December 31, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Isaiah 61:10-62:3 Clothing of justice
Psalm 147 Laudate Dominum
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7 Clothed with Christ
John 1:1-18 The darkness did not overcome it
At the end of the gospel for Christmas Eve, after Luke sets his story in the political turmoil of his time--the imperial context, with Augustus on the throne and Quirinius as governor of Syria, he tells of a mysterious trip that Joseph and Mary made to old Bethlehem to comply with oppressive government decrees, and of Mary "giving light" to the baby there in a trough, in a darkened stable, and of the visit of the preaching peasants and the singing angels--his recounting of the gospel in miniature, with the jewel like statues of the characters, then we are left with these few words: "Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart." So Mary's memories become the writer's source and notebook for Luke the physician turned historical novelist. It is Mary's, and the Church's, feelings--as well as the intellects of the ages--that have brought us our Tales of Christmas.
Millions of us since that time have joined with Mary in pondering these events in our hearts--and Luke's memories remain the stuff of Christmas cards and holiday sentiment, fragrant straw and fat warm cows, soft wooly lambs in perfect farm outbuildings, like the one in Chicago's Lincoln Park, upwind of messy manure, upwind also of magi and magic. Actually it must hve been quite a mess. Jewish rules kept out the grunting pigs, but Peter and Paul have since baptized the swine, slopped the hogs and let them in the door. Ham and Lamb lie down together on the menu. But in the pondering of the old tales, John deleted the kine and the angels, and gave us a highly inellectual discussion, a prose-poem, of the philosophical and theological meaning of the Enfleshment. Big words, about the Word, the Logos, becoming Sarx, flesh in the Greek. Mary never wrote a book after her Pondering, but John, the writer of the gospel set it down for us and ever since then it seems the Church has been busy trying to return that enfleshed Logos back into an "ology", a philosophical system where meaning will hang on an umlaut. The Sarx must be laid out in strips to dry into jerky and jerked into alphabetical order. The search goes on for the right words about God, and we fumble at the task and ex-communicate each other: i.e., deprive each other of the flesh and blood of sacramental life, in favor of an ideological system, always life-diminishing. But John was clear about it: The Word is made flesh, and it is the flesh that is now the vessel of grace and truth.
A religion after all which in the Middle Ages revered in at least three cathedrals of Europe the foreskin of Jesus' circumcision is closer to the faith of the gospel, that God lives in our flesh, than a gnostic religion which denies the wonder of physicality and sexuality and the Sacrament of the Human Body and the goodness of Creation, and prefers catechisms and footnotes, or New Age auras, secret knowledge, gurus and flapdoodle, trust and obey.
The Church has unfortunately elebrated but a few styles of verbalizing about God, instead of celebrating the enfleshment of God in Jesus, in the prophets, in the saints, in our species. 'Though Jesus is our Jewish Lord, yet some who call themselves his friends say that God doesn't hear Jewish prayers. The resurrection of Jesus was first witnessed by women, the first of all apostles, yet some perversely insist Jesus could not have meant for them to be his ministers, his prophets, his priests. It was Yeshua, the brown-skinned, curly haired Semite, the non-Caucasian alien, whom Yahweh chose for flesh, yet there are yahoo Christians who heil the Hitlers of every Holocust.
Our Godtalk, our speech about Jesus, too, frequently forgets the locus of God's becoming one of us. The Logos must be enfleshed in every place, in every venue. So that we may take into our hands and handle the Word of Life, and the unpredictable favor and presence of truth, not in syllogisms, but of touch and taste and handle.
In Humperdinck's opera "Hansel and Gretel," which we hear each Christmastime if we are lucky, in the last act, after Hansel and Gretel have happily toppled the witch into her own oven, which she had heated up so she could bake them into gingerbreads, they suddenly discover that all the cookies and cakes and tarts and sweet things all around are not really pastry images at all--not merely sugary ikons of children--but in fact they are real boys and real girls who were under the witch's spell, and are now begging Hansel and Gretel to change them back into human flesh. "Touch my face" they sing, poignantly. "Touch my face," so that we shall be made children again.
In the Incarnation, at Christmastime, it is God who comes to us, as in Hansel and Gretel, and like Jesus--who harrowed the Hell of being made into a sweet confection for Western civilization, a Gnostic gingerbread man, a Dobosch Torte of sentimental dessert religion, Jesus begs us to Touch His Face, and turn our faith in him back to its human dimension. We, enchanted and spellbound images of people, were pastry images of the beings God meant us to become, and with Gretel and Hansel cry out in our prayers, "Touch my face. . . come and change me, into Me."
To "redeem" means to buy the freedom of slaves. To change the status of someone from property to personhood. In his letter to the Galatian church, Paul says that our status has indeed been changed, from confection to creation, from slavery to freedom, from minor children to grownup family. Until now, he says, we have been in the charge of a baby-sitter, a Pedagogue, and we could not be trusted alone, not because we were evil, but because we were weak and poor, and might fall off our high-chairs, or flick our Gerbers at the ceiling. "We were confined," he wrote, "until faith should be demonstrated." But now the Religion of Rules (of instructions, admonitions, talk) has been dispelled, the Religion of psychobabble is hushed.
