Holy Creep Fest

They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, throwing him into convulsions and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’ At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. Mark 1:21-28

Remember when you believed in evil spirits?

I mean, really believed in them?

For many of us, it was in early childhood when these creepy creatures danced in the shadows of our bedrooms after lights-out. We saw them, heard them, felt their sinister presence, and often communicated with them.

Some philosophers say we are born with knowledge of the other side – the angels as well as the devils – but our awareness dims in direct proportion to our ability to communicate it. By the time we develop a rudimentary vocabulary, all memories of the other side have disappeared except for those occasional childhood glimpses of disembodied entities.

Somewhere in the recesses of our minds are memories of moving shadows that interrupted our childhood sleep. We’d shout out for our parents who, long blind to the other side, would shuffle wearily into our rooms and assure us there was no such thing as monsters under the bed. After Mommy or Daddy repeated that blessed assurance a few hundred times, we started to believe it. By the time most of us entered elementary school, we stopped seeing the spirits, and by the time we reached the seventh grade, we stopped believing we ever had. Or so goes the theorizing of some philosophers.

In the days before radio and television – and, God knows, long before three-dimensional, quadraphonic experiences with Harry Potter – evil spirits were an essential ingredient of childhood imagination. The reason fairy tales had the power to terrorize kids is that haunted forests filled with ravenous wolves, ogres, trolls, and witches already existed in their minds.

Perhaps these horror stories were intended to entertain the young, but they were also used to warn kids about life’s dangers – as in “crying wolf” – and to keep children under control. Some parents warned children about the boogey man who would “get you” if you didn’t behave.

There are dozens of theories about where the boogey man came from, but my favorite can be traced back to Napoleon Bonaparte. When England prepared for a potential invasion by Napoleon in 1803, “Boney” – later “Boogey” – was used to scare naughty English children into submission. In the words of a charming nursery rhyme:

Baby, baby, naught baby,
Hush! you squalling thing, I say;
Peace this instant! Peace! or maybe
Bonaparte will pass this way.

Napoleon never invaded England. He was defeated twice and exiled twice. There is a story that when Napoleon was exiled for the last time on St. Helena Island in 1815, the children of his British guards remembered the rhyme and Bonaparte soon became aware of it. Witnesses said they occasionally saw him placing his index fingers like horns against his head and chasing laughing kids away from his chateau.

But the hair-raising persona of “the Boogey Man” is based more on his other-worldly origins than on Bonaparte’s earthly power. The Boogey Man creeped children out because of they knew instinctively evil spirits exist and can be dangerous.

That evil spirits exist I have no doubt. But is it always possible to recognize one when you see one?

Jesus immediately discerned the malevolence lodged in the man who came to the synagogue in Capernaum, and the spirit recognized Jesus. Mark’s minimalist Gospel describes a dramatic scene, but nothing as harrowing as scenes in The Exorcist. Jesus says to the spirit, come out of him, and the unwilling host convulses as the spirit screams and departs. Just like that.

Mark would have been a lousy screenwriter. When unclean spirits are portrayed, Hollywood producers want to see Linda Blair twist her head 360 degrees and vomit green slime; they want to see huge, hideous faces with multiple rows of blackened teeth; they want to see monstrous gargoyles that freeze hearts and make audiences scream.

But what do unclean spirits really look like? Given their incorporeal nature, it would be hard to tell, but chances are we’d be surprised at their appearance.

When I was two or three I had an imaginary friend. I have no memory of him beyond a vague impression that he looked like Dagwood Bumstead. My parents said I seemed to have a relationship with this figure, who remained with me until my brother Larry was old enough to be a more tangible companion. There is a photograph of me at 2 playing with a hose near an old barn, and if you look closely there is a ghostly image of a child standing patiently by the barn door. (See inset.) It does not appear to be double exposure, but what is it? My imaginary friend? A guardian angel? An evil spirit?

These are unknowable and generally meaningless questions, except for the role they play in my genetic memory. But I suspect they are not unique. I suspect we all have similar memories hidden in the caverns of our unconsciousness. They are like dreams: windows on a world we knew before we were born and to which we will one day return.

The biblical allegories offer vague and imprecise descriptions of that world beyond. Jesus’ encounter with the unclean spirit in the synagogue is one of those allegories. It tells us this much: evil spirits exist; they have the potential of doing great damage to souls and their surroundings; but good spirits also exist in the form of a loving creator, a solicitous advocate, and a savior with the moral authority to rebuke evil and order it away from us:

“Be silent and come out.”

Even so, the origin of evil in the world, the question of why God allows it, and the fundamental nature of evil spirits – it’s all a puzzle.

There are wonderful biblical and extra-biblical accounts of fallen angels like Lucifer who hate God and exist to seduce humans away from God’s love and refuge. But since humans would not be seduced by hideously and horrifyingly ugly devils, one has to wonder: what does evil look like?

I have a suspicion that many devils are quite beautiful: desirable creatures who lure us away from God with the promise of instant gratification and the assurance that we can do anything we want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

In C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, an allegorical book of letters from a junior devil seeking advice from his senior on how to seduce humans away from God, an interesting image emerges. The two demons augment their influence over their “patients” by concealing their identity and encouraging humans to be content with their apathy toward God and religion. “Talk to (your human) about ‘moderation in all things,’” Screwtape advises. “If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel quite happy about his soul.”

In his introduction to the book, Lewis writes: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

Unfortunately, those “opposite errors” neatly summarize where many of us stand.

Many obsess daily over books and films about vampires, zombies, witches, wizards and ravenous fiends – some with unexpected twists, such as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The millions of dollars generated by vampire and zombie films are evidence of what C. S. Lewis calls an “unhealthy interest.”

But many more of us – perhaps most – scoff at the existence of evil spirits and attribute evil behavior to psychosis and inadequate psycho-pharmacology.

The more reasonable path, Lewis suggests, is down the middle.

That path involves trusting our earliest instincts that evil spirits exist and attempt to seduce us away from God’s protection.

And the path requires a calmness of faith that shields us from the temptation to panic at the presence of evil, or the temptation to obsess over media-generated distractions that portray evil as harmless thrills before the credits roll.

In Mark’s first chapter, it unfolds like this:

Jesus, still an unknown itinerant from Nazareth, is preaching eloquently in a nearby synagogue.

Unexpectedly, a possessed man wanders in, and the evil spirit within him recognizes the preacher.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth,” the spirit cries out. “Have you come to destroy us?”

Calmly – perhaps without raising his voice – Jesus responds. “Be silent, and come out of him.”

And the spirit comes out. Just like that.

The reaction in the synagogue is amazement.

“What is this?” They asked. “A new teaching – with authority? He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

This is the proper balance when it comes to confronting evil: a calm recognition that the Lord of our Lives teaches with an authority that leads us to salvation as surely as it delivers us from evil.

That is the path to which we have been called, and with God’s help, that is the path we shall seek.

And no wonder.

As one cinematic scene of exorcism reminds us:

The power of Christ compels us.

The Ichthus Conference

The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’ So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10

There are few jobs more demanding than general secretary of the National Council of Churches.

