Episode IV: A New Hope (Christmas 1a; Matthew 2:1-12; December 28, 2014)

Episode IV: A New Hope

Christmas 1a
Matthew 2:1-12
December 28, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, Ph.D.
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It hardly ever fails.  Sometime around Christmas there will be an article in the newspaper.  A reporter will talk to an astronomer asking for a scientific account of the star of Bethlehem.  The astronomer will rehearse the usual theories.  It could have been a supernova, an exploding star.  Or perhaps it was a comet.  Or maybe it wasn't really a star, but a conjunction of planets.

Of course, other questions will emerge along the way:  Who or what were the Magi?  Where did they came from?  Were there two stars or only one?

Fundamental to all of the theories is one assumption: there really was a star or some other astronomical thingy that people could and would have seen.  There really were visits from the magi, whoever they were.  These were historical events.  Whatever they were, they all took place in Bethlehem.  If you had had a smart phone, you could have recorded it all and posted it on YouTube.

Now, I'm not out to debunk the gospel account, although considered as history there are real problems with it, especially if we also have to harmonize it some way with the account in Luke's gospel.  The gospel, the good news, in this sermon is not that there was no Bethlehem star or visitors from the East.

But I think it is worth a look at this story to see not what happened, but what it might have meant for the folks who first told and heard it.  To me it is always far less interesting to decide whether this or any other biblical story is historically true than to see what the story does with the people who hear and tell it.

In some ways this story is not at all unusual.  Jesus was an extraordinary person.  In the ancient world it was understood that extraordinary people had extraordinary births.  For one thing they would more than likely have been descended from the gods themselves.  For another, their births would have been accompanied by “signs and portents.” Very popular portent possibilities were comets, meteor showers, “new stars,” and alignments of planets in favorable constellations

According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the birth of Caesar Augustus was proceeded by such portents.  In his case they predicted the birth of a king.  In response, the Roman Senate (who were not interested in having a king) required that any male child born that year should be exposed and allowed to die.  He also recorded a story that the god Apollo in the form of a serpent was actually Augustus' father.[1]

According to Matthew, the Emperor Augustus had nothing on Jesus!  And this, I think, is part of the point.  But only part.

The delicious part of Matthew's story is that Herod's court was clueless.  Herod was a savvy politician who had managed to be rewarded by Augustus even though he had supported Augustus' rival Mark Antony in the Roman civil war.  He rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem to please the Jewish people and gain the support of the priesthood, but he also built pagan temples and his own palace complex .

This Roman puppet known to history as Herod the Great knows nothing at all about the birth of the new king.  In fact, he's even ignorant of his own ignorance.  It takes the Magi to show him how little he knows—this powerful and sophisticated ruler—Magi who are neither Jewish nor even Roman.  Only then do his national security advisors produce a briefing.  Jerusalem may be the capital, but it's not where the action is.  Unknown to them, unlooked for by the powers that be, unsuspected by the intelligentsia, God has acted in Bethlehem.  Bethlehem was the Judean equivalent of Burr Oak; someone famous had come from there a long time ago, but nothing to attract the attention of the National Security Council had happened there recently. But it was there in Bethlehem, not in Jerusalem, where God had acted. 

It was episode IV of Star Wars.  It was the birth of a New Hope.  Of course, the Empire would strike back.  It always does.  Next week we will hear the rest of the sordid story.

Herod began the story entirely unaware that his reign was threatened.  When he did learn of this, all his ruthlessness could do nothing to stop the threat.  Herod cannot stand against God.  Later in the gospel we will discover that Herod's puppet masters cannot stand against God either.  They killed Jesus, but death is nothing to the living God.  Royal ignorance could not prevent Jesus' birth.  Royal ruthlessness could not prevent his survival.  Royal violence could not keep him dead.  That was the good news for Matthew's earliest readers.

So where is the good news for us in the story?

Well, let’s see.  In a few days, on January 6 to be exact, a new Congress, the 114th, will be sworn in.  The fact that this will be the Day of Epiphany is mere coincidence and, since the Day of Epiphany signifies the entry of God’s light into the world, it is in fact an ironic coincidence.  The next two years promise to be frustrating for anyone who is hoping for the solution of problems, whether the problems are ours, or whether they are the problems of people with even less political power than we have. 

