Just a Kid

JUST A KID
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Sunday December 30, 2007

Texts: Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23

Silent Night is over, eh?
How long did it last, after all?

It’s an old standup routine by a feminist comic: Silent night? Has anybody ever lived through labour? Do you really think Mary was smiling gently throughout her labour, feeling no pain? Can you imagine Mary piping up, even a bit irritable toward Joseph, or Caesar, for that matter? And sure, baby Jesus would have had those cute moments cooing like any baby – but what baby doesn’t cry, or fuss – or need changing? We left images up on the screen as I spoke, of a crying baby, and a smiling one. Some medieval orthodox art presents the infant Jesus as a tiny adult, without an umbilical or belly button, who learned nothing, just got bigger. Do you too, really?
Plenty of infancy gospels presented Jesus as a genius miracle worker child prodigy, knowing everything before the teacher could present the alphabet, or resurrecting his playmate after pushing him off a roof in a quarrel, or making birds out of mud by the river, or helping dad in the shop by healing boards when Joseph forgot to ‘measure twice, cut once’. The tradition took a couple of hundred years to decide that only 4 gospels were keepers, and they have little to say about life between the manger and the baptism of Jesus. Apparently this presentation works, to introduce generations of us to Jesus, his person and his work and his teachings.

We’re leaving the season of Advent and Christmas, and entering Epiphany next, the season of revelation and recognition in the growing light, the ‘aha’ moments. My ‘aha’ this week was Christopher Moore’s 1989 comic novel Lamb, a gospel according to Biff, Christ’s childhood pal, the missing years, after Bethlehem and before Jesus’ baptism. What we would hear if an angel brought us back a childhood buddy of Jesus, or ‘Joshua’, as Biff calls him?

‘We use to live in Egypt’, Joshua said.
‘No, you didn’t, that ‘s too far. Farther than the temple, even.’
The Temple in Jerusalem was the farthest place I had been as a child. Every spring my family took the five-day walk to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. It seemed to take forever.
‘We lived here, then we lived in Egypt, now we live here again,’ Joshua said. ‘It was a long way.’
‘You lie, it takes forty years to get to Egypt.’
‘Not any more, it’s closer now.’
‘It says in the Torah. My abba read it to me. The Israelites traveled in the desert for forty years.
‘The Israelites were lost.’
‘For forty years?’ I laughed. ‘The Israelites must be stupid.’
‘We are the Israelites.’
‘We are?’ ‘Yes.’
‘I have to go find my mother.’ I said.
‘When you come back, let’s play Moses and Pharaoh.’

Joshua always played the heroes – David, Joshua, Moses – while I played the evil ones: Pharaoh, Ahab, and Nebuchadnezzar. If I had a shekel for every time I was slain as a Philistine, well, I’d not be riding a camel through the eye of a needle anytime soon, I’ll tell you that. As I think back, I see that Joshua was practicing for what he would become.

‘Let my people go’, said Joshua, as Moses.
‘Okay’
‘You can’t just say Okay.’
‘I can’t?’
No, the Lord has hardened you heart against my demands...’
‘Why’d he do that?’
I don’t know, he just did. Now, let my people go.’
Nope.’ I crossed my arms and turned away like someone whose heart is hardened.
‘Behold as I turn this stick into a snake. Now let my people go!’
‘Okay.’
‘You can’t just say ‘Okay…’’
‘Why? That was a pretty good trick with the stick…’

Anyhow, the book gets obscene and scatological beyond those initial images of the children, and into tales of the teen and young adult years, but by the way, when did we get to being more offended by obscenity than profanity, sex stuff than God stuff?

Silent Night is over, eh?
How long did it last, after all?

According to Matthew, Silent Night didn’t last long at all. The Magi, warned in a dream, leave by a back camel track, and the holy family flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s infanticide, only returning when Herod is dead, and then relocating to Galilee to avoid Archelaus, Herod’s heir. Now I don’t know if this is what actually happened, and personally, I don’t think it is historically accurate at all, but I know that this story is true. Infanticide in the enforcement of empire is no surprise, any more than any violence. Herod would do violence, to protect the powers that be.

I wore a T-Shirt from Jenny Holzer’s 1980 art exhibition ‘Truisms’ until it was threadbare: ‘ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE’. She toured it from home in New York to Chicago MoMA to Toronto’s AGO, and it seems to survive a quarter century and remain relevant. Similarly, I can preach the story of the ‘Holy Innocents’ in any Christmas season, and the newspaper headlines will provide current confirmation of the truth of the story of Herod’s infanticide. This year, Benazir Bhutto has just been assassinated in Pakistan, Gideon’s Ark ‘rescuer’ of Sudanese children have been arrested, and let’s not get started on celebrity adoptions in Africa like Brangelina. People still do violence to others, to protect the powers that be.

But the truth of the story of Herod killing babies is typological, and not historical. This gospel matches the shape of Jesus’ story to that of Joseph and his brothers driven to Egypt in the Joseph cycle of Genesis, and the shape of Moses and Miriam escaping slavery under a Pharaoh in Egypt who ‘did not remember Joseph’. Even deeper is the shape of God’s command to Abram in Haran, ‘lech lecha’ or ‘get up and go’, familiar to anybody regularly hearing torah in synagogue.

And the story echoes Jeremiah’s laments, of Rachel weeping for her children, upon the fall of Judah to the Babylonians, just as Israel, whose tribes were known as children of Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, fell to Assyria. These are the stories of refugees, strangers in a strange land, mourning that they can’t go home again. These were the songs of Adam and Eve east of Eden, of Cain wandering the earth, of Abram and Sarah gone from Haran, and they are our stories.

