Christmas is the moment of recognition, the moment when what we have always secretly known is set out in plain and freshly terms. And at the same time, “Woe unto you who desire the day of the Lord” and “Who may abide the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner’s fire” … Christmas is a beauty that is the beginning of terror: the Burning Babe, who has come to cast fire upon the earth, Before his presence, the idols fall and shatter. - Archbishop Rowan Williams, Advent: A University Sermon, Open to Judgement: Sermons and AddressesIn a time of year our late capitalist culture transforms from from verbose longing for something new to silent nostalgia for an irretrievable past, it is sometimes a good thing to consider what, precisely, is this new thing God is doing in the Babe of Bethlehem over which we coo and weep in joy. Far from the schmaltzy Hallmark nonsense that swamps us like a tide of stupid and ugly, in the Incarnation God is doing something that should bring about both praise and fear. As we wait and watch, counting down the days on our Advent calendars and watching other shoppers at the nearest Big Box store with their worried looks and creased brows, we should recall to what end this baby is born.
I sometimes think we have forgotten that the broken corpse of Calvary should lie in the manger, rather than a swaddled baby. Not to revel in blood and death. Rather, because the New Thing that God is doing, coming to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, is nothing more or less than God demonstrating that love is not a feeling, faith is not thought, and freedom is most assuredly casting our lot in with others, submitting ourselves to the strictest discipline, to the point of offering up our very lives for others.
There is nothing cute or cuddly about the life Jesus will live. There is no peace or goodwill that follows in his wake. He knew that. He told his disciples that the world would hate them for his sake. He told his disciples they needed to be prepared to surrender their families, their fortunes, all the things they thought God considered valuable, if they wanted to follow him. When Maundy Thursday came around and they discovered he wasn't kidding, they ran off. Peter, like Judas, betrayed his master at a point when confessing solidarity with Jesus might well have cost him his life.
This time of year, as we gather our loved ones around us in our various family rituals, I think we numb ourselves to the reality that the birth for which we wait, the Coming for which we wait and watch is not some silent blessing, the still small voice that whispered to the prophet Jeremiah. The Gospels are clear enough that Jesus' birth brought terror and death to a world already overflowing with terror and death; consider the Slaughter of the Innocents in St. Matthew's Gospel (the first feast day after Christmas is just that; the second is the Martyrdom of St. Stephen, recounted in Acts). Jesus was born in a world filled with violence and hatred, terrorism and war, economic and social exploitation. He became a victim of these forces, winding up on a Roman crosstree the innocent scapegoat of a socio-political and religious establishment terrified of the promise he offered a people under Roman thumb. Jesus' Revolution was not what anyone in a position of authority wanted, so he ended up dead on trumped up charges.
That he had the last laugh, rising on the third day, confirming that the Kingdom he offered is not one of this world, yet is visible for us and with us, does not remove the blood and horror from the story. As we move through the weeks of Advent, we should prepare ourselves to look in the feeding trough and see not a pink cheeked baby sleeping peacefully; we should look and see the bloody, broken face of the man Jesus would become. Only then will we be waiting for the Jesus promised us in the Hebrew Scriptures; only then will we be ready to hear what the man Jesus will say to us; only then will we begin to understand what the baby whose birth we celebrate offers a hurting and broken world.
Peace? Only if we are willing to risk everything for it. Justice? Only if we are willing to suffer injustice in pursuit of it. Life? Only if we are willing to risk death for it. As Archbishop Williams states, over and over again, not only Jesus but the Hebrew prophets before him insist that it is only through a refiner's fire that we who hear and answer God's call and promise in Jesus become what God wants us to be. If we are not filled with fear this Advent that the new thing God in Christ is doing in our midst may well be what God always said it would be, then we aren't really waiting and watching for the coming of the Christ child promised by the prophets and attested in the Gospels.
5 comments:
I'd say rather Advent is a warning that we are not prepared for Christmas to be a true comedy. The Baby signifies not that we should have fear - but that we should laugh. Christmas is not a judgment that we are not limited, finite. We are not even really possibilities of overcoming human frailty and human vulnerabilities and human tragedies, because the category of "possibility" affirms what it opposes: that we are limited.
The true comedy is that WE are the new thing. It is not our souls, our spirit that is refined. It is idols and sin.
The Baby signifies not that we are old - but that we are eternal. The Baby signifies not that we are judged - but that we are eternally loved. The Baby signifies not that powers can create or destroy - but that they are passable: they have no body.
