'ON TO THE MARGINS"

‘ON TO THE MARGINS”

            The first Christmas story in the Bible in Matthew’s Gospel begins with a seemingly dull genealogy, but with careful reading, it produces some spectacular insights.   It is intended to tie Jesus’ line with Abraham and David, but genetically it  does not work because Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus.  All the other genealogies have only men listed, but Matthew’s includes five women.  It is extraordinary that women are in this genealogy, but these five women are not the pillars of the faith:  Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba (though listed in Matthew as “the wife of Uriah”), and Mary.   Why not list Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and others? 

            The answer likely lies in the fact that these are all women on the margins.  Tamar has to use her wits in a patriarchal system and poses as a prostitute (Genesis 38).  Rahab is a foreigner in Jericho who assists the Hebrews in capturing the city, and some scholars believe that she was the matron of a house of prostitution (Joshua 2).  Ruth is another foreigner who sticks with her mother-in-law Naomi and leaves her land to return to Naomi’s home in Bethlehem – she becomes the great-grandmother of David (Book of Ruth).  Bathsheba, not even called by name in this genealogy, is a participant in adultery with King David, which results in the murder of her husband Uriah (II Samuel 11-12).

            As we saw last week, Mary has been asked to go even further out to the margins of life, as she agrees to allow herself to become pregnant by someone other than her fiancé.  She risks the death penalty, but she says “yes.”  She was already oppressed as a woman, and by agreeing to this request from the angel Gabriel, she has put herself in the complete mercy of her fiancé Joseph and the male-dominated system in which she lives her life.

            And now, it is Joseph’s turn to wrestle with this situation.  Matthew’s genealogy in chapter one is followed by the story of Joseph’s crisis over Mary’s pregnancy by someone other than him.  Mary’s being pregnant before marriage is not a big issue, but for Joseph, her being pregnant by someone other than him is a great offense.  While it was rarely used, the death penalty is on the table for this offense (Leviticus 20:10+).  Matthew tells us that Joseph is no longer willing to marry Mary, but he is wrestling over how to end the engagement.  The least disruptive course would be to send her back to her father’s family in disgrace.  He could also have her stoned in public as a punishment, or he could require her to go the priest and confess and be made to drink a bitter herb, with the hope of aborting the fetus.  Matthew tells us that he has decided to spare Mary as much public shame as possible and send her back to her father’s house.   As Mary’s pregnancy becomes more evident, she will obviously be in public disgrace, but that is beyond Joseph’s control.

            Matthew tells us that an angel comes to Joseph in a dream and tells him: “Don’t be afraid.”  It is the hallmark call of these Biblical Christmas stories: don’t be dominated by fear.  The angel is not identified in this story, so we don’t know if it is Gabriel or not.  Gabriel’s appearances tend to be in public, not in private, so perhaps this is another messenger from God.  The angel tells Joseph to listen to Mary, to listen to women.  It is asking Joseph to move out form the center of patriarchy towards the margins, where God is moving and acting.  The angel asks Joseph to take Mary as his wife and to offer her the patriarchal protection that he has as a man.  The angel asks Joseph to move from the center of patriarchy to the margins, to allow himself to give up part of his power as a man in a male-dominated system.

            In a great surprise, Joseph also says “Yes,” and he becomes the father and protector.  He takes Mary and the baby-to-be under his male protection.  He gives up some of his status and power in order to protect this family.  He moves toward the margins, and we are glad that he did!  This move is costly to Joseph – we never him speak in the Gospel accounts;  he doesn’t have a “Magnificat” like Mary does; no visionary prophecy like Zechariah had when John the Baptizer is born.  Indeed he disappears after the birth stories.

            Joseph gives up some of his male privilege and power when he claims Mary and Jesus.  And, perhaps he serves as a role model for the boy Jesus.  As Jesus grows to be a man, where does he learn that stuff about giving up power and privilege, that losing of self?  It sounds like he learned it at home, from his father Joseph and his mother Mary.

            In this Christmas season, may we dream dreams, as Joseph did.  In these crazy and scary times, let us be listening for God’s messengers to us, asking us not to afraid, asking us to move towards the margins, asking us to follow Joseph’s path, towards love and justice.

AVE MARIA

“AVE, MARIA”

            The famous song about Mary resonates in the Christmas season.  It was written in 1825 by Austrian composer Franz Schubert, and my first encounter with it was to hear my Catholic friends in high school say that they had to say so many “Hail, Mary” prayers to get her intervention with God on their behalf.  The song, like Mary herself, has a complicated history.  It was based on Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake,” written in 1810. 

            Mary’s story in Luke’s Gospel does not begin in splendor but rather in terror and complexity.  She is a young woman engaged to be married to a Galilean carpenter named Joseph, and it is no doubt an arranged marriage.  The angel Gabriel appears to tell her that she has been chosen as a possible candidate to birth the Messiah.  Gabriel gets around in the Bible – he appears also to Daniel to help him interpret his visions, and he has just encountered Zechariah earlier in Luke’s Gospel to tell him that he will have a son who will become John the Baptizer.  Gabriel also appears in the Qur’an, consoling Adam after the Fall and giving Mohammed messages and guidance from Al’lah. 

