Second Sunday of Christmas
We tend to have a negative view of disruptions. Who, after all, wants to be told that they’re having a disruptive influence? When do we use the word “disrupted”? Typically, only during negative circumstances. We talk about traffic being disrupted. We talk about train or flight service being disrupted. It means disorder, turmoil, chaos…
And yet what the bible teaches us is that God is, by nature, disruptive. We tend to forget this. Because we tend rather quickly to settle into complacency when it comes to God.
Several years ago, my friend Patrick began a new ministry. In Nebraska.
Rural. Nebraska. This was not something that he had planned. In fact, Patrick
had become pretty comfortable where he had been in central Pennsylvania.
He and his wife, Breen, had been in their respective parishes for six years.
He’d just witnessed the birth of his first daughter and so was feeling decidedly more domestic.
He was also starting to feel a little antsy, so he decided to rearrange his office. He started throwing away books. Patrick puts it this way:
I had, in my mind, created a category of “books that I will never open…” [What] I had failed to take into account was two things. First, never say “never” to God, it just makes him laugh. Especially when second, I was making a rather bold statement with the full power of my ego asserting itself. …It was me saying, “I would rather live in willful ignorance than to go through the growth it would take to read this book… I will myself not to read this particular book, no matter how good it might be for me.” As such…it was really a case of me hiding from books that might be good for me by sending them away, so I never had to look at them again. It seemed God had some other thoughts about a particular book and it wasn’t leaving my hand until I reconsidered.
So I asked God, “Really? This book? Are you sure?”
I didn’t get a verbal answer, but I knew one thing, it wasn’t leaving my hand for the “will never read it pile.” It did however leave my hand for a new pile, the “Books God told me I had to read” pile, so did six others.
Over the next few months the books got read pretty diligently, and I’d like to say I loved every word of them, I didn’t. I’d like to say all or at least one of them became my new favorite read, I can’t. What I will say I found in them is this: the start of a new calling, and the beginnings of a new way of being. I didn’t love those books, they aren’t my favorites, and I hope I never have to read all but one of them again, but they were the start, they were the guides that pointed me in the right direction, without them I would not be where I am right now and so for them… I am truly grateful.
Patrick went on to earn his master’s degree in spiritual formation and is now a full-time spiritual director.
Some disruptions are like that. We don’t even register them as such, at least not at first, because they happen in a sort of super slow motion. The disruption begins with an idea, a thought, an inkling… And that idea, thought, or inkling leads to another, or an action and then another action.
It’s like the classic cartoon of the villain creating a giant snowball, by going to the top of a mountain slope and launching a pea towards the bottom. It slowly gathers mass and momentum, going from a mere nothing, something really quite ordinary and mundane, to something that is suddenly beyond our controlling.
Other disruptions can be more immediately noticed.
When Anke and I made the decision to seek a new call, which led us to Maryland 9 years ago; we can both point to a pretty specific day; a pretty specific meeting where we said to ourselves: “OK. It’s time.”
I went to seminary with a lot of “formers”: attorney, police officer, opera singer, mining engineer, commander of NATO helicopter operations, teacher, nurse… All of them having come to seminary as a result of God’s disruptive activity in their lives.
This week we will observe the day of Epiphany, January 6th, the day after the 12th and final day of Christmas. And while the day of Epiphany is often symbolized by the three wise men, it’s not really about them. It’s about Jesus, the ultimate disruption, being revealed to the world as more, much more than just a baby.
All the lessons that we have for today show us the disruptive nature of God’s activity in the world. It might not be so apparent in the lesson from Isaiah, but that’s because it’s divorced from its context. To find out how disruptive and jarring this text really is, you need to read chapters 58 and 59, which precede it!
Chapters 58 and 59 are characterized by gloom and despair; a call to repentance. The ways of the wicked are crooked. Our transgressions are many. Our sins testify against us. Burdened by the ability to see only darkness, those two chapters are marked by a yearning for light and glory.
