December 20, 2009 Des Moines
“Will We Want it
When it Comes?”
It will happen to someone this
week, somewhere. It’s not the side of
Christmas that people like to talk about, or even admit to, but it’s an honest
side, nonetheless. Gathered around a
twinkling tree rooted in a landscape of colored packages, a family warmly
begins the ritual. Perhaps methodically,
for some no doubt wildly with abandon, bows are plucked and ribbons shinnied
off the end and paper is eagerly torn away; box flaps are bent aside and tissue
pushed aside to finally reveal the mystery secreted within. And whether the family goes about it
patiently, one-opening-at-a-time, or in a cacophony of erupting disgorgement,
the givers around the room are watching in nervous anticipation.
And that’s when it will
happen: a flash of disappointment on
someone’s face; a brief cloud of letdown, hastily replaced by a mask of
effusive but slightly forced delight.
“It’s wonderful! I love
it.” All those days of wondering, imagining,
fancying, guessing, mentally “trying on,” come down to this.
As we admitted at the beginning of
this advent season, patience is not our virtue; waiting is not our
strength. We have come to view “delay of
gratification” as an abhorrence that is probably even unpatriotic at a time
when our entire economy has become predicated on our collective willingness to
purchase everything we want, as soon as we want it, whether or not we can actually
afford it. And so in those special
instances when we actually have waited – when we actually have
forced ourselves to resist peaking beneath the wrapping paper all these days –
only to be disappointed when all is finally revealed, the disappointment feels
twice as deep, mitigated only slightly by the recollection that the after
Christmas sales – and the Return Counters – are only hours away. Because God knows it is our birthright to
have all of our wishes come true.
I wonder if that is something of
how the Israelites might have felt after all their waiting for a messiah. After all their patience for a time when
their world – long tilted by political impotence and foreign domination, and
stained by memories of grandeur and favor – would be cleaned and set aright by
a mighty warrior and powerful savior, Jesus must have looked like an
ill-fitting orange sweater sent from an eccentric aunt who lives out of state.
And if Mary’s song about his
coming is any indication, we may not be all that happy to unbox him,
ourselves.
This summer, at the General
Assembly of the Christian Church in Indianapolis, I attended a writing workshop
led by a folk singer and workshop leader named Carrie Newcomer who has worked
alongside the likes of Parker Palmer and Barbara Kingsolver just to name
two. By way of a teaser, I sang one of her
songs at the end of a recent sermon, and she will be here in our sanctuary for
a concert in February. One of the
exercises she led us through in the workshop had to do with reflecting on some
of our personal, pivotal divisions of time.
“What comes to mind,” she asked,
“when you ponder the statement: ‘there
was a before, and then there was an after?’”
These, she went on to observe, are the experiences by which we mark our
lives – some quite large, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the assassination
of John F. Kennedy. Some of them are
quite personal, like the birth of a child or the loss of a parent; a divorce; a
wedding. Some of them are so small that
we didn’t realize at the time how profoundly they would come to shape our lives
– a book, a flash of insight; a moment of grace. But regardless of their size or particular
character, there was – at least for you – a before, and then there was an
after.
God said Cain where is your brother
And who will tell his grieving mother
Jacob dreamt an angel called his name
And he never was quite the same
We live our lives from then until now
By the mercy received and the marks on our brow
To my heart I’ll collect what the four winds will scatter
And frame my life into before and after
I think she is right about that. Despite the claims of all the clocks around
us clicking away minute after minute, hour after hour, time is rather less like
a mechanically measured piston, maintaining a steady rhythm regardless of hills
or valleys and withering heat or bitter cold, and more an irregular lurching
across befores and afters. A friend of
mine says that we live on the line between “there’s still plenty of time” and
“it’s too late, now.”
“I know what time is,” wrote
Augustine in his Confessions, “until
I have to explain it.”
“When the fullness of time had come,” Paul wrote to the
Galatians, “God sent his Son...”
