“Making America Great Again”   Advent 4    December 18, 2016   

Community Christian Church

Roger Ray, pastor   

click here to see the video

Matthew 1:18-25     Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ ²²All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

²³ ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’ ²⁴When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

This was a big week for Star Wars fans. The release of Rogue One jumps the story line of the seven existing Star Wars sagas and slips one in sort of between the chapters. It purports to tell the story of the brave and heroic rebels who managed to steal the plans to the Empire’s Death Star, the plans that Princes Lea hid in R2D2 in the movie released in 1977.

Of course, other than some basement dwelling perpetually virgin nerds, everyone knows that this movie is not about real people or real events. Science fiction goes beyond mere fiction. Science fiction typically doesn’t just tell an imaginary story about something that didn’t, or hasn’t happened. Science fiction, such as Rogue One, tells a fantastic story about something that really any rational person would realize cannot happen.

And yet, I was there on opening night and, if you promise not to think less of me, I’ll probably go again this week. The point of such a movie is not to inform.

It doesn’t teach you any facts about history, or science, and, arguably, I would have to admit that it isn’t even very good literature. But I go because it is a story about a handful of people who find the courage to fight against the overwhelming power of an empire. And, of course, as can only happen in the movies, even though most of the heroes die in the process of accomplishing their goal, they are victorious.

I spoke to my friend Manar Shabouk just before I went to the movies. Manar is a refugee from Aleppo who is now teaching Arabic in New York. I have thought of her every day this week as the Syrian government finished the horror of their genocide in her home city, even shooting at ambulances and school buses that were attempting to escape the final destruction of that once great city.

I said, “I wish you could come see the movie with me. At least in the theater a few good people can beat an evil Empire.” She replied, “Good people beat tyrants and dictators every day. We will eventually win.”

I don’t know though. One day David slew Goliath but most days Goliath enjoys a David sandwich without much trouble. Which, of course, is why we tell stories like the story of David and Goliath, that is why we watch movies like Rogue One. We tell stories to inspire hope, hope that has courage even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

The stories we always read in churches this time of year about the birth of Jesus are stories of the David and Goliath sort… and, when it comes down to magical stars that lead a band of astrologers, or choirs of winged angels singing up above the earth, then they come close to the beyond fiction sort of narrative we see in Rogue One. Because they are not just fictional, they are stories that include elements of the impossible which, as I said about the Star Wars movies, could only possibly be taken seriously by the same sort of basement dwelling, perpetually virgin, sorts who take both the implausible and the impossible literally.

If you try to make Luke’s version of Christmas to fit with Matthew’s version you lose all credibility just before you lose your mind. In a reverse Dragnet, In Matthew and Luke, only the names of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are preserved, but the facts are all messed up. In Matthew, the holy family lives in a house in Bethlehem and only resettle to Nazareth under threat of the new ruler of the Empire. Only Matthew talks about the star and the wise men and the flight to Egypt. Only Luke talks about the census, the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem and giving birth in a stable. Only Luke knows about the shepherds and the angels.

They tell two completely different stories that cannot be in any way accurately depicted in a manger scene. However, the stories can be put together in one sense and that is that they are both stories intended to give hope in the face of overwhelming odds.

The only way to miss the hopeful, even radical message hidden within the Christmas story is to try to take it literally as if it was describing history. It is better if we just would take them like a couple of fiction movies…. Don’t try to make yourself believe that Jesus was really born in Bethlehem to a virgin mother, just sit back and listen to the story.

Both of the birth narratives look like they were artificially added onto their respective gospel hosts as an afterthought. The elements of the stories do not appear anywhere else in either Matthew or Luke and we have a pretty good version of the proto-Luke that Marcion had which did not have a Christmas story in it.

These were sermons, concocted out of someone’s imagination to give an introduction to the gospels, to prop up Jesus’ resume’ a bit, and to give the readers a little bit of hope during a very dark time in their history.

The story is set in a tiny nation that has just lately become a part of the ever expanding Roman Empire. People were being enslaved in the public works projects of building roads, sewers, aqueducts, coliseums and public buildings. All of which also cost a lot of money. People were taxed into poverty. What middle class that may have once existed had joined the ranks of the always-nervous poor who perpetually stand at the edge of extinction.

The emperor had appointed one of the really paranoid Herods to rule over the region… a man whose ego was trumped only by his self destructive paranoia….any of this sounding familiar?

