There Was No Room for Them in the Inn

         A Christmas Reflection

          “There was no room for them in the inn.”

 I had always made this sentence into a metaphor: no room in my cluttered heart for God, no room in our busy lives for the Christ Child.

But this year, it wasn’t a metaphor at all. Suddenly, I was the reluctant inn-keeper, and I didn’t like it one bit.

At first, like the inn-keepers of Bethlehem, I didn’t realize that the intrusion of this unknown little family into my world had anything to do with Christmas or Incarnation. I was sleeping soundly, enjoying the blissful and dreamless sleep of a tired woman about to embark on a whole week of relaxing Thanksgiving vacation. Suddenly, the phone rang. At four in the morning. The clergy colleague from Western Kentucky on the other end of the line apologized for waking me up so early and then asked for my help. As she unfolded her rather complex tale, my stomach began to wrap itself in knots, and my heart began to sink. “Not today,” I pleaded with the God hidden in the darkness surrounding my nice cozy bed. I imagine that those innkeepers in Bethlehem were reluctant to get out of bed, too.

“There’s a young couple,” she said breathlessly, “trying to get from Western Kentucky home to Nebraska for Thanksgiving. They don’t have any money, so I bought them tickets on the Megabus out of Louisville.  My sexton drove them the two-hours to downtown Louisville, but the Megabus driver wouldn’t let them on the bus without proof that I had paid for the electronic tickets. He shut the door in their faces and ran over the mother’s foot as he drove away. I’m out $400, and they are downtown with my sexton and don’t know where to go. There won’t be another Megabus tonight, and I’m going to have to contact the company first, anyway.”

 The first “inn” had violently shut its doors. I was too sleepy to be indignant.

My colleague continued: “It’s 19 degrees outside, and they have two small children. Can you help them?” At least it wasn’t below freezing in Bethlehem.

My mind still foggy with sleep, I tried to think of some way to help this family, without inconveniencing myself. I could certainly get up and drive downtown and take them to my house or even to St. Thomas. I could get up and take them all to breakfast and put them on a Greyhound. But I wasn’t feeling very generous. After all, I was on vacation, and I had no idea who these people were! I  wanted to make this my colleague’s problem. I would help her solve her problem. That usually works when I want to look like I am being helpful.

“Why don’t you find them a motel? I’ll pay for the room,” I offered. [I tend to throw money at problems when I don’t want to deal with them.] “What about that motel down by the Cathedral? They could stay there. Call me back if I need to pay.”

I snuggled back down into my pillows, happy to have solved the problem so easily.

Thirty minutes later, the phone rang again. It was my tired colleague.

“They drove over there, and the motel won’t let them stay. They won’t take payment from credit cards if you aren’t there to show them the card. The family really just wants to get going, anyway.”

 Well, I didn’t want to go down to the motel. I didn’t want to get out of bed. The second inn had shut its doors. The nerve of those untrusting innkeepers! What is our world coming to!

I was determined not to get involved. “I guess the Cathedral isn’t open yet,” I muttered, eying the clock. It was about 5:30 a.m. “I know, what about Wayside? Maybe they could stay there for a few hours, and then I can come down and take them to the Greyhound station later?”

I had no idea what time the Greyhound station opened. When my colleague called back with the news that Wayside would take them in the lobby for awhile, I heaved a sigh of relief.

“Give them my phone number,” I added with new-found generosity, “in case there is any more trouble.” And I pulled up the covers and shut my eyes.

At 6 a.m. or so, my phone rang again. This time it was the young mother. “Wayside won’t let us in!” she fumed. They say we have to wait out here in the cold until 8 a.m. before we can go in the lobby. I’m so tired, and the sexton wants to drive back home. He’s been up all night with us. Can you please help us?”

What, a homeless shelter that won’t take in a freezing family?! You’ve got to be kidding me! I start to wonder if the young mother is making up all of this rejection. I get suspicious and try to trip her up in her story. But that sexton is still there with her, so she must be telling the truth.

The third inn had barred its doors. There were no others that I could think of.

Now I was waking up, and I finally started to feel a twinge of moral outrage … or was it guilt? I recognized the familiar voice of an exhausted mother who was worried about her babies. And besides, it was after 6 a.m. now.  I might as well get up.

“OK, ask the sexton to drive you to the Greyhound station. I will meet you there and get you tickets home,” I finally offered.

