Advent Call: Lost in Translation

December 23, 2007
Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
Well, there you have it. The birth of the messiah happened like this, so the story tells us. To fulfill the prophetic word of Isaiah – which we read a few minutes ago and in which we heard these words: “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”
But wait just a second. Didn’t Matthew say, "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."
It was nice of Matthew to translate Emmanuel for his audience – clearly Isaiah did not feel the need to do so for his audience. For them, apparently, that would have been like introducing a woman named Grace to you and saying, “this is Grace, which means grace.” His name will be Emmanuel, which means Emmanuel.
Underscoring that minor internal focus on the question of translation within the text itself helps in understanding the importance of translation in general, and, more to the point, its importance in this seminal passage in Matthew.
For where Matthew insists that the virgin birth of Jesus is to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah, in fact Isaiah prophesied no such thing. The underlying Hebrew of Isaiah contains no suggestion of virgin birth, but rather simply a young woman.
Why? Is it merely a case of the author of Matthew relying on a Greek translation that changed the meaning by imposing the Greek parthenos, or virgin, for the original Hebrew phrase? Or was it a case of the Greek translator transposing words to meet the growing messianic expectations of the age, when saviors were often said to have come from miraculous births? Or did it simply meet Matthew’s needs for such a birth story to connect to Jesus’ story? Or was it an effort to cover over some less savory birth story? Or was it simply something lost – or found – in translation?
On such questions scholars have poured barrels of ink. Over such concerns churches have split. Over alternative explanations for Mary’s condition have folks left the church.
At the slight risk of offending some of you, I stand before you this morning to say, in the words of Rhett Butler, “frankly, I don’t give a damn.”
Actually, it might be more accurate to say, I don’t think it matters one way or the other what Matthew meant or why in his way of dealing with the Isaiah text. The story of Jesus’ birth is concerned first and foremost with Mary’s faith life, not with her sex life. The church of our time could learn a decisive lesson from the example of scripture.
It’s about our faith lives – first, last and always.
So we might render the story this way:
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. … Joseph got a text message from his friend Mary, saying ‘test positive – what now?’ Joe IM’d his partner John saying, ‘Mary’s pregnant! We gotta talk.’ John e-mailed back, ‘could this be the one we’ve been waiting for? We’ve got to get ready.’
John and Joe had been talking about wanting to have a child for a long time, but they could not go to the courthouse to be registered – neither church nor state would sanction it.
Mary, who was unemployed, had broken up with her boyfriend two months ago.
Just the week before, Joe had told Mary about this strange dream he’d had several nights in a row. In the dream, Mary was having a baby and Joe was going to be the father, now, in a strange way, perhaps the dream was going to come true.
Could it happen that way? After all, my story has a Mary, a dreaming Joseph, an unexpected baby and even a John, preparing the way. Would it be more or less offensive to the ears of 21st-century Americans than the story as it is traditionally told?
Ever since I was old enough to understand the connotations and implications of the “virgin” Mary, I’ve thought that our hang-ups about that phrase say a lot more about us than they do about Jesus and the working of the Holy Spirit in the life of his family.
Only a thoroughly modern, but at the same time quite Victorian society with Puritanical roots – in other words, America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, would make the literal understanding of this passage from Matthew and its rough parallels in Luke one of a hand full of “fundamentals” of the faith. And only a church movement hung up about sex and equally hung up about defining insiders and outsiders would cling to such fundamentalism for generations.
