Friday, December 16, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
A classical Christmas pageant
Observe what is right, do what is just, for my salvation is about to come.
Anna narrated the Christmas story, and Erin held the baby. Both very tall, both in the upper grades of Austin Classical School, they carried themselves well in their Galilean robes. One of their classmates wore a helmet with a candle shining above it. He was the angel.
Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. You will conceive in your womb and bear a song, and you shall name him Jesus.
Erin looked bewildered. What was happening?
Mary was greatly troubled, much perplexed at what was said. How can this be?
In that moment Mary, and perhaps Erin too as she felt the presence of Mary in her part on stage, knew what Debie Thomas called “bewilderment.”
Like Mary, I was raised with a fairly precise and comprehensive picture of who God is and how God operates in the world. If anyone had asked me to describe God when I was fifteen, twenty, or thirty years old, I would have rattled off a list of divine attributes as readily as a kindergartner recites the alphabet: “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. God is Three and God is One. God is holy, perfect, loving, righteous, merciful, just, and sovereign.”. . . What an interesting shock reality has been. Who knew that my life with God would actually be one long goodbye? That to know God is to unknow God? To shed my neat conceptions of the divine like so many old snakeskins and emerge into the world bare, vulnerable, and new, again and again?
Anna and Erin’s (as well as Miles’ and Jasper’s) classical education hinges on three learning stages which are called the Trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. Obtaining knowledge and facts (grammar), arranging facts into organized arguments (logic), and communicating arguments to others (rhetoric) teaches them to think for themselves. Questioning what they hear while respecting those who teach them becomes a way of life.
On stage, Mary asks Gabriel about his words. She listens, she accepts. But the few words in Luke 1 don’t say much about what comes between:
In the aftermath of Gabriel’s announcement, Mary must consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites—that beyond all the easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment.
Debie is describing her own life, and Mary’s, and ours. She knows none of us want a faith that is rigid or stale.
It’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.
She quotes from the memoir of one of her favorite poets, Christian Wiman, who cautions her not to be afraid.
Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change.
When I think of Luke’s Christmas story I especially remember how Luke describes Mary after things have quieted down a bit:
Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart (Luke 2:19).
Thousands of years have passed, and still we ponder this verse – sit with Mary and her baby,  reflect on her thoughts, wonder about the way she learned to be with God. And of course, I want to learn that too, to be with God, not to be a “foreigner” but one of his children, living in his house.
For my house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples. O God, let all the nations praise you. Let your face shine upon us. May your way be known upon all the earth.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