Where does Jesus fit in the story shaped this way? Jesus is a refugee, child, not privileged elite. He is not exiled because of anything he said or did – he’s a baby! He may be recognized by the Magi, Zoroastrians familiar to exiled Hebrews, and will be a revelation to those scattered in the diaspora, not just a local sideshow rebel. He may be on the side of angels, but he’s not among them – he’s so human, he’s a totally dependant helpless baby.

Keep working at it with me in our generation – the big word is ‘Christology’ – the person and work of Jesus, not just his teachings, and assertions of both humanity and divinity of Jesus. “High Christology” leans to a more divine Jesus, and can slip into Arian heresies of making him an angel rather than a human. “Low Christology” emphasizes his humanity, and can slip into glib liberal heresies of making him an inspired guru with a balanced personality and opinions suspiciously like our own preferred politics in our place and time.

One of the best tests of any Christology is to imagine the infant and the child Jesus. Presenting him as Silent Night serenity is part of the truth, but won’t last long. Keep the camera rolling now, and imagine him fussing, wailing, needing a diaper change! That’s why Matthew is working on this story, which is not a biography of Jesus, but a gospel, and not just historical, but typologically true, in a much more profound way.

I suggested on Christmas Eve that Matthew is working with the grief of post 70AD, loss of Jerusalem and the temple. The old ways were no longer available. What will the new ways be? The rabbis in Jamnia were working in parallel to those generating Christian writings. It was not an academic exercise in historiography. That’s why privileged academics don’t get it: it’s a pastoral chorus of ‘now what’, and what side of the fence are you on, and who’s there with you?

And the answer is, we’ve been here before…. And will be again. God with us. Emmanuel. Remember the shape of the story: Abram, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Jeremiah. As with them, so with us. Lets tell the stories again, amid genocide, or ethnic cleansing. The risks are that we will simply become victims, or that we will hope for some supernatural rescue, unless we recall the shape of the story, the rhythm of the language: ‘lech lecha’, ‘get up and go’. Even when we age, and complain that ‘my get up and go has got up and went’. Even in a decline cycle of our institutions from mainline to sideline, where ‘those with get up and go have got up and went’.

We read these stories now in solidarity with refugees, with children, the holy innocents. In this week of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, we read it. Where’s Jesus in the story? Silent Night is over. The shepherds have gone, praising God. The Magi have gone, by a back camel track. Where’s the baby? Remember the United Way bus shelter ads a couple of years ago: how young do they have to be before we care? We read the stories, to re-present humanity, and divinity, which is far better than angels, or the greatest of teachers.

Hebrews is less familiar to us, and harder work. Think of it as somebody reading the same stories we do from the Hebrew scriptures, and reflecting on the gospel and Jesus with us. That’s why the reading kept quoting scripture in unfamiliar ways, as if the proof-texts proved anything. This is like moving from a familiar novel form to a graphic novel – we’re lost and disoriented, and we don’t even read comics, as I discovered in preaching this Sunday.

Is Jesus like a superhero? Is he more Spiderman than Superman, more Peter Parker than Clark Kent? One kid was raised by his uncle and aunt, and was bit by radioactive spider. The other was an alien orphan, adopted by strangers but always superhuman. We don’t know the current versions of popular culture superheroes and angels – but some of the kids in worship today did.

Hebrews is assuming a familiarity with the Jewish temple cult, and speaking of it in the present tense, but likely from a place in diaspora and a time post 70AD. Playing fast and loose with history again, to get at the shape of truth, Hebrews was omitted from early bibles, rejected by people like Iraneas, but made the cut in the 300’s, because it gets at some crucial issues of Christology, using the older tradition. Jesus is not an angel, but not just a guy. Jesus, like us, is lower than the angel, a bit better than the beasts, as the psalms said. Jesus experienced our sufferings, even death, not just as role model, as Chrysostom put it, but like a physician tasting the bitter draught to encourage the patients who must take it, as Calvin put it.

We are occasionally tempted to the same old heresies: Docetic, Arian superhero Christs between God and humans, or Gnostic or Jewish-Christian versions of Christ as a great teacher of secret knowledge or prophetic interpretations like any Hebrew prophet. Test those Christologies against imagining Jesus as a baby who never cried or needed a diaper change, or a child who was a know-it-all genius alien pontificator. That’s why those gospels are not in our bible. Instead, we have Hebrews, re-presenting Jesus to us as the one who shows us what it is to be truly human and as pioneer, goes ahead of us through suffering and death.

A later voice in our tradition put it this way, ‘what was not assumed, was not redeemed’. If Jesus is only Jesus when he’s 30 years old and brilliant and miraculous, then he has not taken on and made holy the whole human experience. Thank God for a Jesus who was ‘just a kid’ once, who fussed and wailed and needed a diaper change. There’s hope then for redeeming even our own human condition – each of us re-presenting our part of what it is to be full human, fully alive.

Silent Night is over, eh?
How long did it last, after all?

Thank God for Christmas, and Silent Night. But it doesn’t last long, before the shepherds go on their way, and magi theirs, and the holy family off to Egypt. Only the animals say by the manger, chewing their cud.

Thank God for Epiphany that lies ahead of us, a time of revelation and recognition of the shape and type of truth and beauty and goodness. Next week we begin ‘Invitation to Journey’, in the Living the Questions series of adult faith development series. Let’s build our faith talk and God-talk beyond the manger, beyond our childhood and childish versions of the faith, not in rejection of baby Jesus, but in fulfillment of that good news and gospel, even in the face of death.

Now what? What side of the fence are you one, and who’s there with you? We’re here to figure out how to get on the side of the angels, but we don’t have to be angels, if Jesus wasn’t either. Thank God! Lech lecha – let’s get up and go!

