The Genesis of Jesus

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

 

On the other side of this wall is a little room where the altar party puts on our vestments before worship, and where we keep our processional crosses and torches and other paraphernalia of the liturgy.  It’s also where we keep a book like this, called the Register of Church Services.  Each page in it is the same, a table of columns and rows in which we record the details of every service of worship that takes place under the auspices of St. John’s—when it happened, and where, and what kind of service it was, and how many people were there, and who were the leaders, and so on.  Now, there are more services going on around here than you might realize, but even so, it takes a number of years before a book like this gets completely filled in.  It was Wednesday in Holy Week, 2012 the last time we began a new one.

But I still have not put this, last book to rest in the file drawer in the church archives with the other old Registers of Church Services.  I’ve kept it out on a shelf in my office, right behind my desk.  During the first couple years of its retirement I used to look at it frequently, usually when I was planning for a special liturgical event, and needed to remind myself what we’d done last time, and how many people had attended.  Sometimes I took it down just to look at it for a little while, to see what stories it has to tell.  It had come along with this building when St. John’s Episcopal retook possession from the breakaway church in 2009, and its records go back a number of years before that, detailing the worshipping life of a parish very different from the one I know, and yet hauntingly the same. 

For the last year or so, I’ve not looked at this Register at all, but I’ve kept it on my bookshelf anyway.  I see now that I’d been keeping it out for today.   Because here is the record that notes that ten years ago yesterday, the 17^th of December, 2006, was the Third Sunday of Advent, and that there were 23 in attendance at the Rite I Eucharist at 8 a.m. that day, and 140 at the 10 o’clock Rite II.  And here in the last column on the page, the one headed “Memoranda,” there is written this little note:

12 noon—Parish Mtng.  Vote to disassociate from The Episcopal Church and Diocese of Northern CA and change name to St. John’s Anglican Church!

Ten years is a long time—maybe long enough that after today I can finally put this book away in the archives.  A lot has changed.  I don’t know how many of the 163 people who were in church here that Sunday are gathered again this morning at St. John’s Anglican on the other side of town.  I do know that very, very few of them are here today.  Ten years has been long enough for the crisis to feel resolved, and the wounds almost healed.  It’s been long enough for new things to grow out of the ashes of the fire. 

On the other hand, ten years is not so long a time that we can’t still feel a little of the anger, and the fear, and the sense of betrayal that were in the air that morning.  Which is why I’m bringing it up today—not just because ten is a nice round number, but because this anniversary falls in Advent, when we remember how much we hope for God to come and be with us, to save us from our sins.

This is the hope that Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus is all about.  The angel sums it up for us when it speaks to Joseph in his dream.  It tells him to name Mary’s child Yeshua, which in Aramaic means something like, “He will save,” because he will save his people from their sins.  Now, this line of scripture that might make some of us feel just a little bit squirmy.  The notion that Jesus came to “save us from our sins” has often been turned into shorthand for, if I might say so, a somewhat simplistic and aggressive form of Christian belief.  Which can make it hard for some of us to get any meaning out of it that actually sounds like good news.  But Matthew can help us with this, if we realize that for him these words are not some superficial slogan.  He is making them the centerpiece of the prologue to his gospel, so that we will read the whole rest of the story to find what “saving his people from their sins” really means.

By the time Matthew has finished his writing we will learn that it’s a story that is ongoing, and will be until the end of the age.  And it is also the continuation of the stories that came before, the ones about Israel’s God and Israel’s people that are recounted in the Hebrew Bible.  That’s why Matthew fills his gospel with quotations from scripture, so we see that the events he describes fulfill the ancient prophesies and promises.  It’s why he makes even the structure of his book to be a kind of reflection of the Torah, so that the genesis of Jesus is patterned on the beginning of that other, more ancient story. 

Like the Book of Genesis, the story of Jesus begins with a man and a woman, who are intended for one another.  And then there comes betrayal.  In Genesis the Serpent convinces the woman to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, and to give some to her husband. In Matthew, it is found that Mary, who has yet to be joined to Joseph, has conceived a child.