I’ve known six general secretaries, and one thing they all have in common is a lack of free time. They rise early, work late and accumulate frequent flier miles like secretaries of state. They lead a diverse membership of nearly 40 communions ranging from Coptic Orthodox Christians to the United Church of Christ. On occasion, general secretaries find it difficult to please everyone. In my experience, there were times when even the most ebullient of them sank exhausted into their swivel chairs at the end of the day.

One of the general secretaries was Bob Edgar. A former member of Congress, member of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, finance director of Senator Paul Simon’s presidential campaign, and a senate candidate himself, Bob was no stranger to hyperactivity. But the job is wearing, and it showed. But once a year Bob would return from the road with a lighter step and easier smile and it was rumored he had discovered some secret font of rejuvenation. 

And perhaps he had. If you looked closely at his calendar each summer, two weeks were blocked out for what appeared to be a dreary and demanding ecumenical conclave: The Ichthus Conference. Ichthus, the Greek word for fish, dates back to the first century when Christians identified themselves to one another by drawing an arc. If the other person responded by drawing a connecting arc, forming a simple fish, they knew they were safe. But in modern terms, ichthus invokes images of ponderous clerics engaged in endless discourse about the various styles of baptism, Eucharist, ministry and trilateral dialogues.

But Bob also used the symbol as a special Christian code. For him, the Ichthus Conference was a two week fishing trip with his brothers, and it did wonders for his mental health. Today, Bob is president and CEO of Common Cause, and I notice he is still attending ichthus conferences once a year.

All the foregoing reflection is inspired, of course, by the appearance of Jonah in today’s Common Language Lectionary. All of us know Jonah had his own ichthus conference. It wasn’t relaxing and recreational, but it was uncommonly motivating.

Most of us were introduced to Jonah in our earliest Sunday school years. Maybe some of us sang the delightful ditty to the tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down:”

Jonah was swallowed by a whale
By a whale,
By a whale,
Jonah was swallowed by a whale.
Swallowed whole!

Jonah prayed to God above
God above,
God above,
Jonah prayed to God above
And was forgiven!

As we grew older we learned something about the species of the creature that hosted Jonah. The subject comes up in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, a fictionalized version of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925. I love the dialogue in the 1960 film version between Spencer Tracy, playing Henry Drummond the agnostic lawyer, and Frederick March, playing Matthew Harrison Brady the fundamentalist politician and perennial presidential candidate:

DRUMMOND: Tell me. Do you feel that every word that's written in this book should be taken literally?

BRADY: Everything in the Bible should be accepted, exactly as it is given there.

DRUMMOND. (Leafing through the Bible.) Now take this place where the whale swallows Jonah. Do you figure that actually happened?

BRADY. The Bible does not say "a whale," it says "a big fish."

DRUMMOND. (Finds the place in the Bible, shows it to Brady.) Matter of fact, it says "a great fish." What's your feeling about that?

BRADY. I believe in a God who can make a whale and who can make a man and make both do what He pleases!

The point is made – it’s a great fish, not a whale – but the dialogue continues:

DRUMMOND. I recollect a story about Joshua, making the sun stand still. That's a pretty neat trick. Think Houdini could do that?

BRADY. I do not question or scoff at the miracles of the Lord.

DRUMMOND. Have you ever pondered just what would naturally happen to the earth if the sun stood still?

BRADY. You can testify to that if I get you on the stand.

DRUMMOND. If they say that the sun stood still, they must've had a notion that the sun moves around the earth. Think that's the way of things? Or don't you believe the earth moves around the sun?

BRADY. I have faith in the Bible!

DRUMMOND. You don't have much faith in the solar system.

BRADY. (Doggedly.) The sun stopped.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s go back to this week’s lectionary selection, which actually appears quite late in Jonah – after the cameo appearance of the great fish.

I’m not sure why the best part of the story is left out. If this passage were a movie review, we’d call it a spoiler: It skips the build-up, buries the climax, drowns the denouement, but reveals how everything turns out. Jonah says yes to God, warns Nineveh that God is about to strike them all dead, the Ninevicans repent, God changes God’s mind, and everything is swell. Whoa! Slow down!

One of the best things about Jonah is that it’s a story of struggle, resistance, denial, fearful confrontation, near death, surrender and success – as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. It’s a story we can relate to.

Perhaps you read the cover story in last week’s New York Times Magazine about Judith Clark, entitled “Young, Cold Heart.” [See http://nyti.ms/ykIlj8]

Clark, Tom Robbins reported, was one of “a band of militant zealots armed with automatic weapons who tried to rob a Brink’s truck in a shopping mall in Nanuet in Rockland County, N.Y.” The unarmed Clark was a get-away driver in a crime that led to the deaths of two armored car guards and two police officers.

Writer Robbins, who knew Clark in high school, makes no excuses for her participation in a crime that cost four lives. He describes her callous disregard for the charges and her refusal to participate in her own defense. A relative of one of the victims describes “her smiling face as she was led out of the police station in Nyack.” In 1983, an Orange County judge sentenced her to a minimum of 75 years in prison.

Clark remained uncooperative and unrepentant during her first years in prison, once pulling a two-year stint in solitary confinement in Bedford Hills prison.

Robbins writes that it was Clark’s young daughter who helped her break through the cold wall of indifference. Gilda Zwerman, a sociologist, said to her, “I understand how you did this to yourself. What I don’t understand is how you did this to your daughter.” Robbins reports, “Clark tried to look defiant, but her lip twitched, and she began to quietly weep.”

The breakthrough began a slow process of re-engagement with the world, and today her rehabilitation is regarded by many observers as nothing short of remarkable.

The prison warden and other officials recommended to New York Governor David Paterson that her 75-year sentence be commuted, but he declined – reportedly because he feared he would be “tarred and feathered” by victims’ rights advocates.

Clark may well remain in prison for the rest of her life, but she claims she feels deep remorse for her role in the 1981 robbery. She remains a model prisoner and appears content with her punishment.

“Not long ago,” Robbins wrote, “Clark spoke at a Bedford Hills event. Her theme was the Book of Jonah. Like Jonah, she told the audience, she had spent years in self-destructive behavior and had been cast overboard into a stormed-tossed sea for her actions. Like Jonah, she found rescue in the belly of the whale, in her case behind bars. ‘In prison,’ she said, ‘I learned who I was.’”

The story of Jonah is the story of everyone who has heard God’s voice and ignored it.

The story of Jonah is shared by all who run away from moral obligations and threaten those around them with their cowardly irresponsibility.

The story of Jonah is the story of all who had to be picked up and cast aside by those whose only livelihood was threatened by their presence.

And the story of Jonah is the story of everyone who needed to be forced -- dragged kicking and screaming – to carry out God’s commands.

In so many ways, the story of Jonah is our story, too.

The good news is that once Jonah learned who he was, a servant of God, he was redeemed. God still wanted him to risk his life by going to Nineveh with the news that God was about to destroy the city. But once Jonah freed himself of his shackles to fear and trusted God, everything began to change. The people of Nineveh repented. God decided not to destroy them. And justice and righteousness were restored.

