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Dec 19, 2010
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I’ve been listening to the radio station WXRT a lot the last couple of days. They have a special program for the Christmas holiday called The Twelve Nights of Christmas. For the twelve nights leading up to Christmas they are playing Christmas songs from their archives. It’s been wonderful. I especially enjoy the live concert recordings. And they play the old well-known pop favorites, too. You know, Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town;” that kind of stuff. What you won’t hear much of, however, is religious music.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s just an observation. They aren’t a religious station. It’s fine. The sentimental, the fun, the nostalgic all get their airtime, but the faithful, the religious…it’s just not there that much. This, of course, makes its occasional appearance even that much more noticeable and sometimes even stunning. And there have been a couple of wonderful examples.
Bruce Cockburn’s “Cry of a Tiny Babe” is one. This one aired on Wednesday evening while Trish and I were out Christmas shopping.
Mary grows a child without the help of a man
Joseph gets upset because he doesn’t understand
Angel comes to Joseph in a powerful dream
Says ‘God did this and you’re part of his scheme’
Joseph comes to Mary with his hat in his hand
Says ‘forgive me I thought you’d been with some other man’
She says ‘what if I had been – but I wasn’t anyway and guess what
I felt the baby kick today’
Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe
I like how Bruce’s imagination grapples with the passage from Matthew we have this morning. He pauses to marvel at it and then wonders what the conversation was really like. Did Mary challenge Joseph right back? What did she say to him? Anything? Did she even get the chance to explain herself? He was going to divorce her (To be betrothed was legally binding in those days and only a legal divorce could undo it.). Do you think she knew? She had to know. What did she say?
Bruce tries to imagine it. His Mary is not meek and mild. She challenges Joseph and picks a fight, but the baby interrupts with a kick. There goes Jesus breaking up a fight and the guy isn’t even born yet.
Dave Matthews also has a “Christmas Song” out. It’s been out for several years now. It begins like this:
She was his girl; he was her boyfriend
She be his wife; take him as her husband
A surprise on the way, any day, any day
One healthy little giggling dribbling baby boy
The wise men came, three made their way
To shower him with love
While he lay in the hay
Shower him with love love love
Love love love
Love love is all around
Both songwriters grapple with the story. They try to make sense of it. What was it really like for Mary and Joseph and how do we get where Matthew is with his story? How do we get from the broken promise of a busted marriage to the Christmas miracle?
The answer, I hope, is obvious to you now. It’s the Fourth Sunday of Advent and we’re talking about Love. We’re talking about dreams and miracles, and what happens when God actually shows up and gives you marital advice. “Love, love, love, is all around.”
It’s such a grown-up story, really. Mary and Joseph are to be married. Maybe it was an arranged marriage. It doesn’t really matter. Promises had been made and broken. Well, that’s what appears to be the case on the surface. Mary is pregnant and everyone assumes it’s not Joseph’s child. (That’s why Jesus is called the Son of Mary, by the way. That’s how you would have referred to someone when the father was unknown. They are connected to their cast-off mother and not their father…the babe, the Son of Mary.) Joseph doesn’t claim it as his own.
So…maybe Joseph and the families involved are heartbroken, angry, ashamed, or defiant. Mary knows she’ll be cast off. If you follow the strictest religious legal code she could have been put to death.
This is a very grown-up moment in the Christmas Story. From the beginning we recognize thanks to Matthew that this is a life and death matter. There’s so much to overcome. With all the shame and embarrassment, what do you do?
What do you do when someone breaks your heart?
What’s the conventional wisdom? Turn them out? Punish them?
Joseph takes the high road at least and works out a way to dismiss Mary quietly. That’s a fair-minded, compassionate response to a broken promise. Is it not?
Then the angel of the Lord comes to Joseph in a dream.
Joseph must have been a man inclined to listen to his dreams for God to send an angel there. A dream. Can you believe it? Incredible.
And so Joseph does the unconventional. Joseph sees past the heartbreak. He sees past the betrayal and he grapples with what God is up to and in Matthews retelling of the story, hears the words of the prophet Isaiah.:
“Behold…”
Joseph and Mary were good Jews. That’s what Matthew wants us to know. Joseph knew the rules. He knew his options. He was compassionate and observant. But what made Joseph great, Matthew wants us to know, was his ability to see past observance and rules to what God actually had in mind. He held his situation up to the light of divine prophesy, listened to his heart and did the unconventional thing.
Joseph and Mary were unconventional parents to an unconventional son. They knew the rules. They knew how to be good neighbors, to be responsible members of God’s Chosen People, but they knew something more. They knew why they were Chosen. They lived into the “why” of it all. They listened to the Love of it all; and “love, love, love was all around.”
We have this precarious little story and it trips us up. We want to know about the word “virgin” and what it really meant. We want to challenge the miraculous assumptions and push back. We want to stand in disbelief or unbelief or even forgo the story all together. We give it instead to our children telling ourselves that someday they will perhaps outgrow it.
But that would be a cynical mistake.
It demonstrates a certain lack of faith.
This is what Ahaz is wrestling with in our passage from Isaiah. How do you balance national security concerns with God’s call to be faithful? Does he risk being unconventional? Isaiah is asking him to be unconventional, to look for a way to love and to be faithful no matter what. That’s what Joseph was asked to do.
We have to find a way to walk with Joseph in this story. That’s what Bruce and Dave are trying to do. They want to walk with Joseph. They want to find the reality behind the Gospel story and get to the meat of the issue…They want to know about the heartbreak. They know that God’s love comes to a real world, that God’s love comes to a broken and sad world where there is poverty and corruption and marriages that don’t make it even when it all seems to be going so well. God has to be born into that world, our world, and not some pristine world without dirt and grime.
So, Joseph and Mary have to be unconventional.
Mary has to be so very brave, and Joseph a man who knows how to ask for forgiveness.
And Love, well love has to be everywhere all the time so that we can all do the work it takes to get through the heartache to what God needs from us.
We are called to be Unconventional Lovers. We are called to Love All.
If you were present to hear Heather Styka’s concert in September, you might recall the tune “Clementine.” In it she sings the words:
Clementine, we’re hatching a plan.
You’re the first to laugh and the last to leave…
Clementine you’re a lot like me.
You fall in love with everyone you meet.
You fall in love with everyone you meet.
I fall in love with everyone I meet.
We fall in love with everyone we meet.”
To love all people is conspiratorial…it is a scheme. God is hatching a plan. The world doesn’t know how to love everyone. At least not up close and personal.
Perhaps, we’re good at loving people who are like us
or who are far away on television or the internet
or simply who will love us back or…
who are simply easy to love.
But that’s not the entirety of our call.
We have to fall in love with everyone we meet.
To love as Mary and Joseph loved
To love as Jesus still loves.
To love like God,
well that will change people and change the planet,
and cause us to stand in wonder at what kind of change is ushered in when we join in such Loving.
We have to fall in love with everyone we meet.
Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe
For love, love, love is all around.
Thanks be to God. |
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