In Genesis, when God finds his creatures hiding in fear and shame in the bushes of the garden, Adam points his finger at Eve and says, “She did it!”  And Joseph is tempted to do the same.  He would have been within his rights under the law to publicly disgrace his fiancée for dishonoring him in this way, or even to demand that she be stoned to death.  But, says the gospel, Joseph is a righteous man, and in this manner Matthew is already telling us that “righteousness” is going to have a particular meaning in the story that follows.  It is not the self-righteousness that is superior and judgmental toward others, but something more akin to forgiveness, understanding, and compassion.  Still, Joseph decides that his trust in Mary is broken (who can blame him?), and that it’s best for them to quietly go their separate ways, but just then the angel comes with news from God.

In his dream Joseph learns that Mary has not betrayed him at all, and that he can still trust her to love him and be his wife, and more than that, that all his pain and doubt has been for God’s extraordinary purpose.  At the same time, Joseph is left knowing that something mysterious happened to Mary that will always remain between her and God, and that her first-born son will never be exactly his.  He will always have to live with the knowledge that the neighbors can subtract from nine, and that some of them might see his marriage as not quite up to the highest standard.  He will always have to live with the memory of his painful feelings of betrayal, of jealousy, and rage; the memory of his struggle to master those feelings, and his resolve to break off his engagement.  But being saved from our sins is not the same as having them erased from memory, as if they never happened.  It means that they are prevented from destroying us.         

I cannot help but see the fact that today there are people worshipping from the Book of Common Prayer at two St. John’s churches in Petaluma, as a sin.  Which is not to say that no good has come of it, or that we cannot find in what happened ten years ago yesterday and all that followed, stories of courage, and kindness, healing, and hope, both on “our side” and on “theirs.”  All things considered, it might be better this way, at least for now.  One thing that I am sure of is that God did not allow this sin to destroy us, but has birthed miraculous new life out of the brokenness of anger, rejection, and betrayal.  I hope this is true for “them” as well as for “us,” and it would not surprise me a bit if it were.  Because that is what happens when Christ comes.      

Don't give up yet

• Exodus 3:1-15
• 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
• Luke 13:1-9
• Psalm 63:1-8

On Tuesday, February 16 the small Pacific island nation of Fiji became the first country in the world to ratify the United Nations climate deal agreed on last December in Paris.  Four days later, Tropical Cyclone Winston, making landfall with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, slammed into Fiji, leaving tens of thousands homeless and 44 dead, by last count.   It was the strongest storm ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, and on Thursday Joanne Woodland, one of our parishioners who is vacationing in Hawaii, sent me a cell phone video of the massive ocean swell kicked up by the cyclone, pounding the north shore of Oahu.  That swell will get here later in the week, with waves up to thirty feet high forecast to hit the Sonoma Coast on Thursday night.

Unless we have relatives in Fiji, like the folks in the Fijian congregation that meets every Sunday at the Methodist Church over on the next corner do, we might imagine that big waves are the only impact that Cyclone Winston will have in California.  But maybe we feel differently about the eight people shot in Kalamazoo, Michigan on the same day that Winston tore through Fiji.  After all, that incident was in our own country, in a town like this one.  The victims were like us, a young woman watching children play outside the townhome where she lived, a father and son shopping for a car, a teen-aged girl and her grandma, and three other older ladies leaving dinner at the Cracker Barrel restaurant, when a stranger opened fire.

Whatever the case, I think we have a natural tendency to create a mental distance between ourselves and the victims we read about in the news.  It would be hard for us to live if we went around all day waiting for the bullets to start flying, or the wind to knock our houses down.  It is when people are forced to endure conditions like these that they become refugees, and leave behind everything they know and everything they own, to try to find a place to live a semblance of a normal life.  We human beings need to believe that on balance life is good, and the odds are in our favor of living in relative safety and health to a ripe old age. 

So when we hear about terrible events that call these odds into question, we look for explanations, so we can feel like they have causes we can understand, and maybe even control.  Cyclone Winston was so devastating, we say, because climate change is heating up the oceans, creating more powerful storms.  Or Uber drivers in Michigan go on shooting rampages because they are mentally ill, and gun laws are too lax, and media coverage of all these mass shooters is spawning copycats.  In the days before we had sophisticated scientific, historical, and psychological theories of causation, we explained such things in theological terms.  In today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus responds to the news of terrible recent events in Jerusalem.  And he asks his listeners if they really believe the popular explanation that the victims of these disasters were being punished by God for their sins. 