The eyes of the politicians, pundits, and pollsters are all on 2016 and the Presidential election.  If in the next few months there should be a tsunami that carries away half of the population of California, the breaking news is sure to be followed by the teaser, “Join us at ten for the news that matters most: What does this mean for Hillary’s chances?”  Well, as Will Rogers once said, “We have the best Congress money can buy.”  Still, I wish the 114^th Congress well.  I will pray for them.  And from time to time I will even give them a piece of my unsolicited advice.  I am, after all, a citizen of this country. 

But I hold another citizenship and it comes first.  I am citizen of a different commonwealth, the new thing that God is doing in our midst.  Matthew tells me that it is not in the halls of power in Washington that this new thing will be fashioned.  Nor will that new thing be undone there. 

God is at work primarily in other places: in the neighborhoods of Ferguson, Missouri, where residents struggle with lack of meaningful work, living conditions that are not livable, and schools that do not educate.  God is at work there.  God is at work in Afghanistan where President Ashraf Ghani is, in effect, the mayor of Kabul, the countryside is controlled by the warlords, ordinary folks turn to the Taliban in desperation as the only way to have a semblance of good governance, and the small and impoverished Christian community struggles to find the wisdom and the courage to offer a witness for peace.  God is at work there.  God is at work in Gaza where Palestinians struggle to rebuild their lives back to the unlivable level that they had achieved before the latest Israeli “lawn mowing.”  And, yes, God is even at work in Bethlehem, caught up as it is in the struggle between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government and in the centuries-long quarrels of Christians.

I rather doubt that there was ever a star in Bethlehem, but I tell you that I believe the star shines now.  It shines in the slums of Ferguson.  It shines in the mountain villages of Afghanistan.  It shines in Gaza and in Bethlehem.

It shines into the hospital rooms where families wait for a loved one to die.  It shines into the too-empty homes of the grieving.  It shines into the darkness of the broken lives of the addicted.  It shines into hollow stomachs of the hungry.  It shines into the despair of the hopeless and the isolation of the lonely.  The star of Bethlehem shines into every dark place that humankind has fashioned for itself.  Nothing can extinguish its light.  It shines and shines and shines.

Wherever it shines, wherever it rests, we, if we are wise, will rise up and follow, and there we will offer whatever gifts we have.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1]    Suetonius Lives of the Twelve Caesars 2.94.3-4. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Augustus*.html

Yet In Thy Dark Streets Shineth (Luke 2:1-20; Christmas Eve; December 24, 2014)

Yet In Thy Dark Streets Shineth

Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Paul Shultz, a colleague and friend of mine, and former Director of our campus ministry at the University of Iowa, died in early January this year.  I heard a story about him.  He got a call late one night from a woman who was a friend of his.  “Tell me again,” she said, “I need to hear it again.”  And so Paul, knowing what she meant, told her again, “Everything is not going to be okay.”  She had been struggling.  Her friends and family and well-wishers kept telling her that everything was going to be okay.  She knew better.  Her struggles would leave their mark.  She would find her way to a new life, but the old life was gone.  She would regain her health, but she would always bear the scars.  Everything was not going to okay.  Paul had the wisdom and the courage to tell her the truth.  After a while, after hearing the loving lies of those who hoped to heal her wound lightly, she needed to hear the truth.

I can’t know all the reasons why you are here tonight.  Some are here because you’re in town visiting your parents or grandparents and coming to church with them does their heart good.  Some are here for the Christmas songs and the story.  It’s part of your image of the perfect Christmas.  It goes along with the Christmas tree and the presents and the dinner with all of your traditional favorites.  Some are here because they are Christians and this is what Christians do.  Whoever you are, why ever you are here, you are welcome.  I hope that each one of you gets what you really need. Our life’s way is long and our God is too generous to deny us what we need for the journey.

