Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12
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All of us who are parents have had the joy and the absolute terror of being asked by our young children, ?Where do babies come from??? As intelligent as we are, the question always comes when we least expect it?, like when we are cooking oatmeal for breakfast.? You can?t help but wonder why are they thinking such a thought at this moment??
In our house, as our now twenty-two year old daughter will testify, she learned early on that good information was as close as her mother.? I had to do little more than stifle my laughter.? My dear wife spent many years as a Planned Parenthood sexuality educator for special needs populations.? She can explain anything sexual in the most simple of terms.? She came to our daughter?s questions complete with wall-projected pictures, charts and learning aids.? By the time Kali reached adolescence she knew better than to ask questions but that does not stop a good educator from teaching.? We have had some of the most spirited conversations about all things sexual at our family dinner table.? I am nearly certain that when our daughter has children she will bring them home to be talked to by grandma.
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A significant aspect of Advent is about where did this baby Jesus come from???? As you may be aware we are now in the second Sunday of a new church liturgical year, which is Year A.?? There are three lectionary scripture cycles?A, B and C.? Year A focuses on the life and the way of Jesus as found in the Book of Matthew.
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For about 16 centuries most people assumed that Matthew was the oldest and most reliable set of stories we had regarding Jesus; after all, the Book of Matthew was first in the line-up of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.? Critical biblical scholarship came into formal being in Germany in the 1800?s, and it was discovered that Mark is the oldest Gospel, Paul?s letters even older.? Matthew, being the second created gospel, was perhaps written because Mark is so brief.?
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The reason I bring this up to such boring heights is because in the beginning of the development of this faith system that today we call Christianity, no one cared much about where Jesus came from as a child or as a baby.? What they cared about was how to live as Jesus lived because Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, the fullest expression of God that folks had ever experienced in the Jewish tradition since Moses and Elijah.? The things that Jesus taught informed people, moved people, and transformed their lives and faith experience, and the more people allowed themselves to focus on this Jesus of history the more Jesus became the Jesus of faith that we have inherited.
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The birth narratives, the birth stories, most probably emerged very late in the development of early Christian thought.? In fact, as most of you are aware, we have no birth narrative in Mark?s Gospel, which was written in and around the year 70 CE.? The first mention of Jesus? birth comes in Matthew?s story, written around the year 80 CE.? Ponder this timeline with me.? Jesus is born around 4 B.C.E. and is murdered in and around the year 30 C.E.? It is a full fifty years later before the first birth accounts hit the presses as Christianity is creating firm foundations for itself around the Roman Empire.? Note it is already 80 years after Jesus? birth that Jesus birth stories hit the front pages of magazines in Roman grocery store checkout lines and those early stories were sensation oriented?Jesus born by a virgin, signs and wonders, a new star in the sky along with visiting kings and magi.
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I was in the Nashville IGA on Wednesday evening buying groceries before the snow storm hit and one of those glossy garbage magazines had a headline that Elvis, John Lennon and Michael Jackson were seen appearing on a mountaintop with Jesus Christ somewhere in southern California.? By the time that Matthew?s story is hitting the religious marketplace Jesus is being elevated to the status of a god, not born in the normal way.? I can tell you that when Kali learned about where babies come from it was not because the Spirit of God moved over Mary.
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Sensationalism in first century Rome and today gets us to notice and to buy.? In addition, early Christianity was going head to head with Roman emperors who were claiming divine births from virgin mothers. It was then, and is today, a very competitive marketplace but none of that should be confused with how babies, even Jesus, came into our lives and how it is that God moves in us today.
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One last bit of trivia for all those Christmas parties.? Everyone here should know the difference between the concepts of the Virgin birth of Jesus and the even crazier idea of the Immaculate Conception.? We have our Roman Catholic neighbors to thank for this one.? The virgin birth creates some problems for Roman Catholic theologies because one half of Jesus? birth involves the fact that he was born of Mary.? God, as the story goes, threw some divine seed into a very human vessel?Mary.?
