December 24, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Isaiah 9:2,4,6-7: Light, Joy, Peace: Handel's chorus.
Psalm 96 Cantate Domino
Titus 2:11-14 The grace of God brings liberation to all
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20) The angel said: Do not be afraid.
Luke begins his Christmas story by telling us that it was in the days of Caesar Augustus that it all happened. To his first readers, this was very significant indeed. These were the great days of the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, which Augustus Caesar, the first of the great dictators called Emperors--Caesars, Kaisers, Tsars, American Presidents--brought to what they (and we) liked to call the civilized world. It was the kind of "peace" actually that the great emperors of our time have brought to the world. The peace of Central America, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the nations of Africa, the peace of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Sudan and Colombia, the police state peace of Egypt and the occupied and pre-occupied territory of Palestine and the Processed Peace. Like Processed Cheese.
Augustus was born in 63 B.C.E., and when Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C.E. he was a young student, but quickly returned to Rome and got into politics. By 31 B.C.E. he had become sole ruler of the Roman world, and with Mark Antony drunk at Cleopatra's house, Augustus triumphed, and Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide. Antony's son was put to death and in 29 B.C.E. Augustus returned to Rome after visits to Egypt, Greece, Syria and Asia Minor (more travel than Dubya has done!) and now he proclaimed universal peace, as Dubya will do in January. His name had been Octavian, but now he took the title Augustus, "Sacred One", and in all but name he became absolute monarch. He was a builder--and believed in urban renewal. He so beautified Rome that it was said of him that "he found Rome built of brick and left it made of marble." The month Sextilis was renamed in his honor and we call it by his name to this day unless we are old fashioned Quakers. It is said of him that he had great tact, and he skilfully used the talents of others to accomplish his goals. Nice guy, Boy George Bush is also said to be, and a charmer who will make a good emperor. He skilfully uses the talents of others to accomplish the goals of Empire. Augustus died in the year of our Lord 14, but lives still in imperialism's love of serenity. Augustus returned to Rome after a grand tour of the empire's boundaries, and proclaimed a universal peace process, like Clinton from Camp David.
The enormous significance of Luke's declaration becomes clear when we translate the message into the twenty first century. We are living within weeks now of the inauguration of a new Caesar, who is unlikely to be given the honorific Augustus for a while yet, for he is perceived as no brighter than he needs to be, and was chosen for his willingness to be docile to his owners--as docile as the Corte Supremo indeed, which now knows its place after all, as well as a Chilean court, or a Bolivian or Guatemalan one. We live in a time of turmoil in the Two Thirds world, but of an unparalleled and unmatched power in the Me First World, and most of it concentrated in Wall Street's alliance with Madison Avenue. Pollsters tell us what we think, when to "move on" from our lingering attention span.
Luke continues to set the stage: in the midst of such imperial peace, a world made peaceful by the decisions of Great Powers, there is regimentation. A poor family is forced to go many miles to comply with a government decree. This is not news to us. We know how the poor are pushed round, told where they may go and where they cannot go, are forced to find lodging where they can, and must comply with the rules of empire. Now two people of color--traitors to all our races, shame to all our faces--are enlisted by the Howdy Doody the Court has given us as a guiding Star. Colin Powell will design the world's format and Condoleeza Rice will be the pistol packin' Momma for the national security state of states. Surely a smiling soul food dish will be called after her, too. Mel Martinez, a refugee from Cuba's socialism--(known to Latin Americans however as a Gusano--a traitorous worm)--has been named secretary of housing and urban development. We are about to have the strongest Vice President ever, in Dick Cheney, with his barracuda smile, his sly ways. He will be the shadow pesident--Strong enough never to talk about his Lesbian daughter, or his prostate cancer. Pray for the emperor's health, and for a happy issue out of the veep's afflictions.
