Dear Friends,
What day is it, anyway?
This past week, I saw a few colleagues noting how disorienting this Advent feels. It’s not anything particular about the surrounding mood, though. It’s literally just the calendar. Folding Gaudete Sunday bulletins while December is still in the single digits doesn’t feel right!
Still, here we are. And maybe it doesn’t feel quite right now because of the spacing of Advent but because of the reason we have Advent at all. As we say in Godly Play, “Many people don’t know how to get ready for the mystery. They can walk right through it and not even realize it’s happening.”
Getting ready for a mystery like Christmas can be overwhelming, especially when we’re splitting our attention between the religious/liturgical and the secular. I know she doesn’t have time to read this (it’s finals week in vet school land), but as I think about these sacred measures of time, I’m also browsing cryptid-themed gifts for my wife. I’ve got a recipe for gluten-free gingerbread pulled up because Kate Bowler has me daydreaming about building a gingerbread house. I guess, I’m supposed to make donuts, though, per her tradition, since we got our first snow yesterday.
For what feels like the millionth time this calendar year, I’m not jiving with time in a line. But when I tie the ends together, it feels like the cradle of that circle can catch me.
Of Angels & Appearances
As we continue tumbling toward the fourth Sunday in Advent, I am taken by this Sunday’s Gospel and the manner in which the angel appears to Joseph. Unlike how angels appear to Mary or to the Shepherds, who all had to contend with the angels in waking life, the angel appears to Joseph in a dream. Here, too, the angel utters the words “Do not be afraid” – but then continues “to take Mary as your wife.” In a dream, the fear needn’t be of the angel, but of public reproach and shame. Why is this appearance so different?
So much about the great Christmas story is about bravery and daring.
God chooses Mary to be the Mother of God – and, bravely, Mary says yes.
The shepherds are blinded by a bright light in the fields, but they listen and they follow the voice and the star, straying from their familiar fields in search of the Christ Child.
The Magi are threatened by the Emperor, told to report on the coming Messiah so he can be killed because he is a threat to power. Instead, traveling such a great distance that they’re 12 days late to the birth, they praise the king who is unlike any other and warn the infant’s family before returning home by another way.
Warned of the danger to their child’s life, Mary. &Joseph bundle up their baby and flee from Bethlehem, crossing the border into Egypt.
I don’t know, but it seems to me that Joseph got a bit of a respite, allowed to carry on with as much of an ordinary life as possible until that final flight. After all, anything can happen in a dream. He chooses to be obedient to the message of his, but as earlier Bible passages teach us, that’s just good sense (excuse the fact that I’m currently part of a Genesis Bible study that’s talking about Joseph’s dream interpretation). But what would have happened if the angel came to him in waking life? Would it have been too much? Would he have behaved differently in some way or other?
This past Sunday, I visited a Godly Play class at an unfamiliar parish, and as the storyteller spoke of Mary & Joseph traveling down the road to Bethlehem, how it was so hard for Mary to walk and ride the donkey, one of the children asked why Joseph didn’t carry her. Imagine! Mary, great with child, in the arms of her partner. Somehow, I don’t think that would have gotten them to Bethlehem any faster or more comfortably. It may be hard to walk and ride a donkey when you’re about to have a baby, but it’s also hard to be carried (I would assume).
Right now, in the world of Time in a Line, I have a calendar and deadlines and things to finish. Bethlehem looms in the distance, a sort of finish line rather than the heart of a great story. But in the world where the line is erased, a world that sees beginnings and endings and inextricably linked and tied together, some of that anxiety eases. We are on the journey to encounter the king who was coming then and is still coming. We will arrive. The Magi will turn up eventually, even if they’re technically late. And given that my own nativity is still in the closet, maybe this is just a Magi kind of year for me. So what if they were running late? They were still welcomed and celebrated, and you will be, too.
Sometimes the timeline falls apart. Sometimes the calendar thwarts our best plans and intentions. But you can’t break church and you can’t mess up the incarnation. We don’t have to do anything – the Christ Child will still arrive.
Another Epiphany Note
A few years ago, some sweet children at my congregation at the time taught me a little bit about Puerto Rican Tres Reyes traditions, and this past Sunday I had the pleasure of talking about some of those practices again with another group of children with roots in PR. Their excitement when palpable when I explained how the infamous 12 Days of Christmas song is about the days following Christmas, not the days before, and that it leads us to Epiphany, to the arrival of the Magi. “We wouldn’t be in school” for Tres Reyes, they explained, because it’s a bigger deal than Christmas, even.
In response to their delight, I wanted to find some new books for Epiphany. Certainly I like Home By Another Way by Barbara Brown Taylor and Mary Hoffman’s Three Wise Women, but I wanted a story that was just for them. That’s why I was delighted to find Un Coquí de Boriquén con los Reyes a Belén by Lara Mercado.
Mercado wrote Un Coquí de Boriquén con los Reyes a Belén, which tells of how the coqui, a tiny frog native to Puerto Rico, specifically for children with roots in PR but who don’t live there anymore. It addresses some of the anxieties all children have about relocating for Christmas (or Three Kings, in this case) – how will anyone find me? How will Santa or the Magi know where I live now?
After the coqui helps the kings find their way to the baby Jesus, they make. an important promise; to honor this special holiday, one that holds such vital place in Puerto Rican culture, the king promise to visit every Puerto Rican child each year, no matter where they live. The kings will find you, the story assures the reader. It’s another way that the Circle of the Church Year, the tender wholeness that comes from the way beginnings and endings are tied together, keeps what matters most to us intact too, even when it feels like things could fall apart at any minute.
We are already in the third week of this strange, long Advent. Breathe deep. We still have more time than it seems and, as always, all the time we need.
Peace,
Bird