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I loved the Christmas story growing up. It was the one time of year that church seemed to center around the children. We sang songs without hymnals and performed pageants where the costumes were more important than the words we memorized. There was a sense of mystery in all of this and perhaps, besides the candle light, it felt mysterious that Jesus had actually once been a baby and a little kid just like me. When I was a teenager I still liked the baby’s birth but the “virgin” birth was troubling. My questions were answered by adults who quoted Gabriel who explained it to Mary, “With God all things are possible.” I began to think that believing in the “Virgin Birth” determined whether one was a real Christian. You can imagine my relief when I asked my New Testament professor in college what he thought. His response was simply, ” Certainly you don’t think you are the only Christian in history who has questioned the meaning of virgin birth?” I felt a bit embarrassed by his short response but I left his office with a great sense of relief.
In Seminary the “virgin birth” was addressed by current scholarship: being born of a virgin was a popular myth in the Roman Empire therefore the Caesars claimed to be born of virgins. Since the myth was used to connect the throne of the Caesars to the throne of the gods we can’t help but ask why the writer/s of Luke wouldn’t use the myth of the Virgin Birth to usurp the power of the Roman Empire that had dehumanized the existence of their community? I could hardly contain my excitement regarding the implications of this information.
In the spirit of the Hebrew prophets who had gone before them, the early Jesus community risked their lives and used the story of Jesus birth to address the greed of Emperors, wealthy patrons and political priests who claimed God as their refuge while at the same time refusing to provide refuge for the widows, orphans and the poor. Reframing the “virgin” birth in the context of Roman Culture, the Gospel of Luke opens up the story of the “little people” (represented by Mary, Joseph and the Shepherds) who live as the “expendables” in the Great Roman Empire. Mary’s Magnificat becomes a political protest; the poor are lifted up rather than disposed of by earthly political power.
I am excited that the children and youth of Wellspring are putting on the play, “The Version Birth“, by Dot Saunders-Perez; Music & Lyrics by Janet Allyn. I am deeply grateful that they will not grow up wrestling with an outdated doctrine of the church, but a radical story of the expendables who believed and were transformed because God showed up in their neighborhood in the flesh of one who looked like them!
Pondering the meaning and mystery of Christmas……..Naomi (Luke 1: 26 -56)
If we hang around in the Gospels with the story of Jesus, we know fear is a daily companion for the disenfranchised in the Roman Empire. Life was expendable and the fringe society (which was the majority of the population in Galilee and Judea) was the slave and servant of Rome. Some things don’t change in life. Under an oppressive Roman government fear could collapse on hope in a moment. All news felt like bad news regardless of whether the visitation or the decree came from an angel or Herod…fear was the normal reaction to news, or any disruption in the daily struggle for survival. “Do not be afraid” the angel says to the “powerless” shepherds.
Oppression convinces a person he/she is powerless and teaches a person to fear power. Power is based on “possession” of goods rather than possession of goodness. Political power can bankrupt the physical possibilities for survival; religious power can bankrupt the soul and spirit. You have no goods; you have no goodness seems to be the tagline of institutional power in our world. The teachings of Jesus challenge the bankruptcy caused by the world’s definition of power. He challenges his followers to live under the power of love and forgiveness. Jesus reminds them that God’s power dwells within them rather than on the throne of the Roman Empire. “The kingdom of God is within you!” (Luke 17:20-21) is what he tell his disciples. This seems to ring true in the words of the heavenly angels to the shepherds at the beginning of this gospel of Luke, “Do not be afraid. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. You will find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.” (Luke 2) Now this is a new take on Kings, Messiahs and power; Do not be afraid of this kind of power. It resides close to you, and is being born in a place where your children are born every day. In stables, on the fringes of the empire. Find it and you will find the power of God, and freed from living under the power of Ceasar.
The story of Jesus birth invites us to find room in our heart to ponder the meaning of the Gospel of Luke and not to be afraid! The babe is a gift to help us see the goodness of the “little traditions” that keep the power of hope and love alive in the world.