Prayer for Grace, December 30, 2007

God who made us,
A little lower than the angels,
A bit better than the beasts
In your image you made us
Male and female you made us…

God who dwelt among us as one of us
Not as an angel, but as a human
Nor as an animal, but as homo sapiens, ludens, exercens
Thinking, playing and laughing, working
Living and dying as one of us…

God whose spirit moves
Within and among us, around and beyond us
Like wind and water, breath and flame
Offering visible signs of invisible grace
Moving mountains, changing the world…

You know we could use a word now
After this season of celebration, with familiar strangers
After this exercise in excess, of conspicuous consumption
After this week of wandering, outside our familiar ruts
We could use a word or two, to name it justly….

And we could use a word now
Before we go on, before we go back
Having entertained the possibility of incarnation
Of God with us, pan-en-theism, Emmanuel
And having said the words, and felt the sentiments
We could use a word now, to shape our intentions….

For nobody lingers that long at the manger, for Silent Night
The shepherds go glorifying God and telling the world
The magi sneak off east by a back road caravan track
The holy family flees to Egypt, refugees from violence
Only the animals stay in the barn, chewing their cud…

So tell us the old, old story now
Not just of a good example,
But of somebody who got a taste of our medicine
To prove that’s not all there is
That the story is neither tragedy nor melodrama

Remind us again who we are and whose we are
We’re not angels thank God – but flesh and blood
Full of tears and laughter, from cradle to grave, womb to tomb
Familiar with sorrows, and acquainted with grief, in passion and compassion
From the first light and breaths through the last shadows and gasps
The glory of God, moral beings, fully human, fully alive

Teach us to recognize and rejoice in our common humanity
Beyond ability or disability, fortune or misfortune
Here by the grace of God, to find joy in you, to give joy to you
Through Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faithfulness
Who tried and was tried first, re-presenting you to us
And re-presenting mortality and humanity to us and to you…

God who made us,
A little lover than the angels, a little better than the beasts
In your image you made us, male and female you made us
What word to you have for our hearts, O God
Give us ears to hear, and lech lecha, get up and go!
Amen
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The Night Before Christmas

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and up in Thornhill, many creatures were stirring throughout our snug house. We gathered at 7pm for the night before Christmas according to the 4 gospels, and again at 11pm for communion, with the stories of Luke’s angels, and Isaiah’s great light. These are the notes from my commentary that night, for those who are still struggling to make sense of it with me….

‘Twas the night before Christmas, the culmination of a season of some classic video and audio: Dickens’ Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby singing White Christmas, and ‘We’ll Follow the Old Man, Wherever He Wants to Go”. It’s also the season of the Simpsons’ parodies of the classics, and other animated chestnuts like Charlie Brown’s Christmas, or Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. For those with more attitude at this family service, there’s Home Alone, and Home Alone 2. Which are your Christmas classics, video and audio? Did you remember that they’re not in the bible, and are all fiction not history? Do you think they carry Christmas truth anyhow?

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and this was definitely not the pageant. We had celebrated that church classic of children in costumes building the scene around a manger and a real baby, just the day before on Sunday the 23rd. Christmas Eve was a chance, with a slightly older crowd, to deconstruct, gently, that nugget After all, it’s not exactly in the bible either, and surely is more fiction than history. There are only two gospels with Christmas stories, which we fold together for pageants, though we set out to read from our 4 on this evening.

Jesus’ century generated lots of gospels, not just the 4 we’ve got n our bible. It’s something like the volume of video and audio classics generated in the 20th century, of which only a few will survive the test of time, meaningful to successive generations. Did you know there were several ‘infancy gospels’, elaborating on the immaculate birth of Mary, and the miracles of a boy genius Jesus? Why did they not make the cut? There were several ‘sayings gospels’, expanding at length on the familiar teachings of Jesus and adding many more, but without narratives. There were lots of ‘gnostic gospels’ telling of the secrets Jesus only told a few insider disciples.

Each of the many gospels had its own voice, and accent emphasis, like our own video and audio Christmas classics do. There were fragments, too, just as we have Christmas novelty songs, with hints of whole subcultures of celebration. It took centuries for 4 gospels to win out, as the champions of our 4 survived, and thrived as a religious movement. Sure, there was suppression of heretics who liked the other gospels, but standing the test of time required more than that. They were tinkered with, in remakes and sequels and reissues and translations, until every verse of all 4 gospels comes to us in more than one version. These gospels tell us what we should know about Jesus to make sense of the good news. These voices survived, because they spoke to us from generation to generation, telling us about Jesus and the good news in ways that worked.


‘Twas the night before Christmas, and we heard from each of Mark, Luke, Mattew and John, with me providing commentary like those DVD added features that I usually tune out, too. We set out to tell me the old, old story, of Jesus and his love, and make of it again a living word. Each gospel was read before one of the Advent candles was lit: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.

“MARK” is the shortest gospel: brief, blunt, journalistic, as if to say ‘just the facts, ma’am’. Mark skips Christmas, and jumps from Isaiah the prophet, to John the Baptizer, prequels, really, of our event of this evening, and suitable soundtrack for the theme of Hope. Mark blanks out the whole birth thing, not because he didn’t know the stories, but because he chooses to keep his collection of Jesus stories tighter, without room for this. Imagine building your video or audio library, mix tape, or download collection. Which of the Christmas classics would you include?

Mark is like a guy who collects Alasdair Sims Christmas Carol, maybe plays Handel’s Messiah, but leaves it to others to collect the newer sappy sentimental stuff. This is a gospel that takes Jesus seriously, and ranks Jesus as great in terms of the old tradition. It starts by setting up John the Baptizer, dressed like Elijah, as Jesus’ warm-up act, or his political advance team. ‘Twas the night before Christmas according to Mark, and this is what you need to know about expecting or hoping to meet Jesus again for the first time: Mark 1:1-8.