Was Jonah really swallowed by a great fish? 

Matthew Harrison Brady has no doubt of it. Henry Drummond scoffs.

But surely an intelligent lawyer like Mr. Drummond knows. Beneath the fish story is a far greater truth:

When God calls us to a task, the hardest thing on earth may be to say yes.

But the consequences of shutting God out of our lives are even harder. Taking that path may well remind us how lonely it could be to sleep with  fishes.

Big Mike

This week, the Revised Common Lectionary and a national holiday offer an interesting juxtaposition. The first chapter of John hints at the effortless charisma of Jesus who tells potential disciples, “follow me,” and they drop what they are doing and follow him. And the calendar reminds us this is the 83rd birthday of another charismatic leader, namely, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What these two things have in common is the response to the call of God to abandon everything and enter a new life – and perhaps a dangerous life – of ministry and service.

John, who often adorns Jesus with a nimbus of mysticism, adds precognition to the messianic bag of tricks. There’s Nathanael, standing beneath a fig tree minding his own business, when Philip wanders by, babbling ecstatically about meeting the Messiah, a Nazarene. Nathanael thinks Philip has been tapping the wine skins and cracks wryly that nothing good will come out of Nazareth. But – hey, he has nothing to do besides stand beneath a fig tree – so Nathanael re-laces his sandals and reluctantly follows Philip. Soon, the two encounter Jesus, who shouts out, “Hey, I saw you standing beneath the fig tree when Philip called you.” Nathanael is stunned. That modest act of prestidigitation knocks the wind out of Nathanael. It’s all he needs to sign on for the duration of Jesus’ ministry. Even Jesus is amazed. “You believe because I saw you beneath the fig tree?” he asks. “You will see greater things than this.”

In our day, we have already seen greater things than the gift of second sight. Every time we walk through Times Square, we know someone is watching us on television. But even greater than that is the power to take a wandering, directionless human being like Nathanael and give him a resolute faith and an unwavering moral purpose.

That kind of power amazes us even in this age of cyber miracles.

From what I hear, Martin Luther King, Jr. had that kind of power.

When I started work at the American Baptist Churches offices in Valley Forge, among the fringe benefits were the many colleagues who had known Martin, marched with him, strategized with him, sat on platforms with him, and befriended him. Martin was dually aligned with the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., which was actually formed in 1961 to give him a denominational home, and with the American Baptist Churches USA.
As I listened to stories of Martin, I quickly noticed everyone had a different view of him. If you talk to some of the old ladies at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – also dually aligned with the PNBC and ABC – they will happily regale you with unique stories no one else knows. “Let me tell you,” they will say, leaning close to your ear, “Martin’s favorite hymn was, ‘Amazing Grace.’” But don’t write that down. The next old lady will get a far away look in her eye and say, “I remember Martin telling me how much he loved, ‘Be Not Dismayed whate’er Betide, God Will Take Care of You.’” And later, as, you sit down in the old fellowship hall for dinner and ask your hostess if she knew Martin, she’ll reply, “Oh, my yes, and he once confided to me that his favorite hymn was, ‘It is well, It is Well, With My Soul.’”

It makes you wonder how many people historians have interviewed when they write their books. The one fact about Martin than I’m sure of, because empty bottles of it are prominently displayed among his personal effects in the MLK museum, is that he liked Aramis cologne.

Reminiscences among my American Baptist colleagues also varied. My first boss, Dr. Frank Sharp, who was head of American Baptist News Service in the seventies, regarded M.L. as “a difficult celebrity,” in part because it was Frank who negotiated with Martin’s staff to get him to last-minute meetings and hastily scheduled press conferences on time, an almost impossible task. Dr. William Scott, ABC executive minister in Buffalo, met Martin shortly after the successful resolution of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and wrote in his diary, “He is young and inexperienced and in no way prepared for the leadership that is about to be thrust upon him.”

Dr. William T. McKee, the first African American to head a national American Baptist program board, was responsible for supervising me as director of communications for the ABC, and I would spend hours in Bill’s office as he tried to keep me out of political trouble. Bill, who grew up in Berean Baptist Church in Brooklyn, knew Martin well and often got tears in his eyes when he talked about him. When Bill served on the national staff of the ABC Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board (MMBB) in New York, he was often in contact with Martin England, a white MMBB staff member in the ABC of the South. Both Bill and England were concerned that Martin Luther King had no life or health insurance, and they both pressed him to sign up for MMBB benefits. According to Bill, Martin kept putting it off but finally agreed to sign the application form in 1963, five years before his death. Bill’s eyes would overflow when he talked about that. “If he hadn’t, his wife and children would have had nothing,” he’d say. I heard the story often.

“I called him Mike,” Bill would say quietly, almost as if no one else was in the room. It was from Bill that I learned that Martin and his father had been named Michael King when they were born, and the elder King changed it to Martin Luther King, in part to satisfy the last request of a dying grandfather. But close friends continued to address the two by their original names. Insiders knew them as Big Mike and Little Mike. This is not a secret, of course, but neither is it widely known.

Martin was assassinated in 1968. My kids, all of whom were born after 1976, tended to think of him as a distant historical figure, lost in the archival dust along with Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jefferson. Even before my hair began to thin out and fade to gray, though, the kids suspected I was old enough to have encountered some of these old-time figures. But they figured they had really underestimated my age when they asked if I had known Martin Luther King, Jr.

“No,” I replied. “But I knew his father.”

“His father?” None of the kids ever challenged that. They always had trouble figuring out when I was making things up. They still do.

But I did know Daddy King. He remained a loyal American Baptist all his life and attended many ABC biennial meetings when I was on the staff. One time I stood behind him in the J-K line at the registration tables and listened to a young African American woman on the other side of the table ask his name.

“Martin Luther King Senior,” he said, carefully accentuating each syllable.

The young woman giggled.

“No,” she said nervously. “I really need to know your name.”

I was standing behind him, looking at the back of his large gray head, so I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. But he did make it clear he was not teasing.

“Young lady, I am Martin – Luther – King – Senior. And I am quite sure of it.”

The chastened young woman handed him a registration card, and the great man wandered away.

I was invited by an ABC colleague to have coffee with Daddy King during that meeting, and not long afterwards The American Baptist magazine interviewed him for an anniversary story honoring his son. He sat serenely at his desk and opened letters with a silver knife as he answered questions. His voice was so deep and cavernous that a staff writer and I argued whether to compare it to “pebbles falling on a tin roof,” but we decided that would be disrespectful. We reported that his voice was “deep.”

We probably asked him questions he had heard before. We asked if he was bitter following the murder of his son and the loss of other family members, and he quoted the King James Bible: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

I don’t recall the exact year of the interview, but it was after Daddy King had lost a second son, A.D. King, who died in a swimming pool accident in 1969; and after and his beloved wife, Alberta, playing the organ in Ebenezer in 1974, was shot by a deranged man who had planned to shoot her husband.

The elder King’s quiet grace and determined forgiveness were almost super human and a marvel to those who witnessed it.

If you talk with aging members of Ebenezer Baptist Church today, there is one thing on which they all agree: Martin Luther King, Sr., was the model of love and the harbinger of justice that molded his oldest son into the singular civil rights leader he became.