I still didn’t think about the Nativity, until I saw the baby. There he was, only a few months old, nestled in the manger of an old baby car seat. He looked just like the Baby Jesus in those paintings by Rubens, with chubby little arms and legs, and pale white porcelain skin. His eyes were shut tight, as if they had been painted on, and “no crying he made.” He just looked different, like something the Holy Spirit might have conjured up. Animals didn’t stand around this baby’s bed, but his two-year-old brother tottered unsteadily around him with the jerky movements of an exhausted child. Mary stood there nervously, too, a tiny mother who looked to be about sixteen years old, though I knew she was older. She talked a mile a minute, clearly in charge of this little family and going on pure adrenaline. Joseph looked much older and stood quiet and removed, often looking down at the ground. He was the one who kept thanking me. Instead of shepherds, there were other early morning passengers shuffling around the baby, all a bit down on their luck, all looking tired. Instead of angels, there were Amish women in starched white bonnets and stiff dresses, looking very righteous and yet kind at the same time. Instead of wise men, there was an evangelist of some sort with a kingly gray beard and a thin black tie and shiny shoes, handing out little gifts and tracts to all of the waiting children, with a smile. The Greyhound Station on 7^th Street and Muhammad Ali was a perfect stable for this child of God, a typical refuge for the modern family that everyone, including me, had turned away.

As life would have it, I learned later that this little family was far from divine. As a real-life human family, it was troubled, and the story that they had told my colleague and me was not quite the whole story. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they made it back home, and they opened my eyes to my role as inn-keeper, an inn-keeper with the tendency to keep my neighbor--not just my God--out in the cold for much too long.

I saw a photo this week that brings good news to us inn-keepers, though. It is a picture taken during a risky operation to cure a 21-week-old fetus of spina-bifida. The surgeon removed the mother’s womb from her body with the baby inside and then made a small incision, through which he successfully repaired the spinal cord of the baby. During the surgery, however, this baby stuck a tiny yet perfectly formed hand up out of the incision and grasped the finger of the surgeon, who froze for a moment, deeply moved. Someone snapped a picture. Looking at the picture, I saw the Incarnate God in the frail flesh of that baby’s hand, weak and white like the hand of the Greyhound Station baby, reaching out of Mary’s womb and curling tightly around my finger, refusing to let go. At the same time, I saw the frail flesh of my own hand in the hand of the fetus, a hand feeling its way up out of the darkness to grasp the healing finger of Christ, as he was repairing me in my brokenness.

The mystery of God Incarnate is both—and is the hope for us, the inn-keepers of the world.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150324906131611&set=a.404747486610.189592.349410501610&type=1&theater

Letting Joseph out of the Corner

Advent IV

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

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

            We usually think of Mary’s story when we talk at Christmastime about faithfulness and obedience to God. We imagine the courage and deep faith that it must have required for Mary to bow her head at the Annunciation and say to God, “let it be with me according to your will.” We have centuries of Christian art to portray her reward, as we see her holding the radiant baby close to her breast, as creation bows down before her. Joseph doesn’t usually occupy our Christian imaginations in the same way, except in Matthew’s Gospel that we read today. Only Matthew makes Joseph’s faith and obedience the doorway to the Incarnation, and we would do well to join him and to consider Joseph carefully today.

          My own sympathy for Joseph has grown ever since I saw him portrayed in a marvelous fresco in the crypt of Basel Cathedral, in Switzerland. In this tiny painting from the Middle Ages, the Holy Family is seated underneath the rickety shelter of the stable. In the center of the scene, swathed in long blue robes and crowned with a huge halo, Mary is holding the baby Jesus, and although she is gazing with some trepidation into his sleepy baby-eyes, she is clearly the center of the painting. Beside her, a cute donkey and a cow are smiling and contentedly munching on something green in the manger. Way out to the left, our eyes finally fall upon Joseph, a forlorn caricature of every expectant father’s worst nightmare. Head on one hand, elbow to knee, he is staring down mournfully at the floor, clearly pouting at his lack of a role in this drama and obviously worried about what the future will bring. Imagine the mocking words of the chorus from W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio swirling around in his head:

“Joseph, you have heard/ What Mary says occurred;/ Yes, it may be so. Is it likely? No. …Mary may be pure,/ But Joseph, are you sure?/ How is one to tell?/ …Maybe, maybe not./ But Joseph, you know what/ Your world, of course will say/ About you anyway.”