But some of you are here because you bear an unbearable burden.  Maybe no one else knows but God.  But the burden is crushing you and you don’t know how you are going to make it through.  You don’t know what else to do, so you’ve come here where you have heard that we keep the mystery of God’s love for us, hoping that we, the stewards of the mystery, will be wise enough not to mistake optimism for hope.

You have come because you need to hear the truth and you are hoping that someone will speak it.  You are hoping that someone like my friend, Paul Shultz, will tell you, “Everything is not going to be okay.” 

Christmas can be our collective way of whistling in the dark, of keeping up our courage when we suspect that something is behind us, and that, no matter what, we dare not turn around and look because if we see it we are done for.  And now we dare not stop whistling.

So let me say to you what you and I both know is true: Everything is not going to be okay.

That is an odd message for Christmas Eve, to say the very least.  It clashes with that syrupy mixture of nostalgia, idealized mystification, and wishful thinking that we call “the Christmas spirit.”  But I take courage that it doesn’t clash with the story in Luke that brings us here in the first place.

Luke begins by focusing attention on the rulers, the elite.  Caesar has issued a decree.  Scholars will tell us that this report stands on very shaky historical ground, but that doesn’t really matter much.  The point was and is that Emperors and the fine folk order and people like Joseph and Mary obey.  Augustus had ordered them to Bethlehem, heedless of the inconvenience or danger to a young woman in advanced pregnancy, and to Bethlehem they would go. 

To Bethlehem they went.  The Emperor knew nothing about the realities of their lives and, if he had known, he would not have cared.  There was no mercy in his decree.  Happily for Joseph and Mary (now in active labor), there was mercy in the heart of the innkeeper.  The “guest room” was filled wall to wall with people making the floor their shared bed.  It was no place for a woman in labor.  So the innkeeper offered them the stable.  Otherwise, Jesus might have been born behind the stable instead of in it.  The stable was better, more comfortable, more private and, if the animals in the stable gave off certain pungent odors, well so did the people in the guest room.  Kindnesses like these were how the folk of Joseph’s and the innkeeper’s class managed to survive as they clung desperately to what little dignity the Romans had left to them.

Mary had her baby, whose birth we celebrate.  The shepherds were visited by divine messengers, angels, who announced the good news to these rough dwellers in the margins of their culture.  The shepherds hurried to visit the newborn Jesus, wrapped tightly to compensate him for the loss of the close comfort of his mother’s womb.  The world to Jesus was as the world is to every newborn: a cold world of loud noises, hard surfaces and scratchy hay. 

The shepherds told their story and disappeared into the night.  They never enter into the story again.  Eventually this family went home.  And nothing had changed.  Caesar was still in Rome thinking up decrees.  All the Mary’s and Joseph’s in Rome’s empire struggled to stay live and keep a little dignity in spite of Caesar’s thoughtlessness.  Jesus’ birth had not changed any of that.

Joseph and Mary’s folk had longed for a Messiah, one to set things to rights, to throw off the shameful yoke of Roman rule, someone to make everything okay.  What they got instead was an infant who cried when he was hungry or lonely or, apparently, for no reason whatsoever, who soiled his diapers with astonishing frequency, an infant who was tiny, fragile and weak.  He was another mouth to feed.  Another body to be exploited by Rome.  Everything was not going to be okay.  That was the truth.

But that wasn’t the only truth.  It is true that the world was and is a dark place in which most people struggle to stay alive and keep a little dignity, a world where a few enjoy power and plenty.  It is true that some us are bearing unbearable burdens.

The rest of the truth is that it is precisely into the darkness of Roman Palestine that God chose to shine.  It was precisely among the displaced peasant folk like Mary and Joseph that God chose to dwell.  It was precisely to shepherds, rough characters who would more likely be found at the Corner Bar than Rubaiyat, that the angels appeared, announced good news, and sang God’s glory.  It was not in a palace in Rome or in Jerusalem, but precisely in a stable, that God was born.  And it is precisely with you who carry an unspeakable weight that God comes and stays this night.

Everything is not going to be okay.  True enough.  But that is only part of the story.  Now that God has been born, now that God is here, who knows what will happen next!