Baptists who attended the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Ebenezer Church in April 1968 have many stories to tell: how President Lyndon Johnson sat frowning and drenched in sweat in the middle of the congregation, or how Ralph Abernathy saw Bobby Kennedy in the rear of the church and went to the microphone to invite him to the front.

But many remember a more private moment, when Daddy King saw his son lying in the coffin for the first time. Daddy King began to weep and reached out to his son – some say it was if he was trying to wake him up – and whispered, “He never hated anybody. He never hated anybody.”

Daddy King worshipped at Salem Baptist Church in Atlanta on November 11, 1984. Later that same afternoon he suffered a heart attack and died at 5:41 p.m.

I don’t know what his last words were, but when I heard he died I thought of his four word eulogy for his eldest son: “He never hated anybody.”

What better way to sum up a life? Probably none of us would be comfortable with the opposite assertion, “He loved everybody.” Who among us is capable of that? Even if we have been spared the violent deaths of loved ones, who among us have not experienced insult, bigotry, unfairness, intolerance, xenophobia, sexism, ageism, or discrimination? There are simply persons who cross our paths who are unlovable. And perhaps the hardest commandment of Jesus is to love our enemies. Chances are we cannot, if we are honest, claim that we love everybody.

But with God’s help, it may be possible to get through the snares and thorns of life without hating anybody. That would be grace indeed.

Martin Luther King – Junior and Senior – never hated anyone. But more than that: each had cultivated the divine spark which is planted in all of us but nurtured by few of us.

Daddy and Martin King had what Jesus bestows: the power to live lives of purpose, a power so vivid that it inspires directionless persons to breathe life into their own divine spark, setting them on the path to faith and endowing that faith with an unwavering moral purpose.

Millions were inspired to a higher moral purpose by the example of Martin Luther King – Junior and Senior, Big Mike and Little Mike – and because they lived, the world is very different than the world into which they were born.

But today’s world is still imperfect, and God is still calling each of us to discipleship and diaconal service.

As with the disciples Jesus called so long ago, we may be content to go to him and confess, “You are the son of God, the King of Israel.”

But Jesus continues to push us to greater service, the same way Jesus called Daddy King and Martin Luther King, Jr. to greater service for the good of all.

Jesus’ message is clear: it is not enough to be satisfied with the great things we see now.

With a little bit of effort, Jesus assures us, “You will see greater things than these.”

The Gift of the Magee

I begin with a digression.

The tiny Central New York village where I grew up was not exactly isolated. Morrisville’s location on U.S. route 20, which connects Albany with Buffalo and points west, places it directly in the flow of intellectual and cultural currents. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt motored up route 20 to pay his respects to I.M. Charleton (right in the picture above), the director of the Morrisville Institute (now Morrisville State College).

This little known event suggests Morrisville was not the least among the hamlets of New York State, because one future world leader discerned the importance of cultivating village intellectuals like I.M. (who, if not a Republican, was the only person in the village who wasn’t.) History does not say whether Morrisville was at the top of FDR’s itinerary, or why he appears to have left the engine running as he sat in his car and charmed the local gentry. The important thing is, he came.

In 1930, no one knew what Franklin Roosevelt’s future held, but even then he was impressive enough that I.M. Charleton thought it good to stand on the curb to wave as the Gov whisked by. To the best of my knowledge, Morrisvillians never saw the like, before or afterwards. Some say they glimpsed Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson at Sautter’s Diner in 1964, but Wilson is virtually unknown except to those who cross the Tappanzee Bridge, which is named for him. The visit of FDR was one of the most historic events ever to take place in the village, and someday a plaque may be placed in the pavement where his oil pan leaked 82 years ago.

I posit all this for two reasons. One, FDR’s visit was as memorable to Morrisvillians as if exotic kings from the east had dropped by for coffee and pie. It gives us chronic bible leaders an emotional point of reference for what it must have been like to wake up in a barn in Bethlehem and see three kings stepping delicately over the sheep droppings.

And, two, I always think it’s important to make it clear that my home town was not intellectually or culturally isolated, despite our Central New York accents that make us sound like lethargic Chicagoans. This stems from my frequent embarrassment, decades after leaving Morrisville, to discover no one else pronounces words the way I was taught. Our teachers held that the name of the ancient queen of Egypt was Klayo-PAY-tra, and that the Communist leader of China pronounced his name the way it was spelled: Mayo Tissie Tongue.

And in the seventh grade, when we were introduced to the short stories of William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the name of O. Henry, I was entranced by a story I thought was entitled, “The Gift of the Magee.”

In my defense (and on behalf of Morrisvillians), I must assert that it is very difficult to see the word m-a-g-i and quickly grasp that it is pronounced with a long a and a long i. The dictionary pronouncing hint is even less clear and looks like a logo for a foreign car: mædʒaɪ. Moreover, the word magi was never used in the United Church of Morrisville. We knew about the itinerant kings, of course, because each year we built a manger scene on the front lawn of the church. But I was ten before I realized they weren’t from a place called OrienTARR. And 15 before I realized they were magi, not magees.

Ideally, my digression should end here, but I’m still transfixed by the unexpected visit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to my home town. Like FDR’s visit to the Morrisville Ag and Tech institute, the visit of three kings to Bethlehem was calculated to make everyone feel important. If something was happening that warranted the appearance of the future president or the erstwhile kings, it had to be taken seriously.

Two days ago, Christians around the world celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas that, along with twelve drummers drumming, marks the arrival of the Magi at the manger where Jesus was born. In our household, we observed the traditional Latino celebration of El Día de los Reyes and exchanged small gifts in honor of their kingly largesse. But this is not a practice I grew up with in Morrisville, and it is not a universal observance.

Views as to who the kings were, in fact, are as varied as the Christian church itself. Some sects, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, excise references to the Kings because they were regarded as sorcerers of Satan. That’s a minority viewpoint, but it does make you want to look a little closer at these guys.

A handful of scholars believe los tres reyes were precocious astronomers who mapped the stars and studied the passage of planets, but that would have placed them several hundred years ahead of their time. Most observers are convinced the kings were garden variety astrologers, a possibility supported by the fact that they not only looked at stars but believed that celestial bodies had something to tell them – and, more than that, they  followed one star for hundreds of miles to find out what it wanted them to know.

Of course, the moving star of Bethlehem was more likely a migrating planet than a fixed star, but who knew about such realities of astrophysics back then? One thing seems certain: the first thing the kings would have checked in Entertainment Weekly was their horoscope.

The term magi, from magus, is a reference to the priests of Zoroastrianism, who studied the stars and planets and made elaborate charts to work out what their movements portended in the currents of human life below. The three magicians from the east didn’t become “wise men” until the 16th and 17th century, when scholars who wrote the King James Version of the bible decided to call the magi “Wise Men.” Elsewhere, the drafters of the bible used the same word to denote “sorcerer” or “sorcery,” notably in reference to Elymas in Acts 13:6-11, or Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-13.