          Or perhaps you have heard the Appalachian “Cherry Tree Carol?” It is a wonderful ballad that tells the story of Mary and Joseph walking along one day during Mary’s pregnancy and finding a cherry tree full of fruit. Mary, in typical high-maintenance, pregnant-wife fashion, asks Joseph to climb up into the tree and to pick some cherries for her, since she is craving them. That was the last straw for Joseph, who, as the carol says, “flew in angry,/ In angry he flew:/ [Crying] ‘Let the father of the baby/ Gather cherries for you.’” All of a sudden, Jesus’ voice comes down from heaven and the cherry tree actually bows down to the ground, so that Mary can pick her own cherries, (quote)“while Joseph stood around.”

Poor Joseph. He must feel superfluous, mocked, confused. Matthew describes him as a “righteous man.” In Judaism, to be “righteous” was to live a life of right relationship with God and with other people. It meant living with integrity, caring for others, following God’s teaching, obeying the Torah. Job is called the most righteous man in the Old Testament, and that is why Satan wanted to tempt him, to see if his integrity and obedience to God could stand the test of unmerited suffering. Joseph might have felt like Job, as he was placed in the position of either having to believe a wild tale concerning the purity of his future wife or having to accuse her of adultery, a charge for which Scripture prescribed stoning. Wouldn’t a righteous man like Joseph choose to follow the Law, separating himself and his family from scandal, upholding God’s decrees, doing what the Scriptures said to do? Luckily for us, Joseph does not do the expected thing. He does not follow the Law and quietly set aside his betrothed; he does not listen to Scripture and have her and her unborn child stoned to death. He listens instead to a dream, to the strange whisperings of the Holy Spirit, and he adopts this mysterious baby.

We need to remember that the writer of Matthew’s Gospel is interested in Joseph because of Matthew’s desire to show his community of Jewish Christians that Jesus is a true successor to the likes of Moses, Joshua, and King David. Joseph’s acceptance of the baby is the way to bring him into the line of David and thereby refigure Salvation History. Our lectionary skips over the first 17 verses of Matthew’s Gospel, in which the Evangelist carefully places Jesus into the history of Joseph’s people, the history that becomes Jesus’ own through adoption. What is interesting in this long list of “begats,” is that, interspersed with the generations of fathers and sons, beginning with Abraham, four women are included. And who are these women? The great Matriarchs of Israel, virtuous women like Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel? No, indeed! Instead, Matthew gives us Tamar, the Canaanite daughter-in-law of Judah who dresses like a prostitute in order to trick her father-in-law into getting her pregnant; it includes Ruth, the Moabite foreigner, who has to seduce her kinsman Boaz so that he will redeem her and Naomi from the poverty of widowhood; it even includes the infamous Bathsheba, the wife of poor Uriah the Hittite, whom David has killed in order to cover up his adultery with Bathsheba; and it ends with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, whose fiancé Joseph must decide whether to reject her or to adopt her son. Do you see a pattern here? Foreigners, sinful women, people who break the rules, people whom we would least expect God to choose as examples of faith: from this lineage God brings his Son, our Savior, into the world.

When I first read about these verses, I thought that I had figured out God’s little trick.  “Sure, I know,” I thought to myself, “God works through all kinds of us sinners. God asks us to do all kinds of crazy, risky things. I can deal with God coming to me and asking me to do what I least expect. God does that all the time anyway, right?  I can almost understand Mary’s capitulation before the majestic angel Gabriel. Trust in our upside-down God, that’s what we’re supposed to do.

But there is more. When Mary is asked to trust in God, she puts herself at terrible risk of rejection, but she is not asked to trust any human being but herself. Joseph, however, must trust both God and Mary. I would have trouble if I were Joseph, asked to overlook the possible betrayal by a loved one, asked to withhold judging someone else’s revelation. Growing up, I was taught that people show their righteousness by living by the rules, by doing what church and society expect of us. I don’t find fuzzy lines helpful, and I definitely have a tendency to choose the “rules” over what somebody else claims that God has revealed to them. I’m not even sure that I would have trusted my dream like Joseph did. I might have felt as if I needed to hold the hard line against any possible wishful thinking, against any slipping of standards, against any chance of misunderstanding God and losing my precious righteousness. Righteousness is a hard-won treasure, easily tarnished by shame and guilt. It takes a lot of wall-building to keep it safe. Yes, it’s a good thing that I wasn’t Joseph, for look what we would have missed.