"And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
It took me some time to construct what isn't so much a response as a hearty, "Yes, and . . ." I have, in the past, celebrated the Divine Joy that is represented in the Incarnation, a heavenly laughter in which we are invited to join.
That doesn't preclude, however, it's flip side. Having followed that particular road, without a single look back or regret, I have found myself lately thinking of the many paths to Bethlehem, and from Bethlehem to the hill of skulls outside Jerusalem. Perhaps it's the Wesleyan in me, but the disciplined practice of the Christian life seems to me to include not only celebration and joy - of which our bourgeois churches are far too short in their decrepitude; for some reason, clapping hands and waving an arm around is a stand in for living a life filled with laughter and happiness - but far too little of the very real risk involved in saying, "Yes!" to the Divine Yes incarnate in Jesus Christ.
And don't forget what happened the very next day after King said those words. Which doesn't remove a single moment of ecstasy from the declaration; it only is to say that, here and now, there is always an admixture of comedy and tragedy (not to mention a great deal of farce).
Let me make the point from a slightly different angle. I'm sure by now you've either heard of or read Nick Kristof's commentary today, in which he offers up the possibility of slashing Supplemental Security Income for disabled children as some kind of bargaining chip in negotiations between Congress and the White House. At Eschaton, Duncan Black writes about part of Kristof's argument, viz., a claim that poor are entering the military less and less because of the availability of food stamps and supplemental income checks (a claim for which he evinces not a scintilla of evidence, by the way), saying that Kristof is essentially saying poor people are failing to fulfill their obligations to become cannon fodder for the Empire.
Now, one can quibble perhaps with this somewhat hyperbolic characterization of Kristof's point without conceding to Kristof a single point. I would go further and say such a claim, especially one back by nothing at all, demonstrates not only a meanness of spirit, but an emptiness of anything resembling a moral center. It is quite literally impossible for me to imagine how a human being could write such a thing and mean it, i.e., that poor people should just man up and go in to the military rather than receive the pittance public assistance offers them.
My point is not so much about the politics of this; rather, it is the paucity of fellow-feeling, the inhumanity evident in being able to argue with a clear conscience that part of our national population owes us their lives if they are of the wrong socio-economic class. Each time I've encountered Kristof's piece today, I've become not only angry, but more and more sad. How we all have failed to live in a time and place where something so horrible could be offered up as sensible public policy!
To be able to view fellow human beings in this way . . . it certainly makes me angry. It also makes me weep. The fight for simple humanity for our fellows goes on and on, it seems. This fight is part and parcel of the fight Jesus waged against the Pharisees and Saducees; part of the fight Douglas, DuBois, and King waged; it seems we are called to join this fight day in and day out.
Is there joy and celebration? Of course! Mary had little reason to celebrate, yet sang a song of joy in the blessing God had bestowed upon her. Joy and sorrow, anger and peace - these things neither preclude nor inhabit one another; rather, they exist side by side, and for right now, this post expresses where I am on the journey.
No, it's not a "yes." It is a spiritual distinction. Only a protestant spirit takes the incarnation and turns it into a rhetorically "thrilling" negation. In a protestant spirit, this world is not our home, so we can never be happy in it.
In an orthodox spirit - as for the surrealist, Paul Éluard - "there is another world but it is in this one."
MLK had the orthodox spirit about him in Memphis. You think what happened to him the next morning is a negation or, at the least, a "flip side" to his glorious vision. But King had already denied a flip side. He was speaking to encourage striking sanitation workers who had lost two brothers crushed in the truck's packer because they were not allowed to ride in the cab and it was raining. He was speaking after a decade of leading the nation in the cause of civil rights and that had brought on demonstrations that were accompanied by murders, by beatings, by rapes and Church bombings, by the setting of fire hoses and dogs on children.
And this decade had only followed centuries of chained enslavement and breeding.
This is the context in which King spoke. And he said, "And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land.... Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
Only a spirituality that takes Christmas at its word - that by this birth we are made free to be the true creation in peace and good will - could possibly say what he said.
And it is in this way that the Black church, filled mostly with those who know what it is to have simple humanity denied them, who know what it is to be poor or to have come from poor, who know what it is to be political objects, it is in this way that the Black church is orthodox. They clap and they dance and they wear their best and they stay half the day and they give praise to Jesus because the victory is theirs.
The Baby brings the victory. The message is not the manger. That is the context. But the message is that the world is made holy.
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