Advent Lessons and Carols 2009 Meditations

1. Adam and Eve (Apple)

All of our families have stories about a family member, either recent or in the distant past, who made many mistakes and shamed the family name. Sometimes we try to forget those people altogether, so that our children don’t get any bad ideas from stories about them. But in the church, we don’t hide those people; we tell the stories of those who failed, who fell, and we begin with the very beginning of the human relationship with God: Adam and Eve. We don’t tell their story of disobedience in order to make ourselves look good. We tell it so that we remember that each of us is, as my favorite hymn puts it, “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” We tell this story because we want to make sure everyone understands that, though we are prone to wander away and leave God, and the way to joy and love God shows us, still God does not leave us. God does hold us to account for our sins, as Adam and Eve were banished from Eden, but God does not leave us. I think one of the most poignant passages in all of scripture is this little note in Genesis 3:21 that God, before banishing Adam and Eve from Paradise, realizes they will need protection in the cold, cruel world. God the Cosmic Seamstress or Tailor, makes clothing to protect their bodies, like a parent telling a child on a snowy day, “put on your hat!” After punishment, a gentle, loving act.

After the coming of Jesus, early Christian theologians say that Jesus is the new Adam, and Jesus’ mother, Mary, is often called the new Eve. Let us also remember the old Adam and Eve and how we are like them in wandering, and like them in being cared for by God.

2. Boaz and Ruth (Wheat)

Just as every family has those members who go astray, so do many of our families have those people who think outside the box, who do not follow the usual, accepted way of doing things, the way things “have always been done.” Ruth and Boaz were perfect for each other because they both were that kind of person. Ruth left her native land, language, religion and family to follow her mother-in-law Naomi out of love for her. Boaz didn’t follow the accepted practice of shunning foreigners. He had to follow the letter of the law, as did most landowners, and let the poor glean the leavings of the harvest after the workers had taken the best, but Boaz went further than that and told Ruth he would guarantee that she would have enough to eat and be safe while she worked. Boaz and Ruth both were generous beyond the social norm, and in ways that others in their family and town probably thought were foolish in the extreme. Boaz may already have been an extraordinarily kind and generous man, I don’t know, but the way the story is written, he is inspired by the sacrificial generosity of Ruth to respond to her with similar generosity. She was not his problem, nor was Naomi, but he chose to help them nonetheless.

Although Luke’s genealogy does not name women and so lists only Boaz, Matthew names five women as ancestors of Jesus, and Ruth, the foreigner, the immigrant, the stranger, the generous and loving, is one of them. As we remember the extravagant hospitality of God in this season of giving, let us also remember his ancestors Boaz and Ruth.

3. Jesse (Sheep)

We often read this passage from Isaiah in the Advent season, because we Christians understand that “shoot from the stump of Jesse” to be Jesus, and the words that follow seem to describe Jesus. Why doesn’t the reading say “a shoot shall come out of the stump of David?” As the theology of Messiah developed, it was not Jesse, but his son, the young singer and shepherd who would become King David, who was considered the critical ancestral line for Messiah. But Isaiah reminds us that David did not spring out of the ground like some mythological Greek hero. David and his 7 brothers and who-knows-how-many sisters grew up in a very small town south of Jerusalem called Bethlehem where they had herds of sheep. We don’t know a whole lot about the brothers, except that some of them were very good-looking! We do know that David had an extraordinary talent at music: playing, singing, and composing, and that he also had a profoundly deep faith in God. Someone had to nurture that, or at least allow it to be nurtured. So here’s what I imagine: Jesse gathered his family regularly to pray and to make music in praise of God. Though David was the youngest, and all you youngest children out there can tell tales about how the youngest sometimes needs to compete to be noticed in a large family, still Jesse saw something in the child and paid attention. So that when God came calling, I expect Jesse was not all that surprised.

Jesus is descended not only from the great and mighty King David, but from David’s shepherd father in the little town of Bethlehem, a man who paid attention even to the smallest and youngest of his children. When Jesus gathered the little children to sit in his lap, and called us to do the same, he invoked the presence of Jesse, who noticed and nurtured.

