Jan. 2 sermon by Michelle
There is an old saying among preachers - voiced by no less than Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury - that priests should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The idea is that the eternal Good News should relate to the news of our day. That certainly seemed good approach this week, as we pondered these readings. And, so, on Tuesday, when the Church commemorated the Slaughter of the Innocents, which we hear about in today's Gospel, I went to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to see how a story of children being killed by those in authority, or families fleeing government violence might be relevant to us in the twentieth century.
Well, I didn't have to look very far. Right there, on the front page, in fact, was the screaming headline and pictures of the full cover story. The tragic tale of the detonation of the Greenfield Bridge.
You thought I was going to talk about something else, didn't you? Don’t worry. We’ll get to that. First, let’s look at the Gospel.
One may wonder why we read this story at all during the Christmas season. After all, it does not seem very joyous, or very uplifting. As a Church, we told people for weeks and weeks that they should not be joyous - that they should wait and prepare for Christ to come. Then we said, we would be glad, and celebrate the arrival of Emmanuel - God with us.
Well, we are in the midst of the Christmas season now, Church, but God doesn't seem to be with us. Sure, there's that baby, right there in the Gospel. But he's not doing much of anything. He's just lying there, while the rest of his generation falls victim to a brutal massacre. What kind of god does that?
Even the hero of the story leaves something to be desired, right? Joseph is warned in a dream that something bad will happen - does he tell anyone else? Does he arm his community to prepare to fight? No, he flees under cover of darkness with his wife and baby. It's not a heroic move.
Except that it is.
For Joseph to pick up his family and move took courage, to risk his life on behalf of others. To protect them. To willingly go slowly enough to match the pace of a young woman and an infant or toddler, to carry the baby from time to time, to stop whenever Jesus needed to eat or to sleep. To go through strange communities, and risk being stopped by the authorities, or by bandits on the way. To go in open defiance of the emperor. And to have to settle into a strange community, where he didn't speak the language, had no friends or relations, and no contacts to speak of. To live in this strange country for several years, trying to find a way to make a living, to support himself and his family. The fact is, Joseph would have been safer, perhaps, if he had just stayed at home as the Roman soldiers rampaged through Judea.
God chose Joseph because of his bravery, and Joseph played an important role in the Gospel story. Because without Joseph, we would have no story. Joseph not only risked his life to save Jesus, but he stayed connected with his own community, even during his exile, and tried to figure out when it was safe to return. Without that trip back, Jesus would not have grown up in Judea, and felt the hurt of his people.
By now, you may have caught some parallels between this story, and other stories we've seen in the newspapers over the last weeks and months. Perhaps most particularly, you are thinking of the countless refugees who have been fleeing violence in Syria in the last year, as well as people fleeing other oppressive regimes in places like Myanmar, Bhutan, or North Korea. You may well be waiting for me to make that obvious connection, or to point out that Jesus was a refugee, that Abraham wandered through the desert, and that through both of them, God commanded us to welcome the stranger. And so, next week, St. Paul’s will do a special collection for Episcopal Migration Ministries – which helps resettle refugees, finds them homes and jobs and all the things Joseph needed, and found, in his own journey. But that’s not the parallel we’re talking about today.
Or, perhaps you have thought of a different parallel. On Tuesday, my Facebook feed was filled with people making the connection between the slaughter of the innocents, and the acquittal of a policeman in Cleveland, who shot an innocent black child in the back four times, and left him to die. Others pointed out that we as a country lose more children – proportionally – to handguns than any other country in the world. But those are different issues, and I’m not going to talk about them today.
But, as I said, I'm going to talk about the Greenfield Bridge, the headline story on Tuesday, when the Church marked the feast of the Holy Innocents. Because that bridge can inform our understanding of the Gospel, and it holds some valuable lessons for us.
The first is a lesson in humility. Those who have been in Pittsburgh for a while may remember a bit of the history of the Greenfield Bridge. In particular, I can remember a time, probably about 20 or 25 years ago, when the Bridge had been renovated at great expense. It was probably an overdue renovation, because the bridge must have been over 70 at the time.
Shortly after the renovation, chunks of concrete began to fall from the bridge onto the cars and the parkway below. People were terrified, needless to say. And, throughout the media, the City of Pittsburgh put out a call to catch the teenagers who had been throwing chunks of concrete from the bridge. Teenagers, who apparently had been lugging twenty-to-fifty pound chunks of concrete to the center of the bridge, lifting them over the guard rails, and throwing them to the ground. Someone must have seen them, authorities figured. Because it was impossible that someone could do such a thing unnoticed. And it was even more impossible that - you know - the chunks of concrete had actually fallen off the newly renovated bridge.
It is tempting, in times of difficulty, to try to put the blame on someone else. That's especially true if it saves face, or saves effort. In looking for unknown teenagers, the City of Pittsburgh managed to avoid - for a time - the humiliating reality that their renovation did not actually improve the structural integrity of the bridge. And, of course, it saved them the cost and effort of inspecting the bridge, and making it safe again. Of course, by doing so, the bridge situation was more dangerous for longer.
When warned in a dream about the danger about to befall his family, Joseph did not spend time berating the Emperor. He did what he could, to make his situation safe. He did not - it's worth noting - respond with more violence. He took the high road, as it were. He became a refugee, fleeing for his safety, but not a fugitive, someone who had done something wrong. He left the door open to the future.
Which leads to the second lesson of the Greenfield Bridge. Perhaps not surprisingly, the community of Greenfield, in particular the business district, has been concerned about the closing and now the destruction of the bridge. It connected their community to the rest of the city; without it, people are worried that the community will suffer. Which is why people are working to rebuild that connection as soon as it is safe.
The same, interestingly, is true of Joseph. He fled for as long as he needed to, but after that, he came back to Nazareth. Back to the same troubled community, with the same problems as before. Jesus, likewise, spent much of his life making connections, building bridges, between those in trouble and the healing love of God.
Now, we in Pittsburgh are not keen on crossing bridges, let alone building them. We are often a little too happy staying in our own communities, with our own people, where we think we are safe. We are a little too happy, also, thinking that society's problems are not ours. We get uncomfortable when preachers in sermons ask us difficult questions - like - if Joseph had brought Jesus to the South Hills, would our community have welcomed those refugees? or if we had seen soldiers killing babies - babies that didn't look like us, but babies nonetheless - would we have stopped them, or helped them flee?
The fact is, God was in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, but that didn't stop Herod from choosing to do evil. It did mean that God used Joseph, a man of mature faith, to help bring about a part of the Kingdom, and to stay connected with the places that were hurting so that God could bring healing to them.
God is with us now. But, that also doesn't stop people from choosing to do evil. And, it makes it all the more urgent that we choose the good, recognize our own shortcomings, and stay connected to the places where people are hurting, to help bring healing into the world.
Our collect this morning reminds us that God created human life with dignity, and restored that dignity through Jesus. But it also invites us to share in that life, and to be witnesses to that transformation. And to do that, we have to stay connected, like Joseph. And when those connections are destroyed, we need to prepare to rebuild them. Like the Greenfield Bridge. And more importantly, whose life was spent connecting God to people who were sure that God had no love for them. Can’t we reach out, to show them something different?
Tags: Clergy Voices