudden ending, leaving the readers wanting more. Later someone added more verses to the Gospel, maybe trying to round out the story or smooth out the ending. Mark’s original ending is just as it should be, though. Fear and trembling and ecstasy were appropriate. That’s precisely where Jesus took them; it may be where God takes us.

The lectionary gives us a different passage from Mark to reflect on for Advent: verses from the Little Apocalypse, a portion of Mark’s Gospel that talks of the end of the world. That, too, will happen suddenly, according to this passage. Maybe the idea is to remember the first coming of God into the world by anticipating the next.

HorsebackAheadSo is the emphasis to be on waiting? Or are we to abandon our homes and gather our families on mountaintops, thinking that “suddenly” means “soon”?

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers that they will know the end of the world is near by certain signs, but then he tells them, “Truly I say to you that this generation will not have passed away before all these things have taken place.”

What? All those signs indicating the end of the world, and they had already come true two thousand years ago? Does that mean that the end is nigh? Past nigh? Is the crazy man with the sign right, after all?

Sure. As the fundamentalists are fond of saying, we are all living in the last days. But so has everybody else who ever lived.

That’s the point, or one of them.

We don’t know our last day. We don’t know when it will be over, whatever “it” may be. This world. Our lives. The universe. Any of it. That doesn’t mean that we should cower in the corner, worried and watching for angels or meteors or exploding suns. Or an accident. Or cancer.

The end is nigh. Don’t waste your life waiting for it. Go out and live.

Pay attention, Jesus is saying to his followers. This is what we have, and if we look, we’ll see the signs that it is all passing by us. At its worst, it’s amazing. At its best, it’s ecstasy. So go live, and pay attention, because suddenly it will be over.

HorsebackAheadWide

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X By Any Other Name

Christmas  |  John 1:1-18

[Alternatively, Second Sunday After Christmas, not observed in 2016]

For the second Sunday after Christmas, or this year for Christmas, the Revised Common Lectionary offers John 1:1-18 as the Gospel reading. (You may also see a passage from Matthew referenced, there being some variation among lectionaries.)chi

The prologue of John is famous. These are the words offered in advance of the more ordinary telling of the Gospel story, and they begin, as most stories do, at the beginning. “In the beginning was the Word” is a recasting of the opening words of Genesis, the penultimate “in the beginning”.

At Christmas we often see the shortened form of Xmas, ‘X’ as used for ‘Christ’ even by the ancients in the times before storefront displays and decorated trees, and ‘Xmas’ itself for hundreds of years. The X of Xmas is not the ‘x’ of modern English: it is a Chi, an ancient Greek letter and the first in the name of Christ, written as Χριστός in the Greek alphabet.

The opening verse of John is, in fact, called a double chiasm. What does that mean? The thought structure of the verse, in Greek, would form two of our letter x’s, or two of the Greek letter Chi’s. Here is what the pairing of ideas look like using the Greek word order (different than the word order of the English translation):

The Beginning (God)                                          The Word

X

The Word                               With God

X

God                                           The Word

If you connect each reference to God (left to right to left again), and each reference to the Word (the Logos, or Christ – right to left to right again), you will have drawn two x’s. Or two Chi’s. The Gospel is using the image of the letter ‘X’ to emphasize the unity of God and Christ.

And yes, people in the ancient world did listen for that kind of thing, just as should we hear a modern day speaker offering a list of Light and Love and Life, we would expect the next item in the list to begin with an ‘L’ as well.

There is another comparison here in the beginning of this Gospel. It is a comparison of Jesus, the light of the world, and John the Baptist, who we are told quite plainly was not the light. It is an odd thing, surely, for an opening passage. Why bring out such a contrast, and right at the outset, if it did not have some overarching meaning for what was to come?

John, very much a human being, came to live in the wilderness, and the Gospel tells us that all John could do was point out the light to others. There is the obvious sentiment, of course: all we ourselves can do is point to the light.

There must be something more.

Right through the end of this passage in verse 18, the Gospel writer keeps alternating between the nature and work of Christ and the nature and condition of human beings. The contrasts go something like this:

God was in the world; we did not know God; God gave us power to transcend humanity (verses 10-13).

God became as us; we have not seen God; God the Son has made God known to humanity (verses 14-18).

God is starting with us where we are and taking us where we could not go.

Christians tend to take the later verse of John 3:16 and put it on every card, bumper sticker and billboard in the world. Perhaps we might consider that John 1:12-13 as a better summary of the Gospel message.