Matthew does not identify the three kings, or magicians, or wise men, but thanks to long standing church tradition, we call them by name: Melchior a Babylonian scholar; Caspar (also Gaspar, Jaspar, Jaspas, Gathaspa, and other variations), a Persian scholar; and Balthazar (also Balthasar, Balthassar, and Bithisarea), an Arab scholar.

Everything else we know about the kings is circumstantial. One reason we know they were important is that when they dropped by the palace to pay their respects to King Herod, the King took time to meet with them. This was either a professional courtesy to his fellow kings, or – as Matthew tells it – Herod had heard the rumors that a king of the Jews was about to the born and he invited the three sorcerers in to find out what they knew. The wily Herod asked the three to let him know when they found the lad, “so that I may go and pay him homage.” Yeah, right.

Matthew states explicitly that when the triumvirate found the baby Jesus laying in the manger, they gave him three symbolic gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. But the kings were smart enough to know Herod was setting a trap for the baby – Matthew says they were warned in a dream – and they “left for their own country by another road,” evading Herod and his agents. Herod realized he had been duped by the kings and, according to Matthew, ordered the death of every new born male child in Bethlehem.

No one knows what happened to the kings after they returned home, although there are many interesting legends. Some believe one of the magi was baptized by St. Thomas, the “doubting Thomas” of Scripture, while he was en route to his missionary tasks in India. Both the Mar Thoma Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India trace their origins to the first century visit of St. Thomas to South Asia.

But it was Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned as pope from 590 to 604 A.D., who placed the traveling wise men in their proper historic perspective. In one of those rare sermons that is remembered for 1,500 years, Gregory stressed the fact that the wise men, having searched for and discovered the Christ, took a different road and never retraced their route.  “Having come to know Jesus,” he said, “we are forbidden to return by the way we came.”

Despite all the mystery and speculation about whom they really were, the three magi continue to preach a powerful message across the millennia.

They were three non-Jews whose minds and spirits were open to powerful spiritual currents, including cryptic indications that a powerful monarch was about to be born to the Jews, a group they might have dismissed as a relatively minor sect in the Roman and eastern worlds.

When the three sorcerers perceived a unique sign in the heavens, a bright object that appeared to move ahead of them, they followed it out of intellectual and metaphysical curiosity.

As they pondered the heavenly sign that moved before them, they consulted their charts and concluded it was leading them to a rendezvous with a infant whose power and significance exceeded all they ever knew.

En route to Bethlehem, they decided to mark the occasion with significant gifts to the baby king: gold as a symbol of kingship on earth, frankincense as a reminder of God’s presence, and myrrh, an embalming oil, as a symbol of the death that would be required to bring the prophecy to fruition.

When they arrived at the end of their journey, these wise men born to riches did not hesitate to enter a rude, odiferous barn, because they knew the power and glory that resided in the human baby resting in an old feeding troth.

They came from afar and they knew who they were seeking and when they arrived, they worshipped the baby in the troth.

When they had met Jesus, they knew their lives must be changed forever. And they chose a new road for passage, having decided that they must never again retrace the steps that had brought them to this radical encounter with the son of a God they were only just beginning to know.

The very presence of these three splendid strangers must have amazed the parents of Jesus and astonished other witnesses in area. The visit of the obviously important Magi would have been regarded as a sign that something big was happening – just as Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930 appearance in Morrisville was a sign of something big.

But the glistening kings knew something that may have temporarily eluded others: they knew the magi were not the most important presence in the tiny barn.

That honor belonged to the smallest person in the room, the feeble infant still struggling to find the strength to lift his head.

It was the baby that the wise men came to see, and once they had seen him, their lives were changed forever.

And as we watch them in our minds eye, three kings stepping out on history’s stage, choosing a new route of enlightenment and understanding, may we all be eager to follow them and the star that brought them to God’s salvation,

westward leading,
still proceeding,
guide us to thy perfect light.

What happens next?

In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s autobiographical musical, “In the Heights,” there is a poignant scene in the second act. The characters have just survived a night of looting in the midst of a Fourth of July blackout. Usnavi, the main character, has lost his bodega because of vandalism, but his main concern in the sweltering heat is the health and safety Abuela Claudia.


USNAVI:
Abuela

ABUELA CLAUDIA:
Are you okay?

ABUELA CLAUDIA/USNAVI:
Paciencia y fe!
Paciencia y fe!

USNAVI:
So we survived the night, what happens today?

What happens today? The question crosses all our minds, but there is no answer. We can’t predict the future. It would be futile to try.

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money,’” writes the Apostle James. “Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.” (James 4:13-16)

In the musical, so much happens after Usnavi asks the question, “What happens today?” The musical is no longer on Broadway, but it is on tour, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t like spoilers. Before the day is over, Abuela will split her lottery winnings of $96,000 with Usnavi and his cousin, Sonny. Before the day is over, Abuela will die of heart failure in her bedroom. Before the day is over, Usnavi will make plans return to the Dominican Republic, the home of his parents. But before the day is over Sonny will arrange a special tribute to Abuela Claudia that convinces Usnavi to stay in the Heights. None of these events were likely when Usnavi began the day with the question, “So we survived the night. What happens today?”

Our lives unroll uncertainly before us. Maybe today will be much like yesterday, and perhaps yesterday was much like the day before. On the other hand, no one can suppose there will not be catastrophic changes in the soothing routine. When a family in Connecticut went to bed for a long winter’s nap late last month, they had no inkling that the smoldering embers left in a bag by the fireplace would burst to life and, before the night was over, claim the lives of three children and two grandparents. 

We tell ourselves that tomorrow is promised to no one but, in fact, nothing is promised to us. My Sociology Professor Tony Campolo – who, when I had him in class, did not know that in a few tomorrows he would become an evangelical superstar – used to say how scared he was by evangelists who sought to frighten you into salvation with familiar taunts: “You don’t have to come forward to be saved now, you can put it off until tomorrow or the next day. You can walk away tonight with hell fires crackling around your ankles and wait until some other time to be saved. But – But! – what if you walk out that door tonight and get hit by a bus?” We’d ask Tony, the existential sociologist, if the sermon made him afraid of hell fires, and he’d reply, “No! It made me afraid of buses!”

As we look around us today, at those we love, at familiar surroundings, common items we hold in our hands every day, are we missing invisible signs that might shed light on what happens next?

Some historians have said that one of the eeriest images of the television age took place on the morning of November 22, 1963, as cameras captured the crisp, full-color images of President and Mrs. Kennedy descending the mobile stairway from Air Force One. Mrs. Kennedy beams as brightly as the Dallas sun as she models her pink suit and trademark pillbox hat, and a Dallas newsman who has never seen JFK in person marvels at the charismatic young chief. “He’s taller than I thought,” he reports, “he’s tanned and lean in a well tailored suit and a light green shirt. He’s the prince of America.” In this glistening moment, the future seems secure, God appears to dote on the United States, and the unwary President bares his teeth in a grin of grace and domestic tranquility.

But as we know so well a half century later, these happy moments are fleeting. Within minutes of the grinning descent from Air Force One, as the motorcade heads into downtown Dallas, the President will be gone.

JFK.
Blown away.
What else do I have to say?