What Jesus seems to be saying here is that the distance our explanations create between us and the victims we hear about in the news obscures the truth that they are no different from us.  We may need that distance to insulate us from the fact that our lives are a gift that can be taken away, any day, any moment.  But the disasters that happen to others, says Jesus, are not only an opportunity to give thanks that we have been spared for another day, but to recognize our common predicament.  It’s a chance to really come to terms with how little control we have over what happens in the world, and how little power to keep ourselves safe from harm.  Not so that we will sink into helplessness and fear, but so that we will turn to our only secure refuge, which is the goodness, and forgiveness, and eternal loving-kindness of God.    

To underscore this message, the Gospel of Luke links this saying about disasters in the news with a story about a fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit.  It’s a story that shows up in a slightly different way in Matthew and Mark.  Mark’s version is likely the original, and it begins at Mark 11, verse 12, which, in case you want to look it up.  It comes right after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem that we’ll remember in a few weeks on Palm Sunday, at the conclusion of which Jesus goes into the temple and looks around a bit, before returning to his base in Bethany.  On the way back into the city the next day, he’s hungry and looks for fruit on a fig tree.  Finding none, he curses the tree, and says “may no one ever find fruit on you again.”  Jesus then goes to the temple, where he stages a protest, turning over the tables of the money changers, and shouting that they have turned the house of prayer into a robber’s den—you know the story.  The next day he and his disciples pass by the fig tree again, and find it withered to the roots.

By bracketing the story of the so-called cleansing of the temple with the parable of the fig tree, Mark makes a connection between Jesus’ physical hunger for figs and his hunger for God’s righteousness, which is the only hope for his people.  Jesus goes to Jerusalem, not in a bid for political power, but because he is on fire with a prophetic desire.  He longs for the people of Jerusalem, and especially the elite in the temple, to repent--to turn from their cynical, self-satisfied, self-interested ways and return to the ways of God.  But on coming there, Jesus finds no fruit to satisfy this hunger.  There is nothing to work with here, no openness to his message or willingness to act on it.  And this can only mean one thing for Jerusalem—inevitable destruction.

We can go further in understanding the story of the fig tree, if we consider the historical circumstances in which the gospels were written.  The author of Mark was likely writing just about the time of the doomed Jewish revolt against Rome in the year 66.  It was a period of extreme religious and psychological distress for all Jews (and the author of Mark was almost certainly a Jew), as Jerusalem became the focal point, first, of armed insurrection, then of savage civil war, and finally of a brutal Roman campaign of re-conquest.  So it’s not too surprising that the author of Mark wrote in an apocalyptic mood.  He sees Jerusalem’s inevitable fall, and connects it with the things that Jesus said thirty years before: his condemnation of the hypocrisy and corruption of the temple, and his warnings about the final judgment of the world.

But the author of Luke has a different perspective.  For one thing he or she is probably writing a full generation later.  For Luke the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans is a done deal, a past event as distant as the fall of Saigon or the Berlin Wall is for us.  And Luke is interested in what happens next.  For Luke, the death and resurrection of Jesus is not the last faint glimmer of light piercing the darkness at the end of history.  It is the light of dawn, at the beginning of an amazing new story that is already under way.  And Jerusalem’s part in that story does not end with Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.  The city and the temple will stand for another thirty years, and in that time it will be the birthplace of a new community, even a new humanity.  The power of the Holy Spirit will come upon the pioneers of this community in Jerusalem, and from there they will spread news of forgiveness and reconciliation in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, to Ethiopia and Syria, to Libya, and Asia, and Macedonia, even to Athens and Rome.

So Luke reworks the story of the fig tree, to say that God is not ready to give up on the world just yet, so let’s not give up on each other.  It’s as timely a message now as it ever was, in these days when people seem so ready to harden their hearts against the most desperate and vulnerable people in the world, so ready to blame them for the disaster that has fallen upon them.  When the church is true to Jesus, we are like the gardener he spoke about in Luke’s story of the fig tree, like the gardener he was.  He tells us to roll up our sleeves and go to work.   He tells us not to be afraid to dig around, to loosen the hardened of sin and injustice, and the tangled roots of deceit and delusion and denial.  He tells to be unashamed to scatter the manure of kindness and encouragement, compassion, and helpfulness, and prayer.  He tells us to be patient and watchful and not to lose faith in the power of God, because the old tree in the garden might still bear fruit.