This is a sermon about dead baby boys. Maybe not what you
wanted here on the first Sunday after Christmas. In the Episcopal Church it’s
John chapter 1: in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the
word was god. Cosmic and poetical and beautiful. And we have Herod killing baby
boys. A story that, scholars tell us, probably didn’t happen. Goodness, so why
read it? Why believe this stuff in the first place—that’s likely what some of
my new friends on campus would say. The Edge House has recently embarked on a
relationship with the Secular Student Alliance—atheists, agnostics, doubters,
they call themselves many things. But not Christian, not believers. “What
difference does this stuff make?” is a question they’re offering as a prompt
for an upcoming conversation. What difference does this stuff make? Particularly when it’s about dead babies?
I want to offer one possible answer, and it’s a bit
unorthodox. I want to read you a book. It’s called Press Here and it’s one of my 5-year-old daughter’s favorites. I want you to imagine we’re all
snuggled up in the bed—yes, all of us—and we’re all in our jim-jams and we’re
settled in to hear a story before bed. The book will be up on the screen, but
just pretend it’s right in front of you. Feel free to follow the directions.
[read book (2min, 40sec)]
I don’t know if Abby actually thinks pressing the colors
makes things happen, but she does it all the time. And she giggles…
Now, maybe there are a few folks out there who are thinking,
“yeah, that was cute, teaches kids cause and effect, but whatever, when’s
lunch?” Fair, I often think that during church… [grimace]
Only, here’s the funny thing: every adult who has picked it
up in my house and a few I’ve seen reading it in the bookstore, follow the directions and look up with a
big smile when they’re finished.
Every single one says something like “what a great book! I blew across the page
and the dots moved! I turned the lights on and off! Brilliant!”
I’m fairly certain that my adult friends don’t really think they caused those changes. The illustrator
painted those static images years ago, it doesn’t change on a second reading.
Come on.
This is a wonderful example of what theologian Marcus Borg
describes as the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical stages of faith development.
Pre-critical is basically us as kids: Stories about
Cinderella and Jesus and Batman and the President of the United States are all
equally truthful. Batman is an eccentric billionaire who became a superhero to
avenge his parents’ death—totally! And Jesus was born under a moving star and
magicians from the far East came to worship him--absolutely. They’re both
truthful and factual. And yes, there is a difference—facts generally show us
truth, but things that are true, deeply true that you feel in your gut,
sometimes aren’t factual. Think of you’re most favorite movie or novel that
changed how you see things in the world—true, maybe not factual.
Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with this stage except when we
get stuck in it—things we understand as meaningful have to be literally,
historically factual and we go to great lengths to make them so. Consider the seasonally-appropriate
film Polar Express and its take on
belief.
The critical stage is all about understanding the stories we
tell intellectually. How much of them are historically-accurate? Why did people
tell them? Were any of them codes for freedom like African-American spirituals
in the pre-Civil War South? Spoiler: yes, the books of Daniel and Revelation. Which
stories were several stories stitched together to make one like the story of
the great Flood in Genesis? What is the history of how we got the Hebrew
Scriptures and how were they edited over the centuries? In scholarly circles
this might be called the Historical-Critical Method and its main point is to
understand on a deeper level the Word passed down to us through the centuries
using historical resources outside of the Bible itself. They ask questions
about how different Hebrew or Greek words were used elsewhere or what events
were happening around the Jews that made them write different things. It’s good,
helpful stuff and pretty much all mainline denominations teach it in our
seminaries. But we can get stuck here as well.
Some theologians like John Shelby Spong go to great lengths
to disprove miracles and the more epic stories of the Bible, encouraging
believers to see the meaning behind the myths. But Spong and others lose the
poetry of scripture—it’s not just a list of dates and names but people’s lives
and their attempts to make sense of seeing God in action. If you “disprove”
that stuff, you lose much of the point. And many folks get so stuck in this
critical stage that God ceases to be real at all for them. If these events were
recorded and some invented by humans, where is the divine? It’s the reason so some
Christians push so hard against non-literal reading of scripture—folks think
that if any part of the Bible is not factual, it must not be true. And
therefore all of it is suspect. Again, not a good place to be stuck.