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Such a Time as This: Esther's Call in the Time of Ferguson (Esther 4:1-17; Advent 2a; December 7, 2014)

Such a Time as This

Esther 4:1-17
Advent 2a
December 7, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

I’m glad to be back in Iowa and back in Decorah.  We enjoyed almost everything we did in Houston.  We certainly were glad to see Peter and his family again and especially to see them in their new surroundings.  We enjoyed our visits to the aquarium, the zoo, and the museum of natural science that, oddly, includes a really excellent display of artifacts from ancient Egypt.  It was there that our six year old grandson Ian informed us that the Rosetta Stone, of which they have a replica, was written in “ancient Egypt talk” and in hieroglyphics “to keep it secret.”

The high point for me as a tourist was a visit to the Johnson Space Center and especially seeing the Saturn V, to date the most powerful launch vehicle ever used to put people in space.  I was awestruck by the sheer audacity of the project and the courage of the early pioneers of space flight who understood the systems, knew how precarious they were, and did it anyway.  It took me back in time to when I was a school boy, space was indeed a new frontier, and the future beckoned with promises of deep space exploration and jetpacks for everyone.  I’m still waiting for mine.

The Sixties were not just about the space race.  The shackles of gravity were not the only chains being broken.  Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, women, gays and lesbians began, one after another, to make claims on the promises of our nation’s founding myths.  The stories they told revealed that the conditions and expectations I took for granted were no part of their experience.  They were no longer willing to have it so.

In my family, we believed that racism only happened in the South.  In the North, there might be racists, but there was no racism.   Therefore, African Americans had no excuse for their poverty and lack of progress.  The myth of equal opportunity was unchallenged in our little world.

But I was clear, even then, that others, especially members of racial minorities, did not see it that way.  Rochester, New York, where we lived, exploded in the summer of 1964 when I was twelve.  In mid-July in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City a riot had broken out when a fifteen year old African American boy was shot and killed by a white police officer. 

In Rochester, the next Friday, July 24, and through the weekend, as many as two thousand rioted in the city’s 7^th and 3^rd wards.  About a thousand people were arrested, 85% of them black, most between 20 and 40, most of them employed with no prior criminal records.  My family was mystified.  Why were they rioting?  It couldn’t be because of racism.  After all, racism doesn’t exist in the North.  But then there was rioting in North Philadelphia the next month.  Watts burned the next summer.  Two years after Rochester, Detroit and Newark burned.[1]  Six major riots in six major cities and not a one of them in the South.

Every summer we braced for more rioting, wondering which city would be next.  In the meantime, every summer I made money for college by caddying at the premier country club in Rochester, where there were no black members and no black caddies.  It wasn’t a policy.  That would have been racist.  And racism only existed in the South.

“I am not a racist,” I have told myself, anyone else who will listen, and even those who won’t.  I try to treat everyone the same, regardless of their race or ethnicity.  Furthermore, I reject notions that there is no systemic racism in the United States, even in the North.  I know that there is a great deal more to do if we’re ever going to have a country that lives by its creed.  But I always thought the problem lay somewhere else and not with me.

Then I had what could have seemed like a trivial experience, something that happens all the time to all sorts of people.  It was about twenty years ago.  We were living in a “mixed” neighborhood in Syracuse, NY, a neighborhood where most families struggled to make ends meet and to keep their sanity under that pressure.  It was late in the evening and I had taken our dog Molly out for her last pit stop of the day.  It was a summer evening and people were out on their front porches, because they couldn’t afford air conditioning, and, besides, it doesn’t get that hot in Syracuse. 

Above the usual evening buzz of music and conversation, I heard a group of boys, teenagers by the sound of the voices, at the top of the street coming toward me.  I couldn’t see them clearly, because they were between street lights.  It sounded like there were five or six of them.  They were talking loudly, as teenage boys do when they’re hanging together.  Then they walked under a street lamp and I could tell that they were black kids.  Instantly my stomach twisted into a knot.  I could feel my pulse quicken, and my breathing become rapid and shallow.  They were still half a block away when I took Molly back inside the house and locked the front door.  As I said, it was a trivial event.