“The Future of the Book” headlined the cover of the Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2009. The first article I read by Christine Rosen was entitled the same as the first sentence in the Gospel of John: “In the Beginning Was the Word.” I was hooked by the article as it began to discuss the bankruptcy of Reader’s Digest, its history and the critique it lived with since 1922 of condensing a novel into a short version resulting in the loss of so many words and thoughts. She reminds us that we have now moved from 62 pages in a condensed version of Readers Digest to 60 seconds of sound bites to hear the daily news. “Our willingness to follow a writer on a sustained journey that may at times be challenging and frustrating is less compelling than our expectation of being conveniently entertained,” she writes (p.48). The articles in the Wilson Quarterly juxtapose the written word to digital snippets and images. It questions the possible implications of gathering information quickly through digital snippets and images on our minds? How will it effect our culture regarding our ability to translate human experience. If our stories are based on images and sound bites will we begin to run into the danger of not being able to interpret real or unreal events, because life is handed to us second hand? (p.47-53)
The article said nothing about religion or advent but I couldn’t help but think about how the Bible has been taught in most churches: a condensed version of passages cut and pasted to support selected doctrines. In reality the Bible is a library of books that span diverse cultures, many authors and several thousand years. I can’t help but wonder how the “condensed Word of God” has impacted the way we do theology and church in the United States. Sound bites serve as a reason for faith and the complexities of the “word” remain hidden behind scholarly veils. Perhaps the condensed version has limited our theological imagination so that the complexity and broad scope of understanding the God of the Bible is reduced to snippets of how to be right about who God is.
The condensed version of Jesus birth is inscribed on everything from Christmas cards to Christmas pageants. But we know that birth is not accomplished in a sentence. That is not real. The sound of a wailing woman experiencing the intense pain of labor doesn’t match the image of Mary with a halo on her head that has been handed to us. We know better. I think the storyteller in Luke wanted us to get the picture that a woman gave birth in a stable and it wasn’t pretty or nice. She believed, she bore, and she became an example of what it means to give birth in the midst of devastation and struggle. In its raw form it serves as a beginning to flesh out the meaning of God becoming flesh……and dwelling among us. It isn’t neat and tidy. It happens in the midst of the struggle. The noise, the tenacity, the sheer guts of the narrative is what inspires and gives me reason to believe. “First hand” experiences of God are found in the complexities of life!
It’s been several years since I left the condensed versions of the Gospel and second hand experiences of creeds and doctrines. When it comes to my religion and the library contained in the Bible, I do not want the condensed version. Going back to the words of Christine Rosen in the first paragraph, I want to be on the sustained journey that may at times be challenging and frustrating but much more compelling.
I grew up in small towns in Central Montana during the cold war and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The image on TV of Khrushchev beating his shoe on a desk proclaiming, “We will bury you” magnified the reality of fear in childhood as adults spoke in concern about our future. The site of dust rolling over the top of large military trucks making their way down gravel roads to build missile sites interrupted the backdrop to my world of play that was once undisturbed by “outside forces.” Black and white movies shown in school about what to do if an atomic bomb dropped did not ease my fears. I knew getting under my desk would not be a hopeful scenario for ever returning back home again if an atomic bomb dropped in our backyard. People talked about building fall out shelters and what life would be like after “the bomb.” Our neighbors actually built a fall out shelter. My dad said it wouldn’t be a place to go if a bomb dropped because we couldn’t expect them to feed us when they would only have enough food for themselves. After too much inquiring about where we would go to be safe my dad let the secret out. He told me the truth. In a factual tone he said, “life wouldn’t be worth living if atomic bombs were dropped. The “rain” would destroy everything around us. It would be better to be on the front porch and taken out quickly than to wait around in a fall out shelter and starve to death after the food ran out.” I momentarily felt relief. Being told the truth validated my suspicions; facing the truth opened up a whole new set of anxieties.
The look on my face elicited the response from my mother trying to ease my new set of anxieties. “We can’t spend all of our time worrying about what might happen tomorrow if a bomb drops and we lose everything on earth. We know that if we disappear from the earth, we won’t disappear from God’s eyes. You will always be with God, no matter what. This is what we call the ‘blessed” hope.” This was the first time I heard the word hope in a way where it meant something inside of me that felt like God. God became bigger than the bomb.
The Christmas story was a relief during those years of childhood. The word hope became the “word” of advent. It seemed to me Caesar was like the bomb. The idea that the people who had so little did not disappear from God’s eyes nurtured a deep peace inside of me that has grounded me on my journey.
The Christmas story continues to help me be courageous enough to see truth and remain hopeful in facing the subsequent realities of truth. At the end of the day, regardless of the disturbing realities of powers that can destroy our lives, I do not believe we fall through a hole in the ground and disappear. People of hope from around the world continue to rise up generation after generation. Life matters.
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