Off-stride

One of my most recent Facebook statuses was along the lines of "did you ever feel the need to march, but the band is playing in 7/8 time?"
Despite a few musically-minded literalists getting in the way, I wasn't actually speaking of marching to a Brubeck-esque meter.  Do you ever have that feeling of something or everything not being bad, not by a long stretch (it would take a lot, after the cancer treatment, for me to say things were going badly), not really anything being wrong, but somehow everything just ... feels off.
I can't really point to any one thing.  Classes are going o.k.  The internship has slowed down a good bit, but nothing really unpleasant is going on there.  My health, aside from a nagging cough that seems finally to be easing off a bit, is about as good as it's ever going to be.  It feels like opportunities are shutting off or falling through rather than opening up, though (again) it's not as if I can point to any specific example of such a thing.
And yet, whether waking in the morning or going to bed at night, or in the middle of studying or socializing or whatever, everything feels ... just a bit off.

Swinnnnngggggg...and a miss.  So seems life.

It's the kind of thing that only shows up in odd, out-of-the-way things, like the fact that is, on the last day of February, the first time I've blogged since the last day of January.  I've started two or three, but they don't get finished.
I can't shut up when I have nothing to say, and I can't utter a peep when there is stuff demanding to be said.  I feel like a stranger to myself.
I can only guess that it's my middle-aged self's way of dealing with the kind of uncertainty that was (I thought) in the past.  Let's see, there's March and April left in this term, then the May term, and then, provided I don't screw up, I should graduate on May 31.
And then...?

Quit grinning at me, you hateful little thing!

You see what I mean.
I can put my Pastor Information Form (hereafter PIF) out there.  I can scour the opportunity listings daily.  I can try to get on the supply-preaching lists around here (there's no real benefit to moving anywhere without a call at this point).
And...?  The uncertainty is still there.
I jumped into this fool's errand without a real net, so to speak, and now starts the free fall.
There are certain things I know I can do.  I can preach.  Your mileage may vary, but I can write and deliver a sermon, and it can be good.  I can lead liturgy.  I would not necessarily say I'm real smooth and seamless at this point, and I'll still be terrified the first time a real baptism comes along, but I can do it.  I can teach.  I knew that coming in.  Those are all good things for a preacher to be able to do.  Other of the daily tasks of the preacher I can learn quickly enough.  A little brushing up on Robert's Rules of Order may be needed, to be sure.
I'm nobody's idea of an associate pastor for youth, or children, or "families" (wouldn't that be called, you know, an associate pastor?).  I don't think anybody who knows me well would expect that.  That does eliminate a lot of the first-call opportunities out there.  What it leaves behind is a lot of small churches.
I am o.k. with that, as long as it's not a go-broke-for-God expectation (I'm not asking to get rich, but a living wage needs to happen) and as long as there is decent access to health care (that cancer is going to be hanging over me for a few years yet).  I can be bi-vocational if need be, particularly if there's a small college or juco around that could use someone to teach music appreciation or a similar course (that would actually be kind of appealing).  I'm not setting any geographical limits on where I'm willing to go (my wife may have other ideas), even though I can already hear God cackling and plotting to put me under ten feet of snow in Montana.
There are certain things I won't do (aside from those ill fits noted above), but not that many.
Intellectually I knew this was coming, of course.  While I have my benefits, I'm not the kind of candidate who's going to stride right off the graduation platform on Saturday and into a pulpit on Sunday (unlike some of my classmates).  I'm kind of an acquired taste, and finding the right fit won't be an instantaneous thing.
Still, entering the Stage of Unknowing is no fun, and no more bearable now than upon graduation with that Ph.D.  And, as far as I can tell, it's leaving me feeling just a little bit ... off.

The (fill in the blank) is dying!