Suddenly, then, we have the opening line of Isaiah 60:1 - Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
It’s like a thunderbolt of grace. We have this sudden, abrupt shift from doom and gloom to light and glory. But what’s most surprising is the shift in God’s response to the people’s crooked ways and their sense of despair: They’re not to mend their ways first (out of fear), rather God comes to them, God disrupts the gloom, God arises and shines forth in glory! And it’s unconditional.
God is always a God whose glory involves life and salvation. And God’s gifts of life and salvation are not offered for only one people, but for all people! The people’s repentance, the mending of ways, the living out of justice is a response to God’s disruptive glory! It’s not an attempt to be made right with God. It’s thanksgiving for the God who comes to them, who reveals life and salvation in the midst of the suffering community.
That’s one way to respond to the disruptive power of God’s love: to allow ourselves to receive it and to be transformed by it. The other is to respond with fear. That’s what we see with King Herod.
Herod responds with fear and, let’s be quite honest, from his perspective it’s perfectly reasonable. Puppet or not, he’s still the king. And suddenly to be told by visitors, Foreign visitors no less, that a new king has been born? God comes to the world in human form; God’s life-giving salvation and glory come to us in the shape of a child; an infant. And how does Herod respond? With fear and violence, ordering the murders of all children two years of age and younger. He returns to the same darkness that plagued the people in Isaiah’s time.
But why? My guess is that he simply wants to be sure that he remains in power. Herod is not the servant-king envisioned by Israel’s prophets. Herod’s primary concern is Herod: he’s immediately threatened by even the mere mention of another – and therefore rival – king.
Whatever its cause, fear is a powerful thing. Herod, along with the chief priests and scribes, conspires to find the Messiah and kill him. They don’t succeed. At least, not this time. But, of course, there does come a time in the story when there will again be an unholy alliance between the political and religious leaders of the day who will not only conspire against Jesus, but capture and crucify him.
Matthew’s nativity is the adult version. It moves quickly from the adoration and gifts of the magi to a darker, more ambivalent world of political intrigue, deception, and fear-induced violence. But if Matthew’s account is more sober, it’s also more realistic.
We live in a world riddled by fear… devastating super wild-fires, RV’s rigged to explode by a mentally ill man worried about lizard people, a pandemic that, at least at this point, doesn’t show many signs of slowing down… We live in a world where innocents die every day to preventable illness and hunger.
In Matthew we have an accurate and, therefore, more difficult picture of the world. And that is what is at the heart of Matthew’s darker, more adult-oriented story of Jesus’ birth: The promise that it is precisely this world, this fear-riddled, anxious, violent world, that God came to.
Us: This people, so mastered by fear that we often do the unthinkable to each other and ourselves… God loves us, not in spite of our weakness and failings, but because of them… This gaping need that we have and bear that God addresses through the radical disruptive presence of Christ.
In the person of Jesus, God disrupts the patterns of fear and violence that permeate so much of this world. God shows us that there is a different, better way of being in the world.
Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, the living, breathing, and vulnerable promise that God chose to come live and die for us, as we are, so that in Christ’s resurrection we, too might experience newness of life.
As Denise Levertov writes in her poem “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”:
It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.
God’s divine disruptions crack the mind’s shell, giving God an opportunity to address the heart so that we can have the opportunity to respond to God’s grace. Not in a way that’s necessarily rational or reasonable: Herod, after all, I’m sure thought that he was being quite rational and reasonable, given the disruption he faced.
God gives us the opportunity to counter the violent and anxiety-producing vagaries of life with the power of God’s disruptive love. God’s love and grace continue to be incarnational in nature. God’s love and grace continue to be embodied in the person of Jesus. Not just in the elements of communion: the bread and the wine; the body and blood of Christ, but in each and every one of us.
Daily, we are given the choice in matters both big and small, important and mundane… How will we respond? Will we respond with fear? Anxiety? Maliciousness? Or will we respond with the love of a God who comes to us in the form of a child?
AMEN