Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's December 23, 2007 Sunday worship service.
Isaiah 7:10-16, Matthew 1:18-25, Romans 1:1-7
Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 23, 2007
Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD
Some children see him lily white,
The baby Jesus born this night,
Some children see him bronzed and brown
The Lord of heav’n to earth come down
Some children see him almond-eyed
With skin of yellow hue.
Some children see him dark as they,
Sweet Mary’s son to whom we pray
I wasn’t able to track down the origins of this Christmas song, but I like its plain, honest truth that we all wear the glasses of our own little worlds when it comes to how we view Jesus. Whether its “lily white,” “bronzed and brown,” or “yellow hue,” each era and culture has its own assumptions about the physical appearance of Jesus. But this song and its different options for the appearance of Jesus, asks us take it a step further. What do we see when we see Jesus? If I were to poll the audience, I suspect I’d discover that we’d like to imagine ourselves choosing a universal Jesus, a conglomeration of all colors, the one who can’t be pinned down or re-created in our own image.
Deep down, we know the danger of a spiritual pride with its claims that we could ever perceive the fullness of Jesus; we find theologically, if not historically suspect, artistic renderings of a blue-eyed, blond haired Jesus of Germanic origin, a Jesus made to look like the Buddha, or a Jesus with black skin and an afro. But then, shouldn’t we be equally suspicious of something like Warner Sallman’s famous head of Christ, the image I’d bet comes to your mind if I were to ask you to imagine what Jesus looked like: the Jesus made to look Hollywood handsome with flowing brown hair, well-trimmed beard, soft, hazel eyes, and a perfectly tanned Caucasian countenance?
When we lived in a suburb of Boston and attended a More Light Presbyterian congregation for several years, our minister was a wonderful preacher and pastor, who also happened to be a pronounced feminist, a stance I rarely found problematic until one Sunday during Advent, she tried to convince us that Jesus really was born to Mary and Joseph as a girl. Notwithstanding the shock value of her attempt to have us set aside our usual assumptions about the identity of Jesus, I found myself amused, but then later somewhat disturbed, by her unusual, earnest, and determined effort to rewrite the Christmas story with a feminist twist. In retrospect, I have to give her credit for the courage of sincere convictions, as well as an unswerving willingness to challenge the ecclesiastical status quo, but her perspective was at odds with history and the Bible as I know them.
I suspect we’ve all met someone who wasn’t afraid to swim against the mainstream: the believer who fervently held to Paul penning his letters in King James English, those who would rather die than deny that Jesus really was born and later died as the first Christian, or even followers unafraid to climb fences or be jailed to protest the earth’s nuclear weapons madness. While sometimes we might utter beneath our breath, “God save me from your followers” (author unknown) or dismiss such characters as irrelevant, truth is, the continuation of what we call Church depends on just such a salt and pepper mix of folk.
I had a chance to visit with my parents and several of my siblings this week, and my mother and brother, both clergy, told me about an Advent preaching workshop sponsored by their presbytery in Lillington, North Carolina that they recently attended. The workshop leader, an African-American who teaches at one of our satellite seminaries in Charlotte, posed the question of what Jesus looked like, suggesting to the workshop participants that they should consider the location of Palestine and the Middle East as actually part of the continent of Africa, that, thus, Jesus probably looked like someone from Africa “bronzed and brown” with hair, in the words of the song I began with, “dark and heavy.” I suppose trying to spark an impassioned discussion, he turned to the only other non-caucasion in the audience, asking her what she thought Jesus looked like, to which she responded, “I don’t really care what he looked like!”
It remains the age-old question, doesn’t it? What did Jesus look like . . . Does it finally really matter? Do we, should we care? Who is this Jesus, founder and Lord of the Church?
We often want to construct a Jesus who best suits our desires and wishful thinking about God and the divine plan for the world, and there is plenty enough depth and ambiguity in scripture to have a Jesus for all occasions -- Jesus as soul-winner, Jesus as peacemaker, Jesus as kingmaker, Jesus as the first feminist, Jesus as the world’s greatest philosopher, and on and on the list could go. But scripture also asks that we wrestle with the truth that Jesus emerged out of a particular location, a social and religious setting that bound his life just as surely as our own history binds ours.
For instance, in the first chapter of his letter to the Roman Christians Paul lifts up the human, decidedly Jewish Jesus – a self-evident reality for us twenty centuries later, but a debatable point in the world of Second Temple Judaism. If Jesus wasn’t a law-abiding, righteous Hebrew, then Paul’s logic about the messianic identity of Jesus and his descent from the lineage of David would become faulty, indefensible. Paul writes: that Jesus “was descended from David according to the flesh …”
Matthew, who actually writes his gospel later than Paul wrote his letters, is no less concerned to ensure that Jesus fits within a genealogy that includes all of Israel’s patriarchs – Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, and Israel’s greatest Kings David, Solomon, and Hezekiah. Matthew wants to ensure that his audience is left with no doubt that the genealogy of Jesus is perfectly in line with Israel’s expectations for the political and religious and political fulfillment of the Messianic line.
I might observe that Biblical scholarship today is falling more and more under the influence of archeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and a host of other social scientists. These scholars have shown us theologians that Jesus was a person with a history, one who lived, worked and died in an impoverished, hard-scrabble landscape populated mostly by peasants, controlled by the Roman empire through puppet governors. In our Christmas zeal to romanticize shepherds, mangers, and a pregnant teen-ager journeying to Bethlehem during tax season, we gloss over the truth that Joseph and Mary brought Jesus into a world where the norm was illiteracy, early mortality, and a hand-to-mouth existence.