But I experienced a kind of double vision.  In the front of my brain I was seeing a group of teenage boys enjoying being boisterous together, talking loud and proud, and annoying their elders and neighbors in the process.  In the front of my brain they were harmless; but not in the back of my brain.  In the back of my brain they were not a group of boys; they were a gang.  Their loud talk was threatening.  They were looking for trouble.  Fear gripped me while at the same time I could see through the fear and know that it was not rational.

After the grip of fear loosened, after my pulse and breathing settled back down, what I felt was shame.  I knew in that moment that I was not who I had thought I was.  I knew in that moment that even though I want no part of racism, racism has a part of me.  I knew in that moment that it is possible to have racism without racists.  I knew in that moment that I can think all the right things, say all the right things, do all the right things, but the serpent that is our nation’s original sin can and does still curl itself around my heart.

I enjoyed our stay in Houston, even though I don’t like the city.  I am glad to be home, but I have dreaded this moment, ever since the Monday before Thanksgiving when the grand jury decision was announced.   Ferguson has forced into our consciousness the fact that there is in our road not a just single traveler who has fallen among thieves but a multitude of them: the dead, those whose lives are shortened from the stress of the daily indignities of life as a non-white, and those who have curtailed their own lives out of fear of having an encounter with the police, all issues that in my place of privilege I do not have to face.  I cannot simply cross the road to avoid getting involved.  I have a duty I may not shirk.

It might be easier if I had answers, but I don’t.  You all know me well enough to know that I don’t like not having answers.  I have only some “hints and allegations,” as Paul Simon put it, with or without the “angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity.”[2]

We have been, both in the church and out of it, like a family with an ugly secret.  The family imagines that as long as no one talks about it, they will be safe from their secret.  But the truth is we don’t have secrets; the secrets have us.  From the very beginning, the Methodist Church allowed racism to have its way.  In Philadelphia in 1787, with the Methodist Episcopal Church just three years old, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others established the African Methodist Episcopal Church when officials of St. George’s Methodist removed praying African American members from their knees because they were praying at the wrong time and in the wrong place.  In New York City in 1796, at the John Street Methodist Church, being denied communion until all white families had been served led its African American members to separate and eventually to form the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

We are long past due for an extended conversation about race and its role in our denomination, our congregation, our community and our nation.  I don’t know where that conversation will take us.  But I do know that we are the ones who are duty-bound to call for the conversation. 

Why is that?  Why can’t we just sit this out?  Why can’t we let African Americans do the heavy lifting? 

We are duty-bound to call for the conversation for the same reason that it is Esther who must speak to the king.  She has succeeded in doing what most of her people had not: she is passing for Persian.  She won the beauty contest—an early version of The Bachelor—that gained her a place in the palace and marriage to the king.  She is the queen.  She has a place of comfort and privilege.

The question she faces, that her Uncle Mordecai forces her to face, is “How will she use her privilege?”  This really is the question at the heart of the whole of the biblical story:  “How do the privileged use their privilege?”  It is asked of kings.  Will they use their privilege to defend the widow, the orphan and the undocumented workers?  Or will they use their privilege to amass power and wealth?  It is asked above all of Jesus who gave his life’s energy to heal the sick, free the prisoners of spiritual powers, and finally, to confront the establishment.  All this flows from the character of our God who does not dwell in the halls of power or in corporate board rooms, but instead crawls in beside us behind a crowded inn, and kneels beside the dying body of yet another black teenager bleeding out on the streets. 

African Americans, Latinos and other racial groups can call for this conversation, but only white people can make this conversation happen.  So it’s up to us.  It’s up to us to face our own fears and bad faith.  It’s up to us to decide to listen to the testimony of others whose lives are quite different from ours.  It’s up to us to believe them.  It’s up to us to connect the blood of Christ in the chalice on our table with the blood that runs in the streets, the blood of the wounded body of Christ.  It’s up to us to connect the bread on our table with the hungry stomachs and spirits of those who dwell in the desperate places of St. Louis, New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Waterloo, and Decorah.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] “Independent Lens . JULY '64 . Timeline | PBS,” [cited 6 December 2014]. Online: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/july64/timeline.html

[2] Paul Simon, “You Can Call Me Al,” 1986.