If you slide down the front page of this blog to the mini-biography it displays, you'll discover (or be reminded) that I'm a musicologist by training, who walked away from a perfectly happy career in academia to set off on this fool's errand.  I have no regrets about doing so, even as I also assert the seemingly contradictory assertion that I loved that particular vocation.  To be clear, there's plenty about academia that any academic could happily do without, much as there is plenty about the church vocations that any pastor or any other staff member would just as soon skip.  Still, I freely acknowledge that but for this swerve I'd have been quite content to live out my days in Lawrence, Kansas, getting fat and happy teaching and writing and hopefully lasting long enough to be able to afford tickets to Kansas Jayhawks basketball games.

One of the oddly amusing aspects of this swerve (except when it's no longer amusing) is the degree to which I seem to have traded one dying field for another.

*Note: though plenty of musicologists work in other musics besides classical, for this post I'm placing  myself within the framework of the classical music tradition.  It was where my research resided, it was most of what I taught, and put most simply, it was my first love.  

See, Mozart still lives!

It is something of a sport among cultural critics to proclaim the death, either present or imminent, of classical music.  Whether in the New York Times or The New Yorker or The New Republic, somebody desperately seeking a way to fill column inches decides to whip out the latest round of ugly-looking statistics and proclaim in tut-tutting tones The Death Of Classical Music.  The latest round, possibly set off by declining attendance numbers at the Metropolitan Opera (or perhaps predating those stats? I'm not entirely sure), appeared in the online magazine Slate, authored by someone named Mark Vanhoenacker, frankly added nothing new to the argument.  Stats were cited with due reverence, anecdotal evidence was elevated to the level of holy writ, blah blah blah.  This of course touched off the predictable volley of rebuttals to the presumed thesis; one of the more interesting appeared in The New Yorker, posted by one William Robin, which if nothing else appropriated the clever quote from Charles Rosen ("The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition") and a fun visual aid, depicting various examples of classical music's presumed death throes through the ages, all the way back to 1324, before classical music, technically, existed.  It was dying before it was born!

The volley of articles of course is in turn filled out by panicked Facebook statuses and tweets, which provoke rebuttal Facebook comments and tweets, which in turn provoke oh-so-self-righteous defenses of the classical-is-dying claim, and so on and so on.  Eventually you're better off just popping in a CD or calling up iTunes and listening to some actual music.

I kid because I care.  This is perhaps not quite perennial, but pretty routine in the classical music field, and it is necessarily (and properly) part of the warning anyone who wants to study classical music, whether with ambitions to be a performer or teacher or researcher, needs to hear before making that commitment.  Indeed, one could argue that my departure from the field was in its own way a favor to some young rising musicologist who could make the move to a tenurable post at one of the better music schools in the country.  (You're welcome.)

I also kid because, as it turns out, I didn't really escape the narrative by pursuing this fool's errand; the terms merely changed.

In case you haven't heard, the church is dying.  You can hear it from the likes of neo-Calvinist (why don't we just call these people fundamentalists and be done with it?) Mark Driscoll; a former Archbishop of Canterbury, who foresees Christianity eradicated in Britain within a generation; by others who claim to welcome its demise (of course, if you follow that link you'll see that the author is really about something else with his claim); and if you flip the Google search to "Christianity is dying" you'll quickly get to the likes of Richard (A Little Pedophilia Never Hurt Anybody) Dawkins, who would be truly pleased to see it go.  The point being, you don't have to look very hard at all to find a lot of talk on the subject of the church's demise.

Having lived with it for many years in the classical realm and now settling in for a lifetime of dying in the church, it has become obvious to me that there are some definite similarities in the x-is-dying narratives:

1. Both the church and classical music are perceived as having been "dominant" institutions in the United States for a time.  In both cases, the extent of that dominance is probably overstated.  The church might have been able to build itself big buildings with tall pointy steeples and pass a lot of Sunday blue laws at its peak, but looking at the shape and trajectory of American history it's fairly questionable to what extent the church actually had any influence; far more, it seems, that the church in these here United States was shaped, prodded, and to some degree absorbed by the culture it thought it was redeeming.  Classical music, similarly, was never quite so dominant as its would-be undertakers like to claim.  To the degree that one thinks of the widespread availability of, say, live orchestral music, it's hard to argue that there's been a better time than now, when one can find orchestras -- and good ones at that -- in places like Richmond, Tallahassee, and other small to mid-sized cities where such a thought would have been laughable a hundred years ago.  They may not be full-time orchestras, but they are there.  Also, one can suggest that whatever cultural clout classical music may have had at it peak was squandered much as the church's was.  When classical music actually had "mainstream" radio access with the likes of Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra or other such broadcast outlets, did the establishment seek out brilliant young composers writing daring new stuff, exploiting modern orchestral capacity in vivid and thrilling ways?  Ehh, no. Toscanini and his ilk (and yes, even Leonard Bernstein in his TV shows and other broadcasts) whacked the country over the head repeatedly with the (European) (male) canon, and even when some (male) Americans did break through they turned out to be susceptible to the same cultural clotting as Beethoven and Brahms and the lot.  Opportunity squandered?  Check and check.

My man George Chadwick wasn't canonical enough for those snobs.

2. In both cases the substance of the thing is too easily confused with the institutions that have maintained it over the years.  Is classical music dying?  No.  Are certain classical music institutions -- orchestras, opera houses, recording companies -- dying?  Yep.  While this is tragic for those whose livelihood and security depends on those institutions, propping up the large, unwieldy apparatus of the Grandiose Philharmonic isn't necessarily the answer for sustaining classical music in the twenty-first century any more than bringing back steel mills and blowing up more mountains for coal mining is the best way to sustain the American economy in the twenty-first century.  Likewise, the model of the First (Insert Denomination Here) Church with a program for every party and every party its own program, might just not be the best way to be about the business of doing Christ's work in God's world these days.

2a. Furthermore, maybe a bit of forced adjustment might just unleash a bit of creativity on the part of both institutions.  Maybe an orchestra using Google Glass might just be one way to provoke interest in yet another round of Beethoven's Fifth (if that's such a desirable aim; it is, after all, a pretty strong piece of music despite its massive overplay), if an orchestra is game for it.  Maybe sermons as starting points for extended dialogue via Facebook or Twitter or whatever comes next (even face-to-face!  gasp!) can be a lifeline for the people, if a preacher can get over the presumption that cell phone = distraction.  Maybe the increasing prominence of empty chairs in the concert hall or empty pews in the church prompts both institutions to think outside the walls, going where people are?  Maybe instead of singing "Silent Night" in a darkened sanctuary with candles on Christmas Eve, we throw open the doors and hit the sidewalks to sing "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear"?  Or maybe we find ways to invite the world into our burdensome buildings so that all people are being served by them, not just us select few?

3. Both get accused of being old and gray, predominated by the elderly pining for the Good Old Days. This is often true.  So what?  You got something against old people?  You age-bigot, you.

At any rate, the confusion factor above is worth repeating.  Classical music is ... well, music.  It isn't the Metropolitan Opera or the New York Philharmonic or the Emerson String Quartet.  Neither is the church the big building with the tall pointy steeple on the corner of First and Main.  It is people, even if the people themselves forget that sometimes.

Hey, I've got nothing against the Emerson String Quartet.  They're really good.

All that having been said, I am no futurist.  Here I cop C.S. Lewis's line about the future being something we all get to at the rate of twenty-four hours a day, not a place reserved for favored heroes.  Futurists in both classical music and church will no doubt go about making grand pronouncements about What Must Be Done To Save The Church/Classical Music.  They'll generally be wrong.  No one will hold them to account.  And the cycle will repeat itself.  Some churches will go towards a different kind of service, and after an initial boost they'll start sinking even faster than the fussy old "traditional" churches.  Some orchestras will go heavily into "pops" performances, and after an initial boost they'll lose their novelty and keep right on sagging.

