all organizing is science fiction.
we are creating a world we have never seen. we are whispering it to each other cuddled in the dark, and we are screaming it at people who are so scared of it that they dress themselves in war regalia to turn and face us.[1]
In effect, this is what the gospels
are. They are a form of science fiction mystery which call us to an
imagining with God, an imagining of a different future--without violence and
war, without hunger, poverty, and oppression. We require
imagination, a different way, for as the great Audre Lorde said, “the master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will
never enable us to bring about genuine change.”[2]
The gospels knew
this. Though they used the language of the Roman
Empire to critique the Roman Empire, the world the gospels imagined borrowed
the language and vision, the science fiction of prophets who spoke from the
time after the Exile. The Exile was one
of the nightmares in Jewish history when violence and warfare, oppression and
dispossession were everyday realities.
Remembering a
Scripture verse I quoted from last week, God imagines a different future during
that Exile.
The
Living God shall judge between many peoples,
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
4 but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their
own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;[3]
Those science fiction words imagine peace,
shalom, and rest—something counter to their whole experience living in Exile
600 to 700 years before the birth of Christ.
The gospel writers believed they were now living in a similar time. And as
Adrienne Maree Brown writes about such science fiction writing, “it’s neither
utopian nor dystopian, it’s more like life.”[4]
It is the science
fiction imagined by those prophets who wrote after the Exile, envisioning a
time when people might grow food that they might eat themselves, build homes
they might inhabit themselves. They
imagined that science fiction when all that they could remember of the Exile
was growing food for others to eat, building homes for others to inhabit.[5] From
these writers, like the prophet Isaiah and his tradition, the gospel writers
borrowed heavily to imagine with God, to create their own science fiction.
That science fiction
is necessary because the world they live in is brutal, hard, and scary in the
matrix of Roman occupation, oppression, and everyday violence. Last week I spoke of Rome’s client-king,
Herod the Great, who prided himself on being the King of the Jews. How Herod was so brutal that he killed one of
his sons he saw as a threat to his throne, leading the Romans to say, “Better
to be Herod’s pig than his son.”
Our passage today
begins with Herod. Spiritual Director Erna Kim Hackett summarizes
how the Biblical story reads us. Again,
sometimes we read the Bible so that we might discern meaning. And sometimes the Bible reads us to discern
who we are in the world: She writes.
I found myself fixated on Herod this year. I’ll let you figure out why I couldn’t stop
thinking about an insecure leader who panders to empire and feigns interest in
religion to try and secure his authority.
In the history books, Herod is remembered as a good leader. He was prolific and visionary when it came to
infrastructure. He remodeled and
expanded the Second Temple. And he
maintained a long-lasting relationship with the most powerful empire of his
time and its most powerful leaders. By
many metrics, he could be viewed as a very successful leader. But the Bible does not give a [bleep] about
any of that. If success under empire
were the measure of success, Herod would stand at the center of the story as
its hero. Instead, he becomes its
warning, a mirror showing what happens to a soul distorted by empire. Herod reveals how power twists a person, how
it turns faith into theater and people into pawns. So much of America Christianity is desperate
to succeed the way Herod succeeded:
political access, proximity to power.
It confuses elections with favor and wealth and blessing. But Advent confronts us with a different
truth. Empire’s victories are not God’s
victories. The story opens with a tyrant
on a throne and [Christ] in the arms of a refugee woman. Only one of them is worth following. God shows up on the margins, not in the halls
of power. Advent is an invitation to
scrub off every way empire has wooed us, and to quit confusing Herod
like ambition with Jesus’s way. [6]
The passage starts
with Herod but the Scripture continues with the Magi playing their traditional
role. The Magi were the ones who read
the way the Earth and Sky moved to tell us who were the true kings, the kings
blessed by nature’s wisdom. As a result,
the Magi forever posed a threat to ruling powers.[7]
We have regularly
assumed three Magi made the journey because there are three
gifts. But the story does not tell us how many. Imagine
at least 12 Magi, in their traditional role, taking a little side trip
to Jerusalem just to stick it in and twist it by innocently asking
Herod, “Where will we find the King of the Jews?” In the movie
version of this scene, I imagine Herod, who believes King of the Jews is a
title reserved exclusively for him, excusing himself and finding a private room
where he punches his royal purple walls for about a half hour before he
returns.