I’m inclined to think it would be terrible if we knew how our lives will evolve, if OuiJa boards and botanicas provided spoilers of what lies ahead.

Who needs it? My maternal grandmother got it into her head that she would die on February 6, and all her life she would greet each new year with dread anticipation that this would be the fatal year. She passed so many years safely – more than 80 of them – that the rest of the family lost patience with her morbid annual observance. Then she died, on February 6. Perhaps Grandma had some divination of the day, if not the year, of her death. But what good did it do besides making her miserable every January and February?

As I write this, I’m flashing back to an old Mutt and Jeff cartoon I saw decades ago in the Syracuse Herald-Journal:

Jeff:  I Wish I knew where I was going to die.
Mutt: Why? What good would that do you?
Jeff: I’d never go near the durn place.

All of this prognostication gives power, perhaps, to the story of the ancient woman and man encountered in the temple by Mary, Joseph and Jesus when they went there to designate their first born male as “holy to the Lord,” and for Mary’s purification as a woman who had recently given birth. (Luke 2:18-40)

Simeon and Anna had gifts of divine discernment, and when the young couple and new baby boy came to the temple, the old ones knew exactly who they were.  They also knew what the future held for them, and it was not all good news.

Before she met Simeon and Anna, Mary’s knowledge of her prospects was that they were spectacular. The angel said she was with child by the Holy Spirit, and the shepherds tramped down from the fields to tell her what the angels said about the birth of the messiah, the Christ child. And “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)

But while Mary was treasuring the future in her heart, a harsher reality awaited her and her family, and the old folks knew it. Because the messianic franchise is not all bliss and glory.

Both Simeon and Anna had taken up residence in the Temple, and both of them knew for whom they were waiting. When she saw the baby, Anna “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Simeon discerned God’s promise that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah, and he, too, recognized the baby immediately. He held the child tenderly in his arms, and praised God:

“Master, now you are
dismissing your
servant in peace,
according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your
salvation,
which you have prepared in
the presence of all
peoples,
a light for revelation to the
Gentiles
and for glory to your
people Israel.”

But it was to Mary that Simeon turned on a more somber note.

“This child,” he said, “is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”

And then:  “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”

This is a spoiler about events to come that had yet to be revealed to Mary, the teen-age mother who was still pondering the glory of being the mother of God’s son. God, who had kept this information from her until now, called upon a kindly old man in the temple to tell the whole truth: blessed are you among women; but an anguish of spirit akin to a sword in your soul is your fate as well.

The agony that ameliorates the ecstasy follows shortly afterwards, when Joseph, Mary and the boy Jesus are forced to leave behind everything they know in order to escape the death sentence imposed on all newborn boys by the murderous King Herod. There are few hints, in canonical scripture, what it may have been like to raise an adolescent Messiah, but the attitude of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple is suggestive. Jesus had gone missing amid the Passover crowds in Jerusalem, and Mary and Joseph searched frantically for him. “Child, why have you treated us like this?” Mary demanded. “Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”

Clearly an apology is in order, but the boy’s response is slightly arrogant, or would have been if he had been your kid: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must have been in my father’s house?” (Luke 2:48-49).

A few verses later, Luke reports that Jesus “was obedient to them,” but perhaps this only meant he was turning over a new messianic leaf. Disappearing from one’s parents is not an act of obedience.

At this point, the future still held many incidents of soul-piercing intensity, including the adult Jesus’ departure from Mary’s home, the sermons that convinced Jesus’ own siblings and friends that he was nuts, the angry crowd that followed him with the intent of throwing him off a cliff, the hostility of the religious authorities who felt threatened by his authority, and, ultimately, the arrest, flagellation, and crucifixion. Mary, who had once pondered God’s goodness and her son’s glory in her heart, ultimately sat at the foot of a Roman cross and watched her son die a slow, excruciating death by asphyxiation. The only pain that could have equaled that was the figurative sword thrust so cruelly in her soul.

On that day so long ago, when Mary took her infant son into the temple for his dedication to God, would she have been better off if there had been no Simeon to warn her about the future?

Perhaps not. She would have discovered the truths about life soon enough. She was still a teenager when she gave birth to Jesus, but as a young girl in a family oppressed by a malicious foreign rule, she must already have known life has equal portions of joy and pain. As she grew older and experienced more of life, this reality would have become more certain.

But Mary was also witness to the fact that there is more to life than joy and pain and the finality of death. She also played a major role in the decision of the Creator of the Universe to experience the misery and agony of human life in such a way that pain might be forever expunged from the soul’s eternal essence. Because Jesus suffered on the cross, the sword that pierced Mary’s soul – the swords that pierce all our souls – are forever removed.

It is always tempting, as we live out our lives, to want to know when the inevitable pains of living will come, or when death’s sting will come to us, or where. Some of us would welcome the spoilers, the mystical predictions, which will lay it all out before us. And others will be just as glad to go through life never knowing when that belligerent bus will put a quick end to all we know.

But none of that really matters. It’s enough to know that pain and death will come, whether we know how or when.
But just as certain, as made clear to Mary by Simeon and Anna, the ancients of the temple, is that God has a plan to take away our pain, and the day will surely come when we can praise God for a long-promised blessed release,

for my eyes have seen your
salvation,
which you have prepared in
the presence of all
peoples,
a light for revelation to the
Gentiles
and for glory to your
people Israel.

Shock and Awe

The first 20 verses of the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel are sheer poetry, and many of us don’t get into the Christmas spirit until we hear them read aloud in the King James version:

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shown round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

The words make our spirits soar as much as any Christmas carol and most of us can recite them by heart.

Perhaps Luke, the dear and glorious physician who wrote these words, is using a little poetic license.

The shepherds who, with their ancestors, had been expecting God’s Messiah for generations, were probably not expecting it to happen in quite this way. They were expecting God to intervene in human history with dramatic timing, certainly with angels and trumpets, probably with earthquakes, presumably with wind and fire. And then would come the Messiah on a gargantuan fire-breathing steed, his brawny hand grasping a glistening sword, slashing heads and limbs from their Roman oppressors and hated polytheist neighbors. They were expecting something akin to the way Donald Rumsfeld predicted the opening salvos of the Iraq War: shock. And awe.

But no. Nothing like that. No earthquakes, no fire, just an ordinary night sitting downwind from the scent of the sheep. Most scholars believe it wasn’t even December, a date arbitrarily chosen by the early church because it fit in with other feast days.

And hidden from the shepherds’ gaze, in a small barn, redolent of animal droppings and compost, an ordinary woman in labor crouches over the hay. In one of the humanity’s most common functions, this woman pushes out a baby boy.

How many other babies were born that night within a 50-kilometer radius of Bethlehem? Tens? Scores? Hundreds? Whatever the volume of natal activity that night, one more birth would hardly have been noticed. The incarnation of the Creator of the Universe into human flesh took place in a manner no different, perhaps even less dramatic, than the manner in which you and I were born. Did persons outside the barn even hear the cries of a newborn struggling to fill his lungs with unfamiliar air? Did the lowing cattle quickly lose interest in the human drama and resume the bored chewing of their cuds? Was there ever a night so quiet, so devoid of drama and astounding events?

