BAPTISM OF OUR LORD

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17

Prayer of the Day: O God our Father, at the baptism of Jesus you proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit. Make all who are baptized into Christ faithful to their calling to be our daughters and sons, and empower us all with your Spirit, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.”  Isaiah 42:1-4

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Matthew 3:17

As 2020 dawns, so do the presidential primaries. Already we are hearing the shrill cries of the contenders for and the defender of the oval office seeking to make their voices heard in the street, in print, over the airways and through the internet. This promises to be a bruising season as all but one wick must inevitably be extinguished. While the no holds barred tactics and over the top rhetoric promise to make this election more abrasive and divisive than we have seen in recent years, the process has always been ruthless with a lot of bruising and quenching along the path to glory. About the only thing to be said for republican democracy is that it manages the will to power in such a way that we avoid assassinations, rioting and the sight of tanks in our streets-so far at least.

By contrast, the Beloved Son raises neither his voice nor a sword. His way of “establish[ing] justice in the earth” does not involve seizing the levers of power. For that reason, he need not trouble himself with raising funds, whether in wine caves among the well heeled or through appeals over the internet to the anonymous masses. He is content to travel dusty roads from town to town, trusting in the hospitality of strangers and preaching the good news of God’s gentle reign to whomever will hear it. That does not sound like a winning strategy. But if the cost of winning is breaking a few bruised reeds along the way and quenching a few embers struggling to remain lit, Jesus is not interested. Jesus understands that bringing justice to the coast lands cannot be accomplished by conquest or electoral victory. Jesus has no interest in ruling the world by force. He will conquer it by persuasive, persistent and undying love-or not at all.

It is easy in times like these for the church to be drawn into the shouting match between partisan interests screaming their moral imperatives, advertising their calls to action and asserting their priorities-much of which are cast in terms of the interests of the nation state in which we reside rather than the reign of God under which we are called to live. This week at a gathering of evangelical Christians in Miami the President of the United States declared to a cheering crowd that “God is on our side.” Whether that was meant to refer to his military strikes against Iran or his upcoming re-election campaign or both is anybody’s guess. Either way, it amounts to an equation of God with the nation and its leaders’ political agenda. As such, it constitutes an idolatrous nationalism that, to date, our mainline churches have been shy about confronting head on. Perhaps that is because we, too, have been drawn into the political fray in more subtle ways and have tied our mission a little too closely to the fortunes of the American empire.

I am not suggesting that churches ought to steer clear of politics. We could not do that if we wanted. But we need to enter into the business of politics with a very clear and sober understanding of what it is, namely, the art of the possible. In a democratic republic, government is designed to create a framework of laws acceptable to a diverse population made up of groups with similar, overlapping and sometimes conflicting interests. Legislators must understand that, in order to get their highest priorities enacted, they must put others on the back burner or sacrifice them altogether. They must sometimes agree to drop their opposition to laws they find objectionable in order to win the support of other legislators whose votes need to get their own legislation passed. Hopefully, this process will evolve into an adequate, if not perfect arrangement under which everyone gets enough of what they need to live together in a measure of peace. That’s the intent, anyway.

While the church is not indifferent to the shape of the civil structures under which we live with our neighbors, its mission is to proclaim the reign of God. God’s reign is not the product of political evolution, but the result of God’s revolutionary incursion on the planet by way of Jesus’s incarnation, death and resurrection. In view of God’s resurrection of Jesus and seating him at God’s right hand, the rule and authority of all other sovereigns is rendered relative, temporary and contingent. The church is therefore not at liberty to yield its ultimate allegiance to any government, national leader or political party. Thus, for example, disciples of Jesus are not at liberty to “soft peddle” racial justice even though it is regarded by many progressive politicians as the “third rail” of American politics whose very touch can render them unelectable. So while it might make sound political sense for a candidate for office to put issues like reparations to descendants of African American slaves on the back burner in the interest of defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 election, for the church to do the same would be a faithless betrayal of the Lord to whom the church owes its highest allegiance. As tempting as it can be to settle for the “possible,” the “achievable” and the “lesser of evils,” disciples of Jesus know that justice can never be subordinated or delayed in the interest of some “higher good.” “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” II Corinthians 6:2. In God’s view, there are no higher goods than justice, righteousness and peace-all of which must be had together or not at all.

