God must have a sense of humor.
For the past few days, I’ve mildly fretted over a mid-week opportunity for prayer at our church. I’ve decided to practice some Lectio Divina as part of an Advent discipline, and I extended the offer to my church and others in the community. I set the practice for Wednesdays. So, I have been thinking this week how best to prepare our parlor for some quiet reflection and prayer. I wanted to have the furniture arranged just so, and I tinkered with lights for a bit on Tuesday.
No matter. On Wednesday, several work vehicles showed up in our church parking lot. Roofers.
We’ve been trying to get the roof of our sanctuary redone before winter truly sets in, and last week they delivered all the materials. But, with Thanksgiving, they didn’t get around to the actual work until this week. Until Wednesday.
So, there a few of us sat in the parlor yesterday, looking to take in the words of Isaiah 11:1-9, and the great vision of peace and order where the lion lays down with the lamb and how a little child will lead us.
Meanwhile.
Bang!
Slam!
Bang-bang!
The roofers went about the work of stripping the old shingles off the steep, southern slope of our sanctuary. Pieces of shingles would go floating past the window. I heavy thud of materials being dropped onto the roof would reverberate through our room. At one moment of pure comedy, when God surely was laughing his head off, a worker slammed a piece of plywood up against the building, blocking one whole window, while – I kid you not – the sound of an ambulance’s siren wailed in the distance. For a moment, I was certain the ambulance was headed directly our way as I said a prayer for those workers.
Maybe God was trying to remind me of something crucial, something about those men up working on the roof and the important reminder we need about Jesus and his family during this season.
Jesus’ family was – so it would seem – poor. Certainly this is true when we imagine their life compared to our own. But, consider these facts as well.
First of all, we know Mary, Joseph and Jesus were forced to relocate three times before, Jesus was a teenager. Regardless of what these moves did to them socio-economically, we know that their lives were disrupted by the same things that are currently disrupting the lives of immigrants and refugees, why families continue to show up at our border. First, it was the impersonal gears of a global power, shifting and churning and making fiats that made Joseph and Mary make that difficult journey to Bethlehem in the first place. Then, all the way to Egypt because of the tyrannical and calloused heart of a leader whose concern for “national security” had become so distorted as to do great injury to children of all things.
Secondly, consider what happens when Jesus and his parents make a visit to Jerusalem later when Jesus is a young boy. It’s clear they travel as an extended family because when Mary doesn’t see Jesus on the way back, she doesn’t freak out. She assumes he’s with an aunt or uncle.
Third, we know Joseph was a carpenter, and we like to romanticize this, casting him the mold of a modern-day Bob Villa. But, it’s more accurate to paint Joseph in the style of a day-laborer, a man who would likely have sought jobs here and there to provide for his family.
Fourth, remember that the early Church clearly thought of Jesus as someone of little account in worldly terms, seeing in Jesus the fulfillment of Isaiah’s words about the Messiah’s humble origins (Isaiah 53). Paul talks openly about how Jesus fully embraced the reality of poverty (Phil. 2:5-11). And even some of us his first disciples wondered what good could come from a man from such a backwater village like Nazareth (John 1).
All of this makes God’s little handiwork yesterday not so much comedic as prophetic, and maybe that was the whole point of it.
Maybe God’s purpose yesterday was to do that work of making sure we (read: I) remember God’s desire to level the playing field a bit, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Christmas can’t just be what we’re trying to do or trying to get in order to feel good. It must contend with the reality that Jesus came not only in this world to give us peace, but to also challenge and upset our systems of entitlement that leave many – including myself – very well off. Go back and read Mary’s prayer sometime (Luke 1:46-55). That Magnificat that we like to sing in our comfortable churches? It’s not just a praise song. It’s a song of liberation. It’s the song of an immigrant woman who is tired of getting kicked and tossed around by life and who is always on the short end of the stick economically. It comes out of the tradition of Moses and Miriam finally telling Pharaoh that economic injustice is not part of God’s ultimate design.
It’s the song of a people who make bricks.
Or who put on roofs.
“Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus says, “for yours is the Kingdom of God.”
Advent, if we let it, will disrupt us. It will cause us to hear the bangs going on inside of us and around us, reminding of our own complicity in holding others down and of God’s call to repent and find new ways to live.
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