This is where the angels come in. The heavenly host awakens the shepherds in the middle of the silent night and scares them to the brink of infarction. While the shepherds are clutching their chests and catching their breath, the angels point to a malodorous hovel which the shepherds knew well. 

“Behold!” the angels say. “This is not the hut you think it is! This is delivery room of Christ the Lord.”

I can’t begin to imagine what the shepherds must have thought. No doubt they were frightened out of their wits, and no wonder. How often does one encounter even one angel, let alone the whole heavenly host. And how disorienting, how counter-intuitive it must have been for the shepherds, transfixed by heavenly fireworks in the sky, to follow the angels’ orders to avert their gaze to a crude little shed at the edge of town? Were they too frightened to say aloud what they really thought? “What? This lousy little lean-to is where you want us to seek the Messiah?”

One suspects that without the angel chorus, humanity might have entirely missed the big event. The sheer ordinariness of the occasion was one reason the early church went out of its way to exalt the importance of the Messiah’s lowly birth.

In addition to angel choruses, the church also stressed the significance of the affair by tracing Jesus’ ancestry back to some major players in Jewish history.

Matthew – famous for the “begats” which many Sunday school students were forced to memorize – begins the family tree at Abraham, moves on to King David and King Solomon, follows the royal line through Jeconiah, and ends up with Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus. Luke’s more audacious genealogy goes all the way back to Adam and includes the Prophet Nathan and also leads to Joseph.

This is the point at which some wise ass seventh grader in Sunday school raises his hand to point out that Joseph was not a blood relative of Jesus, so what difference does it make?

The point, perhaps, was to persuade us that the incarnation of the Creator in a baby boy in Bethlehem was a bigger deal than it looked on the surface. But one also has to wonder – as wise ass seventh graders often do – why the lineage would make a difference.

Many of us are aware of notable ancestors and we drop their names to suggest that we, too, are bigger deals than we look. My paternal grandfather, eager to prove he was more than an Oneonta bureaucrat, meticulously probed his family tree to identify impressive antecedents. His main goal was to prove he was a Mayflower descendant, which many Euro-Americans can do by tracing the elaborate web of the millions of people who were connected by endless marriages and intermarriages to the 102 souls who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. My grandfather concluded the Jenkses were descended from Mayflower pilgrim Elizabeth Tilley, who married her fellow passenger John Howland. The inscription on Auntie Elizabeth’s grave gives hope to all would-be lineage enhancers:

Here ended the Pilgrimage of
ELIZABETH Tilley HOWLAND
who died Dec 1687 at home of her daughter
LYDIA & husband JAMES BROWN
in Swansea - ELIZABETH married
Pilgrim JOHN HOWLAND who came
with her in the Mayflower Dec 1620.
From them are descended a
numerous posterity.

I’ll take Grandpa’s word for it that the Jenkses are indeed among that numerous posterity. A less obscure ancestor (because we share his surname) was Joseph Jenks, Jr., the Royal Governor of Rhode Island Colony from 1727 to 1732, and a Baptist benefactor of Roger Williams. One would have thought that would have made me Baptist royalty when I worked for the American Baptists in Valley Forge, but that honor had by then been relegated to bureaucrats who traced their ancestry to Sweden.

Actually, Governor Jenks is my favorite ancestor because he literally stands out among his peers. He was reportedly 6 feet 7 inches tall – freakish in 1727 – and none of his American-made clothes seemed to fit. According to one legend, Grandpa Joseph sent a hand-written note to England to order a 6 feet 7 inch cloak befitting his office. Months later, a package arrived at the colonial mansion: a 6 feet 7 in clock. Clearly I was not the first in my line with illegible handwriting.

My mother, Mary Emerson, traced her line to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it would be nice to imagine that a corpuscle or two of his transcendental genius courses through our family veins. Every Thanksgiving I think of his succinct and eloquent prayer,

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

What a cool guy, that Uncle Ralph. It’s fun to think my family swims in his gene pool and, who knows, maybe yours does, too. But I can assure you, there isn’t a weaker pick-up line than, “Hey, Babe, I’m related to Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

And when you come down to it, what difference does it make? The late mystic George Carlin rightfully chastised those who are prideful of attributes they had nothing to do with, such as being Irish or having red hair or being descended from Zulu chiefs. It’s all good, but it has nothing to do with how you use your own life for better or ill. You can’t blame your larcenous tendencies on being descended from John Dillinger, or attribute your virtues to being a scion of Baptist royalty. How you live your life has nothing to do with those who came before you, and everything to do with you.

In the same manner, it didn’t matter a whit that Jesus was descended from King David, and I’m sure his royal line didn’t add a mite to his stepfather’s livelihood as a wood worker. It may have pleased some early church bureaucrats to claim Jesus was the latest in a long line of Jewish monarchs and prophets, but it doesn’t seem entirely relevant. The only familial relationship that really mattered was God, and it was God Who Jesus addressed as Abba, Father.

Into the feeble human flesh of the frail babe in the manger was poured all the power, authority, creative energy and omniscient power of the Creator of the Universe. Isn’t that shock and awe enough? The host of angels was a nice touch, and the impressive genealogy is interesting (so long as we are not required to memorize it). But the most breathtaking development here is that on one ordinary night, the Creator of the Universe was born in a barn without a perceptible whimper.

It makes you pause to catch your breath.

But it is truly something to celebrate, an event that brings all of us to our feet for a rousing chorus of “Joy to the World.”

Christmas Day has come, and soon it will be gone for another year. But let’s not allow the season to depart without reflecting on the quintessential quietness of the incarnation.

Amid all life’s challenges, stresses, sorrows and pains, we will occasionally find it tempting to call on God for dramatic intercessions, miraculous visions, stellar signs that we will be rescued from the travails that plague us. Like our ancestors who yearned for the dramatic rescue of a mighty messiah who would be attended by earthquakes, wind, and fire, we will pray for clear solutions and unambiguous remedies.

But the God in the mundane manger seems to prefer a more subtle approach. The ordinariness of God’s entry into human history is a powerful reminder that God is with us constantly, even on the most run of the mill days.

And when we need to cry for help, we know God will be there in time of trouble, too.

We may just have to listen very carefully amid the tumult to hear God’s still, small voice.

Dream Along With Me

I can see it now, as vividly as if it were yesterday.

My mother is taking my baby brother Larry and me on a morning walk around Morrisville. Larry is in a stroller. I’m 3 years old and walking beside Mommy and Larry. We cross Main Street and turn left on Mill Street. We pause in front of a telephone pole while Mommy leans over the stroller to re-button Larry’s shirt. I point to the looming pole.

“Remember,” I ask, “when I climbed to the top?” Mommy stands and smiles.

“No.”

“But you were right here,” I insisted.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were!”

Mommy sighed and we began walking again. End of conversation.

But I did climb the pole! I remember it so well. And Mommy was there and Larry was there …

It was, of course, a dream. The walk with Mommy and Larry happened every day, and at one point during nap time I dreamed I had climbed the familiar telephone pole.