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Keep Dreaming

First Sunday after Christmas Day  |  Matthew 2:13-23

Three times in this passage we read that Joseph was warned in a dream. Just as before when Joseph learned that Mary was already pregnant and an angel appeared to guide him, it seems that Joseph’s angels appear to him only in dreams.Rainbow Wash 001

Dreams are that space where the walls we build around our innermost thoughts crack and come falling down. In our waking world we keep our fears at bay and we block out our hearts. In dreams, our fears disguise themselves and walk up to us, our desires walk out into the light to be seen. And in dreams, sometimes God speaks.

Maybe God is speaking to us all the time, and it is just that our dreams are the only place where our minds are quiet enough to hear.

The Magi came, strange wise men from the east. We know nearly nothing about them. It is likely Joseph knew nearly nothing. They came to see the child, left astonishing gifts, and departed never to be mentioned again. And after they leave, Joseph begins to dream.

He believes in the message of his dream enough to take his new family and hide them in Egypt, finding safety in what had been the land of Pharaoh. He has yet more dreams, and he believes in these enough to uproot his family again and to return to Nazareth.

Unlikely as it may seem, Joseph believed his dreams were the voice of God and acted on what he heard. Just like that.

A voice in our heads does not mean that God is speaking to us. Still, though the voice is just in our heads, it may be the voice of God. We only hear God when we stop to listen.

If we never act on our dreams, they remain only voices in our minds. When we act on our dreams, we meet God face to face.

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Only A Dream

Fourth Sunday of Advent  |  Matthew 1:18-25

In which Joseph dreams about an angel…Snow Path 001

Most of us would claim, if pressed, that should an angel appear to us and tell us what the Lord wanted us to do, then we would certainly follow the Lord’s bidding. In the meantime, if we somehow miss the mark, it is that we are unclear on just what it is that we ought to do.

Joseph, according to the story, was visited by an angel, and the angel told Joseph exactly what was going on and what to do. And of course Joseph did it. After all, there is no great difficulty knowing what to do when an angel comes and tells you, and any sensible person would do just as the angel said.

Joseph had learned that Mary, his bride to be, was already pregnant. We don’t know how that conversation went, but we may imagine that it was a bit awkward. We do find Joseph to be a thoughtful and kind fellow: while he was certainly not foolish enough to marry such a woman, neither would he add to her disgrace. He determined to break off the engagement quietly.

One might consider for a moment that the story does not, strictly speaking, say that Joseph saw an angel. In fact, the story says that Joseph dreamed about seeing an angel, which is not quite the same thing. If in broad and waking daylight an angel appears and tells you things, full of light and sound and actual presence, that would be difficult to rationalize away. If you only dream about an angel, well then, one begins to wonder.

If Joseph were very sensible, knowing how the world works and where babies come from, then he would have awakened that morning, shook his head, and muttered to himself that it was only a dream. Then he would have carried out his plan to break his engagement with Mary, gone and married some other woman, and he and what’s-her-name could have made a good life together. That would have been the sensible thing to do.

Following his dream, listening to the words he thought an angel whispered while he was sleeping, that was foolish. Ask any sensible person who knew Joseph.

Oh, that is right: we don’t know any of the people who thought Joseph was foolish. Their names are lost, and their lives are not remembered.

We do remember Joseph. He was brave enough to act on his dream. He was kind enough, loving enough, faithful enough to consider that God was at work in the midst of what appeared to be an untenable situation.

In the end, Joseph simply chose to believe that God was speaking to him. When Joseph made his choice, he did not have lights and trumpets and scrolls handed to him. He did not even have a proper vision, some waking encounter with God that someone else could, at least, observe and confirm in some way, if only to tell Joseph that he did, in fact, sort of blank out there for a few minutes. No, all Joseph had to go on was a dream.

And so Joseph made the best choice he could, despite the fact that well meaning and otherwise intelligent people were telling him he was wrong. He made his choice without certainty, and as he watched his wife’s belly grow, he must occasionally have wondered whether he had done something foolish.

In the end, Joseph knew that he had made the right choice. Just when things were going so badly that his new wife was giving birth in a rented stable, not even in a decent house, and they were so far from home that their nearest family member was a donkey, suddenly there were angels aplenty that everyone could see. And there were wise men coming from who knew where bringing gifts, pretty good ones.

By then, it may be that Joseph did not need angels and wise men to tell him he had made the right choice. Long before Bethlehem, and even if the child were to have been quite normal and unremarkable, he may have looked at Mary and known that he would love her and the child regardless. He had made his choice with what good sense he had, the love in his heart, and faith that God is in our choices and our dreams.