There was,
in other words, with the birth of Jesus a before and an after in which
everything – even the way we measure time itself – seems to have changed. B.C.
A.D. There was a before, and then
there was after.
I
recognize that, while Mary apparently understood something of the magnitude of
his birth, the shift took awhile for others to comprehend. It wasn’t until early in the 6th
century, when a monk named Dionysius Exiguus wearied of counting time using a
calendar named after a persecuting tyrant and proposed an alternative, that the
current system of dividing and ordering time according to Jesus’ appearance
came into being. Known now as the Gregorian
Calendar – after the Pope who adopted the system in 1582 – it has become the de
facto global standard, employed by atheists, secularists, and people of varying
religious persuasions. To be sure, there
are different, more generic labels that are sometimes applied – the “common”
era, the “current” era, and sometimes simply the “Christian” era, but even they
trace their roots to the beginning of the 17th century, and they all
draw their reference from the same point in time: this one known as Jesus of Nazareth.
It
wasn’t, of course, merely his being born that created this continental divide;
who knows, after all, how many other babies might have been born that same year
– that very same night; even among animals and hay. My guess, after all, is that even what we
today might think of as sanitationally-challenged circumstances would have
represented the norm rather than the exception in his day. No, far more important than the town or the
stable or the manger or even the star in the east, it was – and is – what Jesus
came to represent that made all of human progress seem, to those swept up in it
all, to stop and move in a different direction.
Part
of that reorientation has been thumb-nailed into what Martin Luther once called
the “Gospel in Miniature” – that “God
so loved the world that he sent his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but
may have eternal life.”
But an
even larger part has had to do with his re-imagination of how life, on a social
and ultimately a cosmic level, is determined to unfold. And that “re-imagination” is precisely where
our problems may come in, for while we may sing about it and celebrate it, and
with great pomp and horn-honking “holiday” it, chances are we are a bit
uncomfortable with it when the implications of it really sink in. In fact, some have even found the essence of
it subversive – as when the Guatemalan government banned Mary’s particular characterization
of it in the 1980’s.
Did you
listen carefully to her Christmas Carol when the lyrics of it were read a
moment ago? After speaking of her own
sense of personal honor – of glory and joy and favor and blessing, she goes on
to sing about how...
God has scattered the proud in the
thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
For a people as proud and powerful
and full-tummy rich as we are, I’m not sure how “good” this “good news”
sounds. Which is why I was wondering if,
after all this time of waiting, we actually want the gift when it comes? Seen from that angle, it looks like we may
have a lot to lose.
But while I
believe that Jesus imagined some fundamental changes in the ways of the world,
he had more on his mind than simple cultural inversion – as though to say, “OK
you have had your turn at the top long enough; everyone now trade places.” Jesus had less interest in the relative
priority of one group over another, than in the inequities, injustices and
disadvantages that constrain any group beneath another.
There is a
story told about the great artist Michelangelo – probably apocryphal, but compelling
nonetheless – pushing a huge piece of stone down a street. A curious neighbor sitting lazily on the
porch of his house called to him and inquired why he labored so over an old
rock. Michelangelo is reported to have
answered, “Because there is an angel in that rock that wants to come out.”
That,
I think, was Jesus’ imagination – and ultimately his life’s work: liberating angels. And while he hammered some fundamental cracks
into the stone, there is still plenty of chiseling to be done. Mary sang as though all those angels were
already free – as though the proud already have been scattered; the powerful
already have been brought down; the hungry already have been filled – and while
we know it isn’t so; while we can attest
that there is still far more stone apparent in the world than feather, we
recognize that you have to be able to imagine it before you can help create
it.
And Mary
gave birth to that, as well as a son.
There was a time, after all, before
she started singing when we simply couldn’t imagine it. And now – afterwards – can we imagine any less?
“My soul magnifies
the Lord,” Mary
sings, and we right along with her, “
and my spirit rejoices
in God my Savior.”
Rejoice,
indeed, for all you have come to receive, and all you have been given to
imagine.