Truth is, cosmopolitan Rome cared little about backwater Palestine. Palestine may have served as a buffer zone, shielding the empire from enemy threats, providing a safe haven for bandits and criminals, and representing an easy source for tax revenues, but in terms of political importance or military strategy, the land of Jesus didn’t amount to much.
Today’s almost daily headlines featuring the economic significance of the “middle east,” its oil-rich reservoirs, and strategic military significance can easily lull us into thinking that Palestine has always been front and center in the history of the world. That is surely not the case.
In fact, the text from the prophet Isaiah, written some 700 or 800 years before the advent of Jesus, portrays the sobering reality that the nostalgic glory days of Israel’s political independence and military power under King David are now past. In Isaiah 7, King Ahaz has even deigned to seek help and security from Israel’s arch-enemy of that era, the Assyrian empire. God promises the birth of a special child, Emmanuel, God-with-us, who will be a sign that Israel’s leaders shouldn’t rely on outside powers; however, for King Ahaz, trembling before the reality of the Assyrian Empire’s well-fed and well-equipped army, such a promise seems foolhardy. The King will capitulate, and rather than place his trust in God, he will trust a foolish alliance with the Assyrian empire and its offer of short-term security guaranteed by the power of threats and weapons.
Centuries later after Isaiah, it is this same world into which Jesus is born. The names of empire have changed again and again, from Assyria to Babylon to Persia to Rome, but the reality remains the same: Palestine was a subjugated state and its people lie subservient beneath the heel of an outside, foreign power.
Jesus wasn’t born as an elite member of the superpower of his day. He hardly had the economic or social advantages that we might expect someone of his latter day influence and prestige to have enjoyed.
His father, Joseph, was himself no more than an ordinary citizen, if citizenship was even a category that would be used of a peasant carpenter. Joseph was, of course, more importantly for our story, an obedient, law-abiding Jew, unwilling to impose public disgrace upon Mary for her supposed act of adultery in conceiving a child. Although Joseph knew that he was not the father, a problem had arisen, “and with every passing week, the problem got a little bigger. From the story Mary told him about how she became pregnant, Joseph must have been concerned about her morals and her sanity.” (Journal for Preachers, Advent, 2004, p.9). A righteous Jew, Joseph could have either cast her out in disgrace or quietly filed for divorce, but he did neither. Joseph goes beyond the Law, beyond the norms of his day, and he experiences the “holy intrusion” of being awakened in a dream to the divine intentions.
I don’t know how Joseph may have felt bringing his baby into a world dominated by empire. My best guess is that he didn’t have much direct information about the truth of how the Roman government operated, the complexities of the royal budget for defense spending, or the latest attempt by a politician to stay in public favor by placating to the desires of the wealthy and influential. We do know from Luke’s version of the story how the engaged couple had to return to Joseph’s ancestral birthplace in order to pay the dreaded tax, a heavy requirement that seems unusually cruel given the discomforts of travel for a woman presumably nine months pregnant.
But what do you do, if you’re a Joseph or if you’re a Mary, and you not only have a baby, but a baby whom you’ve been told will bear the hope of a nation on his shoulders, a baby who enters a world dominated by the agenda of empire?
Baby and Empire. Could there be a more pointed contrast, one helpless and completely dependent, the other all-powerful and desirous of conquering others?
It seems to me that the singular, essential message of Christianity is the invitation to place our trust in the security that alone God can give. Others may see the essential message as the offer of eternal life or the enumeration of moral and ethical guidelines or something else, and surely all of this and so much more is part of the mix.
But at the heart of the gospel of hope is the good news that the military and economic security offered by empires will not have the final word. Instead, the justice and peace brought by the message of Jesus is what will endure.
It’s always been interesting to me that the language of fear appears so prominently in the Christmas stories that we read this time of year. In the text from Matthew, the angel who appeared to Joseph in a dream tells him, “do not be afraid,” for it must have been quite petrifying to deal with all the mixed emotions and mystery associated with a pregnant fiancee for which he knew he was not responsible.
And then, there is the angel who appears to the shepherds out in the field in Luke’s story who says, “do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy” (Lk 2:10). Here, in a desperate landscape were young men who occupied one of the lowest rungs on the Palestinian social and economic ladder, and they of all people are told to go to Bethlehem to witness the birth of the long-awaited Messiah. Who would have thought they would be called out as witnesses to such an epiphany and history-changing moment – they who had no prestige or power, no standing within the empire of that day or any day?
We all know that the flight or fear response is embedded deep in the human brain, perhaps the most primal of all instincts we possess. In their own way, each of these Christmas characters in the Bible overcame fear in order to follow, and by following, they came to realize that a baby was the sign of God’s enduring and patient love for the entire world.
No less now than then, there is so much to fear. Political agendas in these days of expensive presidential campaigns are filled with the politics of fear: the fear of terrorism, immigration, the housing crisis, global warming, a shaky health care system, crime, the threat of gay marriage, and on and on the list could go. We have personal and private fears as well, about our health, about our future, about change, about a multitude of things that would distract us from the spiritual path we know we should be traveling.
The older I get, the more I realize that Christmas, for all of its crass commercialism, should really be the most counter-cultural thing we do as Christians. For Christmas, at its core, declares the life-changing and world-changing power of a baby, And Christmas thereby declares that the values of empire – war and conquest, the accumulation of more and more wealth, the rhetoric of divine, national appointment, the presumption of political self-righteousness, that all these temporary and transient things in which we too often place our trust do not endure, but a baby does.
Thanks be to God, that we find our hope, our security, our purpose, in the baby of Bethlehem’s manger! Amen.