“LUKE” is a lot longer than Mark. It opens by saying ‘I’m collecting the best bits for you’, in a very long sentence, and demonstrates more by taking nearly 5 pages to do what Mark did in 1 column of one page, 8 verses. If you really get the hang of Luke, tt’s a gospel trying to include the ‘nations’ into this religious movement, the ‘gentiles’ or in Greek, ‘ethne’ or ‘ethnics’, like us.

Part of the pitch to non-Jewish folks is that you don’t have to read all the book first, before you join, but can get started with a couple of songs and character sketches. These are chants and hymns from the earliest church, liturgical chants and choruses from Jerusalem’s Jewish Christian movement, before the temple was leveled in the 70AD rebellion. For Luke to invite people then to learn these songs is like us postmodern protestants trying Gregorian or Byzantine chants, putting us in all our place as equally new invitees, from many nations or ‘ethnicities’. So there are stories and songs about Zechariah, and Elizabeth, about Mary and the angel, a song from happy parents, and from old people sharing the joy. The Catholic church uses these songs better than we do – see if you recognize and remember them.

The next part of the pitch to us ethnics is a populist appeal about bureaucracy, you and me enrolling in Caesar’s census, working nights, the unsung heroes that keep the system going. This gospel is for us, and from our midst, even if the world belongs to the rich and famous and pious. Luke also notices Mary’s labour, and the manger, and her paying attention, and her remembering but keeping it all inside. Luke is generally good at notice women in the story. It’s not that Luke hasn’t heard about magi, or Herod, from our pageant. It’s just this boxed set, this collection of greatest hits, doesn’t choose to include those cuts, pitched for this market

‘Twas the night before Christmas according to Luke, and this was what we needed to know, us nations, us ethnics, us women: Luke chapters 1 and 2.

“MATTHEW” may come first of the 4 gospels in your bible, but it probably wasn’t the first one written. It sure looks like a book written after 70AD, after Jerusalem and Temple were wrecked as the Romans put down a rebellion. Now what? Imagine a people whose old religious ways are wrecked. Imagine so much change, no more good old days. The minister doesn’t even know how to run a decent pageant! You can’t go home again, wrote Tom Wolfe. Sure, you can imagine the situation that this gospel addresses. It’s ours.

Matthew opens with the begatitudes, the genealogy of Jesus organized into 3 sets of 14 generations, from Abraham to David, David to the exile to Babylon, and exile to Jesus. In the big picture, it’s time for a big change. Matthew continues with Joseph’s choice to honour his betrothal, and welcome a child not his. (The whole ‘virgin’ thing is based in Matthew’s reading a Greek translation of Isaiah instead of the original Hebrew) Now that we’ve been reminded of a big picture, and warned not to take bloodlines so seriously, let tradition be fulfilled, in new ways with new neighbours, argues this gospel.

The bits about Herod and the Magi? We’re being invited to remember other ages of crises: Joseph and his brothers fled famine to work in Egypt, then Moses & Miriam led the people out of slavery there. We were exiled to Babylon, the land of Magi, and we were restored from that exile, though most of us stayed scattered, and included in our communities new friends and inlaws from Iranian, Iraqi, and Zoroastrian heritage. It’s not that Matthew didn’t know about the census, or the shepherds and angels. This is a different playlist, for a different audience, in a time of lost anchors and roots and traditions, of new bosses and new neighbours of joy and life beyond or present grief and loss. As the funeral psalm says it:
“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning”

‘Twas the night before Christmas according to Matthew, and this is what we needed to hear, who grieve the old and are disoriented amid massive change: Matthew chapters 1 and 2.

“JOHN” was likely the last of our 4 gospels to be written, and the last and most controversial to make the cut out of all the gospels and fragments from Jesus’ century. John’s the voice in the tradition that obsesses on Love. Jesus gives the longest after dinner speech in the bible, going round and round in circles or oriental reasoning. It’s a bit like comparing Capra to Simpsons, Handel’s Messiah to this year’s novelty songs. John’s dreamy poetry is about light and life and creation and incarnation, with no baby in sight, and no diapers to change.

When we get too blunt like Mark, when we get Jesus too far from God, just a guy, or a superhero or a mutant, we need the voice of John in the chorus. Lest our Jesus become a zombie, or an alien abduction of a human body, we need John’s non-Christmas, his nearly-gnostic speculation that whatever it is that you need to know about Jesus as Christ, it was there from the beginning in the nature of God, in relation to creation. As Calvin said, God told us the same good news in creation, in patriarchs, at Sinai, through prophets, in Jesus, the same message different ways, like Christmas classics each belong in one class. Jesus’ birth is not a ‘oops, let me fix my mistake’ by our Maker. The miracle is mundane and familiar, flesh and spirit, clay and breath, incarnation, God loving creation, and inviting us to love back.


This beginning of John was an old hymn, like the poetry we read in Luke, with a few of the words changed, and another verse added, to distance the gospel from its Gnostic sources and sisters. It’s a bit like our own 20th century hymn changes, ‘let us our songs employ’ and ‘good Christian friends rejoice’. John doesn’t think Christmas is such a big deal. It was there from the beginning. It’s still there for anybody to see. It’s not that John doesn’t know the other Christmas stories, but this is like comparing animated features with old black-and-white talkies. ‘Twas the night before Christmas, according to John, in familiar words, of light and love: John 1:1-18.

So, we heard from 4 gospels in 4 voices, in harmony and in chorus, they make a pageant, but as solos, we appreciate them differently. We have to find our own voice, and join the chorus. ‘Twas the night before Christmas, according to us all, and as the ushers pass the plates, and Ryan Peters drummed, we lit the final Christ candle with the presentation of ourselves and our gifts.

At 11pm, the emphasis was a bit different, more subdued orderly approaching the communion table in shadows and candles. The texts were Isaiah and Luke’s shepherds and angels, and I began by reciting and repeating:
The people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great light.