The question by the
Magi is a form of Biblical humor, sarcasm aimed at the upper-crust and
powerful. In our modern world, it might be a number of radical
Muslim clerics arriving in Washington, D.C., asking where they might find “the
leader of the free world.” Making it clear that they don’t think
it’s the president, they move on to Haiti to follow the star they have
seen.
The story is told as
a snub, a diss, to move from the seat of Rome’s client-king, the seat of
local political and religious power in Jerusalem to a place on the
margins.
The Magi come from
the East, the place of the Roman Empire’s mortal enemy, the Parthian
Empire. Imagine not only 12 magi arriving in Jerusalem but
maybe 50 to 100 of them with all of their royal servants and
accoutrements. For the Biblical passage says that when the Magi tell
Herod of the star they have seen Herod and all of Jerusalem are frightened. The
king-makers show up to say they are looking for the King of the Jews. And, oh by the way, Herod, it isn’t you! The Magi have been looking for portents,
signs in the natural world, which would tell of the passing of an old order in
favor of something new.
As the seat of
Roman-controlled Jewish power, everyone in Jerusalem knew that a star sighted
by the Magi could only mean that change and transformation were about to occur,
a new king was on the rise. Three times in Matthew, Chapter 2, it
says that these “king-makers” prostrate themselves before the infant child, a
form of worship and reverence for a ruler or an emperor. Not once
did these same Magi do so for King Herod.[8] They
have made their choice. The Magi proclaim who is the true king, the
king for whom heaven and nature sing.
Long have Christian
scholars misinterpreted what the Magi bring to symbolize gifts that reflect the
life and death of Christ. Rather, the
gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh evoke the words of Psalm 72, the Psalm
that was the basis for our responsive reading for today. That Psalm is considered a coronation Psalm
to be spoken as every Israelite ruler takes the throne.
Psalm 72 says that
the king shall practice social justice.
This value is affirmed as nations and kings from all over the known
world shall make a pilgrimage to Zion to lay these gifts at the feet
of the king. This king shall be the
champion for the economically poor and downtrodden. The king who shall crush the
oppressor. The Magi bring these gifts to affirm Psalm 72, to affirm
the true king’s primary value.
Three times in
Chapter 2, Herod’s death is mentioned, as a way of suggesting that when God’s
narrative and the narrative of imperial power come into conflict, imperial
power is not ultimate. The imperial system, a system exposed as
ruthless and murderous, opposes the presence and power of God. And at each turn the imperial system is
thwarted in trying to kill the new king. 1) The Magi are
uncooperative. 2) Angels and dreams further the will of God and
frustrate Herod’s plans.. 3) Though the Holy Family must quickly
leave for exile in Egypt, they do escape with their lives.
All to say that the
imperial system is not the ultimate. Rome has its
limits. While Caesar claims the god, Jupiter’s presence, for Rome,
throughout the Gospel of Matthew claims are made for Jesus’s presence among the
community of the disciples. Even after
the Empire crucifies Jesus and he dies, his presence is still afoot for those
weaving together the Empire of Heaven.[9]
The title of king is
not taken lightly by the Romans. Those who claimed the title without
ordination by Rome were routinely executed. The historian Josephus
chronicles that others who took the title king did not fare well. This is an ominous sign of what is in store
for Jesus. Simon was beheaded. Athronges
was captured. Menachem was killed. And another Simon, who led one of the longest
and most successful revolts against the empire, was executed in Rome’s
capital city as a dramatic presentation of Rome’s superiority and
intolerance for any challenges to its superiority.[10]
Jesus of Nazareth
became a symbol of hope and resistance because of the very real and gritty ways
of living he offered that helped Galileean communities to be sustainable and
resilient at a time when they were fracturing.
Roman imperialism and its Caesar exerted everyday intense stress,
pressure, poverty, and violence against their subject peoples.
Jesus did not counsel
people to engage this struggle righteously alone. We sit in places like this church today
because Jesus encouraged people to fortify one another by piecing together
community, sharing food with one another, participating in mutual healing,
darning back together fractured relationships destroyed by the economic
violence, challenging the system which robbed those with those living with
their backs against the wall. And in the
way Jesus practiced this movement, he had fun doing it. I want to remind us again and again that they
called Jesus a glutton and a drunkard.