            In Luke’s gospel, he greets Mary with strange words:  “Hail, O favored One!”  They are strange words because the words that he shares with her don’t seem favorable at all.  He asks her to allow herself to become pregnant with the Messiah, to become pregnant by someone other than Joseph her fiancé.   These are troubling words because they require that Mary allow herself to be moved further to the margins.  She is already marginalized as a woman, and now she is asked to put herself at risk of the death penalty because she will be pregnant by someone other than her betrothed.  She is the property of her father, being passed on to be property of her husband.  She has no agency in most of her life, but now Gabriel is asking her to have agency and to say “yes” to this dangerous request.

            Obviously Mary is afraid, and Gabriel responds with the words that resonate throughout these Christmas stories in the Bible:  “Don’t be afraid.”  Don’t be dominated by fear.  Gabriel tells her that God’s power will come upon her, and she will be filled with the fertile power of God.  She will become pregnant in the famous but incorrectly named “Virgin Birth” – it is rather the “Virgin Conception.”  The silly Alabama official who sought to justify Roy Moore’s abuse of young girls by citing this story obviously had completely misunderstood (or perverted it, more likely) it.  The point of the story is that males had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus – Joseph did not get Mary pregnant by abusing her.  Or, as Sojourner Truth put it so well at the Women’s Convention in Ohio in 1851:  “Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from?  Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!  Man had nothing to do with him!”

            We don’t know what motivated Mary to say “yes,” but she does say “yes.”  As she puts it:  “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.”  She puts herself at great risk to be the loving source of the power of God.  This decision to say “yes” has been used by all sides over the centuries – in the early part of the 20^th century, belief in the “Virgin Birth” became a requirement to be ordained as a minister.  Margaret Atwood understood how this radical decision could be misused and entitled her famous novel “The Handmaid's Tale” based on Mary’s words.

            If we seek to put this “yes” back into its original context, it is a reminder that God often asks us to take radical steps of love, steps that take us towards the margins.  When she says “yes” to Gabriel, Mary yields any small vestige of power that she might have – she has truly allowed herself to be moved to the outer margins of society.  Her political fate now rests in the hands of her fiancé Joseph, and next week, we will look at his response.  While God is working in her and for her, it is Joseph and the patriarchy who will decide if she will live. 

            Even in this precarious position, and perhaps because of if, Mary’s eyes and heart are opened wider.  After she receives the support of her cousin Elizabeth (now 6 months pregnant with the fetus who will become John the Baptizer), Mary’s vision deepens and sharpens.  She sings what has come to be known as “The Magnificat” in Luke 1:46-55, in which she sees the Christian vision of God’s turning the order of the world upside down:  “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich God has sent away empty.”

            As we have seen in the election of Donald Trump, the rich are exceedingly threatened by such a vision.  As we think about these things in this Christmas season, and as we are tempted to think of sweet baby Jesus, let us remember what a dangerous and political and surprising story this is.  And, may we hear Gabriel’s words to us: “Ave, Nibs….” Ave, {put your name in here}.”  May we hear how we are being asked to have God’s Spirit born in us.  May we have Mary’s spirit of courage and love to say “Yes.”

PREPARE YE THE WAY OF THE LORD!

‘’PREPARE YE THE WAY OF THE LORD!”

            “You children of snakes!  Who told you to run from the fire that’s about to bust over your heads?”  These are the harsh comments that John the Baptizer has for the religious leaders when they come out to the Jordan to inspect him and to see what is so powerful and so scary about what he is doing in his ministry.  My quote is from the Cotton Patch Version of the Gospel of Luke by Clarence Jordan.   You can hear Nat Turner’s voice in these words.  You can hear the mommas who watch their sons and daughters sold off into slavery.  You can hear the voices of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina.

            John is a man on fire, cajoling and pleading for God to come and intervene in human history to provide justice and mercy.  He challenges the religious establishment by attacking Temple worship at Jerusalem, a worship that we are seeing revived by President Trump’s endorsement of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.   John’s emphasis is that it is time to get right with God, and the way to do that is not to go to the Temple in Jerusalem but rather to come out to be baptized in the Jordan River. 

            Luke begins his gospel not with the birth of Jesus but with the conception of John the Baptizer.  Luke tells us that John’s parents have been unable to have children, and as usual, the wife named Elizabeth is blamed for it – Luke 1:7 tells us that she is barren. Since they have no children, however, how do we know that the husband Zechariah isn’t the barren one?  An angel appears to Zechariah the priest right before he goes out to lead worship – the appearance is an announcement that he will have a child.  Zechariah is stunned and not quite sure if it is true, but the angel brooks no dissent.  Zechariah loses his voice – a terrible thing for a preacher – until his son, who will be named John, is born.