And what a powerful dream it was. Even now, nearly three decades after my mother’s death, the memory of this dream invokes the clearest image I have of her as a pretty young woman. But at 3, I hadn’t sorted out the difference between dream memories and real memories.

The psychiatrist C.G. Jung raises the question of whether we ever really sort it out. Dreams, Jung said, are windows between our conscious reality and our unconscious spirituality.

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul,” Jung wrote in The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1933).  Our daily waking experiences overwhelm our ability to remember everything, so we remember some, forget others and lose track of everything else that has happened to us. “But in dreams,” Jung said, “we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man … there he is still in the whole, and the whole is in him … It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral.”

Dreams, Jung believed, are spiritual glimpses into memories our brains have forgotten but our souls retain forever. 

But Jung cautioned those who would interpret dreams that these glimpses are not always understandable. “The dream is often occupied with apparently very silly details,” he wrote in On the Psychology of the Unconscious (1953), “this producing an impression of absurdity, or … so unintelligible as to leave us thoroughly bewildered.”

About 15 years ago I had a dream that was remarkable in its length, plot, color, detail, and unintelligibility – and remarkable in that I have retained so much of it over so many years.

I’m in the large reception hall of a great house. The floor is marble, the dark wood walls are elegantly polished, and a vast staircase spirals upwards toward a dim yellow light. As I watch passively, several two-dimensional heralds who look like fugitives from a stained-glass window enter from the right, their glass feet clicking against the marble floor. The heralds trill their trumpets shrilly and begin to march up the staircase. Pope John Paul II enters from the right and follows the heralds upstairs. The Pope looks harried and tired as he makes his way up the steps. He is surrounded by hundreds of people of all races and ages, chirping in cacophonic unison.  Some are in modern dress, others wear medieval rags, some are adorned with armor, and still others look like cartoons and computer-generated grotesqueries. Their noise intensifies as they process up the stairs. The Pope turns to look at me. He shakes his head and shrugs. As he continues up the staircase, I notice he is wearing black pumps with two-inch heels.

What the heck was that all about? Was I receiving a divine revelation about Pope John Paul, perhaps a message from on high that the church needs to welcome and affirm all God’s people? Or was it silly nonsense, “producing an impression of absurdity”?

Beats me. Jung said he could not interpret his own dreams, and he pointed out in Psychology and Religion (1938) that the church was reluctant to interpret random dreams. “In spite of the Church's recognition that certain dreams are sent by God,” Jung noted, “she is disinclined, and even averse, to any serious concern with dreams, while admitting that some might conceivably contain an immediate revelation.”

Dreams play a profoundly dramatic role in many biblical narratives, so the church has to take them seriously.  Remember an earlier Joseph whose dreams were both prescient and dangerous:

Once Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, ‘Listen to this dream that I dreamed. There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf.’ His brothers said to him, ‘Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us?’ So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words. (Genesis 37:5-8)

And who could blame the beleaguered brothers for hating him? Joseph’s dream is clearly a divine revelation about the future. Perhaps he would have been better off if he hadn’t mentioned it to his brothers, but then, he had to be stupid enough to brag about it in order for to fulfill God’s metaphors.

In the case of Joseph, the betrothed of Mary, the dreams are vivid messages from God and require prudent action.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. Matthew 1:18-25.

That’s a remarkable turn of events: Joseph did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.

Thank God Sigmund Freud would not be born for another 1,856 years, because that could have been disastrous. Freud, unlike Jung, believed dreams had no spiritual import but were either erotic in nature or expressions of wish fulfillment. You know. Sex.

How would Dr. Freud have counseled this hurt, confused young man?

“Joseph, my boy, you will never set your anger aside if you don’t face it honestly. You have been a good boy, you have never laid hands on this women who has been betrothed to you. And yet she is with child! Sure, you’ve been cuckolded. Sure, you’re hurt. Sure, you’re angry. But this dream of yours – forget it! This dream is only your wish that you and Mary could go back to where you were, that nothing would have changed, that you can still possess this woman and make righteous, innocent love to her. But hoping for that and dreaming about it will not make it so. Forget about it.”

Freud would have gone on to advise Joseph that sex is a fundamental human drive and he needed to understand that if he wanted to start all over again. But no one thought like that when Mary found herself with child. What people thought was written down in the Bible:

“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress will be put to death,” says Leviticus 20:10, among other verses.

Maybe Joseph was thinking, hey, the adulterer was probably a Roman bastard and maybe Mary didn’t have a choice. So – what the hell – I’ll just throw the girl out and get on with my life.”

But then Joseph closed his eyes and had a dream. And, there being no Dr. Freud to confuse him, the dream had a profound impact on his thinking and on the history of the world. He went to bed a cuckold. He woke up the stepfather of God’s son.

That’s one hell of a flip flop. One commentary suggests Joseph’s dream is the first recorded example of post-hypnotic suggestion. The Star Wars generation will see evidence of a Jedi master manipulating the conscious mind:

Obi-Wan: These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
Storm Trooper: These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Storm Trooper: He can go about his business …

But the truth is, we know Joseph better than that. We know he is not a weak-minded wood worker subject to mere hypnotic suggestion. He is a good and righteous man. He’s the sort of man who recognizes God’s voice when he hears it, even if it comes in a dream. And he’s the sort of man whose personality is strong enough to withstand the withering stares and judgmental gossip of prying neighbors. His wife is pregnant with God’s son, and Joseph makes a moral decision not to care what anyone else thinks. His message to the neighbors is a brass-age rendition of a modern bumper stocker:  God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

What an extraordinary  man, this Joseph. His is a story we hear so often we have stopped wondering what it must have been like for him. He was the oldest son of Jacob, the scion on a patriarchal lineage extending back to King David, a man who grew up expecting to be the unchallenged head of his household. It is remarkable, radical even, that Joseph was able to step back from all that and assume one of history’s best known second banana roles.

Joseph was one of history’s most notable dreamers, a practical man who predated Jung by two millennia but who understood that dreams are windows to the soul. Once Joseph heard God’s message in the stillness of the night, he set a new path and never looked back.

Granted, not all of us have dreams that are as easy to understand as the ones that were visited upon Joseph. And most of us have had dreams that are, as Jung said, unintelligible and occupied with silly details.

But that does not diminish the possibility that our dreams are spiritual experiences, and that they come laden with messages from that part of our unconscious where God speaks to us.

The next dream you have may be perplexing, confusing and beyond your comprehension. But it can also be an opportunity to reflect on the power of Joseph’s dream, and to embrace all such REM experiences as a potential blessing.

Perry Como put it this way:

Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star
Come along, come along, leave your worries where they are
Up and beyond the sky, watchin' the world roll by
Sharin' a kiss, a sigh, just use your imagination!
On a cloud of love, we'll hear the music of night
We can wink at the moon as we hold each other tight
And if we go in the right direction, heaven can't be very far
Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star!
We can wink at the moon
as we hold each other tight . . . 
And if we go in the right direction, heaven can't be very far
Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star!

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See an Advent reflection on Joseph by the Rev. Martha M. Cruz: http://bit.ly/siY4t4