While Joseph and Mary were away from home, Luke tells us, complying with bureaucratic rules set down by an all powerful government, Mary comes to term and, as we say in Spanish, "gives light" to her firstborn, laying him in the feeding trough of a primitive cattle shed, attached to an inn, a humble hospedaje, where there was "No Vacancy." The equivalent for us today would be the greasy corner of a parking garage, attached to a no tell motel. That's where they'd be left, to receive the hospitality from poor folks who are car hops, tending the vehicles of the rich, for tips to feed their families. Matthew's gospel has Jesus much more royally received, surrounded with luxurious gifts and majestic visitors. He argues for a Jewish king with pedigree and claims for ascendancy, as a central point about Messiah Jesus. A Zionist, he. John begins his tale with an apotheosis, fit for academic discussion, a theological seminar. But Luke is here more inerested in telling us that Jesus didn't enter history at that level--the level of presidential inaugurations, with foreign dignitaries, gunship helicopters chopping the sky above, and sleek wardrobes by Elsa Klench. He did not take "sacred" or "augustus" for his first name. As the great ones today impose peace, the peace of menace and threats, of chemical, bacteriological and genetic mutation warfare, of thermonuclear spankings for recalcitrant acolytes of empire.
Luke says that Peace enters the world instead at ground level--at ground Zero, among what we are pleased to call the Lower Animals. Some scholars say the manger was not as we depict it at all, a neat crib that stands up off a clean floor, filled with sweet hay and twinkling lights. Instead, it was a hole in the floor of a dark and smelly shed, or cave, and was a trough, not a blue bassinette. Jesus our Peace enters our world at its lowest place, among refugees, the homeless and the unseen. With "sleepy cows and asses." Maybe even a Gadarene sow. Think of the forms of life that "may have gathered there" as well as angels and archangels. We would need to bring our spray cans of "Off!"
For the next part of Luke's gospel story moves to the night sky above, to the highest forms of life known to myth and legend: what we call Angels, or Messengers, currently undergoing Rave notices even amongst fundamentalists and Bible thumpers. Lively emanations of the Diety, flown in specially for the occcasion from Persian myth, along with Magi. Often called upon, as we call for cherubs to decorate our birth announcements.
Luke uses the formal style of announcing births, which was used for declaring the celebrations of the emperor's birthday: Euuangelion! Good Spiel! Buenas Noticias! Gospel! An Evangel would be issued each year on Caesar's birthday, saying "I come to proclaim good news!" As babies today have their arrival announced in formal engraved notes, with "blessed event" as superscription. Luke has the angels give this message to the shepherds there, the working people, the underclass of social structure. The angels did not go to the main drawing oom of the Inn that Luke imagined, which would have no room for a poor refugee couple. The angels did not go to the palace of His Holiness, the Sacred Emperor in Rome, nor to the wonderful house of the High Priest in Jeruslem, nor even to the holiest place of the Temple on the Mount in the Sacred City of Zion. But they went to the marginal folk of the sheep fold. Disreputable, without baths for months, rough and funky field hands. It was here the angels came and sang a personal holiday greeting: It is YOU who have nothing to fear. For you get the Evangel, the Good News, to take charge of it, and to share it with the people. The first apostles of the Christmas evangel are the working class, outcasts of a forgotten and impoverished corner of empire. Peace! Salaam aleikum! the angels sing. But not the peace already there, the peace proclaimed 29 years or so before that night, when Augustus declared it to be so in honor of his inauguration. Luke deliberately says that universal peace is announced NOW, and it comes with the birth of a peasant's child at the edge of the world, at the edge of hope. Out of sight of the movers and shakers. Peace will grow from those grass roots upward. It was to be thirty three years before this baby began to come to the attention of the world's movers and shakers. Rome will learn of him only through its flunky named Pilate, who probably even now can probably not emember his victim's name, or pronounce it clearly in the Passion Play. The Coptic church has canonized him anyway, as a repentant soul.
But Luke wants us to know tonight how WE got here, how our story got started, and where, and to whom our story was first chanted, and sung, and read aloud, and shouted. And Luke wants us to enter into this dreamscape, his Dickens of a Christmas carol, and to know for whom the tale is told, for whom it is meant. And who, from the beginning until now, is in charge of telling it.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
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