Monday, December 17, 2012

Christmas Magic

We like to think of Christmas as a magical time of the year.  That is particularly true for those of us in New York, where the season leading up to Christmas takes on a seemingly magical atmosphere.  It feels like winter.  There are ice skaters at Rockefeller Center, Central Park, and Bryant Park.  The store windows along Fifth Avenue tell stories of elves and reindeer.  Lighted trumpeting angels line the streets.  All we need is a little snow.  It is easy to fall into the magic, and who wouldn’t want to?
Among the things stolen from us last week was Christmas magic.  Nothing seems magical in a world where a disturbed young man could enter a school and shoot 26 people including 20 first graders reveling, no doubt, in the magic of the season of anticipation, and erasing visions of sugar plums with brutal permanence.  I have read that residents of Newtown, Connecticut have been taking down the so recently unveiled Christmas decorations.  Christmas has become difficult to bear.  The magic has gone out of the air.
In truth, though, Christmas has never been all that magical, even from the beginning.  We tend to overlook that the holy birth occurred in Bethlehem because of an act of oppression, and the threat of violence, when a man and woman were forced to travel from Nazareth to their ancestral home by the decree of an occupying army in the final days of the young woman’s pregnancy. 
And, although we tend to be only vaguely aware of it, the massacre of innocents, not at all unlike the one we experienced on Friday, is woven inextricably into the story.  Only three days after Christmas Day, on December 28, the Church’s calendar remembers the other children of Bethlehem, the ones left behind when Joseph fled with Mary and Jesus to Egypt for safety following an angelic warning, the ones slaughtered by King Herod in a fearful rage.
There is really nothing at all magical about Christmas or the birth of Christ.  No matter how much we might like to make it so, it has never been.  Though we may rarely come to terms with it as somehow we must this year, the Christmas story begins and ends in violence shockingly similar to that at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
We should not be surprised.  We should not be surprised that the incarnation of good, of which the innocence of all children reminds us, is not received either warmly or passively by the presence of evil.  Sometimes that evil finds its expression in armies of violence, sometimes in greed and fear and power, and sometimes in clouds of darkness that overtake and consume those among us most vulnerable to delusion left to their own devices by a society deaf to the needs of the mentally ill.
No, there is nothing magic about Christmas at all.  That is good.  Magic too easily lets us off the hook for the role we are called to play in the story, the story of goodness being birthed in the world, the story of light that the darkness would overcome, the story of innocence confronted by evil, the story of Christ.
The world is not magic, and Christmas has no special exemption from that.  Every single day, eight children in America are killed by gun violence.  That’s 56 children every week, almost three times the number of children killed at Sandy Hook.  Every single week, 75 adults in America are killed by gun violence, over 12 times as many as at Sandy Hook.  Half a world away, in Afghanistan, 10 little girls were killed yesterday by an explosion while gathering firewood, possibly the result of a new bomb or a decades-old landmine forgotten and left behind, now just part of the landscape in this troubled part of the world.  It is everywhere.  Why on earth would we ever think there was a Christmas vacation from violence and death?  There is no magic.  There never has been. 
No, there is no magic.  What there is is an age-old struggle with evil that comes in many forms.  Christmas comes into play, not because it represents even a temporary respite from reality, but because the birth of incarnate love lays bare the reality that it is the evil that does not belong here.  The birth of incarnate love lays bare that the slaughter of innocents in whatever form, child or adult, finds no place, no home, no tolerance, no business as usual in the world of which God dreams. 
And, once we are robbed of the magic of Christmas, we begin, maybe, to grasp its reality.  The reality is that the birth of the Christ child does not cast a magical spell rendering the presence of evil ineffectual.  It does not relieve humankind of the reality of the world we have made of the creation.  Rather, it invites us to participate in its redemption.  The birth of the Christ child is not a tool for us to use, like sorcerer’s apprentices, magically relieving us from doing the hard work that needs to be done.  It is a call to action.
The grace of the death of magic this Christmas may be that it has starkly called us to wake up and look around us, and to take part in the work begun when a babe was laid in a manger by its holy mother on a probably not-so-peaceful night many, many years ago.  We can disabuse ourselves of any notion that magic is going to save us, even at Christmas, and this year especially at Christmas.  What is going to save us is entering into the life of that infant, the Holiest of Innocents, the Christ. 
And, as we do, we can find a joy based on what is real surpasses even magic.  Our true joy is the assurance that in this particular child, Jesus, God has entered the world in a profoundly real, not magical, way.  And that in this particular child, light has come into the world and the darkness did not, and will not, overcome it. 
I wish you all a joyous, but not remotely magical, Christmas.  May your joy be as real as the light, as real as the goodness, as real as the Christ.
Peace,
+Stacy

