December 22, 2019:The Fourth Sunday of Advent – St. Paul’s
Opening
Normally I would say “Thank you for inviting me back.” And, “I’m glad to be here.”
It’s not appropriate, somehow, today. "It’s good to be here. The reason for being here is decidedly not a happy thing.
Fr. Jim called me shortly after seeing the doctor back in November. Mostly I think he just wanted me to know. Further conversations and here I am this morning. I assured Fr. Jim and Susan and Charlotte that I would help in whatever way I could as you, the people of St. Paul’s, Monroe, journey through this conflicted time.
I am glad to be here, for all kinds of big and little reasons and with emotions that cover a range – and are all too human.
It’s one of the things I like about being here at St. Paul’s , Monroe – it feels real.
A couple of weeks ago we watched a movie.
Watched tonight Beasts of the Southern Wild. An utterly one of a kind movie that successfully portrayed metaphor (glaciers melting, wildebeest like animals tramping across the landscape portending doom).
A kind of aside – I realized while watching this film something that has troubled me about movies for a long time. It gets at the difference between reading a book and seeing a film made from the book. Movies tend to kill metaphors. They are made explicit and they are no longer metaphors. Movies have a subtle way of taking away the power of imagination.1
In Beasts of the Southern Wild, The main characters are a father and daughter off the grid on an island forgotten in a Louisiana bay – called in the movie Bathtub. The film portrays the violence as well as the deep love of folks living in deep poverty.
The star is a 6 year old child. Amazing performance. Youngest person ever nominated for best actress (2012). The lead actor a baker by trade who at first preferred to keep baking for his people than to be a part of a movie. The directors wanted him, though, and they prevailed.
In a strange sort of way I can totally relate to the movie.
- Cosmic ordering.
- Small packages living in a big universe
- The deep significance of even the smallest package.
Hushpuppy I’m recording my story for the scientists in the future. In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.
Hushpuppy “There is an order to the universe, even if I am too stupid to see it”
Hushpuppy The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece. the whole universe will get busted.
Hushpuppy When you’re a small piece of a big puzzle, you gotta fix what you can.
Miss Bathsheba (the teacher): The most important thing I can teach you? you gotta learn to take care of people smaller and sweeter than you are
Time of year a powerful blend and mixture of emotional forces.
It is often observed that this time of year is a strange amalgam of different emotions.
Like the mixture of reasons for my being here this morning. Both joy and sadness. It’s like love. I’ve thought for a long time that the popular sentimentalism of that word was completely misguided. To love someone is to enter into both the celebration and the mourning, … marriage vows: “sickness and health, richness and poverty, birth and death.”
Christmas blues is a time that brings all that together. The thoughts and memories and emotions can take on mythic power, like the movie we saw. Joining the smallest child to the universe which is so big – all of it under the dominion of a big, big, God.
Sometmes the news is joyful, like: “Behold a young woman is with child” and it’s spectacularly good news. Sometimes the phrase, “Behold a young woman is with child” is a great bittersweet news, like if the father was killed last week while rescuing survivors of a disaster.
Truly this time of year brings the whole range of reality and truth together, under the umbrella of the one who shelters and shields it all – the God and Father of us all.
Joseph
In our scripture readings we get a similar shift of themes. We started Advent – in fact we ended the month of November – with Apocalyptic messages.
Then the prophet John the Baptist takes center stage for a couple of weeks.
Now we shift the focus and aim for Christmas. Today we get the Christmas story with Joseph. If you come back in a couple of days you will get the Christmas story with Mary as the lead actor. But for today, Joseph.
I honestly think that hearing Joseph as the focus is almost like – “Wait, what? That’s not the Christmas story!”
The gospel of Matthew is distinctive in the way in which it treats the Birth narrative. Joseph from the book of Genesis you may recall has dreams. His parents and grandparents had all talked directly with messengers from God. Joseph in Matthew’s gospel also encounters angels through dreams.
When I was in my 20’s, and testing the “new” translations of the Bible that were coming out – I thought a test was to see how it treated Isaiah 7 and Matthew 1 – today’s readings. The passage from Isaiah that I was taught was a “prediction” of Jesus – or at least Mary’s virginity. I knew by then a little about the Hebrew and Greek words in the two passages.
I’m quite a bit less interested in those kind of nuances and details today and more interested in questions like, "What is this passage saying to us today. If Isaiah was addressed to King Ahaz in the 8th c. BCE and Matthew’s gospel was aimed at a community of the 1st c. wrestling with the separation of the Jewish and fledgling Christian communities, what do either or both of them have to do with us today?
For myself the connection is at least partly illustrated in that movie that we saw, Beasts of the Southern Wild. I hear God telling us that each of us has a vital role to play in the unfolding of the universe, no matter how insignificant we may feel ourselves to be.
Maybe we’re a “Hushpuppy”. Maybe we’re a leader. Maybe we’re all alone, having lost the connections that once bound us to community. We may be at the beginning of things or at the end. Nevertheless …
“There is an order to the universe, even if I am too stupid to see it”
And no matter where we are in the scheme of things, no matter how insignificant we may feel, we can make a difference.
The most important thing I can teach you? you gotta learn to take care of people smaller and sweeter than you are.
“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”
Closing
Today we have been handed a platter. Like Joseph we may be inclined to say, “What am I supposed to do with that?”
Today one thing I know with a certainty is that the angels are telling us: “Do not be afraid.”
Today one thing I hear Jesus telling us through the words of Matthew is “Emmanuel. God is with us. I am with you.”
And, indeed, the very last words of Matthew’s gospel in Chapter 28 is: "And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Notes
See also the death (Nov. 15) of Sallie McFague. She had a profound impact on the way I think about theology, talking about God, Christian faith. Cf. her book Metaphorical Theology and David Tracy’s Analogical Thinking. ↩︎
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