Then I admitted that it was not that dark, really, especially with spotlights up front. Outside, the Richmond Hill observatory of the UofT is being sold, due to too much light pollution. We don’t live like those in the north or in ancient days of dark nights and bright stars. So it’s a metaphor – a figure, a type –
The people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great light –

As Isaiah says, it’s like a baby boom, ‘multiplying the nation’. It’s like payday, bonus time, old style harvest. It’s like tearing wrapping paper in the morning, since we don’t go for violent military imagery of pillaging. I recalled a cartoon of a Viking scolding a slow solider, giving him the remedial lesson for the shamed “Pillage, and then burn… pillage, and then burn…”

If that’s what the light is like – what’s the dark like? It’s like wage slaves, working longer and harder for less, downwardly mobile, with frozen income amid rising prices. It’s the dollar tide that rises in the west, ebbs in local manufacturing plants. It’s the electronic leash, the PDA and work email checked amidst ‘holydays’ and even worship and concerts and parties. It’s interest rates on obscene levels of personal credit. That’s what the dark is like, says Isaiah.

When does dark turn to day, then? When soldiers’ boots and bloody uniforms get burnt. Like when David stood up, the underdog vindicated, (before he got old and corrupt…) that’s what we’re watching for, in Isaiah, when the people who walk in darkness see a great light. So when Luke tells you about shepherds, it’s all about those who walk in darkness, and it’s a metaphor – a figure – a type. These shepherds are the wage slaves the underclass, those working too much for too little – as W.H.Auden has them say in For The Time Being:

The winter night requires our constant attention
Watching that water and good-will
Warmth and well-being,
May still be there in the morning

For behind the spontaneous joy of life
There is always a mechanism to keep going

And someone like us is always there

We observe that those who assure us their education
And money would do us such harm
How real we are just as we are, and how they envy us,
For it is the centreless tree
And the uncivilized robin who are truly happy
Have done pretty well for themselves:

Nor can we help noticing how those who insist that
We ought to stand up for our rights,
And how important we are, keep insisting also
That it doesn’t matter a bit
If one of us gets arrested or injured, for
It is only our numbers that count.

In a way they are right
But to behave like a cogwheel
When one knows one is no such thing

Merely to add to a crowd with one’s passionate body
Is not a virtue.

What is real
About us all is that each of us is waiting…

What if the light shone? What if our darkness was broken by dawning? This is a tale of regular folks getting wise, of revelation and recognition, of breaking the endless cycles of day and night with an illuminating interruption. What if we had eyes to see? We’d surely be scared: I hate change, and fear the worst as I change homes and jobs. I do not share the relentless progressive optimism of my culture, my generation, my denomination

But if the light really dawned on us, if we really got a taste of that baby boom, payday pillaging. We might exult and dance as if a weight were lifted, and we might hurry off to test the hypothesis, that that’s not all there is, for God is… We might act as if it were so…

So I wished you late on this Christmas Eve, approaching the table, walking forward from darkness into light, that you might find a moment, an interruption in the droning soundtrack, a stumble in the monotonous march, a hiccup in the serious speeches – a moment of grace. And we closed with a wee bit more of the poetry of theologian Dorothee Soelle:



Dorothee Soelle: “In this night”

In this night
The stars left their habitual places
And kindled wildfire tidings
That spread faster than sound

In this night
The shepherds left their posts
To shout the new slogans
Into each others ears

In this night
The foxes left their warm burrows
And the lion spoke with deliberation
“this is the end
revolution”

In this night
Roses fooled the earth
And began to bloom
In the snow.

So be it. Amen.

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Replaced, Included, and More, and Less

REPLACED, INCLUDED, AND MORE, AND LESS
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Second Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2007

Texts: Romans 15:4-12, Matthew 3:1-12

Have you ever been replaced? Of course you have, as I reminded you. Your child came home from grade 1 and cited her teacher as the ultimate authority, or he rejected your Santa spiel, or they preferred their teenaged peers’ company to yours. At work, you were declared obsolete, passé, yesterday’s man or woman. You were laid off, packaged out, or retired. Even if you left a job for good news, you visited back and found they had survived without you. Never trust anyone over 30 said my generation, to the tune of ‘will you still need me, when I’m 64?’

Have you ever been replaced? Of course you have, as I reminded you. Who was the host of your Christmases past, and who played the supporting roles around the table? The generations change and the travel patterns develop, and eventually you concede that next year, the younger crowd gets to schedule their circuit of ‘turkey-hopping’ among inlaws, outlaws, ex-laws and next-laws.

I invited you to remember being replaced, and many of you told me you had. You remember the hard feelings, and empathized with others being replaced. You also told me you got over it, that life went one, and that you refused to be named as ‘over’. Many sermons were preached in your head, and many lessons will be shared and taught – but I didn’t preach them.

Have you ever been included? Of course you have, as I reminded you. You have cracked a new school, or team, or peer group as a child or youth. You took a new job, and got disoriented and reoriented, moved to a new community, neighbourhood, building, joined a new church or club. You’ve been included in new extended family circles, with their own rituals and rules. You were told, directly or indirectly, if and on what terms you were included in a new ‘us’.

Have you ever been included? I told you how often I have changed churches, and learned their Christmas routines. Caroling in Tagalog, or in a mining town bus, or sipping Guyanese mauby tea, I was included – but never fully part. Sure, you can be included in our church – ministers come and ministers go, though. The cat may have kittens, and nurse them in the milking barn, but that doesn’t make her a Holstein cow, after all! Or as Woody Allen says, ‘I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.’ Inclusion has a shadow side.

