First Sunday after Christmas, Year C
Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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Daryl
Davis was playing blues in a piano bar one evening, when a man came up and told
him that he appreciated his playing.
"I really enjoy you all's music," he said.
When Davis thanked him, the man admitted, "You know this
is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.”
As an African American pianist, Davis
must have heaved a sigh. Everyone knows that the blues originated in the black
community. What kind of an idiot was this? But Davis kept his cool and
continued with the conversation. After a while, the white bar patron announced,
"You know, this is the first time I ever sat down and had a drink with a
black man."
Davis
became even more curious. So he asked the guy, "How is that? Why?"
At first, the man didn't answer Davis. Finally, a friend
sitting nearby elbowed him and whispered, "Tell him, tell him, tell him."
The patron finally responded, "I'm a member of the Ku
Klux Klan." He pulled out his wallet, flipped through his credit cards and
pictures and produced his Klan card and handed it to the pianist. Davis froze. What
was he doing having a conversation with a Klansman?[1]
When was the last time that you had a profound
and fruitful conversation with someone with whom you deeply disagree? Were you even
able to probe the things that matter to you with friends or family members this
Christmas? Or were you on guard, tip-toeing carefully away from the many topics
that might cause discord? I, for one, am already worrying about returning to
Texas for my fortieth high school reunion in the spring. I know that I’m
not on the same page with my classmates about much of anything anymore. What
will we talk about besides old memories? In this charged political season, even
a simple comment on the weather could lead to an uncomfortable disagreement
about climate change.
Conversation these days is in decline.
Division rules. And technology silences. Studies show that most teenagers now text
their friends more often than they speak with them.[2] But let’s not put this all
on our teens. As an introvert, I totally enjoy the freedom from face to face
conversation that modern technology brings me. Why talk when you can text or send
an email so much faster? Why deal with a salesperson when you can order what
you need with the push of a button on Amazon? Why engage in messy conversation
when you can put up your opinions for the world to see on social media? Why argue
with someone, when you can block them on Facebook?
Why take the trouble to converse? Why
accept the risks? Because we follow a God of conversation. Many of us know the
poetry of today’s Gospel by heart: “In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What you may
not know is that there is another translation for this difficult passage. Way
back in the 16th century, the Christian biblical scholar Erasmus decided
that the Greek word logos or “Word,” needed
a more dynamic translation. For Erasmus, logos
means conversation.
When I first read Erasmus’ translation
of the first chapter of John, I heard the Gospel in a new way. Listen to the
beginning of Erasmus’ take on today’s lesson:
“It all arose out of a Conversation,
Conversation within God, in fact the
Conversation was God.
So, God started the discussion, and
everything came out of this,
and nothing happened without consultation…”[3]
If
you look up the origin of the word “conversation,” you find that it comes from words that mean to “turn
with.” It is a swirling, moving interchange of thoughts and feelings, using the
spoken word.[4]
I can picture our Triune God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--joining together in
the intimate dance of conversation, imagining worlds together, putting words to
thoughts, turning and bending with one another to create a cosmos. I can
picture Jesus, too, as the intimate mingling of conversation divine and human.
I can see him dancing his way into our chaos, fleshing out all the words,
giving voice to the love and listening to the longing. And I can sense God’s
vulnerability, God’s desire to converse with us, no matter how the conversation
might turn. It is the vulnerability of a baby in a manger, the vulnerability of
Love hanging on a cross. In Jesus, God risks the conversation further: asking open-ended questions, listening, inviting
a response from a hostile world.
As Erasmus translates:
“The subject of the Conversation, the
original light, came into the world,
the world that had arisen out of his
willingness to converse. He fleshed out
the words but the world did not
understand. He came to those who knew the
language, but they did not respond.”
When Davis the blues pianist kept up
his conversation with the Klan member in that bar, he too was taking on risk.
He didn’t know if the conversation would turn to rejection or even to violence.
How easy it would have been for Davis to turn away, for him to go home and tell
his friends about this fool of a Klansman and the disaster of an encounter that
he had barely escaped. But that’s not what he did. Davis opened himself to the
power and promise of the Conversation. Davis followed the light. He decided that he was going to seek out
other Klansmen, to sit down in risky conversation with them, over and over
again. He wanted to go deeper into meaningful conversation with his enemies. He
wanted to learn from them—to understand how they could hate him without even
knowing him.
For over thirty years now, Davis has engaged
Klansmen in real conversation. He doesn’t lecture them. He tries to understand
them. He asks them open-ended questions. He listens. You might be surprised at
the results—but God isn’t. Through the
power of simple yet risky conversation, over two hundred Klansmen have turned in
their white robes, renouncing their racist ideology. Davis explains:
“If
you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about
race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something
in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship
and as you build about that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's
what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted
themselves.”
They
saw the light. As John writes: “Those who [responded to the light of God’s
conversation] became a new creation (God’s children), they read the signs and
responded… They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took
part, discovering a new way of being people.”[5]
This Christmas, Christians are called to
rediscover a new way of being people, the way of connected conversation. It’s a
risky venture, but it is the way of our loving God, from the very beginning of
time. Not all of us will find ourselves face to face with a sworn enemy like
Davis did, but we have opportunities every day to open our eyes to the light
that is in all creatures. Over and over, we are invited to respond to our world
with genuine curiosity, rather than with closed-off minds and sharp-tongued
mouths. As journalist Celeste Headlee points out, real conversation involves
the disposition to be amazed—amazed at the beauty within others, and amazed at what
true listening can do.[6] Join in the power and
promise of the Conversation, and be amazed. For "it all arose out of a Conversation, Conversation within God, in fact
the Conversation was God."
[1]
Dwane Brown, as heard on All Things
Considered, found at https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes.
[2] Celeste Headlee, TED talk found at https://youtu.be/R1vskiVDwl4.
[3]
Jonathan Merritt, Learning to Speak God
from Scratch (New York: Convergent, 2018), 200.
[4]
https://www.etymonline.com/word/conversation.
[5]
Merritt, 201.