These days, as “rules” seem to get slipperier, it seems to me as if it is getting harder and harder to get a “yes” out of us Christian Josephs. Especially when holding the hard line has to do with sex. In a recent article on the “Duck Dynasty” fiasco, the author made an interesting point. For the fundamentalist, he wrote, “all sin—when it comes down to it—starts with sex. This sexual obsession, as the Pope has rightly diagnosed it, is a mark of neurotic fundamentalism in Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity.”[1] Even for those of us who are not fundamentalists, when we think of sin, our minds go straight to sexual sins, don’t they? Adultery is much more interesting than greed or pride or the failure to love one’s neighbor, right?

For Matthew, however, that was clearly not the case, as we see in this list of scurrilous men and women who are the forebears of our Lord. We tend to be like Thomas, our namesake, whose feast day we celebrate today. We want our truths to come in neat packages and with clear checklists. We want to see and understand before we can trust. We feel that it is better to know than to love. But today’s Gospel asks us to be like Joseph, unafraid to bind ourselves to what we do not know, more concerned with Love than sex. As the holidays approach and we are given choices, difficult choices, about how to deal with complicated relationships in our families, choices about where to give and when to save, choices about when to trust and when to condemn, can we trust God enough to replace a rule with forgiveness? To replace a grudge with grace? To open our arms in Love, even if it means risking ridicule or suffering or even the taint of sin? Perhaps poor Joseph is pouting in the corner of the stable not over his lack of a role in God’s story but in ours?  

The Cherry Tree Carol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYaFGSG_x80

---

[1] http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/12/19/ae-cannot-bear-very-much-reality/

Is Advent about Repentance or Not?

The Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

On a college sports trip to South Carolina, my youngest son sent me a text with a photograph of a store-front church in a gritty strip-mall. “Church of the End-Time Harvest” proclaimed the sign over the door. There were sheaves of grain that looked rather like flames all around the bottom of the sign, and in the windows stood cardboard with the words “Repent or Perish!” in big letters. “What kind of a church is this, Mom?” sniggered my son in his text, contempt toward organized religion oozing even through cyberspace. It’s not surprising that Christianity—and repentance—have gotten a bad reputation for many in our country, with such larger-than-life threats as their most public face.

If you google “repent” on the computer, one of the first things to come up are images of the Westboro Baptist Church, that cult-like hate-group that pickets the funerals of veterans, Jews, and LGBT persons. In one video that I watched, Westboro members stand as closed-faced as unsmiling statues as they sing a parody of the Beatles’ song, “Yesterday.”

“Yesterday God warned you,” they intone with gravity, “but you keep on sinning, so you are going to pay.” Repent or perish, indeed!

 Barbara Brown Taylor describes these kinds of churches as operating like courts of law. [1]They are places where sin and sinners are loudly denounced, and punishments are eagerly doled out to fit the crimes. These court-like churches single out scapegoats for punishment, and the scapegoats are always people who are different, people who don’t look like the righteous accusers, people who don’t fit into their black and white worldview. It is always the “other” who needs to repent, always the “other” who needs to change. The “righteous” rule-followers never seem to have to see things differently, change their viewpoint, or do any of the work to repair the world’s brokenness.

While the secular world turns away in horror from the dismal displays of hatred and judgment found in the “law court churches,” mainline Christians like us hang our heads and look at our feet, reacting with embarrassment to any mention of sin or any demands for repentance.  

“Advent is about quiet and preparation, not sin and repentance,” we promise. “We are waiting for God’s love, for the joy of Christmas. We’re Episcopalians—we love everybody. We’re not like those other bad Christians, so don’t scoff at Christianity. Come to our church!” we beg. “You’ll see.  No talk of repenting here!”

Taylor calls churches like ours, “clinic churches,” “where sin-sick patients receive sympathetic care for the disease they all share.”[2]  We sigh together: “Oh well, we are all sinners. God loves us, and there’s not much use in dwelling on what goes wrong. We’re caught in huge systems of sin, and all we can do is to come to church on Sunday and say the confession, be forgiven, and then drift back out into the real world.”  The clinic-type churches have no use for repentance, because repentance demands that we take responsibility for what is wrong in the world and do something about it.