I invited you to remember being included, and many of you said you did. This was subtler stuff, about the good feelings and the incomplete joys of being included. We resonated most when I asked those born in the United Church to raise their hands, and more than half of us were not – had I asked who grew up in Thornhill United, there would have been far fewer, and most of us would remember being included, more or less smoothly. Who is fitting into whose norms?

You had complete permission to reflect on these things on a personal, private basis today, on the approach ramp to Christmas. You have been replaced, and included, and have maturity and wisdom and experience and empathy, and choices to make, and lessons to teach. Go preach it!

A census report about Toronto’s changing demographics got lot of press this week, and invited our reflections about the political dimensions of being replaced or included, as well. Over half of GTA residents were born outside Canada, and many of those born here are young children of new Canadians. It hasn’t been like that in Thornhill since this church was founded 200 years ago! ‘Old Thornhill’ was a rural village, and our oldest members recall when you knew everybody and they were either United, or Anglican or Presbyterian. Postwar boom suburban Thornhill transformed this church, from its people to its building, into a big regional icon. Who and what was replaced in the process, and who and what was included, more or less well?

Mine is not the only clan in our pews who have lost and forgotten the Gaelic of our forebears. It’s not so long ago that Hogmanay was a bigger deal than Christmas, or Robbie Burns day and Orange Lodge parades on the ‘glorious 12th’ – and enough of you nod that I know it’s true. Now, I go to a Hannukah party downtown, and have to explain our ‘kill a tree for Jesus’ cult, or talk with black Pentecostal youth pastor who has never heard of our ‘United’ church. There’s a lot of unexamined grief in our feelings of being replaced, obsolete, unappreciated – and a lot of unexamined assumptions in our presumptions that it is up to us to ‘include’ others, in our way.

I argue that our progressive glib liberalism with all its claims to inclusive diversity suffers from a set of assumptions I’d call social Darwinism. ‘Christianity replaced Judaism, then Protestantism improved upon Catholicism, and in turn our ‘cutting edge’ novelties beat old fashioned superstitions’. The fancy academic term for this is ‘supercessionism’ in theology. We don’t consciously mean it, but our lack of empathy leads from ignorance into antagonism toward others who remain Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, or otherwise traditional. And we in turn have no answer to those who claim to supercede our faith in turn with New Age, Progressive Christianity, Bahai, or certain popularizations of Islam. This was a difficult argument for us this Advent day.

We certainly recognize medieval models and claims of crusading religious authorities and institutions – and we tend not to like them. Christianity takes on Judaism, Protestantism takes on Catholicism, Islam challenges the west that Jesus is just one of their prophets, and sectarian conflicts degenerate into justifications for wars that are really political or economic at root. These are the models of replacement and mutual exclusion, and we consciously abhor them.

We are equally familiar with a modern tendency to marginalize and privatize religions, subordinating it variously to rational enlightenment, secularity, or some new overarching model of rights and accommodation, or new spiritualities. But who is the gatekeeper, and who sets the norms, for these approaches claiming to be above or beyond religions and faiths? Suppressed, the faithful in various traditions erupt in response with fundamentalism. Where can we stand?

I insisted that we listen to today’s lessons careful not to assume that they speak of replacement or inclusion as we construe such ideas. I denied that I aspired to reclaim WASP hegemony, and suggested that just as we are rueful about the presumptions of the IODE serving tea at citizenship ceremonies, so we will be abashed in another generation with our presumptuous use of the language of inclusion and diversity. We live in a spectacular moment and neighbourhood, with Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim communities and buildings adjoining synagogues and all types of Christian crowds and structures. God knows what is emerging around us – but hasn’t told me! You had complete permission to reflect on this politically this morning, and you did.

It was Karl Jaspers who proposed the concept of an “Axial Age”, recently popularized by Karen Armstrong’s Great Transformation, and frequently referenced in Hans Kung’s work. Although the earth is about 13 billion years old, humans have been here 1.5 million years, but 99.9% of that is primal history. Only 200,000 years ago Stone Age life began, and only 10,000 years ago sedentary farming cultures emerged. Early ‘high cultures’ finally appear, Sumerians in the Tigris Euphrates 3500BCE, Egyptians in the Nile 3000BCE, Sanscrit in the Indus 2500BCE, and Huangho in the Yellow 1500BCE. Finally, in the few hundred years before our ‘Common Era’, an ‘axial age’ generated the roots of Tao, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and classic traditions. There’s some perspective – are we in a new axial age? Don’t hold your breath!

In this second week of Advent, we narrow the focus of expectation from apocalyptic visions, to Paul’s exhortations and John the Baptist challenges about getting ready together: for what? Since this is not just the happily ever after ending of a story, how is it to be a beginning? If we are replacing and being replaced, we will read these texts and apply them one way. If we are including and being included, we will hear this word in echo it in another way. The personal is political, and the political is personal, and we do well to reflect and empathize.

We come from a world, and return to a world, that defies the medieval models of supercessionism, authoritarian ambitions to crusade, command, and control. That world also erodes modern claims of inclusion, of reasonable accommodation within values or idealisms, and fundamentalist reactions to religion and faith being narrowed, privatized or ignored. We tried, finally, to listen for a word of profound praise, of awe at an invitation and promise of something beyond what we could ask or imagine, but for which we are called to prepare.

We heard Paul’s letter to the Romans affirming and using scripture to amplify his good news;

Welcome one another, therefore,
just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

As Christ welcomed us, so should we welcome one another. He reminds us of scripture, written to help us to that simple thing, and of prophets alerting us. Scripture, for Paul, is the Septuagint, the Greek bible from Alexandria in Egypt. Over 300 years after Alexander the Great, Greek culture and language were as dominant as English is now, and Hebrew texts were written to be read in the day. The Mishneh, oral torah of tradition and custom elaborating beyond scripture, was taking shape to become later Talmud, for the new phenomenon of synagogue Judaism. He also reminds us to assume the prior welcome to the Jews, and also to imagine a welcome to Gentiles, non-Jews of any origin. As Christ welcomed us, so should we welcome one another.