            In the middle of this story the angel Gabriel goes to Mary to engage her, and we’ll look at that next week.  After the birth of John, we don’t hear anything else about him in Luke until he bursts on the scene in Luke 3.  John comes from the margins, from the wilderness, and he challenges those at the center of life to shift their social location, to come out to the Jordan and find a new life.  He also invites those at the margins to find a new definition of themselves, to hear that they belong to God, not to any of the powers who seek to claim their loyalty, even as they are told that they belong at the edges of life rather than at the center of life.

            Both Luke and Matthew’s gospels begin John’s adult story with quotes from Isaiah 40 about preparing the way of the Lord, in which every valley shall be lifted, and every mountain made low.   From the beginning there is a sense here of great reversal, and indeed the Christmas stories are full of such reversals:  Mary’s song praises God for lifting up the lowly and sending the rich away empty.  The baby is born not in a fine home or medical center but on the streets in a cowbox.

            As we jump into the Advent and Christmas season – maybe some of us are dragged into it – let us remember John’s fire, those pushed to the margins, and our own dreams about our lives.  This season is a time of memories, hopes, fears and longings.    As the preacher Phillips Brooks put it in his famous song that has become a favorite Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem:”  “the hopes and fears of all the years are born in thee tonight.”  May we know the birth of that baby in our own hearts and find the fire and vision that led John the Baptizer.

DON'T BE AFRAID

“DON’T BE AFRAID”

            We have stepped into the season of Advent when the church begins a new year.  It starts with the birth of Jesus, and only Matthew and Luke have stories about the birth of Jesus.  John’s Gospel has a powerful theological introduction about the birth of Jesus, but he is not interested in the historical details as Matthew and Luke are.  Luke especially wants to place the birth story in the middle of the messiness of history, and his approach describes a feeling very similar to our time.  We should note that Luke does not begin his story with the birth of Jesus but rather with John the Baptizer, and we will look at that story next week. 

            When Luke does get to the birth story in chapter 2, he sets it squarely in his understanding of secular history.   Octavious, nephew of Julius Caesar, and avenger of his uncle’s death, has had himself crowned as the first Emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus.  He orders a census for tax purposes, and Luke tells us that a couple in Nazareth, engaged to be married, head for the man’s hometown of Bethlehem.  This combination of an emperor/dictator and taxes brings it home to us in our age, as all of us tremble for the future of our country and of democracy with President Trump’s leadership.  Is he looking to be emperor?  Does he want to be dictator?  However one answers those questions, it seems clear that he wants all power to flow through him.

            Luke sets his story right in the middle of these kinds of fears and anxieties.  Indeed, the Christmas stories are full of humans engaging our deepest fears and our deepest hopes at the same time.  As we will see later, when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and asks her to allow herself to become pregnant with the Beloved, he tells her not to be afraid, even though he is asking her to assent to an action that will place her in danger of receiving the death penalty.   In Matthew’s account, when Joseph is wrestling over whether to allow the death penalty to be given to Mary, an angel appears to him telling him not to be afraid.  In Luke’s story on the appearance of the angels to the shepherds, the angelic chorus begins with the same phrase:  “Don’t be afraid.”

            The Greek word for “fear “ comes from “phobeo,” which is where we get our word “phobia.”  The admonition about fear in these Christmas stories is not about repressing fear but rather not allowing it to become a phobia, a dominant force that makes us unable to receive the gifts of God.  There is every reason to be afraid in these stories – Mary is subject to the death penalty;  Joseph is asked to take himself from the center of patriarchy to the margins of life,  and to allow himself to be hunted by government soldiers;  the shepherds are asked to leave their jobs and live under a new vision.  These Christmas stories, then, are not sweet and sentimental stories about the birth of a baby – there is obviously sweetness to them, but their point is to interrupt our lives in the midst of our fears and in the longings of our hearts.

            These Christmas stories ask us to consider an alternative vision of life in a time of hatred and violence and patriarchy and death.   These stories are not asking us to leave the world behind.  They are asking us to step more deeply into ourselves and into the world.  No escapism here, no matter what the culture does to these stories.  These stories are realistic about us and our lives and about life in the world.  They ask us to move from domination by fear to domination by love:  to act as Mary did and say “yes;”  to act as Joseph did and say “yes;” to be inspired by a new vision as those shepherds were.  As we enter this Christmas season in a time of great fear and trepidation, let us seek not an escape but the deepening of our lives and a consequent commitment to the power of love that is at the heart of this season.

            Howard Thurman put it this way in his fine book “Moods of Christmas:”

            “I Will Light Candles This Christmas”

            Candles of joy, despite all sadness,

            Candles of hope, where despair keeps watch,

            Candles of courage for fears ever present,

            Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,

            Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens,  

            Candles of love to inspire my living,

            Candles that will burn all the year long.