Piece of the Puzzle

Happy New Year?  Just as we were ready to return to our routines, refreshed and exuberant, here comes the snow.  And more snow.  And we were not ready! 

How many of you felt a little sad to miss gathering for worship last Sunday?  I sure did.  I take for granted the stabilizing force of this spiritual discipline of gathering for worship with other people.  Sure, I can worship God anywhere, and occasionally I do, but I don’t really have the internal motivation to focus my attention on God when I’m all by myself.  I need a community to hold me accountable. Maybe some others of you have experienced this too. 

It’s not for nothing that God arrived on earth as a baby, born into a family, which is the story we tell about Jesus.  And it’s not for nothing that the familiar nativity scene stories feature wildly disparate characters, see if you can recognize them:

·         the business owner in the hospitality industry who operates with only a shred of mercy for migrants—an innkeeper

·         the people who work outdoors with livestock—the shepherds

·         the mysteriously shining messengers that appear in the sky like UFOs or maybe drones—the angels

·         the highly educated scientist scholars who are curious enough to leave their home country to investigate a brand-new celestial phenomenon—the Magi following the star

·         the petty tyrant who issues executive orders to kill children—Herod

·         the migrants fleeing persecution to seek refuge in another country—the holy family themselves, Mary and Joseph and Jesus. 

I think we’re so used to hearing the story of Christmas that we stop listening because we think we already know the whole thing.  It’s important to stop and notice how many very different people are part of this story, almost as though God thought it would be important to bring in multiple actors from very different places, giving each one a small piece of revelation, like a little piece of a jigsaw puzzle that—by itself—makes no sense but must be joined together with others to create the whole picture. 

There are so many places in Scripture where the Holy Spirit is working in multiple places at the same time, giving messages to individuals with the instruction to carry that message somewhere else, to get people to come together.  Sometimes angels deliver the message, sometimes the Holy Spirit works through dreams or other divine inspiration. 

The Christmas story has multiple examples of this theme: an angel tells Joseph not to separate from Mary when she becomes pregnant, an angel visits Mary who then goes to her relative Elizabeth who is also carrying a message from God, angels speak to the shepherds in the fields and tell them to find a child lying in a manger. 

And can we take a moment to notice how PROFOUNDLY WEIRD that is?  Babies come pretty standard, hard to tell them apart.  How are shepherds gonna know which baby is the one they’re looking for?  Put the baby somewhere unusual.  An infant in an animal’s feedbox is so weird that it had never happened before.  What kind of desperate first-time parents can’t come up with any better ideas for where to put the baby?

I don’t know a lot about animal behavior but even I know that it’s a bad idea to get in between an animal and their food.  I wouldn’t stick my newborn in a manger any more than I’d balance them atop the rubber tire of a parked car.  Sure, it looks safe while the car isn’t moving, and the baby is sheltered by the wheel well; but it’s just not going to be safe in the long run. 

But even though Jesus grew up—luckily—and eventually got really popular, the baby-in-a-manger phenomenon did not catch on.  There was never a “manger is best” campaign for new parents caring for infants.  Even people who want to honor God by taking on spiritual disciplines like Jesus did—like fasting and prayer and worship and baptism—as far as I know, not a one of them put their own child in a manger, saying, “If it was good enough for baby Jesus, then it’s good enough for my baby.” 

But here’s my point: all of these heavenly messages, all of these Holy Spirit connections between people, the stories are wild but understandable.  Maybe not relatable, but it could make some kind of sense.  The shepherds are told to go to a city and find a baby in a manger, which has to be something they’ve never seen before because nobody has seen that before (or since).  But they know what a baby looks like, and they know what a manger is.  The message is just weird enough to motivate your curiosity, and just familiar enough that you can’t possibly blow it off as “that’s ridiculous, I don’t even know what that is, I could never find such a thing.” 

And the message is not complete until the action is taken, until the instructions are followed—get a message from an angel and then actually GO.  Get a message from the Holy Spirit and then follow up and check out that story with someone else. 