This text does not say ‘Christians replace Jews as predicted by the prophets’. Nor does it say ‘ignore the bad old law and just count on new loving God’. Paul doesn’t say that ‘Jews should include Christians’ or that ‘Christians should include Jews’ in some hegemony of unification. Certainly not, though we have read all of those messages into it! Rather, Paul confirms promises made to patriarchs, says Jesus serve the circumcised, and was a light to Gentiles. Paul does his job, to welcome Gentiles as Christ welcomed us, and leaves others to do theirs.

We heard Matthew’s version of John the Baptist’s message:

Get ready, for the kingdom of heaven is come near!

This passage is hugely ‘intertextual’, referring and alluding to wilderness like Moses, and outfits like Elijah in former prophets, explicitly quoting the major prophet Isaiah, and affirming the traditions of apocalyptic visions that we heard about last week. So we can’t just read that the bad old ways are over, and we just have to get ready for a completely new way.

All the gospels – the four in our bibles, and the ones that didn’t make it – collect bits of tradition and tales from various traditions that converged. Imagine a Jesus people movement, and a John the Baptist crowd, learning to live together in one community, just as Presbyterians and Methodists did last century, and as our majority not born United transform this community. We miss the subtle signals of inclusion into Matthew’s ‘big tent’ Christianity. Jesus doesn’t replace John the Baptist, nor does one movement include the other – each fulfills or transforms the other.

We do hear a lot of threats in this passage about burning in fire, mostly directed at Sadducees and Pharisees. If we hear only replacement of bad old Jews with good new Christians, we’ve continued the sins of our religion against our neighbours. Imagine again, the Jesus people and the John the Baptist crowd, remembering the events 60 years after the fact, and a generation after Jerusalem and the temple were razed by the Romans. Who are the Sadducces and Pharisees, from that perspective? They were the sectarians squabbling in old Jerusalem, the first crowd coopted by power, the second provoking violence with their pietistic righteousness. What remains of what they worked so hard to justify against each other? It is all burned up!


Have you been replaced? Have you been included? You told me on the way out the door that we all come from the same place, and seek the same ultimate ends. I said to you that I agree, and that we affirm those common origins and visions before we squabble about our versions of the right roads from where we’ve been toward where we’re going. I also said we can’t just reduce and boil down religions and faiths to some lowest common denominator propositions, values or principles. We come from something much richer than that, and are called toward to something much greater and transcendent than that.

We spent half an hour this week reflecting together on being replaced and being included, in personal and political terms. But we did more than that in the half hour of word and sermon, and much more than that in the rest of our worship together. We shared profound praise, in music and prayer, that sticks with us long after we forget the sermon details. We build identity and imagination, we develop empathy and ethical reflexes. Less than medieval megalomaniacs ambitious for political power, more than modern marginalized clubs for private personal piety, we are part of something not yet complete, that can’t be reduced to replacement or inclusion.

Welcome one another, therefore,
just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

Get ready, for the kingdom of heaven is drawn near! Read more...

Alarms & Apocalypses

ALARMS & APOCALYPSES
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com at Thornhill United Church
Advent 1 December 2, 2007

Texts Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:26-44

I began by confessing to you that I set 4 alarms every morning, which alert me from 6 to 6:30am that it’s time to get up. If that isn’t working, the neighbour’s big Suburban with the diesel motor fires up a few moments later. Warning? Promise? I do lie there and wonder about the day ahead. You might call it prayer. Last night, with a snowstorm and streelights shining a strange light into my room, and worried about commuting to Thornhill in the morning, I lay awake more. I notice that lots of you knew about multiple alarms, and others about sleepless nights, spent in resistance and in eagerness for the days of our lives. Some recognized my reference to the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day movie, where he is wakes to the same day over and over again with the same song on the radio, until he gets it right and lives it right. Time needs shaping, like this.

When will Christmas be this year? We agreed on the 25th of December. Will you be ready? Just like my 4 morning alarms, we have 4 Sundays of warning or promise. This first week, as usual, gives us the apocalyptic texts, and next week the story of John the Baptist. Apocalyptic texts express the mood of a time of crisis, from the perspective of a powerless people. Faced with powers that be far beyond an illusion of control, the oppressed imagine that God will trump evil, and plan to cooperate with the one and resist the other, living under the spectacle of heavenly warfare, which is expressed but not resolved in earthly conflicts. It’s the stuff of cosmic drama.

Modernity reduces sin and evil to crime, sickness, and ignorance: problems to be solved by policing, medical care, education. Our progressive social gospel, building a cooperative commonwealth in one generation, was a modern liberal dream, the vision of a generation’s rebellion against their elders, since our elders of a century ago were unabashedly apocalyptic. We Protestants were millenialists, sure that a thousand years of just rule would either follow Jesus’ second coming, (pre-millenialists), or follow it (post millenialists), or express our dream of how this world should be governed as if the next were ever near (a-millenialists).

This polarized vision of spiritual warfare between the forces of good and evil got knocked out of us in the 20th century through a couple of world wars with shocking mortality, in which all the armies thought that God was on their side. However, the postwar liberal progressive solutions are proving inadequate too, maximizing individual freedom to pursue property, but unable to account for the mysteries of imperial oppression and conflict, sin-and-death, beyond social engineering. Apocalyptic talk is returning, offering the scale we need. The pope’s new encyclical this week, only his 2nd, is on hope. What is our hope, in the end, beyond our mortality, not only for us, but for us in God’s world, and a world to come? Bad apocalyptic talk, or good – but we can’t have none any more – it’s in every account of a pandemic or environmental disaster.