Such a movement is lost in translation. Such a movement is blind to the light of the Advent story and deaf to its call. And while just such a movement has gained incredible cultural and political power in our society and used that power in damaging, often devastating ways, it is more to be pitied than feared, for ultimately the unbounded, unfathomable grace and love at the heart of this ancient story of Advent will triumph over every effort to domesticate it and fence it in.
Indeed, the unusual biology of Matthew’s account – that is to say, the miraculous birth – suggests precisely that God is in control and that God is about to do a new thing in the world that will insist on working its own new way in our lives.
So, let’s liberate the story and enable it to work its way in our lives.
What would that look like?
It would begin by proclaiming clearly that the way Jesus came into the world pales in significance in comparison with what was coming into the world in him and through him.
What was that? More to the point, what continues even now to come into the world through the Christ of faith?
Recall that the word Advent means coming. What is it that is coming into our world? The story in Matthew, its parallel in Luke, my own faithful recasting of it this morning each underscore a common conviction: that God works in and through the everyday lives of ordinary human beings. And that divine work heralds the coming into our world – into our everyday, ordinary human lives – of an extraordinary divine love that exceeds every human effort to limit it, to assign it according to our terms and standards, to wall it off and claim ownership or power over it.
What came into our world with Jesus, what continues to come into our world through the Christ of our faith, is this boundless and extraordinarily powerful love that beats as a rhythm from the center of all that is.
As it beats, it calls us to join our own lives to its rhythm. While it beats from the center of all that truly matter, this love calls us to recenter our own lives away from the centers of power, influence and affluence that seek demonically to dominate our lives and our society.
This story of Jesus’ birth disrupts the market-driven consumerist idea of Christmas as the season of making ends meet, and insists instead that in this season we meet our end – that is to say, our telos, our purpose, the ends toward which authentic human life points.
As Walter Brueggemann suggests, “The whole passage reminds us that the present world is not locked into a safe or predictable mode. It is open and on the move, precisely because Yahweh is Lord. We must not be so fascinated with the biological as to miss the news that is here, good and bad.”
Don’t miss the news!
Some of it is good, some of it is bad. We’re not used to thinking of the Christmas story as bad news in any way, but that is simply because we have for too long gotten far too comfortable with the domesticated gospel of feel-good cards and carols and forgotten and forsaken the Biblical story itself in which the only carol is Mary’s song heralding the great turning of the world. The powerful brought down from their thrones, the rich turned away from the table to make room for the hungry.
The bad news is, the coming of Christ proclaims the end of the world as we know it.
But, as REM might put it, I feel fine, because the good news is this: in Christ we find the perfect love capable of casting out of our own lives all of the fears and insecurities that lead us to build up the structures, the walls and the barriers of class and color and creed that have come to define our world.
In Christ we are called to create in the way of Jesus a new community that breaks down the old orders of consumerism, militarism, racism, sexism, heterosexism and inaugurates a new order based on compassion, generosity, awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. It starts right here, as we come close round the manger. It starts in our own lives.
Again, Brueggemann, “Advent and the birth are not events that happen and just sit there. They are events with futures. They open new lives and establish fresh vocations. They call baptized folks to live lives as odd, abrasive, and unacceptable to reason as any biological miracles.”
So, don’t just sit there this holiday waiting to open presents. Instead, open your hearts to what is already present in our world and what is, always already, coming again into our lives: Emmanuel – God with us, this day, this very moment, and always coming yet anew. Amen.