Luckily, Marcus Borg offers a third stage which many of us
dip in and out of when it comes to our faith.
The post-critical stage takes both the wide-eyed belief in the stories
as told and the scholarly, perhaps cynical understanding and holds them next to
one another at the same time. The story in Matthew about Jesus and his folks
fleeing to Egypt is a literary device to remind readers of both the Exodus led
by Moses and the later Exile when thousands were killed and displaced by
invading Babylon. There is no historical evidence and no other mention in the
Bible that Herod had any children killed, because of Jesus or not. But Matthew
recalls the prophet Jeremiah speaking of Rachel weeping over her children
Israel. Matthew is making past grief new again to make Jesus’ miraculous birth
and miraculous life even more miraculous. AND this story about a family
becoming refugees to avoid terrible death at the hands of a despotic leader is
deeply true. We have only to consider Syria and the 2,000,000 people, 1,000,000
of them children, who have fled the war there. Or mothers escaping abusive
relationships with their children. Or students fleeing a school-shooter.
Post-critical reading of scripture doesn’t take away from the beauty and
authority of the Word, it adds to it, deepens it. Like nostalgia or parenthood
adding flavor to the reading of Press
Here, even more do history, literary criticism, and our own
life-experiences add to the reading of scripture.
Now, there’s good news here beyond this lecture on how to
read scripture, I promise. It’s good news in itself that we don’t have to check
our brains at the door here,
BUT ALSO in the midst of this horrific account of the
slaughter of baby boys, Matthew recalls for us Jeremiah’s words, not only of
Rachel’s weeping for her children, but what follows: “Return, O virgin Israel,
return to these your cities. How long will you waver, O faithless daughter? For
the Lord has created a new thing on the earth: a woman encircles a man.
“God has created a new thing” is spoken by Jeremiah and
Isaiah and Matthew and John of Patmos in the book of Revelation. God is always
doing a new thing. And “By quoting this small bit…of Jeremiah,…Mathew…implies
the rest of the rest of it: it is Mary…being called back from exile, Mary, as
virgin Israel, that returns salvation to God’s people through the new thing on
earth which the Lord has done, through the man she encircles in her womb.”[1]
I just read a wonderful article in which a prostitute who is
also a junkie and a mom of 5 said, “you know what kept me through all that? God.
Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.”[2]
how could we not draw parallels to school shootings or mass
graves in Sudan and WWII Germany? And we’re meant to. Herod’s evil, Babylon’s
evil, Pharoah’s evil are not unique nor is our mourning. We cry for our own
children—we cry when we lose them, we cry when they’re happy because the world
isn’t good enough for them, we cry because the same story seems to keep
happening. And then Jesus comes and, to the critical eye, the story is the same
and it doesn’t make any difference.
And to the post-critical eye, Jesus comes and there’s
something else going on. It’s the same story, but the themes are different,
it’s meaning is different, how we react to it is different.
It’s the same story, “A decree went out from Caesar Augustus
that all the world should be taxed…” and the no room at the inn, and the
shepherds, and the flight to Egypt to avoid the slaughter of the innocents.
It’s the same story, and with a post-critical eye, with the
eye that knows and embraces the traditional words and also knows how Matthew
has carefully crafted his account,
we see hope. We see that God is doing a new thing. God is
writing a new book and taking our crappy lives and memories and actions and
making something else, something unexpected with them.
There are people out there fighting against the world’s
brokenness and hurtfulness.
People inspired by Jesus and people who’ve never heard of
him.
People who will not just accept Herod and Babylon and
Pharoah.
May we be those people. May we see the hurt, may we stop and
ask if we can help. May we offer love in the place of judgment and embrace in
the place of fear.
[1]
excerpted from http://www.questionthetext.org/2013/12/23/mary-took-jesus-to-egypt-joseph-stayed-home/
, accessed 12/28/13, 11:48am
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/24/atheism-richard-dawkins-challenge-beliefs-homeless
, accessed 12/28/13, 4:15pm
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