The long and short of it is this: disciples of Jesus must enter into the political realm with a willingness to lose elections, accept failure of their efforts and live with defeat. Faithfulness, not efficacy, is the measure by which political involvement (and all other Christian endeavors) must be judged. That is because the reign of God is not a distant future hope to be achieved, but a present reality given to us as sheer gift. Our political involvement, then, consists first and foremost of witness to the reality of God’s reign and the imperatives it places upon us. If along the way we accomplish something in the political realm, so much the better.

In Sunday’s gospel lesson God lets us know in no uncertain terms that the beloved Son is none other than the one who whose ministry fails spectacularly with his arrest, his followers’ desertion and his cruel execution. Everyone Jesus healed eventually died of something else. His preaching was misunderstood by most, ignored by many and opposed by some. It doesn’t always seem that Jesus left us with much and often it seems we have very little to offer the world or each other. Our world’s wounds are so very deep and our efforts so very frail. I think about that as I walk the beaches of Cape Cod picking up discarded bottles, plastic bags and deflated balloons-even as Australian forests burn, the polar ice fields melt and my government opens up the regulatory floodgates to pollutants we have spent forty years cleaning up. I wonder as I peel carrots for our town’s community walk in dinner what real world effect I can possibly have on the looming threat of global famine. Most days it seems as though our acts of kindness and mercy amount to little more than a thimble full of water thrown at a raging wild fie. As in the words of the poet, it often seems as though we have little more to offer than a frail opportunity, a mere chance for a better tomorrow in some small corner of the planet.

In the weeks to come, Jesus will let us know in no uncertain terms that his followers can expect nothing less than what he himself experiences. Yet because God raised up the crucified one who staked his life on a kingdom of which we can catch only fleeting glimpses, disciples of Jesus persist with living into that kingdom, as futile and ineffectual as that might seem. They know that they are part of something bigger than themselves. For them, as for Jesus, God’s reign is more real than the “political realities” that constrain the workings of nation states. God in God’s limitless compassion and generosity, takes up our little offerings of kindness and mercy and puts them to work in God’s undying mission to redeem and make new God’s creation.

Live and Let Live

It must have been born out of time,
that wasp I saw fly across the room,
startled evidently when the clock began to chime.
Cooped up indoors it would surely expire
from hunger, thirst, or a swift blow with the newspaper
wielded by my mother-in-law in her ire.
Outside on this cold December night
it stood hardly a better chance,
the dead grass and flowers being shrouded in icy white.
No friend of these creatures am I,
having known their venomous sting,their malicious humming in the sky.
To this one misplaced stranger, though,
I felt a certain kinship, a bond between myself
and this insect, my natural foe.
Desperately, I hoped he would survive,
yet knew the odds were stacked against him
and could not imagine how he’d stay alive.
I opened the window and let him fly.
He disappeared into the black of night.
The wind gave fourth a mournful cry.
So often it seems the most we have to give
is a lottery ticket, a quarter to the homeless beggar,
the hope, the possibility, the mere chance to live.

Source: Anonymous

SECOND SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS/EPIPHANY

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 147:12-20
Ephesians 1:3-14
John 1:1-18

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, you have filled all the earth with the light of your incarnate Word. By your grace empower us to reflect your light in all that we do, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

When I was still in active full time parish ministry, I always celebrated Epiphany on the closest Sunday to January 6^th. I was advised once (in a very disapproving tone) by one of my colleagues in ministry that this is not proper liturgical practice. Epiphany, he told me, is not a “movable” feast. Consequently, it ought to be celebrated with a separate mass on whichever day January 6^th falls. That’s fine in theory. If I thought for one moment that my working members would take the day off, my teens would skip a day of school or that my elderly members would drive through the dark to a weekday service, I would gladly have done an additional Eucharist. But that was not about to happen and I was not about to exile Epiphany, a feast I consider critical to the church calendar, to a worship service no one would attend. So, I advised my learned colleague that Epiphany would be celebrated in my parish the coming Sunday and that he could sue me. (OK. I really said something more gracious and respectful, but to the same effect.) If you are of the same mind, I invite you to re-visit my post of January 3, 2015.

Of course, this need not be a binary choice between sticking to the lectionary or observing Epiphany. Sunday’s gospel from St. John presents a perfect opportunity for talking about the revealing of God’s glory in the person of Jesus Christ. I think that perhaps the best way to describe how John writes his gospel is aptly reflected in the words of John Steinbeck:

“When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.” John Steinbeck from his novel, Cannery Row.