Advent Light

December 16, 2007
Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:2-11
Have you ever done one of those cave tours where they take you a ways into the side of a mountain and then ask if you want to experience absolutely dark? Then they turn out the lights and you literally cannot see your hand in front of you face. Then, after an appropriate interlude, during which your pupils widen completely, the guide flicks a lighter and it almost blinds you?
That’s what Advent light is like. It shines in the darkness and the darkness shall never overcome it. It opens the eyes of the blind.
To use Isaiah’s words, when the light shines, “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus, it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.”
As often happens for me, I understand this a bit better through artistic expressions. Last week it was a poem about hope, the week before that a song about peace, and this morning, another song. This one is called, “Light One Candle.” I suppose it’s a kind of Hanukkah/Advent song, written by Peter Yarrow.

Light one candle for the Maccabee children
With thanks that their light didn’t die
Light one candle for the pain they endured
When their right to exist was denied
Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand
But light one candle for the wisdom to know
When the peacemakers time is at hand

Don’t let the light go out!
It’s lasted for so many years!
Don’t let the light go out!
Let it shine through our love and our tears.

Light one candle for the strength that we need
To never become our own foe
And light one candle for those who are suffering
Pain we learned so long ago
Light one candle for all we believe in
That anger not tear us apart
And light one candle to find us together
With peace as the song in our hearts

What is the memory that’s valued so highly
That we keep it alive in that flame?
What’s the commitment to those who have died
That we cry out they’ve not died in vain?
We have come this far always believing
That justice would somehow prevail
This is the burden, this is the promise
This is why we will not fail!
©1983 Peter Yarrow/Silver Dawn Music (ASCAP)

I suppose, if I had to name quite simply, the charge of Advent, that would be it: don’t let the light go out. Tend to it. Guard it. Keep it alive, especially in these grey winter days when the darkness can get so oppressive.
Darkness comes in innumerable shades: depression, illness, longing, mourning, anxiety, stress, anger, fear, violence, war.
Advent faith does not promise an escape from the darkness, nor en end to it. It is a tempered faith that promises, rather, to light the way through the darkness.
A couple of years ago, when my father’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease was as yet undiagnosed and he was getting mysteriously sicker and sicker, I flew home to visit for a couple of days. The day before I got there, my brother Tim had taken mom out to get a Christmas tree and the first night I was there I helped mom decorate the tree.
I remember how much that simple ritual of lighting the tree brightened so much more than their living room that year. It was a sign of hope, for my mom, that even in the midst of the gathering darkness of my dad’s illness there was and would be light.
I’m sure that each of you have similar stories, and they are incredibly important to share and keep alive.
But lest Christmas be reduced to Hallmark cards sweetness, it is also incredibly important to remember that the power of the light born into the world on that first Christmas – the light whose coming again we anticipate now – shines not only in private, personal, family settings, but also shines its bright, transformative power into the darkest situations in the world, as this wonderful John McCutcheon song recalls in telling the true story of the Christmas truce of 1914 in the darkest days of the first world war.

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool,
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung,
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, "Now listen up, me boys!" each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singing bloody well, you know!" my partner says to me
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war.

As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
"God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was "Stille Nacht," "Tis 'Silent Night'," says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky.
"There's someone coming towards us!" the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one lone figure coming from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
As he bravely strode unarmed into the night.

Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men.

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
"Whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone for evermore.

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.
©1984 John McCutcheon/Appalsongs (ASCAP)

Advent is a time for gathering light against the darkness. Each week, we light one more candle until the entire sanctuary – even, perhaps, the entire world – is filled with holy light.
How do you know when you are in the presence of such light?
Well, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”
Individuals lives are brightened and social worlds are transformed. Perhaps that’s why light is such a powerful metaphor – it breaks down the either/or that some folks want to put up to mark the distinction between individual faith and social action. Light knows no such artificial barriers. What shines brightly in your personal life will also shine brightly in the wider world.
We put our tree up at home yesterday afternoon, and will decorate it today, to light up our family hearth. Then this evening, at 5:00, we’ll go down to Lafayette Park to shine the same light in the public square.
This season opens space unlike any other time of year, when we have the opportunity to transgress the line between public and private space and to open each to a holy illumination.
So, no matter how you deck your own halls and no matter if you respond to today’s invitation to lift high the light of peace in the public square, do open yourself to the light of God’s love and allow it to shine through you wherever you are.

Advent Hope

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

December 9, 2007

The epistle lesson for this morning, which we haven’t read, comes from the end of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. As he signs off, he has this to say: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”

We might have hope. That seems precious little to go on – we might have hope.

I wake up most mornings to Garrison Keillor’s The Writers’ Almanac, and one morning last week he read this poem from Anne Sexton, called “Snow.”¹

Snow,

blessed snow,

comes out of the sky

like bleached flies.

The ground is no longer naked.

The ground has on its clothes.

The trees poke out of sheets

and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

I bite it.

Someone once said:

Don't bite till you know

if it's bread or stone.

What I bite is all bread,

rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

Today God gives milk

and I have the pail.

