Mrs. Turpin was glad that God had made her the right sort of person. It could have been so different. Sure, she was a large woman, overweight, but she was of a good class of people – a ‘home-and-land owner’ with a farm and a husband. There were other people with more money and much bigger houses and more land, but she was not of a lower class and she was grateful for that.
As Flannery O’Connor describes Mrs. Turpin in her short story, “Revelation,” she thought of herself as a proper Southern woman living in the mid-twentieth century. She sometimes thought about what would have happened “if Jesus had said to her before he made her, ‘There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a [black person] or white-trash,’ what would she have said? But she hadn’t had to make that decision and she was feeling very grateful for her position in life. Though she sometimes had dark dreams. When she fell asleep after ranking all the people around her by their class and status, she would have “all the classes of people…moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.” But that was in her sleep. In the light of day she knew her place and the place of everyone around her.
She was sitting in the waiting room for the doctor. Her husband, Claud, had been kicked by a cow in the leg and needed attention. So she sat there, sizing up the other people in the room. There was a “stringy old fellow,” “a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress,” “a lank-faced woman” she considered kind of trashy, a common woman and her dirty child, a pleasant woman that Mrs. Turpin considered her equal, and a young girl scowling at her over the pages of a heavy book titled Human Development. Gospel music was playing. The song was familiar to Mrs. Turpin, “When I looked up and He looked down…and wona these days I know I’ll wear a crown.”
As O’Connor tells the story, we hear more and more of Mrs. Turpin’s judgmental remarks and thoughts. She also becomes more and more disturbed by the girl with the bad disposition who is glaring at her as if she hates her. Finally Mrs. Turpin tells the pleasant lady, who is the girl’s mother, that if there is one thing she is, it’s grateful. “When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!”
With that the girl, whose name is Mary Grace, hurls the book at her, hitting her just over the left eye. Then she attacks Mrs. Turpin, grabbing her around the neck until she is pulled off of her. The doctor comes in and gives Mary Grace a shot to calm her. Mrs. Turpin gets up but something tells her the girl has a message, a revelation, meant for her. She goes to the girl and asks, “What you got to say to me?”
The girl raises her eyes and locks her gaze with Mrs. Turpin. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”
Now Mrs. Turpin’s world is turned upside down. Everything she thought she knew she no longer knows. The order of things that she thought she could trust has been totally rearranged. Back home at the farm she goes out and starts hosing down the concrete of the pig barn she has on the farm, staring at the hogs. She talks to God, “What do you send me a message like that for?...How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell, too?” It’s a shocking turnabout.
John the Baptizer is sitting in prison. Fierce John. We met him last week in our gospel reading when he was out in the desert. Wearing rough, itchy clothes of camel hair. Eating bugs. Shouting at the people who came to see him – religious leaders, soldiers, ordinary people, whoever would come. “Repent,” he said, “for the kingdom of heaven is upon us.” “The ax is at the root of the trees,” he said. “You bunch of snakes,” he said to the Pharisees. “Get ready,” he said, because the Messiah, the savior we have been waiting for, is on the way.
Then he came. Jesus came to John in the desert and it seemed so clear. Here was the one. He was the one. “I ought to be baptized by you,” John said, but Jesus said, “No, let it be so for now.” And John had baptized in the Jordan River.
So it’s very confusing now to see John have such doubt. He’s sitting in prison. He’s wondering what it’s all about. His world is turning upside down. Everything he thought he knew he’s no longer sure of. The order of things he thought he could trust has been totally rearranged. What had he expected? A quick march to Jerusalem? A grand showdown with the powers that be? Another king like the great King David?
John sends word through his disciples to ask, “Are you the Coming One or should we wait for another?” It was that unclear. Even John was beginning to doubt, to look for evidence.
I know you don’t ever have these moments – these moments of doubts. Or do you? Are there times when you wander through the lights and tinsel of this season and wonder if there is some magic yet in this old world? In Advent we light the candles and wait on a Savior as generation upon generation of Christians have done and do we ever wonder why – whether the waiting has been in vain – whether the hopes and fears of all the years will really be met in the coming of Christ again? We make plans for being with family and friends. We tell ourselves that we are going to be happy. We are going to be joyful. We are going to see the promise of God in the land of the living. But we wonder.