Tomorrow I will be attending something called NEXT Church.  A regional gathering, to be precise, mostly because it happens to have landed more or less in my front yard.  I am going mostly to be skeptical, for reasons hinted in the paragraph above.  I will be watching intently for any signs of ageism, urgency to pronounce last rites on the church, panacea prescriptions to Save The Church, or anything that smacks of the above.  Don't go there with me.  I've worked in a dying institution before, and lived to tell about it.


UPDATE, Feb. 4: So I went.  I can wish it well, but I don't see the fit for me there.  Just to clear that up.  As I think I snarked in some past post, my particular talents and interests probably render me more of a PAST Church type.

Don't go out there by the river, where bright angel feet won't tread...

I couldn't quite figure it out.  Why did this morning's service have me so out of sorts?

Today's lectionary featured Matthew's account of the baptism of Jesus.  Not an unfamiliar text.  Perhaps the most interesting part of it was John's disavowal of Jesus's request -- "you should be baptizing me" and all that.  There was also Psalm 29 and a longish bit from Isaiah.  None of those are terribly bothersome scriptures.

The hymns weren't necessarily the problem either.  OK, so "Shall we gather at the river" is a bit old-hat for a recovering Baptist, even if it was highly fascinating to both Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. The others were new to the Presbyterian hymnbook, so at least interesting to hear the first time.  The anthem was that thing from O Brother, Where Art Thou? in which I have difficulty finding coherent and complete sentences, but that's also old-hat by now.  So the music wasn't it, either.

The baptism itself was a wonderful event, even if from my admittedly distant perch I was beginning to wonder if the child was going to kick his way out of the grasp of both parents and pastor.  Baptisms are wonderful events, to be celebrated, right?

It took a while to dawn on me that my trouble wasn't anything in the liturgy so much as the headline that formed its backdrop this week.

Maybe you missed it in the midst of the "polar vortex" or the shocking revelation that the governor of New Jersey is a bully.  But near Charleston, West Virginia, a chemical plant managed to bust a leak and disgorge a whole lot of chemical spillage into the Elk River.  More pointedly, the spill happened just a short distance upstream from one of the primary intake points for the state's principal water utility.

The particular fun of this spill is that the chemical in question (Crude MGHM, used for washing impurities out of coal), seems to be a bit of a mystery chemical to way too many people.  No way to text for its toxicity in water; not a lot of clarity on just how toxic it is to drink or breathe or shower in or any such thing.  It's clearly enough to smell bad and to make some folks near the spill sick, and apparently enough is known to tell folks that even boiling the water, that old purification standby, doesn't work in this case).  But one has to wonder just how much thought went into letting a plant that works with such a chemical regularly get upstream of a water-utility facility in the first place.

All the more lovely is the absolute silence of the corporation that owns the plant, Freedom Industries (what a bitterly ironic name; is this what "freedom" means anymore, one's freedom to dump all over another and get away with it?).  Their website, in case you're wondering, has diddly-spit to say about the spill.  At any rate, residents in and around Charleston can't drink the water.  Or bathe in it, or prepare baby formula in it, or anything other than flush with it.  (At least they can do that.  Yikes.)  Such is the desperation of the situation that police got called in to guard a shipment of bottled water to Wal-Mart.

Amidst this, I wonder how many churches in the Charleston area were observing the Baptism of the Lord today?  Did any baptisms have to get cancelled?  Or were fonts getting topped up with Aquafina or Dasani?  Would today's baptism have been possible if that kind of spill had happened here in or around Richmond?

Maybe this kind of thing is why those creation-informed liturgies took over Advent on this blog.  Or maybe it's just the cavalier way we ignore the precious stuff of creation or let it be devolved into mere fodder for our conveniences or for somebody else's profit, which leads us to where we are, with the substance that is essential to not only, you know, living, but also to one of the two generally accepted sacraments in the Christian tradition becoming little more than a waste dump for liquid toxins.