That comes from Sexton’s collection The Awful Rowing Toward God. I’ve often thought that Sexton had a deep understanding of the existential struggle between faith and doubt, and so it strikes me as perfectly appropriate to read her work here in what has been a snowy week, and on a Sunday when we are focusing on Advent hope. For Advent hope must balance between faith and doubt.

So, we might have hope, as Paul promises – hope everywhere, the poet suggests. But, as I’ve considered hope this week, I am left wondering, what is it that we hope for? What do you hope for?

I was at a meeting a while back when the conversation turned to “hope.” Someone in the group said that she was, frankly, tired of talking about hope, she wanted to talk about action and success. If hope is “the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson put it, then this woman was way past ready to test its wings and fly.

Hope for the future, she complained, was a lousy balm for soothing the wounds of the present reality.

I suppose, if expressions of hope become excuses for inaction, then I would have to agree. After all, if nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes, then hope is, at best, a coping mechanism and, at worst, a delusion.

Hope is also an easily manipulated notion. For example, have you seen the new Hummer TV ads? It features folks safely riding their monstrous, militaristic SUVs safely through disaster areas and gives way to a slogan: “HOPE: Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergencies.”

If that is all we have to hope for, all that keeps hope alive, all that we can hold out hope for, well it’s no wonder we live in a deeply cynical age.

So, in the midst of such an age, what do we make of Advent hope? After all, this is the season when we reread the ancient story about the coming of Christ and speak about Christ coming again. Yet, we’ve been doing that for 2,000 years now and still no Jesus – at least not in any manner that fulfills the expectations articulated by the early church through the gospel writings and the Pauline correspondence. Paul, for example, promised an astounding revelation in his second letter to the church in Corinth:

“Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (2 Cor. 15:51-52).

But, if Paul was a prophet of hope when he wrote to the Corinthians, then his writing was a thing without feathers for all the billions of folks who have lived and died without hearing a trumpet blast these past two millennia.

The first generation of Christians clearly believed that, as the gospels put it, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matt. 16:28).

But it didn’t happen that way, so we are left to wonder about the nature of Christian hope in the season of preparation and expectation of Christ’s coming again.

It is surely true, as the book of Hebrews puts it, that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). So we are invited into a relationship of trust, of faith, with the one who promises to dwell among us, in our midst – Emmanuel, God with us.

I’d like to stand before you and make a grand pronouncement, reveal a mystery like Paul announced. Instead, listen and I will tell you a smaller mystery:

Advent hope is not about waiting patiently for some indefinable future; it is about how we live the present moment.

As Barbara Kingsolver put it, “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

Living under the roof of your own hopes enables you to grasp the present moment – no matter what its contours – and continue to map well the journey of a faithful life. This is the small mystery: living in hope, and in gratitude, in the midst of whatever comes your way, is the only way to discover who you are and what you are called to be. In still other words, living in hope and in faith enables us to discover more fully the content of our faith – the deep, authentic grasping that we belong to God in life and in death, in success and in failure, in the present moment and in the infinite future.

I came across an expression of this truth in one of my favorite places for discovering unexpected theological insights: Sports Illustrated. Last week they named Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Farve as their “Sportsman of the Year,” and in the accompanying article that traces not only his remarkable football career but also his personal growth through battles with substance abuse, enduring personal losses on the way to remarkable humanitarian efforts. The article closes with a series of friends and teammates offering their favorite memories, and most of them are of his various football triumphs or signature plays. But when Favre was asked the same question, he said, “The funny thing is, it’s not only about the touchdowns and the big victories. If I were to make a list, I would include the interceptions, the sacks, the really painful losses. Those times when I’ve been down, when I’ve been kicked around, I hold on to those. In a way those are the best times I’ve ever had, because that’s when I’ve found out who I am. And what I want to be.”

Advent hope is like that. In these shortest days of the year, we find out how long and far our faith can carry us. In this darkest season of the year, we discover how brightly one small candle can shine. In a time that can feel sometimes very lonely, we discover again that God loves us enough to accompany us through every step of our journey. In this quiet season of wintry nights, we can hear again the voice crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord.

