single persons, people
of all races and families
of every kind.
Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 25
Dec 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
The Church of
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in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey
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To whom
was
the story told?
Reflections on the
lessons for Christmas Eve
24 December 2000
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Isaiah 9:2-4,6-7 / Psalm
96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14 / Luke
2:1-20
Since it's still Sunday, let's begin with a little Sunday School for those of you who haven't been to class today. Luke begins his Christmas story by telling us that it was in the days of Caesar Augustus that it all happened.
To his first readers around the year 100, this was very significant. These were the great days of the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, which Augustus Caesar, the first of the great Roman Emperors brought to what they (like us) thought of as the civilized world -- the world that looked and talked and thought as much as possible the way people in the capital did. It was the kind of "peace" actually that the great emperors of our time have brought to the world. A kind of peace that was only peaceful as long as the little people did what the big people told them to do -- or else.
Augustus was born in 63 BC. When Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C he was a young student in Alexandria, but quickly returned to Rome and got into politics. By 31 BC, with his chief rival Mark Antony out in Egypt courting Cleopatra, Augustus triumphed. He was the sole ruler of the Roman world.
Over the next two years, Augustus traveled throughout the nearer parts of the Empire -- flaunting his power. After visits to Egypt, Greece, Syria, and Turkey he proclaimed universal peace, controlled from Rome, for everyone who "mattered". There was no thought given to Asia, Russia, Northern Europe or other barbarian parts of the world. His name had been Octavian, but now he took the title Augustus, Caesar Augustus, "The Sacred Emperor". And in all but name he was absolute monarch, using the Senate and military as rubber stamps.
He was a builder -- and believed in urban renewal. He so beautified Rome that it was said of him that "he found Rome built of brick and left it made of marble." The month Sextilis was renamed in his honor and we go on vacations in August to this day. Augustus died in the year 14 AD, but lives on still in imperialism's love of order and heavy-handed control from above.
The enormous significance of Luke's declaration becomes clear when we translate the message into the twenty-first century. We are only a few weeks away from the inauguration of a new Caesar -- we all know that the American President functions quite a bit like the Emperor of the known world. The next president is unlikely to be given the title Augustus anytime soon. He has too many too tight margins for that. But there are other similarities to the picture Luke paints.
In the midst of an imperial peace, a world made to seem peaceful by the decisions of Great Powers, there is regimentation. A poor family is forced to go many miles to comply with a government decree. This is not news to us.
We know how the poor are pushed around. Told where they may go and where they cannot go. Forced to find lodging where they can. How they must comply with rules in which they have little or no say.
While Joseph and Mary were away from home, Luke tells us -- complying with bureaucratic rules set down by the government -- Mary came to term and laid her baby in the feeding trough of a cattle shed, attached to an inn where there was "No Vacancy." Today, this would be a baby born in the parking garage of a motel that rents by the hour. The baby is put down in an old tire, wrapped in a coat from the Salvation Army. That's where they'd be left, to receive what help they could from the folks who pump gas in the station across the street.
Matthew's gospel has Jesus much more royally received, surrounded with luxurious gifts and majestic visitors. He argues for a Jewish king with pedigree and claims for ascendancy, as a central point about how Jesus would be the true Messiah, sent to recreate Judaism.
John begins his tale with an apotheosis, fit for academic discussion, a theological seminar. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
But Luke is more interested in telling us that Jesus didn't enter history at that level -- the level of presidential inaugurations, with foreign dignitaries; the level of intellectual and philosophical theory.
In Luke's story, Jesus is not named Augustus. He is not portrayed as someone -- as was expected by those who knew Emperors and waited for a revolutionary general type of Messiah -- who will come wielding peace like a power play, backed up with menace and threats and money.
Luke has a very clear message. He says that Peace enters the world at ground level -- among plain people and other kinds of workhorses. I've never seen a nativity set that tries to be literal or historical. I wonder why not. We have a very pretty one here. But Jesus' manger was not carved from olivewood. It was probably a trough in a dirty floor. And the people there probably weren't as finicky about it as we would be. They were used to rough things. Peace enters the world at its lowest place, among refugees, the homeless, and the unseen.
For the next part of Luke's gospel story moves to the night sky above, to the highest forms of life known to ancient myth and legend: What we call Angels, or Messengers. These days, even fundamentalists and Bible thumpers seem to be fascinated by angels in a way they were certainly not a couple of decades ago.
In our imaginations, we see blonde hair and white dresses and harps. But angels in Jewish tradition are borrowed straight from Persian mythology -- just like the Wise Men. Those angels were kind of scary. They were forceful emanations of the Deity. They were on the same team as the fiery sword angel who beat Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, the same species as Lucifer's band who plotted a coup to overthrow God. Angels in the sky that night had every reason to warn anyone looking at them not to be afraid. You just couldn't know what to expect next from an angel.
Luke has the angels use a recognizable, formal style of announcing a birth. It was a public proclamation used throughout the Roman Empire every year for declaring the celebrations of the emperor's birthday: Evangelion! It would begin in Greek. Good News! Later, in Old English God Spiel! Gospel! An Evangel would be issued each year on Caesar's birthday. The herald who read it out in town squares would start by reading "I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people!"
Luke has the angels give this message to the shepherds, the working people, the people who are not running things from the top down. A new kind of power. A new kind of birth. A new kind of people who matter. That's the point of the story the way Luke tells it. The angels did not go to the presidential suite of the inn Luke imagined. They went to the folks in the parking garage, trying to hide from the security guards. The angels did not go to the palace of the Sacred Emperor in Rome, nor to the wonderful house of the High Priest in Jerusalem, nor even to the holiest place of the Temple on the Mount in the Sacred City of Zion. But they went to the marginal folk of the sheepfold. Disreputable, without baths for months, rough field hands.
And they sent them to see the new Peace coming to the earth in a spot where they could walk right in and not feel out-of-place.
The angels sang a personal holiday greeting to the working guys: It is YOU who have nothing to fear. This Good News is for you, to take charge of it, and to share it with the people. This time you're not only part of the plan, you're indispensable to it. This plan is not being told to you. You're the ones doing the telling. The news is that there is a new peace. But not the kind of peace that Augustus proclaimed 30 years before that night, in honor of his inauguration. And maintained with political, military, and economic muscle.
Luke deliberately says that a genuinely universal peace -- for everybody alike -- starts with this birth. The birth of a poor child to a poor family out on the edge of the world, out at the edges of hope. Out of sight of the movers and shakers. The Christmas Good News is that Peace is only reliable when it grows from the grass roots upward. It was to be thirty-three years before this baby began to come to the attention of the world's movers and shakers. And two thousand years later he would still be known to the high and low alike. But the regular folks have first claim. Luke wants us to know tonight how WE got here, how our story got started, and where, and to whom our story was first chanted, and sung, and read aloud, and shouted. And Luke wants us to know for whom the tale is told, for whom it is meant. And who, from the beginning until now, are really in charge of telling it.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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