What does it take to get us to care, church?  What does it take to get us to treat God's creation as, well, God's creation?  What does it take to get us to shout down and call out the damnedness of those who oh-so-piously preach against "getting political" when it comes to something so basic as what we drink to keep ourselves alive, and get on with the business of righting what we have so long wronged?  How many water sources have to get despoiled by chemical spills or fracking or tar sands extraction or who knows what other foolish and greedy process before we Christians will get angry enough to scream so loud about it that we drown out the idiot duck guy in Louisiana or the neo-Calvinist fear mongers or those others we get so heated up about?  Seriously, what the Hell is it going to take?

Yeah, dammit, I'm angry.  If you're not, perhaps you might want to pay more attention.

The guest cat goes home

Some weeks back I put up a quickie about a "guest cat," one which apparently lived in the neighborhood but turned up at our place, for which we put out food.

She would eat hungrily, sometimes more than the two monster cats who actually live here.  Usually, though, she'd stick around, and usually she'd want attention.

Sometimes she'd stay around the front porch for hours, particularly on warm days.  Some days she'd get into our back yard (she could get under the gate) and curl up on the back porch, in the sun.

Eventually she'd wander off, if the food or attention waned, if I went off to class or work or my wife was inside at work.  Typically she'd return in the evening, to eat again, and for more attention.

She didn't quite seem to be fully homeless; for all the outside time she was a relatively clean cat.  We thought we know where she lived, but much of the time she seemed outright afraid to go there.  There are two quite large dogs at that house, and we assumed that was a problem for such a small cat.

We had to assume she was playing us, and we had to figure we weren't the only ones.

It was interesting.  Because of the guest cat, I would end up sitting outside, on the front porch steps, with her propped up on one of my legs, or walking back and forth across both, or curled up beside me.  This of course was a tremendous flattery, as neither of our cats typically will do so with me -- they are very much my wife's cats in that regard.  I might have my cell phone out and checking messages or reading the latest tweets, or occasionally have a book and try to catch up on class reading, though that behavior would not be tolerated, as cats are wont to demand one's full attention, when they want it at all.

Or I might simply look around.  See the neighborhood.  Notice the trees.  Notice the kids passing by from the bus stop after school.  Hear the arguments across the street, or note the serious remodeling job going on across the way.  Sometimes she'd go out to the street to seek attention from the passerby, particularly one girl I'd guess was middle-school age.  She'd receive her petting and cuddling, then, when the girl was on her way, return to our porch.

We indeed were not the only ones.  A woman who lives around a couple of corners away, who had apparently set up a heated shelter for the cat, talked to a cousin of hers who was looking to add a cat to the household.  She then stopped at our house, figured us as other patsies for the cat (with a food bowl, a water dish, and two pillows on the porch, it probably wasn't hard to guess), talked to my wife about her plans (apparently the residents at the home we thought she lived in did not want to claim her).  Later, when I arrived home, I went out and shook a kibble container; that got the cat running (with her usual hitch in her giddyup) across the street for dinner.  We stayed with her on the porch until the neighborhood woman could be contacted via text to come gather up the cat and take her to her new home.

So it's a success story.  The cat is not only alive and not at a shelter, she's going to have a nice warm place to stay, which is important tonight as it will be colder than it has been and might snow a little bit.  We don't have to worry about trying to bring her in, particularly with our somewhat hostile older cat, or to worry about whatever illnesses she may have or about those insane claws she has.  Our cats will be less disturbed with that interloper gone.  Hard to conceive of a better ending.

Yet already I've unwittingly checked the front porch a couple of times, before remembering.  I may or may not have blubbered most unmanfully when she was gone.  And I'll miss my front porch time, with a cat perched on my knee.

No more "only human"! (And other things I wish would happen in 2014)

I don't normally fool with New Year's Eve blahblahblah.  Something has been on my mind, forwarded by a few conversations and perhaps by just viewing 12 Years a Slave at last.  But here's my quibble, my phrase I would banish first of all from the lexicon if I were somehow to ascend to the office of Language Despot.

"Only human."

As in, some variation of "he shouldn't have done that, but what are you going to say? He's only human," or "she shouldn't have said that, that has really messed things up, but you know, she's only human," or "I can't help it, what do you expect from me?  I'm only human."