We’re accustomed to being derisive, or dismissive, in our false sophistication, of evangelical TV preachers who tell us to escalate conflict in the Middle East then count on Jesus to return to resolve a great Armageddon. But our culture is a secularized version of a millenialist model, a sort of post-millenialism postponing any role for God, our soft religious note of messianism avoiding questions of ‘saved from what’, and ‘saved for what’, ‘from whom’ and ‘with whom’? Apocalytic texts are not limited to the book of Revelation, and we may have to revisit them.

Paul’s letters including this one to the Romans are free with the imagery of a cosmic battle of good and evil. Paul counsels obedience to the powers-that-be, for God had let them have their head – for now. He proposes that we live as children of light, not of darkness, for these dark times will pass, and all will be revealed. What do you want to have shown and revealed of your life, in the end? Karl Barth, as a mid-20th century a-millenial European interpreter, says that
“what is delayed is not the Parousia [Second Coming], but our awakening. Did we but awake; did we but remember… then we would become aware of the dignity and importance of each single concrete temporal moment, and apprehend its qualification and its ethical demand… accept our present condition in its full seriousness.... ‘

Apocalyptic talk tries to find shape and meaning to time, rather than Groundhog Day futility and repetition. It tries to articulate how our choices matter, while confessing that we are not in charge, and bigger forces determine the big picture. When will it all come out? Well, says Paul, one thing we know for sure is that the day is closer now than when we first believed! And as generations learn that we reach that day through out individual mortality, the point remains, to live as if it mattered, as if we were not sure when the deadline, or our own deadline, was coming.

Matthew’s gospel tries the apocalyptic perspective in midrash on the stories of Noah in Genesis: right up to the end, they were all doing business as usual, marrying and partying. It wasn’t that some by their own actions or attitudes were removed from the flood: two will be in the field, two women grinding wheat, and one will be taken, and the other remain. When will it happen? God knows, and isn’t telling! If the homeowner knew when the thief was coming, would he be sleeping? Imagine how it would save on insurance, security! Would you really live differently?

‘How I met your Mother’ is a TV sitcom. Last month, one character had won the right to slap another, whenever he wished, 5 times. The first couple of times he simply ambushed and surprised the other guy with the slap, but then he declared American Thanksgiving Slap-day, and promised to slap his friend at exactly 2pm. Which is worse, knowing or not knowing? As Monty Python sketches said, ‘no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition’! Bruce Cockburn sang that
“the trouble with normal is it always gets worse”. What if you knew the moment and manner of your death – or even your heart attack – or the collapse of the Nortel stock price a while ago?

We don’t know the day or the hour, but we know we are closer than we were when we began. Imagine the relation between this world and the world-to-come not as linear prediction, but like a science fiction plot of parallel universes with portals between them, or as Celtic spirituality called it, ‘thin places’. Our corner of the tradition has long been ‘a-millenialist’ denying that there is one narrative historical plot line, predicting a series of disasters like the Tim LeHaye series of books and movies, “Left Behind”. We were not paralysed, but galvanized to choose.

I admitted in closing that just as it takes me 4 alarms to get up, I never responded well when called to the table for breakfast or supper’s ready. For years, I thought all oatmeal porridge was rubbery and chewy, as it was by the time I got to it. For years, and still, I keep reading, and get to a cold supper, and thank God for micro-waves. Today we had a call to supper, and invitation to come to the table, not just in remembrance of a last supper, but anticipation of a final one. This is communal behaviour, making and shaping our anticipation, and our hope.

I quoted a lot of 20th century poetry this morning: T.S.Eliot, W.B.Yeats from the apocalyptic time between world wars, and Dorothee Soelle, a German finding voice after those wars, all speaking about this ‘second coming’ and ‘advent’ as something fare more than baby Jesus:

Yeats’ 1919 “The Second Coming” reflects a Great War, Irish Rising, and Russian Revolution:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

T.S.Eliot’s 1927 poem “Journey of the Magi” imagines one of the wise men, aged and remembering his youthful adventure following the star. I suggested that many of us could identify with it on a cold day, closer to our own mortality, as strangers and misfits in our culture:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Dorothee Soelle’s 1974 “When he comes again” speaks from the perspective of a German struggling with her elders’ role in the apocalyptic conflicts of the century, and I closed with it, as something closer to the tone of voice we might claim, of hopeful if not wishful thinking, as part of a people and generation often judged, weighed in the balance and found wanting:


1
I can’t promise you for sure
I have nothing definite to go on
sectarian illusions fill me with sadness
and I recall the faith of my fathers with scorn

Who will come again I would ask
cock robin or humpty dumpty
the singsong of children waking early
The buckets in the abortionist’s office

No smile has ever returned
no angel come twice
no peace will come again

If he comes again
I can’t promise you for sure
but I promise him to you
I with nothing to go on
you without expectation
he without proof
on his return…


3
When he comes again
you’ll shed your old self

Take the facts of your daily life
the thin walls of your apartment
forbade you to listen
the confines of your desk
forbade you to see clear
the crowded streetcars
forbade you to sing

A foreman was needed
you’ll fill that role
until he comes.

4
Only this AGAIN
keeps him alive
childhood’s forgotten yearnings
the plight of the maimed
call him home to us
in this wasted land

He leaves the bright heavens
comes
again
condemned
to hang between heaven and earth.


And there he remains
he absolves the guards
lets the tortured forget
makes hatred subside
teaches the wary to breathe
the trembling to sleep
the dreamers to act
the doers to dream.


I use 4 alarms to approach each day, and often am slow to respond to the call to the table. This was our first Sunday of Advent, shaping the season of waiting for Christmas, for Jesus coming – not only in memory, but also in hope, that it’s not up to us to save ourselves. Thank God as we begin this Advent season, for the hope of a ‘second coming’, not only the memory of a first one. Read more...