Indeed, we prepare the way for the Lord of our lives – for the one whose life meets the hopes and fears of all the years, the one whose life defines for us the content of our hope, the one whose living and dying shows us how to live into hope.

Advent hope is not the end; it is the beginning. It does not promise completeness, but rather renewal. As Reinhold Niebuhr reminded: “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime. Therefore, we are saved by hope.” He went on, saying, “Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

May the God of love, who keeps faith with us always, keep us in grace and mercy, and may we ground our hope on that mystery this Advent.

Advent Peace

Isaiah 1:2-5
December 2, 2007
Let’s begin this morning with a song. This is Fred Small’s Peace Is.
I love that song, and it works for me on several levels. First, it’s easy and fun to sing – always a good thing in a song because it invites you in. But more than that, it invites you to consider how you think of peace. By saying “peace is the bread we break” the song invites us to move to the level of metaphor – which is precisely the level that this morning’s Advent texts work on as they invite us also to consider what peace is.
So, what is peace to you?
As the song I began with suggests, peace, like bread, is fundamental; it is essential for life; it is deeply rooted in the dust of creation; it is simple.
Why, then, is it so very rare?
One could quickly, and not inaccurately, fall back on the preacherly truisms here: we are broken people, prone to idolatry, living in a broken world. All that is surely true.
Nevertheless, we are just as clearly called, as followers of the Prince of Peace, to the work of peacemaking. As the Presbyterian Church has put it plainly for quite some time, peacemaking is the believer’s calling.
So, where to begin?
During the past few weeks, in working with Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, I’ve heard over and over from many folks across the nation speaking about the burning out and the tuning out of so many who are so tired of the present war.
Somewhere amidst the weary litany of frustrations, my mind turned back to my own first encounter with the idea of peacemaking.
I was in the sixth-grade chorus of the Rivermont Elementary School in Chattanooga. It must have been about 1970 or 71 – the country mired waste deep in the big muddy of Vietnam. We did a concert – perhaps around Christmas, I don’t recall. But I do remember singing, “let there be peace on earth … and let it begin with me.”
That simple piece has lingered with me far beyond what its music merits. What it lacks in sophistication, though, has been more than made up for by the power of its simple challenge.
A couple of years later, as I grew into the pop music of the day, I encountered the Crosby, Stills and Nash anthem, “Chicago,” with its refrain that declares, “we can change the world.”
It’s another piece that has stayed with me as a challenge far greater than the music.
The difficulty of the challenge, though, it not so much in imagining peace than it is in imaging that it could, somehow, begin with me.
The word of the Lord that came to Isaiah, in the midst of his people’s own strife and violence, says, “For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. God shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
In other words, Isaiah wants us to understand, peace does not begin with me – it begins with an invitation from God. The world may change, and I may participate in that changing, and even contribute mightily toward it, but I cannot do it at my own initiative. The changing of the world begins with God’s invitation.
So our first charge, as peacemakers – whether we’re talking about creating peace in our families, workplaces, schools, or in the larger world – is to listen, to prepare our own souls for the work.
As the reading from Matthew reminds us, we don’t know when we are going to be called to make peace – to be a peaceful presence in a conflict, to be a calm center amidst the vicissitudes of life.
But Jesus’ words are clear: stay awake! The time will come. The opportunity will arise. The voice will sound. There will be wars and rumors of wars, and we will be called to hear the ancient summons, to take the ancient vision and recast it for the present moment, and to remind the nations about swords and plowshares, spears and pruning hooks.
Whether our calling as peacemakers is to arbitrate between the nations or, perhaps, between the toddlers or the colleagues or the students, we will be called.
Peace begins – true peace begins as we recognize that calling and respond to it with a hope that casts bright light into the present darkness. That hope is the light of this season of watching, waiting and preparing.
We are sustained in our watchfulness by gathering at table and sharing this bread and cup. If peace is the bread we break, then peace begins here.
Let us pray.