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To solve this problem with Mary being human the Roman Catholic Church devised the Immaculate Conception, which has nothing to do with Jesus?s conception. ??The Immaculate Conception added to 19th century Roman Church dogma the idea that Mary was created immaculately, without original sin.? They did this so that in their minds, at least, Jesus was then born into a more pure vessel?..Mary was immaculately conceived so that Jesus could be born of a pure virgin who herself was not born in what Roman Catholic theology would often term human sexual sin.? Of course by doing this Mary becomes something other than human, doesn?t she?? It just becomes more craziness stacked on to more sensational craziness and keeps us from what is most essential.
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I am a big supporter of the joy that comes with the traditional Christmas story.? I am a big supporter of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Mother Nature.? Period.? No add-ons.
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For those of you who have been wondering where the turn in this sermon comes, here it comes.? When we allow in our most sacred places for Jesus or Muhammad or Mary to be made radically other than us, of divine origin or even divinely called in ways that the average person is not?, we are creating an unnatural divide, a division that more often than not keeps us from knowing our truest potential and abilities.? It gives us an out that I am not willing to give us or me.
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What people believe about Jesus is as varied as are the winds.? We?ve been told for centuries that if we don?t believe the right thing about Jesus then we are going to hell.? That has never sounded to me much like anything that Jesus would say.? It sounds more to me like ecclesiastical people trying to make money and hold on to power in a church organization.? There has always been a wide diversity of belief about where Jesus came from and what meaning people attribute to his life and death.
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I stand in a long line of passionate ones who believe that God is not more uniquely placed in one than another and that in fact all are gifted with the fullness of God.? What is most unique is not our birth but our sensitivity to the individual expression of God that fully dwells within each of us.
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There is no inviting God into our lives.? What there is is a lot of allowing God to be expressed through our lives.? There are no three spiritual laws and a prayer that leverages us to salvation.? What there are are sincere prayers in response to our already existing partnership with God that we might risk being faithful to that lure, to that tug, to that ever-present awareness that we have to what we could be doing if we were to but allow ourselves to fully follow that lure of God that is always dreaming for us to be acting, living, being as our highest selves.
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There was a book out many years ago now that operated from the premise that if you meet the Buddha on the road, the Christ on the road, you choose whatever mystical religious agent you want to put into the equation: if you meet them on the road?kill them.? Because when we allow ourselves to believe that the specialness of being the Christ, the Dali Lama, or the prophet exists for others only, then we exempt ourselves from the responsibility of being the Christ to the ones in our lives that need the mercy, the gentleness, the compassion, the forgiveness, the love, the justice that are ours alone to provide.
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There have been in our lifetimes many women and men who have are easily identified as having been such expressions of the Spirit of God that they become Christ-like figures?folks who have so given themselves over to the light, the movement of God that it just obviously shows.? I think of Sojourner Truth, Marian Wright Edelman, Dorothy Day, Florence Nightingale, Dr. King and of course today, that communist sympathizer, long labeled by the USA as a terrorist, Nelson Mandela.? He was a terrorist to white power.? But, what a Christ figure for freedom in the face of tremendous historical and current oppression Mandela was!
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When I ponder what it means to be Christ-like it rarely goes society- or world-wide in scope.? Because 999 times out of a thousand, 999,999 times out of a million, the work of being the Christ in our lives has to do with being at a stop sign and giving the right of way to someone else, sitting quietly with a dying person and listening to them grieve and hurt, being a doula to a birthing mother and providing security and care and love during the vulnerability of new birth, standing tall for the umpteenth zillionth time at work or on the soccer field or in the locker room against gay basing, racial epithets and abuse of women through either the use of words or physical violence.?
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Being the Christ in our everyday lives is less about ending up on a cross than it is making sure others are not crucified because they are not the norm, because they are being themselves.? Being the Christ is working at the homeless shelters, as well as participating in the public dialogue where there needs to be clear talk about reasons for generational poverty and class inequities.? Being the Christ in our everyday lives involves standing once and often for the causes of justice, peace, and the wellbeing of the most vulnerable, whether in our offices or in the sweat shops that make our clothes.
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The Christ, the very essence of God, is warming in our hearts, minds and souls. Prepare for the birth of the Christ not only in others but perhaps most importantly in you.? Christmas is coming.
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Amen.
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