Rather than relating the story of Jesus’ birth, John gives us a poem about the miracle of the Incarnation filled with many opposite, contrasting and complementary images that will be developed and brought into sharper focus throughout the following narrative. Light and darkness; being and nothingness; knowledge and ignorance; belief and unbelief; birth from flesh and birth from God. All of these images and terms will find further expression and deeper meaning as the story of Jesus unfolds. For now, though, they swim about together in the rich primordial soil of John’s imaginative lyrics. We must wait for them to ooze out and show themselves for what they truly are.

John begins with the declaration that the Word was both with God in the beginning and was God. This is entirely consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures which speak of God’s Word as “coming” and “accomplishing.” See, e.g., Jeremiah 1:2; Isaiah 55:11. God is not merely as good as God’s Word. God is God’s Word. Yet even though the same as God, the Word is somehow distinguishable from God.

But then John goes on to tell us something really remarkable. “The Word became flesh.” The Word became a human person such that the invisible God is now visible. John goes on to speak of the enfleshed Word as God’s Son. It would seem that if we are going to say that God has a Son, it follows inevitably that there must be at least two gods. Yet John (along with the rest of the New Testament writers) maintains that God is one. The church struggled with this enormously counterintuitive confession from the onset as it forged its Trinitarian confession, rejecting numerous simplistic and more plausible alternative understandings along the way. At the heart of the Incarnation stands this one scandalous truth: God is visible and God is human. The Incarnation was not a temporary state into which God entered for a single lifetime. It was not merely a clever disguise. In Jesus, God became irrevocably human and remains so. That is why John can say in his First Letter, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” I John 4:20.

The inescapable conclusion is that to rend the flesh of another human being is to rend the flesh of God. To ridicule, excoriate or insult another human being is to blaspheme God. God cannot be harmed or insulted by the removal of a crèche or a cross from public lands, by disrespect for the Bible or by desecration of a sanctuary. Only by harming the persons created to bear God’s image and for whom the Son of God died can God’s self be injured. When that becomes clear, it is equally clear by how far much of what passes for Christianity these days misses the mark. Something is seriously out of whack when we grieve more over the removal of humanly designed plastic figures of Jesus from the park than we do for the homeless people created by God in God’s image who are still sleeping there.

One of the most significant words in this section is that word “dwelt” or “lived” as the New Revised Standard Version has it. Vs. 14. Both translations fall short of the actual Greek word “skaiano” which means literally to “tent with” or “tabernacle with.” The word conjures up images of the tent of presence in which God dwelt among the people of Israel on their journey to the Promised Land. This powerful image of Jesus as God’s presence gets lost in the English translation!

There is far more that could be said about this section of John. Nearly every word in John’s gospel is freighted with meaning that accumulates like the mass of a snowball rolling downhill. For those of us who will be observing the Feast of Epiphany on Sunday, the contrast between light and darkness is particularly meaningful. One might consider weaving the themes of Epiphany into the miracle of the Incarnation and the divine humanity of Jesus-as does the following hymn by Mechthild of Magdeburg.

We praise You, O Lord.
For you have sought us in your humility,
Saved us by your compassion,
Honored us by your humanity,
Led us by your gentleness,
Ordered us by your wisdom,
Protected us by your power,
Sanctified us by your holiness,
Illumined us by your intimacy,
Raised us by your love.

Source: The Flowing Light of the Godhead,  published in Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets: A Historical Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Writings, Madigan, Shawn ed., (c. Fortress Press, 1998). Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207-1282) was monastic and mystic born to a noble Saxon family. At age 12 she had the first of several visions. In 1230 she left her home renouncing all claim to wealth and privilege to join a Beguine order at Magdeburg. There she seems to have risen to a position of authority in the community. She became acquainted with the Dominicans and became a Dominican tertiary, studying many of the Dominican writers. It was her Dominican confessor, Henry of Halle, who encouraged and helped Mechthild to compose The Flowing Light. Mechthird’s criticism of church dignitaries and their religious laxity along with her claims to theological insight by reason of her visions aroused ecclesiastical opposition. Some clerics called for the burning of her writings. In old age Mechthird lost her sight and found herself alone and the object of much criticism. Around 1272, she joined the Cistercian nunnery at Helfta, where she was given protection and support in the last years of her life. You can read more about Mechthild of Magdeburg and sample more of her writings at the Poetry Foundation website.