As I preached last
week, these Bible stories are a threat to those who want to romanticize
Christmas. As a preacher and a pastor, I
don’t know if I have ever been challenged to make Advent and Christmas more
Biblically real. Again and again,
however, I have been challenged to practice the more imperial, sentimental
Christmas with the right hymns, the right Christmas Eve words said at the right
times, and to preach in a way that makes everyone feel all snug in their beds
while visions of sugar plums dance in our heads.
I hope. I hope and pray for just a second, however,
that like last week we might consider that the Biblical Advent and Christmas are
needed in places throughout our world where people are imagining what God is
imagining, entering into a science fiction project that speaks to our hearts of
a new dawn, a new day where we might all experience the goodness of God.
Because again, for
some in the world, the pain is all too
real. And a sentimental and vanilla Christmas does not rhyme with
their family’s tremendous debt, the fear of one more medical bill, violence
some face in their everyday life as a spouse or child, people caught struggling
with trauma and addiction, and the worry for some that they will be stopped
without proper papers.
Or, now in our
own country, what happens if Herod or Caesar come for my family and my
children? What am I to do? Do we pack up our family and
head for the safety of Egypt? How do we
make sure that the Holy Family escapes the mass slaughter of someone who calls
himself the King of the Jews?
The Gospel of Matthew
makes it clear that even Jesus’s arrival does not prevent the slaughter of
children, poverty and disease, and deep, deep pain in the
world. What Jesus brings is the idea that God wants a decidedly
different world, wants us to imagine it, to do our own project work in science
fiction, and that God is inviting us in to be collaborators on the
project.
Spiritual guide,
Matthew Fox, has written, “Sentimentalism is feelings without care for
justice. Nazi concentration camp hierarchy would torture prisoners
during the day and return home at night and weep listening to Beethoven.”[11]
“The tamed piety of
the conventional church wants an innocent baby who comes gently into our secure
lives and keeps everything benign and friendly. It may be
conventional and it may be tame but it is not biblical and it is not
Christian.”[12]
The Biblical story is all too messy and real.
That story is about both hope and hurt; pain and risk, as well as
excitement and joy. All were part of the adventure.
I want to invite us
all over again to be Christ’s church, a symbol of hope and resistance over and
against Herods and Caesars in each age. How might we join with, be
good allies with, peoples that seeks
liberation from the everyday warfare aimed at its people? What would
that look like to create a space where every person might be able to rest under
a vine and fig tree--to offer refuge and sanctuary?
In this day,
the Magi come looking for the people who walk the path of a new king, people
who seek to be collaborators on the imagined project God has set before
communities of sustainability and resilience. Goodness knows Advent
hope, peace, and joy begin when we ask what God might be imagining for the
world and then begin to weave that together.
We begin where the prophet Isaiah and all the Gospel writers began—at a
time when people have trouble even thinking it’s possible. It’s not born yet. We can only describe it along the edges.
Coloma/Watervliet or
Bainbridge has/have never been the center of the universe, but neither were
Bethlehem and Nazareth. People of good courage, let us begin, with
imagination and vision to walk the road to begin the science fiction project
God has placed before us. Like the Magi, what are we willing to walk a
long time for?
Last night and
promised tonight the beauty of the Geminid meteor shower tells us that a new
world awaits us. The Herods and the
Caesars of the world quake in their boots knowing they could not control or
commodify it. Let us scrub off every way
the Domination system has tried to woo us to remember who we are as followers
of the refugee child on the move from Bethlehem. Let us be scrubbed clean to journey with Magi
and to imagine with God. Amen.
[1]Adrienne Maree Brown, “afrofuturism and
#blackspring (new school, #afroturismtns),” adrienne maree brown, May
2, 2015
[2]
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114.
2007
[3] Micah
4:3-4a
[4]
Brown, “afrofuturism.”
[5]
Isaiah 65:21
[6]
Erna Kim Hackett, “Liberated Together” on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/DR_Qssskdkj/?img_index=1.
[7] Warren
Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity
Press International, 2001), pp. 66-67.
[8] Carter, Matthew
and Empire, p. 66.
[9] Ibid,
p. 67
[10] Ibid,
p. 161.
[11] Matthew
Fox, The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has
Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved (New
York: Sterling Ethos, 2011), p. 39.
[12] Ken
Sehested quoting Kyle Childress, “Wiseguys and one scared king,” Prayer
and politiks, January 1, 2012. http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/articles-essays-sermons/2019/01/04/wiseguys-and-one-scared-king.3418910.
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