They had enjoyed a time of self-rule. A time of rebuilding family businesses, growing a family farm. But that time had come to a sudden end and there was not much light on the horizon…no credible reason to believe that things could get better anytime in the foreseeable future.

For years we have talked about where we were on the morning of 9-11.

We all remember where we were when the Challenger blew up. Most of us here have at least faint memory of the day that John Kennedy was assassinated. Now we all have an election-day memory to talk about. I was scuba diving in Belize. I went to bed with absolute certainty that Clinton would win the election in a land slide and awoke to the awful news that the man who wants to deport millions of Hispanics, who sexually assaults women, who wants to ban Muslims from our nation, who insults and stereotypes black people, who wants to take away the rights of gay couples and the right women have to manage their own reproductive lives… all under the banner of “make America great again,”….. we’ll be telling that story for a while.

And in the month since we awoke to this awful news, have you wanted to just shrug and give up? Having lost so much of what we had thought were a lifetime of moral progress won through years of advocacy, protest, demonstrations, voting, donating, door-knocking…. How does Darth Vader, I mean, Donald Trump get to drag our nation back into segregation, into homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia? It makes me feel tired to think about it.

In the movies hope comes with superheroes with super powers…. It is the X Men, the Avengers, it is Superman or Batman, it is Dr. Strange or Luke Skywalker.

In the Christmas story, it is the opposite of all of that. The hope comes in the form of a baby. In Matthew, it is a baby the Empire wants to kill but in both Matthew and Luke, it is a baby that draws the poor to his side, who brings foreigners, people from other and strange religions, the powerless and dispossessed. In Luke the baby inspires his mother to sing about how the mighty have been cast down from their thrones and how the lowly have been lifted up. She sings about how the rich have been sent empty away and the chronically poor and hungry have been filled.

The story closes with Herod still on the throne, with Cesar still in Rome, with all of the darkness of the Empire still all around them… but there is this baby… this reason to believe in the future.

You know how I love that Bruce Cockburn song, Lovers in a Dangerous Time, where he says, “we have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.” Against everything in us that is tired and despondent, that wants to give up, we have to look for the little ways in which we can kick at the darkness.

I can only comfort my friend who has survived the fall of Aleppo until Aleppo can rise from the ashes again. I cannot stop the pipeline in North Dakota but I can take food, firewood, hats and gloves, and some hope to the camp at Standing Rock and shiver for a few days in the cold with my native brothers and sisters.

Those of you here already know about this but for our internet audience, let me tell you that we have a teacher in our church, Holly Ketchum, who has proposed to publish a children’s book about what really makes America great. Holly and David have taught in Russia. They have done relief work in Cambodia.

They have put their very souls into living with conscience and now, with the prospect of seeing so much hate and prejudice spread across our country, Holly has proposed to write a children’s book about inclusion of people of different sexual orientations, different abilities, different races and religions and to hire illustrators from among these marginalized communities to create the pictures for the book.

Because, what makes America great is when we can welcome a Syrian refugee; when we can help an undocumented worker to get their documents. What makes America great is when we can meet people who speak another language, who practice a different religion, who even love and create family differently, and rather than reject them, we include them, embrace them, and try to learn from them.

I don’t want to offend any of our international listeners but I have to say this, Americans have lead the world in sciences, in invention, medical research, in engineering, computer sciences, and our universities are the envy of the world. Even our music, our movies, our literature are all just amazing because, specifically because… these things are only true, because of our diversity. White protestants have contributed a lot to the modern world but you wouldn’t want to live here without the contributions of Jewish scientists, composers, directors. You wouldn’t want to live in a world that hadn’t been changed by Martin Luther King, Jr. Heck, there wouldn’t be a church music program anywhere if even our most conservative churches really did expel all of their gay and lesbian church members.

So I’m committed to helping Holly to raise a few thousand dollars to get this book produced because I want to volunteer to go read in some of our local schools when I can take that book with me. I want to sit on the floor with five and six year old children and engage them in seeing those who are different from them as being the best thing that ever came into their lives.

I want to infuse the coming generation with a kind of moral vision of the future that will make America great. I wish that we could just blow up the death star and go on to the celebration but that isn’t how we win. We win by kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. We lost an election, but I refuse to lose my hope.