“Signing the Name:
With-It God, Be With Us Now”
Thanks to Joseph this morning, this is a
great day for daddies! Don’t give up on the men of our lives, including the
preacher men! There is hope for us yet. Poor and lowly, forgotten and
neglected, Joseph in this story (We joke about when the child playing Joseph
in the pageant calls in sick, the show goes right on without him!) -- Joseph
strikes a still-sounding blow for liberated man- and fatherhood. He puts
love of life above love of law. He gives what we call “the name above every
name” to this baby whom he could have had stoned to death, along with the
mother, according to that same source of law in Leviticus used to stone some
folks spiritually yet today. For Mary, his betrothed, has been “found to be
with child from the Holy Spirit,” -- whatever host of suspicions that phrase
might cover! So Joseph, “a righteous man,” has been disgraced, and the law
gives him option to disgrace Mary drastically in return. But Joseph rises
to this moment and chooses life before law. Joseph sees, and invites us to
see, there is a spirit of law that works by liberation than any letter of
law can work by domination.
I just read just this week in the journal
CrossCurrents a story that begins, in the spirit of Mary and Joseph, “My
first pregnancy scare occurred the week of my eighteenth birthday, three
months after my baptism. My boyfriend (who was a few years older) was
gentle, Christian, and not trying to take my virginity. . . .” The author,
the woman, goes on to say, “The most dismaying thing about a pregnancy one
does not intend, aside from its very occurrence – the thing that can
undermine a serious young person’s religion – is that it unsettles all one’s
notions about God’s will. There is something uncanny and untrustworthy
about a universe in which the conception of a new person can come about by
accident. . . . God is nowhere discernible in it.” Or perhaps discernible
everywhere . . . .
We might say the Christmas story is about
making God discernible to such “serious young persons,” whatever their age,
precisely in the scariest and most challenging of everyday circumstance and
condition. Christmas is to say, God is committed to bringing forth life, to
bringing forth love, to bringing forth hope and joy, justice and peace,
every chance that God gets! Which often means, every chance we give God!
God is committed to doing God’s “new thing” right in the midst of our every
old way. By choosing life, by choosing love, for Mary and for her child,
Joseph frustrates the law to fulfill it. Biblical theologian Megan McKenna
said in her visit to Reno the other week that after what Joseph does here,
use of the law can never again be justified for judgment and power,
condemnation and control, over the life of another. In this time for us to
“wait and watch, imagine and dream,” McKenna says Joseph’s dream of an angel
bringing the Christmas message, “Do not be afraid,” liberates all of us to
search for life-giving, life-loving responses to our every circumstance and
condition as well.
This contemporary woman reflecting on her
“pregnancy scare” observes of Joseph’s, and Mary’s, kind of law-altering
law-breaking, “Those who have not committed a forbidden act perceive only
that it is forbidden; those who have find out that one has to live after
it! Life is different on the other side: one disobeys, and the prohibition
was only a prohibition, the lightning does not strike, and one is left in
the entirely practical position of being responsible for one’s self. . . .
Either decision, to obey or to disobey, gives rise to more decisions, which
still demand to be made with care and honor.” Isn’t that Christmas? Isn’t
that life? That each of us (even God!) has to live with every circumstance,
every condition, every discernment, every decision? Yet we may do so in
full assurance that our lives are signed with the precious name of this
Jesus! Our “with-it God” who is hip to everything happening to us also is
“with us” wherever our journey leads us.
Here is the bottom and signature line of
what this modern woman says about the new righteousness of righteous
Joseph: “There is a more genuine righteousness that does not depend on
fierce public shows of rectitude [such as stonings to death, most executions
and most wars], but that righteousness is not easily shocked, is infinitely
gentle in speaking with the vulnerable, and knows the meaning of pardon.”
O, to be not easily shocked, infinitely gentle, and knowing the meaning of
pardon! Nor do we need “fierce public shows of rectitude” to “put the
Christ back in Christmas,” as we like to say, -- nor the Ten Commandments in
courthouses, nor even prayer in the public schools. Christmas says, God
needs no such defending, no such protecting, from us. And at least with the
coming of Jesus, we need no such defending, no such protecting, from God.
In fact, we will be trying, as we talk about
Jesus’ birth and life the rest of these Winter seasons, to go beyond purely
traditional and parochial ways to express and enact the mysteries and
meanings of Christmas/Epiphany events and stories. For Christmas is
cosmic! Earth rebirth! World awake! Voices of angels and viewpoints of
stars! Just as Christmas is personal and familial. For each of us,
whatever our gender, whatever our sexual practice, whatever our age or stage
of the journey through life: to live is to give birth! To give birth to
ourselves! As Joseph here gives birth to himself and becomes a “new man” of
new righteousness in this moment! God is not done with us yet! Whereas the
“old man” may yet be seen in the story of Ahaz here telling Isaiah he will
not ask for a sign from God. Like any “old man” yet today, no matter how
lost, the king will not ask for directions! We would much rather be “right”
than righteous as Joseph is.
There are many deep meanings to being “born
again,” filled with new life, new hope, that those who talk most about it
rarely seem to find time or the grace to get to. Seeds of new justice,
seeds of new peace, seeds nonviolence and love are sown in us, in many
public ways yes, but also in very personal ways, everyday. Seeds are given
to us to be sowing and showing to others. Sisters and brothers, of Mary and
Joseph, of one another and of all others, God needs us in these days every
bit as much as we need God! As Megan McKenna says about Christmas as our
inspiration and our in-formation (formation in us) by God’s incarnation in
Jesus: Spirit needs Flesh to exist in this world! God cannot do without
even us! Much as we cost God to suffer, in us and with us and for us.
Christmas is God’s day to take up the chance, the choice, the challenge
forever!
McKenna says Christmas means our “new
wisdom” is awful (awe-full) openness to God’s Spirit as “Giver of Life:”
Give me whatever you want! Give me whatever you will! It is not so much
about me always knowing or getting what I want as it is about me wanting to
be “with you” in all things, and wanting to know you are “with me,” “with
us” to the end! Christmas is always about both beginning and ending, both
birth and death: birth to the “new way,” “death” to the old. Christmas says
God’s “end,” God’s intent in creation is new beginning each day! For each
person everywhere! Every child born with the hopes of the world! McKenna
speaks of “the long eye of God,” of learning to see as God sees, and of
Christmas “wisdom” as giving to and for others. Christmas is always about
the Finite One giving birth to the Infinite Many, -- to all the complexity,
all the diversity of all personality, all humanity in every time and in
every place.
And Christmas is all about giving
bottom-line signs of the blessing of God upon us. As a Roman Catholic
speaking with many Roman Catholics, Megan McKenna asked us to practice the
sign of the cross, not only upon ourselves, but upon one another, which we
found to be much more awkward and vulnerable.
So that is what Christmas is like for God!
Becoming human! Blessing others! Awkwardly, vulnerably, often without a
clue as to what’s going on, what the other might need that we might give,
but giving because that is who we are, who we “born again” to become. In
effect, as God becomes flesh, so we become children, or child-like, again.
In this season of “mountains and plains, highs and lows,” we see God as the
one who sits high but looks low. Just as we have to go “downstairs,” to the
catacombs, to be with the children of this congregation! Someday, with
apportionments paid, and heating and air conditioning paid off, we will
start on an elevator! I know we will! The children will come even closer
to us: God’s highness made lowness in Jesus, the child, the child-like in
us. Amen.
Rev. John Auer