4. Heli (Wood or nails)

Matthew’s genealogy says that Jesus’ grandfather’s name was Jacob, but Luke calls him “Heli,” a form of the more common name “Eli.” According to Luke, Heli’s father was named Matthat and his father was Levi and his was Melchi and, well, you heard us sing the rest! With the exception of a Joshua way back in the family tree (the name Jesus is another form of the name Joshua), no name anything like Jesus appears in that list. Now from our point of view, that’s no big deal. We choose names for our children for lots of reasons. In Heli’s time, however, that was much less common. You may remember that in the story of John the Baptist’s birth, the relatives at the naming ceremony felt that Elizabeth made a mistake when she said his name was John. “But you have no relatives with that name!” they objected. So I wonder how Heli felt when Jesus was taken for his circumcision and Joseph announced his name was Jesus, the name the angel had given him. The circumstances surrounding the conception of Jesus were already questionable, and now this. Heli was a carpenter. He built things to last. Tradition was important to him and he clearly brought up his son in the deep traditions of his faith as well as his vocation. Now he was being asked to accept something new, something uncomfortable and there didn’t seem to be any clear reason to do so. Dreams and visions are not like wood and nails; they are not solid and clear. When you design a chair and put the wood together you know exactly what you will get when it’s finished. Everything about this marriage and this child, on the other hand, was completely up in the air. I wonder how Heli handled this? Did he embrace Mary and Jesus with all the ambiguity and possibility, or did he withhold his affection?

After all these centuries, we might ask how anyone could doubt that the coming of Jesus was an action of God. Remember, though, that at that time, all this was less than clear. Remember Heli, and that God’s Spirit can be a disrupter as well as a comforter.

5. Joseph and Mary (Angel)

We’re not sure what interests or personality traits Joseph and Mary had in common; marriages in those days were most often arranged by parents and not the result of two people falling in love and deciding to make a commitment to each other. There is one experience, however, that we know they had in common, something that makes them unique in the list of relatives in that genealogy: an angel. They both were visited by an angel with a message for them about a child to whom Mary would give birth and for whom both were called to be loving parents. Sometimes it might seem that angels were around all the time in Bible days and that lots of people experienced them, either in person or in visions. But if you read the whole of the Bible, you would not strain your math skills to add up how many people actually had this experience. In the New Testament, you could add it on two hands (depending on how many shepherds were in that field).

In those times when a couple got engaged, the woman moved in with the husband’s family, so we can assume throughout her pregnancy, except for her visit to Elizabeth, Mary lived in the same house with Joseph and Heli and Joseph’s unnamed mother. Like any family awaiting the birth or adoption of a child, we can assume they wondered together about who the baby would look like, what talents he might have, and how their lives would change after his arrival. But when you have been told by an angel, twice, that this baby is going to be God-in-the-flesh, well that’s a different conversation, isn’t it? I imagine that Mary and Joseph became the first Christian theologians in those evenings around the fire, trying to figure out what all this meant. What was God up to? How were they part of it? Would he show signs of being divine even as a baby? What would happen to them, to their village, to their nation, to the world when this baby grew up? Was this all just a dream and would he come out totally normal in the end, and, in some ways, would they be relieved if that’s what happened? Were they sometimes more afraid and anxious than excited about the birth of this child?

After the shepherds visited Mary and Joseph in that stable, we are told that Mary “pondered in her heart” what the shepherds said about their angel visit. For most of us the weeks before Christmas, when we are all pregnant with anticipation, and some of us perhaps more afraid and anxious for the holiday than excited, we have precious little time for pondering. Let us remember Mary and Joseph, who pondered. The hymn we will sing in a moment is a slow hymn, not a bouncy Christmas carol. Let us enter into this music and let it help us set a tone for the next two weeks. There’s certainly room for bouncy excitement! Let us also make room for pondering, for considering angels and their messages, for sitting with Mary and Joseph, and the great cloud of ancestors, around that evening fire and wondering: what is this all about?