We wonder if there can be transformation in this world. We wonder if there is power in this place. We wonder if peace on earth is more than just a sentiment we sing but a possibility. We wonder about the intractable problems of the planet – the wars that never cease, the hatreds that brew, the lives that are lost, the children who suffer, the bereaved who grieve, the marriages that falter, the deep, racial wounds that never seem to heal. We wonder if the savior is coming into this.
Sara Miles is a Christian laywoman in St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. She came to Jesus by stumbling into the church as an adult and receiving a piece of bread from the communion table. “I didn’t know who Jesus was until I tasted him,” she said. But the taste led to a whole new life for her.
She started a food pantry in the church – right there in the sanctuary around the big round communion table that St. Gregory’s had placed in the center of their worship space. The table hit her like the book that slapped into Mrs. Turpin. It led her to see the world in a whole new way. She found that she was changed and that others were changed when they gathered around that table – both for worship and for the Friday food distribution.
When the people of the church saw that they need around them was great, they prayed for an answer. How could they help provide more people the opportunity for food, for bread, for transformation? A lawyer working on a federal case had contacted Sara about being the recipient of a settlement that was to benefit California charities. Even though he was not a believer, he had heard they were doing good things. He went to work on the case and Sara kept praying.
Then, in the midst of their wondering about where God was leading the food pantry, Sara got a letter from the U.S. District Court. A big settlement had come through and they would be receiving $20,000 a year for the next ten years. Sara called Derek, the lawyer. She called to say thanks, but he stopped her and said, “No, thank you, for giving me the chance to do this…I had to go to church when I was a kid, and they kept telling me what to do—sit still, say this, and…and, you know, I didn’t like that. I don’t like being told what to do…
“Now I take my kids to an Episcopal church…really rich, everyone’s very nice, but you just sit there…When I went to your pantry, I saw all the food, and I thought this is what church is for.”[i]
Maybe doubt slips in because we’re looking too hard for miracles that are shaped the way we would shape them. Maybe the miracle of the savior is not in grand, comprehensive moment of conquest. Maybe peace on earth doesn’t happen in an instant we can capture on live TV. Maybe Christmas doesn’t happen in the ways we try to channel it. Maybe it happens in the hardened heart of a trial lawyer. Maybe it happens when we receive a piece of bread and realize that we are cupping our hands to receive ‘God with us.’ Maybe it happens in the midst of messy, mundane relationships because that’s just how it happened the first time.
Jesus can be frustratingly vague about all this. Sometimes I just want him to answer the question. “Are you the Coming One, yes or no?” But then again Jesus is pretty concrete in how he answers. “Go back and tell John what you see and hear. People who are blind see. People who cannot walk, walk. People with leprosy. People who are deaf hear. The dead are raised to life and the poor have good news proclaimed to them. And happy is the one who is not repelled by me.”
When we touch the world and are touched by it…when we understand that the transformation of the world is happening one life at a time…when we understand that we can be the dead raised to life and can offer that same gift to the walking dead around us…well, Christmas can come.
Mrs. Turpin’s last vision as she stands by the pig parlor washing down the shoats is to see a purple streak in the sky as the sun sets. It cuts “through a field of crimson and [leads] like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk…She saw the streak as a cast, swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black [folks] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and God-given wit to use it right…
“At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”[ii]
We don’t know in the end whether Mrs. Turpin has been truly transformed and redeemed. We don’t know what she did with this revelation. But then we don’t know what we’re going to do with it either yet, do we? There is a great parade coming. And a place in the battalions of freaks and lunatics for people like you and me. Lives are being changed. Will you join Jesus? Will you taste the kingdom? Will you let Christmas come in you? Thanks be to God.
Matthew 11:2-11
Now John, when he heard in prison about the work of Christ, sent word through his disciples and said to him, “Are you the Coming One or should we wait for another?”
Jesus answered them, “Go, tell John what you hear and see; the blind gain sight and the lame walk; lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised and the poor have good news proclaimed to them; and happy is the one who is not repelled by me.”
Then, as they were going, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John. “What did you go out to the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? No, what was it that you went out to behold? A person dressed in soft clothes? Look, the ones wearing soft clothes are in royal houses. So, really, what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and much more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written:
‘Look, I send my messenger ahead of you,
Who will prepare your way before you.’
“Truly, I tell you, no one has arisen who is greater among those born of women than John the Baptizer. But the least one in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”
[i] Sara Miles, Take This Bread, [New York: Ballantine Books, 2008], ebook location 3660.
[ii] Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation,” in the collection Listening For God, ed. by Paula J. Carlson & Peter S. Hawkins, [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994], pp. 18-35.
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