Stop it.  Now.

Genesis 1:27 first of all: humankind is made in the image of God, male and female both.  Who else gets to claim that one?  (Our cats might think they are gods, but nothing in Genesis supports this claim.)  This isn't exactly the kind of thing that makes the phrase "only human" make any sense at all.

The psalmist gets it, a little bit (139:14): "I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."  No matter how much we degrade it, being human is a pretty amazing thing.

If nothing else, the Christmas season (and we're still in it, remember) should remind us Christians of one amazing thing about humanity; Jesus was human.  Everybody remember the phrase that has shredded the brains of theologians for centuries?  "Fully God and fully human"?  That the one God and Lord of us all should have deigned to squeeze all of that God-ness into human form should be forever and always an impediment against demeaning our own humanness or using it as a cop-out for our own stupidities or evils.  To look at Jesus is not only the closest we're ever going to come to seeing what God is like on this earth, it is the best expression of what it means to be human as well.

If you have to find some way to excuse the evil words or deeds of another, find another way to say it. Maybe "he shouldn't have done it, but what are you going to say?  He's as fallen as anybody."  Or "Wow, she shouldn't have said that, but hey, we're all sinners here."  Not only does it not demean our "fearfully and wonderfully made" humanity, but perhaps it forces us to look to our own fallenness or sinfulness at the same time?

Theo-linguistic rant over.  For now.


Other things I wish would happen in 2014:

I wish I wouldn't have to write any more blog posts about my health, even if those are the ones that get read the most.

I wish that by this time next year, I'm writing this blog from a new location, if I have time to write it at all what with settling into a new calling and all that.

I wish that the Yankees would miss the playoffs for a second season in a row and that the Pirates and Royals would play in the World Series.  (I didn't say all these wishes were realistic.)

I wish another phrase would be laid to rest for good: "the Olympic movement."  It's not a movement, for pete's sake, it's a corporate empire.

I wish that popular music would be less about desperate cries for attention and more about ... well, virtually anything else.

I wish that the Minnesota Orchestra labor dispute would be settled in a way that allows everybody to make a living and to get back to being a good orchestra.

I also wish, speaking of classical music, that the clapping-between-movements thing would be settled once and for all, so I can know if it's even worth bothering to go to concerts anymore.

I wish I would recover my ability to read novels.  Historical stuff, biographies, non-fiction in general; I can get engrossed just fine.  Fiction has failed to do that for me for a while now and that pains me.

I wish that the duck guy with the beard would be strapped into a chair and forced to watch 12 Years a Slave on endless loop until either he gets it or his brain explodes, his choice.

I wish that people would really get just how much World War I has shaped the world, as the centennial of its beginning approaches.

And I wish that your 2014, and mine, would be not merely happy, but joyful.

Fugitive child

This year's lectionary sequence for those on the Revised Common Lectionary is the kind of text that prompts pastors to take a vacation Sunday.  After all the cuteness of the Christmas Eve pageant, or the resplendent beauty of the lessons & carols service, or whatever your church did on that occasion, for this Sunday you get a text on mass murder.

A king with a paranoid and violent past, which tendencies were only reinforced by advancing years and declining health, needed little prompting to react with an act of violence.  Not only had those visiting scholar/astrologers put about this business about a newly-born king (and Herod knew he had no brand-new descendants in cribs anywhere about), they had also failed to play along with Herod's scheme to eliminate this new threat.  They were supposed to report to him, those scoundrels.  They were supposed to tell him where this upstart infant was.  Somehow, they got away without reporting back to Herod.

Those damned prophecies went on and on about someone coming, someone who would be bad news for people in power. Herod believed in knowing his potential enemies, and kept scholars around who could interpret these hoary old prophetic texts of this crazy tribe of people in this backwater of the Roman Empire.  When those Eastern visitors showed up spouting this business about a child born "king of the Jews" and a star somehow connected to it, Herod wasted no time putting his own research staff to work on the problem.  They'd tell him what he need to know.  They knew how their bread was buttered, and most likely they knew where their graves were dug.

