Hope and Sorrow
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I had a very different sermon prepared for Christmas Eve, and I tossed it just a few hours before the service rolled around. A more sparkling, effervescent sermon, it was.
As I was just finishing the last rewrite of the original text, my sister Lynne called and told me that our brother Robert, a recovering alcoholic, had relapsed. He was a complete mess when she went to pick him up and bring him to our parents’ house for Christmas Eve. Yellow eyes, unkempt, depressed. Drunk. Unable to stand up.
We spent a long time talking about what to do next. Christmas Eve is not the best time to pursue detox options.
But I was aware that I just didn’t have it in me to deliver a sermon based on the reality that I was part of before my sister called. The tougher reality that seized my heart that night had to be the basis of my reflections. There could be no clarity, no affection, no honesty, and no real exuberance for the holiday without facing the harder truths. After all, hope is the theme of the season, remember. And hope is not cheap optimism, which is often just a sense of entitlement. Rather, hope is the mainspring of a life that neither denies the past nor romances the future.
But it seems to me that hope in the midst of hard reality is the purpose of the Christmas story Luke tells. A story of poverty, heavy taxes, and a difficult family situation is hardly a pretty tale for children all dolled up with pink bows. Birth itself is not an easy thing—ask any woman—especially back in those days. The shepherds in the story may have had a wondrous experience, but from all we know about the shepherds of ancient times, their reputation wasn’t much better than a gang of modern thugs. They were not the kind of folks anyone would want crowding into their maternity room.
The Christmas story has lots of tough elements in it. But think. How many stories of people you know are not fraught with hardship and difficulties? Most life stories I can think of, my own included, and yours, fill the bill almost as well as this ancient story.
And yet, in the midst of the Christmas story, which makes the difficulties plain and obvious, we hear, like some far off angel-song, that something remarkable is still possible in this world. Something like hope is stirring. Something that might not be as obvious as the march of legions, the sound of the war trumpet or the clatter of coins on the tax table. But still something…tender skin, skin still red and wet, a voice crying out, new life.
The story doesn’t describe the birth as miraculous at all. According to what we know from medical manuals of the time, like the writing of Soranus of Ephesus, the birth depicted in the story was very typical. Doctor Soranus recommended that newborns be laid in a nest of hay, a pressed down channel of the house cattle feeder, so that the child wouldn’t be able to turn over. Wrapped up tight in small strips of cloth already moistened with olive oil, the baby was protected from accidentally hurting its own eyes with its roaming hands. Both pre-natal and post-natal care for peasant babies was quite sophisticated. Just because people are poor doesn’t mean they don’t know anything, you see. Just because the Romans were oppressive didn’t mean everyone just gave up. Just because taxes were high and unfair didn’t mean people just laid down and died.
No, they lived and struggled to make the best life they could.
And please, they weren’t waiting around for a Messiah to come along either. That is a Sunday school fairy tale. It is simply not true. Oh, there were a few eccentric folks in Judea who talked about anointed characters who might come along one day. Always in the plural, mind you, never anything called “THE messiah.” They imagined there might be a clever anointed priest one day who would help explain things better. Or some wily warrior king who would work with the priest to push foreign oppression away. But they were not sitting around waiting for some godlike being to be born and change everything once and for all—make the world perfect, bring heaven down to earth and fasten it tight. No, none of that.
The reason people teach that fairy tale is because of theology. The earliest students of Jesus knew him as a person, a fellow peasant. But those who came after him didn’t know him as a peasant, only as an idea, the subject of wonderful stories. So they tried to fit him into their theological framework to make sense of these stories. So they took all of these strange ideas of anointed characters from the fringes of Judaism, and said that he was, in Hebrew, ha-meshiakh; in Greek, ho-khristos; or in English, the Messiah, or the Christ.
They were taking all of these distinct ideas and combining them into one super Messiah. It was their way of trying to show how much they thought of him. How much they loved him. But within only 40 years of his death, people like Paul were calling him, not by his name, but by this newly invented tribute. Christ Jesus, Paul called him, not Jesus of Galilee.
But he himself was just a peasant artisan. Born in a poor family, probably somewhere up in the Galilee. Born of parents who were not, I repeat, not, waiting for a Messiah.
Oh, they were waiting of course. Just not for a Messiah. They waited for the crops to
come in. They waited for the midwife to arrive on time for the birthing. They waited for the honey production to finish. They waited for the wine to ferment. They waited for the bread to rise. They waited for the storm to pass, the temper to soften, the love to return, the child to fall asleep. They were, I think, a lot like us.
They had to struggle to get by. Like us. The economy wasn’t any better then than it is now. Ups and downs. Bad decisions and terrible consequences. But Rosemary Radford Reuther has this to say about struggle:
Within the bounds of present life, struggle itself is its own reward.
It is in the process of struggle against debased existence, with the attendant demands for becoming more sensitive, more self-disci-plined, with a constant resetting of one’s sights upon the vision of salvation, that one is closest to the secret of human life.
The secret of human life. Large words, those, yet somehow they ring as true.
Struggle is its own reward. What does that mean? I think of the struggle my family has faced with my brother’s deep despair, his debased sense of self and vision. I think of the decisions that have had to be made, the struggle to understand.
I think of my family of origin, my brother and my sister, a family no different in many ways from that ancient family we lift up each Christmas. Mediterranean peasants. Living with expectations—yes, they, for the next crop and for the storm to pass; yes, we, for my brother’s life to become honest and healthy again—but struggling and struggling to live out lives in the midst of all that expectation.
But, like they had in ancient times, we too have a few tools to help us as we struggle.
Mary had a peasant’s sense of medicine, and peasants, as I often remind us, were not at all foolish. She very well understood the uses of olive oil, strips of cloth and a bed of hay.
My sister and I are not professional alcoholism workers. But we are not foolish either. We have a peasant sense of psychology, and understand the uses of patience, and direct naming of issues, supportive conversation, and interventions. Heck, we even have the internet, the yellow pages, and wise friends, too!
Just as, in the story, the couple had to travel far before the birth begins, so have my sister and brother and I. We will start on that journey many times perhaps, and perhaps the outcome will not be as beautiful as in the Christmas story…who knows? It’s hardly like hope comes with promises tied to it with bows. But in the words of James Broughton:
Even if I never arrive
I shall keep departing
I believe in the unreachable,
the unlikely, and the unmentionable.
I do believe in my brother’s sobriety. I know that many struggles, many journeys, do end in transformation, in new birth, in unmentionable angels cart-wheeling in the background and singing lovely theology: God’s glory is not like Caesar’s, full of sound and fury, pocked with weapons and cruelty. It’s people, ordinary people, peasants and everyone, at peace, getting along, cooperating, honest, and not afraid.
It’s goodwill and all that.
But the struggle itself, says Reuther, is the reward. The struggle to be honest, to embrace the difficult. And this is the struggle my sister’s phone call offered me. Not the gift I was expecting.
But a sacred call nonetheless.
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