Monday, December 10, 2012

Magic Words

I learned growing up that there were certain “magic words,” by which my mother did not mean hocus pocus.  She meant please and thank you.  To say please and thank you was the foundation of all manners.  And in Southern homes, knowing your manners was valued just about above all else.
And, as every Southerner also knows, they do not necessarily convey anything remotely sincere.  Manners are matters of formality.  They are social conventions that do not necessarily carry a very deep meaning. 
Somewhere along the line I picked up some other magic words, things you say to be polite that do not necessarily carry much meaning.  One of them was “how do you do,” which is the polite thing to say when introduced to someone for the first time.  There is no sincerity involved, of course.  I wouldn’t know what to do if someone actually answered.  It’s just something you say.  Somewhere along the way, I came to understand “I’m sorry” the same way, as just something you say, without really meaning very much at all.
Now, of course, sometimes I really mean I’m sorry when I say it.  At least sort of.  I do not mean to hurt others, and when I say I’m sorry, I’m really saying I regret that someone was damaged by my actions or that someone’s feelings were hurt.  And I actually mean that.  But if that is as far as my “I’m sorry” goes, it really isn’t good for too much.
“I’m sorry” doesn’t really mean very much unless it also means, “and I intend not to do it again.”  That comes closer to what we mean by repentance.  To repent requires a very high degree of sincerity that “I’m sorry” does not necessarily carry with it.
Any “I’m sorry” that matters involves more than mere regret and goes beyond intention.  It must also involve behavior.  In the words of the gospel for the Third Sunday of Advent, it must involve repentance. And repentance means bearing fruit worthy of repentance.  Any “I’m sorry” that matters involves behaving as if you really are. 
John the Baptist, who like Jesus preached a lot about repenting, doesn’t spend any time at all on how anyone feels.  He is preoccupied entirely with changing behavior.  “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”  (Lk. 3:8)  And he has an urgency to his message.  Anyone who doesn’t bear such fruit isn’t worth saving.  “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  (v. 8) 
And he goes on to speak of what it means to be sorry, to repent.  He isn’t much interested in hearing tax collectors say they’re sorry.  Sorry only relates to the past, and no one can do anything about the past.  Being sincerely sorry has to do with behavior in the future.  To the tax collectors he says, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.”  (v. 13)
John isn’t much interested in hearing the soldiers apologize.  Apologies relate to the past, and it is impossible to change the past.  The issue is about behavior moving forward.  “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages.”  (v. 14)  He really doesn’t care whether they feel sorry or not, only that they do something about it.
And, of course, there are the crowds.  They are not tax collectors or soldiers, which were groups with particularly bad reputations.  The crowds are just regular folks, regular folks like us.  What is the fruit we should bear?  It is sharing.  “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”  (v. 11)  John, I daresay, isn’t much interested in hearing confessions about what has been done.  He is interested in behaving differently.  Otherwise, we aren’t much worth saving.
Otherwise, all the “I’m sorries” in the world aren’t worth much at all.  I’m sorry, after all, are not magic words.  They actually mean something.  Or are supposed to.
Peace,
+Stacy

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Bulldozers for Jesus

The ministry of John the Baptist, according to Luke, is explained by the prophet Isaiah.  We know the words from the soaring melodies of Handel’s Messiah and the resonance of a beautiful tenor voice.  “Every val-al-ley shall be ex-al-al-ted.”  The majesty of Handel’s music and the grandeur of the poetry of the King James Version obscure the reality that Isaiah is talking about road construction.  Only Handel could make road construction spiritually uplifting.  And Isaiah.
Isaiah foretells the coming of the Lord, the saving intervention of God in the world.  It is a grand idea to be sure.  Isaiah’s metaphor is about building a highway for a king’s journey.  The exalted valleys refer to filling in the low spots on a mountain road to make the passage level.  Likewise, the lowering of the mountains is about taking the tops off of hills to make the road less steep.  The twists and turns are to be straightened out.  The rough parts must be smoothed out.  The potholes must be filled.  The asphalt must be applied. 
More recent translations make this a little easier to see.  “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled.”  (Lk. 3:4)  We’re talking about dump trucks and serious earthworks.  Whatever the text says, though, I suspect we tend to hear Handel.  What we should hear is bulldozers. 
Isaiah is calling to mind the effort made for a royal visit in a day when travel was not by airplane but by painstakingly constructed roads.  He’s talking about thousands of people, slaves perhaps, toiling in the hot Middle Eastern sun with ancient tools to move dirt, nothing more.  There isn’t very much grand about it, any more than road crews in orange vests putting down a layer of asphalt on a baking hot summer day.
This, though, is how the kingdom of God comes in.  This is how we prepare for the coming of the Lord.  This is how we get ready for Jesus.  With bulldozers. 
John the Baptist is God’s bulldozer. And God’s bulldozer is encouraging the people who heard him to be bulldozers, too.  We have a role to play in the coming of the Lord.  Hastening the coming of God, of God in Jesus, requires effort, effort like a mighty bulldozer. 
John described that work as repentance.  What he meant was taking a bulldozer to the human heart.  That’s a pretty big effort. 
Why would we want to do that?  What makes us want to hasten the coming of the Lord?  It is this promise Isaiah foretold:  “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” 
Rev up the bulldozers.  Jesus is coming!
Peace,
+Stacy