In the meantime Herod brooded.  Matthew quaintly tells us that "all of Jerusalem" also brooded with him.  It would be a mistake to take this as some kind of sign of sympathy.  When a king with Herod's track record of eliminating enemies or potential enemies or imagined enemies got upset, you were upset, because you never knew if you might be one of those enemies or potential enemies or imagined enemies.

Herod's research department finally came through with a location, a backwater in the backwater named Bethlehem.  Herod sent the visitors on their way, with a polite but firm reminder that they should stop by on their way home and tell him all about this newborn king, and then went back to nursing his ailments and his grudges.

They had stiffed him.

Too much time had passed with no sign of the visitors.  Who knew what was up with that infant usurper now?  He put his research department to work again: how old might that child king of the Jews be at this point?  Armed with their answers, he engaged in about as gruesome and vile an act as the Bible records (and it records plenty of gruesome and vile acts).

A boy?  Born in Bethlehem? Up to age two?  Kill it.

Kill them all.

The dream angels got to work again.  Having warned Joseph not to put away his pregnant wife, and redirected those visitors away from Jerusalem, they had more dream work to do.  Joseph needed to get his newly-enhanced family in gear and get them out of Bethlehem.  Death was coming, and it was not this child's time to suffer it.

But really, was it time for any child in Bethelehem to suffer the kind of death Herod had in mind?  Was it time for countless Rachels to be set to weeping for their no-more children?  But it is not our place to wonder at Herod's evil.  Political agendas continue to kill children, even in our enlightened day, do they not?

But for Joseph and family, the angel warning must have seemed ominous itself.  Flee to ... Egypt?  Egypt, of all places?  Joseph, whom Matthew takes great pains to place in a line of descent all the way back to Abraham, through Judah the son of Jacob, would know all about his people's history with Egypt, the ancient famine refuge-turned-enslavement empire of the Hebrew people.  A place like that was where someone like Joseph would have no connection, no relations, no home whatsoever.  Of course you were going -- the king wanted to kill your son (never mind all that crazy business with Holy Spirit pregnancies and the gaggle of shepherds who showed up when your son was born; this is my son and the king does not get to kill him, not if I and these strange dream angels have anything to do with it) -- but how were you going to survive in Egypt?  And for how long?  And how would we know when, or even if, it was safe to come back?  But still, you went, so Joseph and Mary and the infant-toddler aged Jesus took flight into Egypt.


Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c.1597

So, for a few years of his childhood, the one Christians call the Messiah, Son of Man, King of Kings, all those grand and glorious titles, was essentially a fugitive from justice -- or at least one sick, paranoid king's idea of justice.


Adam Elsheimer, The Flight Into Egypt, 1609

And again, we dare not judge.  The refugee is not a rare enough figure in our time for us to judge.  And it doesn't take a sick old king to set families to flight.  The number of refugees in flight from Syria is in millions and escalating constantly.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Flight Into Egypt, ca.1916-22

The artist above, Henry O. Tanner, apparently found the theme of the Holy Family's flight resonant with his own life; he created about fifteen different works on that theme.  Was it the racism he experienced in his native US, racism which eventually drove him to relocate to Paris, that caused the image to force its way into his mind again and again?

Eventually the family got one more dream angel alert, telling them it was okay to return from Egypt, and then one more, suggesting Galilee as a nice alternative to Judea.  Thus, according to Matthew's account, the child came to grow up in Nazareth.  Nazareth was apparently the kind of place people made fun of, if Nathanael's pithy putdown in John 1 ("Can anything good come out of Nazareth?") is to be believed.  Still, it was outside the reach of the late Herod or any of the late Herod's descendants, which was good enough.  The fugitive Messiah had a home, at last.

That child would grow up, and again take to wandering.  Approximately the last three or so years of his life were spent as an itinerant rabbi, preaching with particular vehemence a good news about enough for the poor, the release of captives, sight for the blind and hearing for the deaf, about justice for everyone instead of law for those who could afford it.  How much the fugitive childhood remained in the mind of the itinerant preacher, we cannot know.