So we go along pretty calmly all year until the second Sunday of Advent, this day when John the Baptist bursts out of the lectionary in his scratchy camel’s hair cloak, with locust legs sticking out of his mouth. He tromps right into our nice staid liturgy, right into our self-complacent shoulder-shrugging and cries:  “Repent, you brood of vipers! … Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come!” John sounds just like the folks from Westboro Baptist Church, warning us about the coming of a Jesus who is going to weed out and burn the chaff, inaugurating what sure sounds like that church of the “end-time harvest!”

Are we wrong, then? Are the condemning churches the ones who are following the Scriptures? Do we really have to repent or perish in flame? I believe that we do have to repent, but we can’t just take the word at face value—or use it like the folks from Westboro. As a matter of fact, one scholar has said that the English word “repent” is the worst translation in the whole New Testament.[3] Our English word comes from the Latin root meaning “to be sorry again.” We usually understand it to mean that we are supposed to tell God that we are sorry for the wrongs that we have done, to regret the rules that we have broken. The act of repenting is in this sense an act made up of words and makes it seem as if repentance is just a fancy, churchy term for asking forgiveness:

“I’m sorry, God, for not speaking to you all week. I’ll be sure to pray next week…. I’m sorry, God, for passing up that homeless guy shivering out in the cold without even looking him in the eye. I’ll speak to him next time, I promise, and I’ll even bring him some food. I’m sorry, God, for yelling at my kids. I’ll keep my temper tomorrow …”

For prophets like John the Baptist, however, repentance means something different indeed. The Hebrew word translated as repent actually means “to turn,” both physically and metaphorically. “Turn and amend your ways,” the Hebrew prophets cry. “Don’t keep on going down the same old path. Stop and turn to follow God’s way.” The Greek word that Matthew uses in today’s Gospel is also an active word, better translated “change your thinking and acting.” It is more than just using words to admit your mistakes. It is, as Craig Dykstra defines it, “a turning from the self to God as the source of our … sustenance.”[4] Repentance is a reorientation of our whole being, a letting go of our attempts to direct our own lives and putting ourselves entirely in God’s hands. In turning, “we give up everything that tells us who we are, what is expected of us, what the rewards and punishments will be of acting and thinking in certain ways, and let ourselves be remade from top to bottom.”[5] It’s the opposite of what the people from Westboro Baptist are doing.

The “fruit” of this repentance, the fruit that saves us, the fruit that John the Baptist asks us to bear, is not some action that we take on our own, nor is it some halo that sets us apart from all the sinners out there. It is the radical freedom to be myself, the self that God created and that God sustains, the self that will go forth in directions that I could never imagine while I was trying to control and do everything.[6] Repentance opens us to prayer, and prayer leads us to service, and service prepares the way for the Kingdom of God that John and Jesus proclaim. It’s like that “shoot of Jesse” that all of our readings mention today. It is the divine generative power that makes the dead wood and sawed off trunks of our lives sprout in a new direction, filled with new life unlike what had been there before. What bountiful fruit that is, indeed!

How hard it is, though, to let go. The Pharisees and Sadducees that John wants to shake up with his harsh words in our Gospel reading have to let go of the privileged position that they feel belongs to them as “the chosen children of Abraham.” As for me, I find myself constantly needing to let go of the perfectionism through which I try to control life and myself and God. What do you need to let go of in your soul this Advent? Of what do you need to “repent?”

In thinking about repentance, I couldn’t help but think of Nelson Mandela, who died this week. His life sliced open by the evils of apartheid like a tree chopped down in its prime, the bare stump that was left of him spent 27 years in prison. But he didn’t come out of that prison hating and condemning others. He didn’t come out sighing that truth wasn’t worth fighting for, either. He came out serving his neighbor and his country with what seems to us an amazing freedom of soul. I think that he must have done the hard work of repentance in the solitude of his cell. He must have learned to let God reorient who he thought he was, granting him the Christian freedom that no jail cell can hold, that no system of hatred can oppress. “I’m not a saint,” Mandela once said, “unless a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.”  

Letting go, turning all of our conceptions of self and world entirely over to God’s crazy mystery, is about as difficult a spiritual act as it gets. Luckily for us, we don’t have to do our repenting alone in our prisons. We have the community of Christ’s Body, the Church, a loving community of fellow sinners who can nudge us and support us as we turn, and turn, and turn again toward God’s Kingdom.

Canticle of the Turning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9QeTmRCpW4 

---

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2000) 76.

[2] Ibid.

[3] https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/142ba135ebfdbbc1

[4] Craig Dykstra, Vision and Character (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 91.

[5] Ibid., 92.

[6] Ibid., 93.