FIRST SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS

Isaiah 63:7-9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 2:10-18
Matthew 2:13-23

Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, you know that we cannot place our trust in our own powers. As you protected the infant Jesus, so defend us and all the needy from harm and adversity, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

The grizzly story we know as the “Slaughter of the Innocents” and the flight of the Holy Family from that terror into Egypt reads very much like the stories of thousands of refugee families fleeing gang violence, starvation and war in Central and South America, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Burma and many other places around the globe. As we don’t read that Mary and Joseph were detained at the Egyptian border, the family separated or the Christ child confiscated and caged, we can presume that the imperial authorities regulating borders back in the 1^st Century were a tad more humane than our own U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, affectionately known as “ICE.” This is the same border to which Abraham and Sarah came fleeing famine and starvation in Canaan some four millennia earlier and felt compelled to trade sexual favors for passage. Centuries later, Jacob and his family came as refugees to Egypt and then fled as refugees four centuries later. The people of Israel knew very well what it was like having to flee from home to a foreign land. They knew what it was like to live as foreigners in a land where they were hated, feared and persecuted. It is for this reason that as Israel established itself as a people in the land God had given them, the people were strictly ordered: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 19:33-34.

As I write these lines, hundreds of asylum seekers, including around 200 young children are sleeping in the open near the U.S. border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. This is due to policies under U.S. President Donald Trump aimed at reducing the number of new arrivals in the United States. This has caused a backlog as United States border officials limit the number of asylum cases they receive at ports of entry each day. Consequently, tens of thousands of mainly Central American asylum seekers live for months in Mexico as they await court dates or interviews with border officials.

As serious as this humanitarian crisis is, it pales in comparison with the horrendous suffering resulting from migrant refugee waves within and out of Africa, Asia and South America. Moreover, this too is but a foretaste of the global refugee movements that will surely be triggered by floods, famines and epidemics resulting from climate change. Soon, the industrialized nations will be faced with a stark choice: 1) meet the refugee crisis with substantial aid for those areas worst affected, open borders to resettle displaced persons and sacrifice substantially to rebuild a more just and sustainable order; or 2) fortify their borders and use all necessary means to preserve their positions of wealth, power and privilege. The current administration has clearly chosen the second path. But disciples of Jesus know that salvation lies in the first.

My biggest fear is that one day my church, which has issued apologies for its participation in our country’s slave trade, for its involvement in the genocide of America’s first nations, for its silence and complicity in the murder of six million Jews will someday be issuing an apology for its failure to stand with refugees turned away at numerous borders and allowed to die. For once, I hope the church recognizes Jesus in the hungry, poor and desperate stranger in front of its face rather than having to apologize for making that recognition only a century later. There are some hopeful signs. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is currently suing the Trump administration over its unlawful executive orders severely limiting refugee resettlement within our borders. Congregations of all Christian traditions around the country are sheltering refugee families from deportation. Armies of disciples are at our border even now assisting refugees with nutritional support, medical care and legal representation. It is my Advent prayer that perhaps this time, the Church of Jesus Christ will be standing with Jesus, the child of refugees fleeing for their lives in search of a safe haven.

Here’s a poem by Robert Southwell, S.J. capturing this very hope:

The Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,

The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

Source: This poem is in the public domain. Robert Southwell (1561–1595) was an English Roman Catholic priest of the Jesuit Order and a poet, hymnodist. He served the Roman See as a clandestine missionary in post-Reformation England. Southwell was arrested and imprisoned in 1592 and after being tortured and interrogated by the authorities, he was tried and convicted of high treason for his links to the Roman Catholic Church. He was executed in February of 1595 by hanging., Southwell was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970. You can read more about Robert Southwell and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

Kierkegaard’s Ghost

(News that’s fake, but credible)

Kierkegaard’s Ghost has acquired, through an anonymous source, a copy of the original draft of President Trump’s December 17, 2019 letter to House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, prior to editing by the president’s communication team. The text is printed below.

Deer Pee pee Pelosi

This impeechment thing is so unfair! You are just mad cause I beet Hilery 2016 by a land slide. You are just jelus cause I am the best president the cuntry ever had. The ameriken peeple love me. Fox news poles that say they want me out are rong. Fox is fake news. They sed they were my frends. But Fox and frends are not frends. Except Tucker Karilson. He is still my frend. The rest are not frends enymore.