Of course, this story was preached today, if it was at all, to congregations most likely far emptier than normal, and certainly less full than this past Tuesday night.  Again congregation size becomes a pretty good metaphor; very few would be, or could be there for the family in flight.

Unlike last week's rant, this week's events don't quite set me off the same way.  Yeah, my life has known disruption, but I can't say I've ever even remotely felt like a refugee, or an exile, or a fugitive. Perhaps having this "text of terror" dropped in our laps so soon after our cute little Christmases is exactly about disrupting the rather complacent and prettified way we do Christmas.  In truth, I'm not sure we can do justice to the story; how do we possibly capture the horror of such a slaughter as Herod enacted in his paranoia and fear?  Or how do we possibly capture the panic of the family's emergency evacuation to a strange and fearful place to escape something even stranger and more fearful?  And what place does it hold in our Christmas?  What does such a story do to our manger scenes and children's sermons?

Can we, in our hearts, ride with the fugitive child?  Can we see that refugee child in the countless millions of refugees all across our world?

Upon a midnight clear

It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, good will to all, from heaven's all-gracious king":
the world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.

A song.  Not some windy and accusatory finger-pointing sermon, though such would have certainly been justifiably preached at a world that already was well-versed in humans hating and enslaving and degrading one another.  Not a treacly, gloppy effusion of hyper-sentimental mock poetry, or painfully earnest talk of "feelings" or some other embarrassing display of sanctimonious goo.  No, this news, this radical, world-upsetting news, this divine intervention to end all interventions, this ultimate offense against our human sense of superiority and self-sufficiency, had to be delivered in a song.

Still through the cloven skies they come, with peaceful wings unfurled,
and still their heavenly music floats o'er all the weary world:
above its sad and lowly plains they bend on hovering wing,
and ever o'er its Babel sounds the blessed angels sing.

The song is not stopped; the worst we can throw at it cannot, will not silence it.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long; 
beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong;
and we at war on earth hear not the tidings that they bring;
O, hush the noise and cease the strife to hear the angels sing.

We humans excel at war.  We excel at the multi-national kind, with armies massing against one another with spears or swords or cannon or rifles or bombers or drones; we excel at the more personal kind, with weapons made of words, or with fists or clubs or ropes for hanging or sainted beatified handguns.

We are failures at peace.  We fall even short of the low bar of goodwill.  In our heart of hearts we have to admit that much of the time we really don't want to be good at those things; war is more fun, until it isn't anymore, and then hating others for getting us into the war we were screaming for in the first place is more satisfying than admitting that our screams for war were wrong and hateful and sinful to begin with.

And yet, amidst the noise of our noisiness, the song will not be silenced.

And you, beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low, 
who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow,
look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing:
O, rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.

You whose forms are bending low, bowed under the weight of poverty, of homelessness, of enduring the spittle-flecked hatred of people who claim a fictional, weaponized, whitewashed Jesus as a club to batter you for your poverty or homelessness or merely being what God created you to be; the song is for you.  It may not come swiftly, it may come so slowly as to leave us despairing that it will ever come at all, but the hour is coming, and the song of peace will yet become the reign of peace, and not merely of peace, but of shalom -- real, pervasive, more-than-peace peace, when all is fulfilled, all is in its right place in God's good created world, all is in right relation to God and to one another.  The song continues; the day will come.

For lo, the days are hastening on, by prophet bards foretold,
when with the ever-circling years comes 'round the age of gold,
when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling, 
and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing.

It will come; the song of peace will be the song of all of us, even if some can only sing it with throats poisoned with bile.  The song of peace, the song of a child who becomes a dividing, upsetting, empire-rattling Man of Peace and Man of Sorrows, who suffered and continues to suffer the flaying and crucifying of those who fawn over manger scenes and those who scorn them; that song will continue, even if no one sings it, until all will sing it, and peace will be more than a dream.

Rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.