A religion which has created the wonderful science of psychiatry--our pedagogic religion, has completed its task. Thomas Sasz, the libertarian psychiatrist has said that psychiatry is just a fancy name for talking about problems. That's all it is--talking about personal problems. The human method of dealing with problems is to talk about them; that's political science, too--talking about public problems. But God didn't mean for Talk to save us, even the Talking Book, bound in leather and gilt edged with ribbon markers--a sturdy thumping Bible, shot from the hip--but the Word made flesh, who pitched a tent among us.
Frank Moore, a subscriber to Homily Grits, writes to ask: "in the Greek, doesn't the term for "became flesh" have its root in the Indo-Aryan or Sanskrit "skein" for skin? As the hunter "skins" the dead animal, didn't God "enskin himself"? Isn't the Greek word for a tent of leather similar? Can we invent a spanish verb, "enpielarse"? Is it right to say that Jesus pitched his tent of skin and bones in our campground?" Frankly, yes!
We can indeed say that God "tabernacles"-- tents-- among us, so that our God moves wherever we move our own camp; God is, in Jesus, a camp-follower. Paul says that because of Jesus we are no longer slaves (the same word used for minor children) but grown up heirs and heiresses. Isaiah told us that a royal crown belongs to us now, with no Teflon lining, for it's going to stay put on the wounded head of the wounded church of Jesus. May she wear it in health. And a robe as well--a robe of liberation, a gift from the one in swaddling clothes. Rehnquist, the Supreme Court "Justice," as he arrogantly robes himself--a true believer and a Missouri Synod Lutheran--can name your president, but he can't name your Liberator.
A Christmas tree is one of the gifts Isaiah alludes to this morning: "For as the earth puts forth her blossom, or bushes in the garden burst into bloom, so shall God make Justice and Praise blossom before the nations." The Christmas tree is always green, and so God's planting. As the Christmas tree is always fruitful, always covered with light, in the midst of our winter of secret wars and the chilling frost of moral failure, so it tells us summer will return, and the earth bring forth fruit once again.
The people of God get at Christmas the clothing for the wedding we're on our way to, for Isaiah says heaven and earth are being married up here--and we can't wear these wedding garments if we are already covered with the geegaws of class privilege, gender prerogaive, racial dominance. There's no room to house the Infant revolution when the Inn is already full of the overstuffed and overprivileged, when militarism has the best suite, when money is sprawled out as a drunkard in the nursery. The robes of justice cannot be put on over the rags of "just us", the rule of the Rich.
Re-naming is the best of the Christmas gifts. God wants to call us by new names which are not insults, which are not the language of oppression. The language of oppression is relentless, and there's a big dictionary full of it. Oppression has a large vocabulary to hurt, words to enslave and diminish: Nigger and Spick, Wop and Chink, Faggot and Dike, Bitch and Boy--the language meant to freeze our human flesh, and humanity flees from them. But "In the beginning" was another Word, and this Words, as a Word of Liberation, is a Word to rename us, for it is an uterance of wholeness and of understanding. This is the Word with God.
Most of us don't get to all the Christmasses-- all the masses of Christmas, of the Eve, the Dawn, and the Mid-Day, so we don't get to have the full course of festival and fattening Scriptures meant for us. So we should get our Bibles out and read all the lessons this week--it's daunting, like freaking out on a Whitman's Sampler of all the chocolates mapped out for us in the box cover. Mark's christmas story is the baptism of a new prophet who is a Son of God. Matthew's goes back to the nation's founder, Abraham, to trace the family tree through Joseph, who adopted the baby Jesus still unborn. Luke takes the family tree back to its oldest roots in earth's first settlers, Eve and Adam. But John's is the only one to take the story all the way back, to Morning Yet on Creation day. Matthew tells good news to political liberators: that the people of God and their ethnicity are the subject of Salvation. Nicaragua and the Zulus are God's concern, just as Israel and Judah. Luke preaches the gospel when he gives a trumpet for Mary's Song of Liberation for all the poor of the human community, in all ages. One poor person telling another person where to find bread, where to find Beth-Lehem, is always what gives "incentive" (i.e., blows the pitch-pipe) to cue the Angels for their Gloria in Excelsis.
John's re-telling has pride of place, and puts it all together. All the utterances we fashion of amplitude and abundance, of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, of hamhocks and blackeye peas, of turkey and dressing--all have come to be told in John's word about the Word. Wherein he tells us that words were not enough. So we read directly from the manger, as from a book, the restoration of the cosmos, and we hear carols in the winter of cities. God has spoken to us in a Child, the one without a home, who is also "the Love that moves the Sun and the other Stars."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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