Impeechment is an ugly word. But it is an importent word. It is an expensive word. Expensive things are good. I have all expensive things. Very expensive things. The best things muny can by. But you took an expensive word and made it cheep. That was very bad of you. It shoes you are a bad person. All the democrat party is bad persons. They are all very bad to me. They have been bad to my famly. Very bad. They made my famly feel bad. And that is bad.

You shud be ashamed of yourself. The founding fathers would be ashamed of you if they knew you. But they don’t know you cause there dead. But if they were not dead, they would be ashamed. Ashamed of you. Not me. They wood be proud of me. Cause I am the best president ever. I made a big wall to keep bad people out of the cuntry. I made a tax bill that made the stok market go up. I made lots of jobs for black people even though they do not like me. But they shuld like me cause I was very nice to them. I gave them lots of jobs.

You sed my call to valdumer zelincky was abusing my power. It was not! It was a perfect call. The perfectest call there ever was. It was a butiful call. All my calls are butiful. But this call to mister zelincky was the perfectest call I ever made. But you sed it was bad. All the democrats sed it was bad. That is a lie! It was a very very very good call. Everybody says it was a perfect call exsept you and your very bad frends. You shud be ashamed!

You are very unfair! Joe Biden goes to ukrane and does many bad things and you say, oh, that’s joe. We like joe so he can do what he wants. Donald Trump has a perfect fone call and you say, oh Donald is bad! He did a bad thing! We have to impeech him. You just like joe Biden beter than me and so you treet him nice and me mean. That is very unfair. You are a very unfair person and so is the democrat party. Very unfair. Rudy juliani knows who the bad person reely is and he is going to tell evryone how bad joe Bidan is.  Rudy is my frend. He is not mean to me. He helps me like you shuld help me. You wud help me if you were a good person. But you are a bad person so you don’t help me.

Adam shiff is also a very unfair, very mean person. He was very mean to me and said things that are mean. He sed I put myself in frunt of the cuntry but I did not! I put the cuntry ferst. I always put the cuntry ferst. But nobody in the senate is going to lisen to shiff. The democrats will lisen, but there are more republicans than them so they can think what they want. It won’t matter. The republicans, who are more, lisen to me. They know I made a perfekt call. They know I did not do bad things. They know I do good things. So they will akwit me no matter what the bad democrats say. Akwit means say I did not do anything rong. And that is what they will do. You can’t stop them from akwiting so buggers on you!

Yours truly

Donald J. Trump

P.S. This is you.

****************************************************************

FAKE NEWS ALERT: The above article is satirical. The events it describes didn’t happen.  “There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn’t necessarily a lie even if it didn’t necessarily happen.” John Steinbeck

FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Isaiah 7:10-16
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25

Prayer of the Day Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. With your abundant grace and might, free us from the sin that hinders our faith, that eagerly we may receive your promises, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 1:20.

Matthew’s Christmas narrative begins with an unplanned pregnancy. There is no romanticizing this narrative. No angel appears to Mary with glad tidings about the child she is carrying. The angel speaks only to Joseph and only in dreams and only after the baby is well on the way. We can surmise, I think, that the engagement of Mary to Joseph was arranged as was usually the case in 1^st Century Palestine. Marriage in that context was more a business arrangement between two families than the culmination of a courting ritual between two individuals. Thus, Mary’s pregnancy threw a wrench into the workings of a carefully negotiated social contract, thereby threatening not only her own reputation, but the peace and stability of the community. Given these realities, Joseph’s resolution of the problem appears both humane and pragmatic. Setting Mary free to marry the father of her child will keep peace between the families, preserve public respectability and spare Mary the stigma of adultery.

But things are not always what they seem. Turns out that Mary’s pregnancy, is “from the Holy Spirit.” That changes everything-though it might have been cold comfort to Joseph.  The Spirit has been known to work God’s redemptive purposes out of some very unsavory circumstances. If the lengthy genealogy set forth in the previous seventeen verses had been included in our gospel reading, we might have been better prepared for this.  The royal line from Abraham and Sarah to the promised messiah leads right through the middle of incestuous unions, prostitution, seduction and adultery. From all that we can discern in the text, the assurance of the Spirit’s involvement, whatever shape that might have taken, was all the information Joseph was given when commanded by the angel in his dream to do the counterintuitive, namely, take Mary as his wife. This is the Christmas story as we have it from Matthew.