It’s not for nothing—God is working this way very much on purpose.  Because when you get a weird message from the Holy Spirit, it’s so easy to think, “Maybe I imagined this,” and fall into self-doubt.  Or self-diagnosis: what if I’m crazy?  Or overthinking: couldn’t be me.  Or fear of what comes next: what if I follow these instructions and something bad happens to me?  Better to be safe and just stay put and do nothing. 

But if that’s where you land, watch out, because the Holy Spirit is an expert at chasing people down.  The Holy Spirit will make you miserable until you complete the task given to you to do, or deliver the message given to you to deliver, or simply speak the truth that has been revealed to you. 

Because you have a piece of the puzzle and also it’s not all about you: your piece won’t make sense until you join it with the other pieces, and conversely, your piece will help someone else make sense of their own piece.  And if you and your piece are missing, well, then the puzzle can never be complete. 

This is one reason why I believe we really do need each other.  We need each other’s perspectives and each other’s stories and life experiences so that we can connect and make sense of our own life and somewhere in the mess of it all, in the discernment and conversation and sometimes patient waiting for revelation, we are piecing God’s purpose together. 

This is what baptism does—makes us a family, bringing individuals together as brothers and sisters and siblings of one another.  Baptism is one thing Jesus did that we still follow, unlike putting babies in animals’ feed troughs. 

So if you can’t make sense of what God is doing, trade stories with someone else.  Maybe you’re asking yourself, “Is a feed trough a weird place to put my baby?” but then someone else waltzes in, saying “Oh my gosh!  Baby in a feed trough!  This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!”  And sure, anyone who overhears this conversation will wonder about it, so if you’re the one witnessing the weird stuff, go ahead and ask questions about it.  The answers you get will be fascinating, even if the story isn’t altogether logical or sensible. 

Epiphany means revelation of God.  Epiphany is the “aha” moment when God becomes visible and makes some kind of sense of whatever is going on.  For us in the church—even those of us asking “What am I even doing here?”—we have this whole season of Epiphany during which we read the parts of Scripture to make sense of Christmas, to put the pieces together to shine light on what God is doing. 

Seriously, a baby in a manger?  I mean, it’s tragic, but also that hasn’t happened in about two thousand years, so it’s like they say: tragedy plus time equals what?  Comedy. 

There’s a pastor, Pedro Senhorinha Silva, who finds the humor in God’s story.  He writes, “What if the comedic arc of ‘tragedy plus time’ isn’t just a human invention but a formula imprinted int our world from the very beginning?  Perhaps it’s a mark of grace that God invites us to navigate when we are losing ourselves in chaos.”[1]

Pastor Silva notices the comedy in the Christmas story, a moment “wrought with spiritual, historical, and political tension.”  At the time Jesus arrived, people were waiting for a political Messiah, a “triumphant leader sweeping into power to liberate God’s people from oppression.”  Pastor Silva writes, in Sojourners magazine, that

“God employs what comics call ‘misdirection.’  While the audience’s gaze is on the presidential palace, eagerly awaiting the transition team of the ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,’ across town, something funny is happening.  God’s actual messiah is emerging hidden from view, off the political stage.  …The scene is so unexpected that it’s laughable…a reminder that God’s ways are hidden from the powerful and revealed to those on the edges.” 

Pastor Silva notices that throughout Scriptures, God makes jokes of those ‘unrighteous governments and abusive power systems” because only God has true power.  Even though it occasionally looks like evil has the upper hand, such as on Good Friday, Pastor Silva writes:

“God delivers that ultimate comedic surprise on Easter morning.  Apparently, death did not have the last word.  …The practice and promise of resurrection helps us cope with the in-between times.  When we give our very real tragedy and disaster over to God’s time and loving gaze, God’s comedic arc in history shines through.  Resurrection is the punchline.”

We may be nervous or even scared in this coming year, with some very unfunny realities.  But we follow a Savior who started out life in an animal trough, ended his life on a cross, and rose again to eternal life, to deconstruct the joke that is power.  Resurrection is the punchline, and all of us have our own part to tell. 

Amen. 

Pastor Cheryl

[1] Sojourners magazine article page 14.

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