Walking For Wisdom

Last year about this time a movie came out that seemed like it was a pretty far-fetched science fiction movie. Children of Men was set in Britain in 2027, just about two decades from now. But things in this Britain of the future are falling apart. The movie imagines what would happen if the world stopped having children. This is caused by a worldwide epidemic of infertility that nobody can seem to explain. When the movie opens this has been going on for 18 years and the youngest person on earth, a teenager by the name of Baby Diego, has just died in a barroom fight.

Things had been going badly already, though. As things collapsed in poorer parts of the world, people were struggling to get into richer countries like Britain and there is a huge battle by the government to keep out and to detain the African and East European immigrants. There are running battles between rebels and nationalist groups. In the midst of it, though, it is discovered that one of the young African immigrants is pregnant. The drama of the movie is all about how a disillusioned government bureaucrat named Theo, (the Greek word for God), helps a rebel group named the Fishes (seeing any Christian parallels here?) get the pregnant woman to the coast to establish new hope for the human race. And, of course, this being Hollywood, there are car chases and explosions along the way, but that’s the heart of the story: a child disrupting the world and yet by its very promise offering salvation to a dying race.

You know, we have been spending a lot of time these past few weeks talking about children and the disruption they cause here in church. A few weeks ago we talked about Joseph and what the birth of Jesus was like for him. Last week we talked about the horrible story of the slaughter of the innocents. And today we’re going to go back into Matthew one more time to get a prequel to that story – the tale of the Wise Men coming to meet with King Herod on their way to find the Baby Jesus. But before we go into that story I think we may want to stop and think about how close we are to that dystopia that the movie Children of Men portrays. And I want to make a theological affirmation.

The truth of the matter is that we can imagine a world like the one in that movie because it is uncomfortably like the world that we’re in. We feel like we’re living on the edge of extinction, too. Events of recent years have taught all over again, as if it weren’t always true, that the way things are is not the way it will always be. Skyscrapers will fall to the ground. Nations will break apart. Brothers and sisters will go to war with one another. Neighbors will sell one another into slavery. Democracies will falter and politics will fail. Families will be torn by abuse and violence and neglect. Sea levels will rise. New Orleans will sink beneath the Gulf. Polar ice caps will melt. Sanjaya will win American Idol. Or not. At least some catastrophes have been averted. But the point is that things are changing and we’re not too sure that ANYTHING, even the ground beneath our Eastern Shore feet, is permanent.

One response to all this is a perverse fascination with what the world would be like if we WEREN’T here. The world is overpopulated? We’re having trouble feeding all those mouths? We’re facing environmental catastrophe? Well, maybe the answer is that we shouldn’t be here.
One of the most popular books of this last year is one called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Weisman talks about what would happen to the earth if we suddenly disappeared – if there were no more humans. As he tells it, there would be some huge events. Nuclear reactors would melt down into radioactive blobs and petrochemical plants would eventually blow up spectacularly. The New York City Subway, without pumps to prevent it, would fill with water within two days. Lexington Avenue would be a river. But most of the changes would be more gradual as nature reclaimed the human landscape.[i] As Weisman tells it, it would be beautiful. Birds would sing. Rivers would flow unpolluted. You should see what the world looks like without us. Only you can’t.

We’re not likely to disappear so quietly or so quickly, but we do exhibit a worrying tendency to talk about ourselves as an invasive species rather than as children of God. Don’t get me wrong. We’ve made a mess of things and there’s a lot to clean up. We don’t exactly live in harmony with the rest of creation and we should beg forgiveness for the way that the environment has suffered because of our shortsightedness and hubris, but the answer is not to listen to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which claims that we should all just refuse to have any more kids. After all, children are a bother. They take a lot of resources to support. They interrupt our work lives. Our love lives. Our plans.

A recent news report talked about how in some European countries like Italy, the birthrate is half of the death rate. The population is not even replacing itself. The government is paying people to have children and they aren’t having children. One 27-year-old woman in Genoa said, “Kids are not important - the priority has to be to have a steady job and make a living, to give yourself some security.” On the playgrounds you see more old people than children playing.[ii]

What is it about this developed world that we live in that sees children as a threat? What are we fearful of? Most of the abortions we see can be traced to a fundamental fear of how much children will change our lives. We assume that it cannot be for the good. But what is sadder to imagine than a playground on which there are no children’s voices?

So here’s my theological affirmation – God saves us through children. Though the world is always only generation, one day away from losing everything that is not the narrative we should be telling ourselves. God’s narrative says that we are always only one birth away from changing the world.

Which, of course, is what scared the dickens out of King Herod. I was a little rough on Herod last week. I called him out. Told him to take his best shot. Told him that he was pretty toothless and pretty powerless as a rival to Jesus. Questioned his manhood. But when you think about it, Herod was caught up in a political system that made him like he was. He was a puppet of the Roman Empire who was called King of the Jews, but he didn’t have any real authority of his own. It was given to him by Rome and Rome could just as easily make somebody else King of the Jews. It wasn’t given to him by the people who were always ambivalent about their so-called rulers. Herod was perched on a pretty precarious throne.

So how do you THINK he felt when these foreign astrologers appear out of nowhere from the eastern horizon and come to ask him where the King of the Jews was? If I were Herod, I would have said, “The King of the Jews? You’re looking at him! What do you mean you saw a star leading you to somebody else? What do you mean it’s a baby?” Talk about a child causing a ruckus! Herod was shaking in his sandals.