The gospel narrative does not tell us anything about how Mary became pregnant or how the Holy Spirit was involved. The temptation to fill in the blanks with what we think we know from Luke’s gospel or to negate the scandal with doctrinal assertions is strong. Yet I believe we need to resist that temptation if we are going to hear this narrative faithfully. I believe Matthew wants us wonder how the Holy Spirit could possibly be working in the midst of this seemingly unholy circumstance. I believe Matthew wants us to wonder why, after going through the painstaking effort of recounting the holy family tree from the patriarchs and matriarchs down to Joseph, he begins his narrative with a pregnancy wholly unconnected to that lineage. I believe that Matthew’s gospel would have us stand squarely in the shoes of Joseph as he contemplates the command given to him in a dream that must grate on his every instinct.

This is a timely exercise as we seem to be confronted with a whole panoply of circumstances from which nothing good appears to be coming anytime soon. The grim news given to us regularly by the scientific community concerning the progress of climate change does not admit of any “silver lining.” Moreover, just when global leadership is required to meet this crisis, global institutions, international treaties and strategic democratic alliances are falling apart before a wave of populist nationalism giving expression to the darkest and most violent human instincts rooted in blood, soil and nation. You have to look long and hard at this dark picture to find even an inkling of light.

In the face of what well might be the dawn of global catastrophe, the story about a dream, a promise and a child is a slim reed upon which to hang our hope. Yet this fragile gospel tale that begins with so much scandal, doubt and ambiguity is, in fact, all that the church has ever had to offer. For those with ears to hear it, the Nativity story blows like a fresh wind over all the stale hopes that have disappointed us. As Americans, we have always believed in our constitution and our democratic institutions to ensure justice. We have always looked to our superior military might to defend our freedoms. We have always believed in the innate goodness of our nation. But today we find our government paralyzed, our military powerless to achieve the lofty objectives of peace and security we set for it and our politics beset by a rising tide of racial hate and nationalist sentiment calling into question our national character. Nevertheless, in the darkness of this dying empire expiring in the midst of a disintegrating world, “God is with us.” The Spirit is moving. The young woman has conceived. The child has been pushed out into the glaring light of day. God has become human, holds us with human arms, loves us with a human heart and makes room in our tortured existence for divine hope: hope for the healing of our past; hope for newness in our present circumstances; hope for creation’s future.

Disciples of Jesus are realists in the sense that they recognize and acknowledge the full scope and extent of evil. But they also recognize that evil is not the only thing out there. As the anonymous poet says, God slipped quietly into the world through the messy consequences of an unplanned pregnancy. That changes everything. Because “God is with us,” the Spirit of God is also always an active part of the mix in whatever is going on. For that reason, we often witness surprising, unexpected and redemptive moments in the middle of the most painful and hopeless circumstances. The wasteland created by the Chyrnobyl disaster is recovering faster than scientists anticipated and has become a thriving refuge for animals threatened with extinction. The demilitarized zone between North and South Korea has likewise become a revitalized stretch of jungle habitat that in recent decades has become all too rare in Asia. The election of Donald J. Trump has awakened us to the ugly reality of racism deep in our psyches and the systemic perpetuation of white privilege in our schools, our workplaces and our government. More importantly, the recognition of that reality has spurred many of us to break our silence and to speak and act boldly in the face of oppression.

I don’t mean to say here that God causes bad things to happen in order to bring about a greater good. Rather, it is the case that God takes whatever evil the world throws in God’s direction and works redemptively with it. So however apparently hopeless the circumstances, there is always a “God factor” at work that frequently surprises us with good news where we least expect to find it. Sunday’s gospel, along with all of the other Advent scriptures, challenge us to plan for the unplanned and expect the unexpected.

I Sing of a Maiden

I sing of a maiden
That is makeless:
King of all kings
To her son she ches.

He came also still
Where his mother was
As dew in April
That falleth on grass.

He came also still
To his mother’s bower
As dew in April
That falleth on the flower.

He came also still
Where his mother lay
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.

Mother and maiden
Was never none but she-
Well may such a lady
God’s mother be.

Anonymous verse composed sometime in the 15^th Century. Source: Chapters into Verse, Edit. Robert Atwan & Laurence Wiler (c. 2000 by Oxford University Press) pp. 251-252.