This post starts out sad, but, much like Advent, turns into Christmas: Advent didn't end softly in my world. Yesterday, Christmas Eve, I sat with a family whose otherwise healthy child became dangerously ill that same morning. So instead of the normal last-minute holiday wrapping, cooking, and planning, the family gathered at the hospital and tearfully kept vigil over the balance between life and death of a toddler. And I sat with them.
This story could be another apt illustration of Advent need and lament. But to leave it as lament ignores that there is so much more that our faith offers. At the very least, what a strange wonder that this same night Christians the world over would celebrate the birth of the Christ child, God-with-us. That is: God-with-us here, in this, right now. In our joy and our pain.
Lindsey and I both have a soft spot for this tender little song, the Friendly Beasts, with its child-like language about Jesus' birth. Given all the sad news about children this year, from Sandy Hook all the way to this toddler's sudden illness, it seems only appropriate to let the children carry the lead in the music department today, because we could stand to re-learn from the wonder, the joy, the magic, and the play of how children experience the Christmas story.
Yet children aren't immune to the pain of life. Each family I visited on Christmas Eve in the children's hospital was accompanied by the young patients' siblings, worrying, but also wondering aloud about other important issues... like how Santa would leave presents in the hospital. Unsure and scared about their families, yes, but also hoping and joyful about the promises of this Christmas day. Filled with possibilities and magic, dreams and wild imaginings for what Christmas Day might bring to their lives in so many ways.
To inaugurate the next twelve days of Christmastide on the A.M. Project, enjoy the Christmas story in the voice of those who might know it best of all...
(Best watched full-screen, if possible)
May our hearts and lives be full this day, may we find peace, and may we keep in mind the wonderful inspiration that 'then there was a party!'
In Spanish, one way of saying that someone is really funny or quick-witted is to say "tiene mucha gracia." Gracia basically means "wit" or "quickness" in this context, but the same word also means and is used for what you'd guess: "grace," as in God's grace. I love the way humor and God's work in the world are so intertwined in this one small word.
One thing that's been helping me a lot recently is thinking about how funny the Bible is, or at least, many parts of it. Sometimes I wonder if humanity doesn't realize that we're God's straight man, and God keeps cracking jokes we don't quite get. Ever heard the one about the big fish? What about the man who had a wrestling match with God? Or what about the one where God walked around as a human and told jokes all day long about the amazing, backwards, looney grace of the Reign of God and no one understood? That was a good one.
I'm not trying to be flippant. All of these stories are ultimately deadly serious, having to do with forgiveness and death and struggle and fear and hope -- but so are all the best jokes. The role of the jester in most Shakespeare plays, for instance, is often to tell truths in the form of jokes and riddles, not to be obtuse, but to reveal what's hidden by flipping it inside out.
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have gained a huge following in my area, mostly based on the exuberance of their music and lyrics, but what I love most is their dual interest in celebrating wonderful things like connection and love, and also talking about terrible things like war and brokenness. They even admit in their "manifesto"-style song, Janglin', that, 'once we were the jesters... and now we're out to be the masters/ for to set our spirits free.'
"We want to feel ya'
(We don't mean to kill ya'!)
We come for to heal ya' janglin' soul..."
- Janglin' by E.S. and the M.Z. (Full lyrics HERE)
Janglin' by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
There's something freeing about recognizing that life's seriousness and pain has an edge of humor to it, that the grace of God sometimes comes in the form of a joke. One of my favorite meditations on the resurrection, by H.A. Williams, compares Jesus' rising to a punch line: all the solemn important Powers that Be have put down the Man of Nonsense and are congratulating themselves... while not knowing that he has risen again and is gaining even more followers than ever before. They were trying to stop the nonsense of Jesus' inside-out stories of radical love, and don't know they just helped him create the most inside-out one of them all: one that traveled all the way to the cross and back. As Williams says, "if that isn't funny, nothing is."
What if Advent (and even Lent?) had more jokes in it? What if our ultimate goal as Christians was to tell more jokes: with our lives, our priorities, our hopes? What if we weren't so stuck on serious and were able to welcome God's promises with relief instead of angst? What if we let the humorously "weak" powers of love and forgiveness do some powerful healing for us and others? What if we recognized that the jokes themselves (wolves lying down with lambs, the meek inheriting the world) are the biggest threat to the Powers that Be because they use ammunition that no vest can stop: truth and a little bit of grace.
The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them... - Isaiah 11: 6
May we tell better jokes and ease our hearts with laughter at the surprising Grace of God who, at Christmas, came as a baby instead of a regal King - not in spite of the difficulties of this world, but because of them.
The first week of Advent, the A.M. Project thought about how we long and need our way into Advent. This second week, we'll be thinking about: what helps? What helps us not just get lost in the necessary crying out during Advent; all our rightful needing and longing?
Adam Lay Ybounden is a medieval poem I learned in college, and it's one of those theologies that makes me squirm a little: it basically argues that the"Fall" in Eden (eating the forbidden fruit from the tree) was a good thing, because if it hadn't happened, Mary would never have borne Jesus Christ. Given the traditional concept that humanity's Fall brought all sin, suffering and death into the world (though not exactly my view), this still sounds like a pretty bum deal -- all respect to Mary and Jesus, of course.
But listen again: what I hear when I listen more carefully is PLAY. The poet is playing with the stories of the Bible, turning things on their ear to see what shakes out, and saying, "See? Look at it from this direction!" You don't have to agree with the affirmation to see the benefit: it makes us look twice. And maybe, if we dare to affirm that there's something wonderful about Jesus' story (virgin birth and all?) that's so meaningful, so beautiful, so valuable that it would move a poet so many hundreds of years ago to write "thanks be to God" to whatever set this story in motion... maybe it can amaze us, too.
We should keep wrestling with our traditional theologies, especially noting the ways in which they have "gone wrong" in history, furthering bad practice, harmful attitudes or false justice in the world. But maybe we shouldn't throw out our ability to play with these same ideas, upend and re-tell these same stories, filled with strange God-in-flesh babies and virgin births. Maybe there's something in a slightly-embarrassing drawer of Church theology that might offer us a strange grace... an insight, a "huh!" of surprise or delight... that makes it worth another look. In the end, maybe it's our ability to play that will save us from despair, not only in the Church, but in upending our views on the world, looking again, and playing with the myriad possibilities of change and Creation.
"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly..." - Colossians 3:16
May we wrestle and struggle and ponder our way through these days, calling out pitfalls and errors, but 'being not afraid' to play, to mine the richness of tradition and story for insight, truth and grace.
This post starts out sad, but, much like Advent, turns into Christmas: Advent didn't end softly in my world. Yesterday, Christmas Eve, I sat with a family whose otherwise healthy child became dangerously ill that same morning. So instead of the normal last-minute holiday wrapping, cooking, and planning, the family gathered at the hospital and tearfully kept vigil over the balance between life and death of a toddler. And I sat with them.