Matthew tells us that Herod the King (he makes a point of telling us that it was Herod THE KING) was stirred up by what he heard from the magi. And not only him but the whole city of Jerusalem because when the king ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. So Herod did what people in power do when there’s a scandal brewing – he appointed a blue ribbon panel as a study commission. He called in the chief priests and the scribes and let them answer these impertinent foreigners.

Now to their credit, the chief priests and scribes of the Law don’t cover over the fact that Herod was not the Messiah. Even though they will be Jesus’ biggest opponents at the end of the gospel story, they are able to read the scriptures and to understand that the promised one was to be born in Bethlehem of Judah, about six miles from Jerusalem.

Herod called the magi in secretly to tell them the news and to find out a little more about this star. He decides to do something else that people in power often do. He tries to co-opt them for his interests. Tries to make them his agents. He sends them on to Bethlehem to do the searching he personally wants to do. Then he tells them, “As soon as you find him, come back and tell me where he is so that I can go worship him.” Of course, as we know from last week’s story, that’s not what he intends to do at all. Herod is scared to death of this child, this rival, and he wants to put him to death. But also, as we know from last week, he doesn’t have a chance of succeeding.

You see, what the magi see that Herod can’t see, is that this child that scares him is the source of salvation, even for Herod. Who are these crazy magi that show up in our nativity sets with their strange, vaguely inappropriate gifts? Surely Mary would have appreciated a few more Pampers and a little less incense. What is that they see? What are they trying to tell us by showing up like they do? Why do they cross deserts following a star? Why are they so darn joyful? Why can’t they just be afraid and anxious like everybody else living in these troubled times? Why can’t they admit that things are not looking so great? Home sales in Judah are at a record low. The religious leaders are corrupt. Civil liberties are being curtailed. Terrorists are threatening. They’re crucifying people left and right. What’s with their giddiness? What’s with their gifts? What’s with their joy? They’re not even from around here! What have come here’s got to tell US about our salvation?

What the wise men see, what gives them joy, what sends them off walking for enlightenment, what makes them wise is that they can see that the things that trouble us, that are at risk, that are so vulnerable to the worst that the world can do are the very source of our strength. They can see that this child will save us…that this event on the margins of history will transform the world. They can see that there are journeys still to take and places still to go for God’s people. Even though God’s people themselves couldn’t see it, they could see that God still wanted to change the world…that God was not going to let the death-dealing powers of this world define the life God has to give…that the dreams of the old and the visions of the young would not be lost…that the hope of the ages and the light of the nations would yet come…and a little child would lead them.

Which brings me to us…the people of God in Franktown Church this day. I look around at the churches around us…at the community around us…and I fear we may one day be as barren as those swing sets in Italy blowing in the wind.

You know that one of my roles, that I will soon be shedding, is as the chair of a committee in our conference looking at the culture of the call. From that perch I see a church in which less than 5% of our clergy are under the age of 35. Less than 5%. It’s a symptom of something gone wrong. Partly is a result of our failure to present the call to ministry to our young people. Partly it is a result of our failure to have young people! As Elizabeth Mitchell Clement put it when she was talking to me while she was here last month, we have a fear of reproducing. And for the church, as for the human race, when we are afraid of reproducing ourselves it means that we have lost faith in the present as a life-giving experience of God’s presence…we have lost faith in the past as a tradition and a story worth passing on…we have lost faith in the future as a time when God will bring to completion the work begun in Jesus Christ…we have lost faith in God when we stop producing new Christians! And here I’m not just talking about having babies…I’m talking about our work of being a place that regularly gives birth to new Christians through that baptismal font.

This is a work for the whole church. God still wants to change the world and God is still using our children to do that. Nothing gives me more energy and hope than being with our youth and young adults who persevere in searching for meaning even when they live in the cesspools of cynicism that our culture produces. They look for deep answers and reasons to hope even when the school system they’re a part of us is underfunded and troubled and torn apart by the sinful chasm of racial misunderstandings. We cannot fail these children who are around us, who will lead us, who need us to give an account for the hope that is within us. If we fail them, we fail ourselves and we fail this gospel message to which we give lip service. Because God will change the world. God will not fail to be faithful. God will not abandon these children. How dare we do that! God wants everybody on board but God doesn’t want bystanders or cheerleaders, God needs participants who will give themselves to the work of bringing forth life.

King Herod is dead. But there are still wise men and women among us who see what God is up to and who are calling us to recognize what is already among us. Jesus is here. We see it in the world around us. We see it in the faces around us. We see it in the faces of our children. What are we going to do?

Go forth and multiply. Thanks be to God.

Matthew 2:1-12
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King. Look, magi from the eastern horizon came to Jerusalem. They asked, “Where is the one born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star rising in the east and we have come to worship him.”
When Herod heard this he was stirred up and all Jerusalem as well. He called together all the chief priests and scribes of the law and inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judah, for this is written by the prophets: ‘And you, Bethlehem, of the land of Judea are by no means least among the leaders of Judah. For out of you will come a leader who will shepherd my people Israel.’”
Then Herod called the magi secretly to determine from them exactly the time when the star had appeared. As he sent them on the Bethlehem he said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report back to me, so that I also can come to worship him.”
When they heard the king, they went, and look, the star, which they had seen in the east, led them until it came and stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. When they came into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They fell down to worship him and they opened their treasure boxes to offer him gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.
After receiving instruction in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed by another way to their own land.

[i] Review by Jennifer Scheussler, ‘Starting Over,’ New York Times Sunday Book Review, 2 Sept. 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/books/review/Schuessler-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[ii] Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Empty Playgrounds in an Aging Italy,” International Herald Tribune, 5 Sept. 2006, http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/04/news/birth2.php