There’s an old
joke about two fish swimming around. One fish says to the other, just to make
conversation, “How’s the water?” and the other says, “What the heck is water?” The
point of the joke is that fish don’t know what water is because water is all
they know. And also because they’re not that smart.
It’s a dumb
joke. But it has a larger point, too, which is that we can become blind to what
surrounds us. The water we swim in comes to feel normal, because it is normal for
us, even if others might think it very strange. It’s helpful to get an
outsider’s view now and then.
And that is true
for the scriptures as much as for anything. When the stories we read in
scripture feel perfectly normal we have probably lost sight of what they
actually say.
Take these three
wise men. In so many crèche scenes, I have some trouble discerning who is who,
because they all look alike. Usually Mary and the angel resemble each other
quite a bit, so I look for the wings. Angels have them, Mary doesn’t. It’s
peculiar, actually, that the angel always seems to be a woman, because I can recall no female angels described in the Bible. This one’s name is Gabriel – not
Gabriella. So, there is one oddity we have gotten so accustomed to we never
even notice it.
And all the men tend
to look alike: the shepherds, the wise men, and Joseph. Sometimes the shepherd
has a sheep on his person – either wrapped around his legs or carried over his shoulder
– so that helps. With the wise men, I look for the gifts. Guys who are
carrying packages are wise men. And Joseph? Well, whoever is left over must be
Joseph.
The point is
this: we have homogenized all these characters. We have whitewashed them so
they all look the same. It seems an odd thing to do, and I have to wonder why
we do it.
I read an
article recently about what it is to be a Midwesterner, and the author said it
is very much about being ordinary, being normal. We are, in the Midwest, the
definition of normal. And this also means, the author added, that anything threatening
to that normality, anything unusual, will often be repressed, because it
threatens our self-image. Something similar seems to happen in religion, too. We
decide what is normal, what is acceptable, what is – to use the religious word
for it – orthodox, and then we make sure everything conforms to it.
The problem with
this normality is that we don’t see what is right in front of our faces
sometimes. Look at Matthew’s gospel.
Who among us has
carefully read the first chapter of Matthew. You would not be alone if you
admitted that you haven’t. It’s a genealogy. Yawn. Everyone skips over the
genealogies, the same way we skip over the long tedious lists of ordinances in
Leviticus and Deuteronomy. These things are not really part of the story – except
that they are.
If you have read
Matthew’s genealogy carefully then you know that there are a few women
included, which in itself is weird; but the women he chose to include make it
even weirder. Matthew’s genealogy includes the names of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and
a fourth woman who is not actually named. But it’s not hard to figure out who
she is; her name is Bathsheba.
What is weird
about the inclusion of these women is that not one of them was an ordinary,
respectable, Jewish housewife. Each one of them had a story that most families
would try to closet away; these are the relatives families don’t talk about. Take
Tamar: for the purpose of tricking her father-in-law into impregnating her,
Tamar pretended to be a prostitute. You heard me right. Rahab didn’t have to
pretend. Ruth came dangerously close to becoming one. And Bathsheba – she
wasn’t a prostitute, but this wasn’t a bedtime story she told her children.
So that’s
chapter one of Matthew’s gospel. All these women were part of Jesus’ family tree.
And then in chapter two, things get even weirder.
After Jesus was
born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men came from the East. They were not kings,
even though we often call them kings. They were Wise Men. Magi. Men who
practiced magic, which was definitely not kosher. They were not Jews, they were
not even close. Sources say they were probably from Baghdad, or thereabouts. They
were men who swam in very different waters than the people of Judea. What are
they doing here now?
The preacher
Debbie Blue says we ought to sneak characters like Bart Simpson figures into
our crèches. We ought to put an odd Batman action figure or a Barbie doll in
there with the holy family. Because, if we did people would say, “what are they
doing there?” As we should be asking about the magi. What are they doing there?
Maybe they are
here because only a foreigner could see what was going on.
It’s a classic
case of being too close to something to even see it for what it is. The people
surrounding Mary and Joseph had no clue, apparently, that the Son of God was in
their midst. It took these men who were foreign in every way to recognize him.
These men from faraway lands were closer to the Christ than anyone around him
was.
And that’s the
way the story unfolded. It is a story of the people closest to Jesus having the
most trouble understanding who he was. It’s a story of being rejected in his
own hometown, rejected by the authorities of his own religion, being rejected
by the very ones who had been waiting for him. And in fact, this is a pattern
that continues even now.
It is often
those who claim the most familiarity who have the most difficulty really seeing
Jesus. The ones who claim the most knowledge of the gospel might have the most
trouble hearing it. It has become too commonplace, too ordinary, too normal. We
have too much invested in our interpretation of it. If the gospel of Jesus
Christ stops seeming strange to you, you had better be concerned. You might be
losing your ability to find your way to Jesus.
These wise men –
and actually, who knows how many there were? We always say there were three
just because they brought three gifts – these men were as strange as strange
could be to the land and people of Judea, yet they found him. They didn’t know
their way around and they had to stop and ask for directions from Herod – of
all people! But they kept at it, diligently following the star in that peculiar
way of theirs, and they found him.
Of course, this
was months later and he was no longer a newborn lying in a manger. Mary and
Joseph were living in a house, probably with some of Joseph’s family. And these
wise men probably looked very strange riding into town on their camels. I
wonder what the neighbors thought of them.
Here is the
thing: these men who were complete outsiders found their way to Jesus. They
used methods that the residents of Bethlehem would have considered blasphemous.
They are not believers in this God of Israel. They just know that the divine
has broken through into our world, and they care enough about it to put their
lives on hold, put themselves at risk, and travel this long journey to a
distant and foreign land to pay him homage.
Everything about
them was wrong, yet they were the ones who found him. Do you see how strange it
is?
My hope is that
we, the church, will wander away from what is normal, what is acceptable, what
is orthodox, for the sake of finding the Christ in our world. My hope is that
we will open our eyes this Epiphany – a word that just means illumination or
insight, revelation perhaps – and see the danger of hewing too close to the
standard, the conventional, the normal. My hope is that we will wake up and see
that God is guiding us, by a star or a dream or whatever it might be, to
something different than what we expect. My hope is that we will, like the wise
men, hear God leading us – warning us – to go a different way, to make a new
path, to never, ever stop seeking, finding our way to Jesus.
photo: Kokopelli? What's he doing there???
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