| |||||||||||||||
 |
     | ||||||||||||||
*** My friend John Buchanan, in the latest Christian Century, reports about a survey in which people were asked to identify the most obnoxious Christmas music. He writes that “The Little Drummer Boy” narrowly defeated “Silver Bells” and “Do You Hear What I Hear.” At the risk of repeating myself, I imagine that this survey happened well before the now nearly classic “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” was composed by whatever great composer composed it. At some other moment I will tell you about a precious young lad tapped to play “the little drummer boy” in a church pageant long ago, clothes tattered, soot rubbed on cheeks and forehead, marching up and down the aisles, lightly tapping on a little snare drum while the choir sang. I think that little drummer boy swore that if he ever had children he would not subject them to such an ordeal. So far, so good. But to that drummer boy. Buchanan reminds us of the novelist David James Duncan’s writing about “The Little Drummer Boy” and the peculiarity of the song’s premise: an “uninvited urchin, standing next to the cradle of the newborn baby, banging away on a drum. Have any vindictive relatives,” Duncan wonders, “ever given a child in your home a drum?” He then describes the rhythm – pa rum pah pum pum – as a “kind description of the resultant noise…I liked to picture the infant Jesus’ eyes, so innocent and new that they were unable to focus, startling wide open at the sudden banging. I liked to picture God the Father wincing On High, wanting to cover His beloved son’s ears…send in the wise men to stop the banging.” And yet, Duncan says that when he now hears “The Little Drummer Boy” for the first time each year, ‘”the chills run down my spine to my eyes, something spilling over as the truth…hits home…I played my best for Him pah rum pah pum pum.’ What more can one offer, no matter how silly or bad it sounds?” (December 16, 2008, page 3) What more indeed? What more could Mary offer? This is her day. Mary’s day. We have heard the story again, the strange visit of the Angel Gabriel, the ever-present reminder to not be afraid. “’You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,’ (Gabriel) said. As he said it,” Frederick Buechner imagines the angel’s internal dialogue… “As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.” (Peculiar Treasures) It is perhaps the central rhythm of the gospel soundtrack – do not be afraid. It bookends the story of Jesus, the angel here and the angelic messenger speaking to the women at the tomb. Do not be afraid. That seems so easy to say to those who are not facing a lost job or a foreclosed home or a broken relationship. That seems so easy to say to those who are not facing cancer. That seems so easy to say if you are not living in a war-torn, financial crisis laden, globally warmed world where fear is the currency and any attempts to obviate fear are met scornfully or cynically. That seems so easy to say to those who do not have an angel in your living room announcing news of an incomprehensible and life-altering nature. And yet we repeat, over and over and over, like a steady drumbeat…do not be afraid. And Mary, after allowing the news to wash over her, decides that she will not fear, or rather will submit her fear to a higher power. And she breaks out into song, or something like song. The Magnificat, we have called it, because Mary says – sings – that her soul magnifies God, makes God and this news even bigger than it already is. If this were a literature class, we would examine the structure of Mary’s poem: the movement from the blessing of God to the acknowledgement of her own role in this drama to a consideration of God’s might and then a reminder of the moral and ethical fundamentals of all of this. It is to that ethical core that we may be drawn today, the constant, faithful rhythm of God’s radical, alternative, world-changing insistence that the way things are is not the way they should be and not the way that they will be. * The world values pride – Mary says that God will scatter
the proud. That hits home this week, it feels, as we encounter tales of ponzi schemes in the billions, politicians trading power for money, corporate executives compensated in excess while the companies they run seek bailouts from Washington. I am not a politician or an economist, but I am a citizen and a person of faith, as are all of us gathered here. And what I believe is that when Mary says that God will bring down the powerful from their thrones, and will do so through the birth of this unexpected Messiah, then in the least our task is to overlay that vision and promise with the news of the day. Where are connections? Where are disconnections? How does the truth of this Advent message speak to our reality? What are the implications and how are we called to follow? That is why I don’t get worked up as much as some of my colleagues about the commercialization of this season. Some seek clear demarcations between culture and religious observance, putting Christ back in Christmas, they sometimes say, as if Christ weren’t there all the time. I don’t like all of it, of course, and I like it even less when it seems as if our nation’s economic future hinges on how much stuff we buy this season. That seems a tough way to run an economy. But the TV specials, the endless secular music, even the innocuous greeting “Happy Holidays:” what that suggests to me is that a little of our story is rubbing off, a little hope, a little joy, a little love. The world knows something is up this month – let’s not do anything to disabuse them of that notion, even if it’s delivered in a package slightly different than we might choose. Then, when the world sees us driving around town in the snow, delivering Christmas baskets, treating people in line a little friendlier, making choices about our time, it will pay attention. It’s called evangelism, I think, telling the Christmas story. Embodying a slightly different rhythm than the world around us, and by so doing allowing this story to dwell within us and beyond us and through us, and the moral and spiritual transformation it promises, what Mary seeks so faithfully to magnify. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we attended a basketball game at a large midwestern university. Now any sporting event has intrinsic value, and this game was fun for all sorts of reasons. But it was not much of a contest. It was one of those early season games when the big dog piles on the little dog. The score was 30-6 at halftime. In fact, much of the crowd left at halftime, and you get the sense that if the visiting team could have done the same, they would have. We, on the other hand, being frugal and also enjoying the whole thing, stayed to the end. And I am glad we did. At half-time, something extraordinary happened. Onto the court paraded about 20 young men, young African-American men, each carrying a set of drums – twenty little and not-so-little young drummer men, probably ages six to sixteen. And they started drumming. It was unbelievable. They drummed and drummed for a solid 8 or 9 minutes, with spot-on precision, joy, discipline, camaraderie. They worked movement into their drumming, a kind of percussive and mesmerizing choreography. When they were done, they marched off the court to a standing ovation, and the crowd sensed that in the low expectation of an early season halftime show they had witnessed something special, to rival and perhaps outshine the game itself. Something of that day is what is going on here. Life moves on, history progresses, to its own beat and rhythm. And an angel shows up and a young woman receives and considers and accepts and proclaims good news and tells us about an alternative rhythm, a transforming syncopation, that will convert the way things are and be entirely more compelling than the main event. Lauren Winner calls this day’s series of episodes “interruptions.” Gabriel interrupts Mary. Winner says that “the fact is, I’m not especially interested in being interrupted by God.” Interruptions, Winner says, lead, to “uncomfortable glimmers of self-awareness…that, when I let them, foster a little humility… humility that allows me to sometimes recognize these interruptions as God’s way of gradually schooling me in the grand imperatives of letting go of all I cling to and following Christ.” And the Magnificat, Winner says, (is) “God’s revolution interrupting not only our tidy, ordered lives but our whole social order.” (Christian Century, December 16, 2008, page 20) When I was beginning piano lessons many moons ago, certain things came easier than others. There were the notes and the fingering, of course. And then there was the counting. Twos and fours, I could get, but threes – the counting pattern of much Christmas music – didn’t go down so well. But then a teacher from later in my abbreviated, undistinguished piano career, who sometimes played on weekends in jazz clubs, changed things. She taught me musical tricks that would have made my earlier teachers shudder, but it kept me at it for a couple of more years. And she taught me so much about rhythm, about the wonderfully named “grace notes,” about syncopation, about beats within beats and why the notion of being “offbeat” was not as bad as some would make it out to be. That is what has been going on in these four Advent weeks – the prophet Isaiah, John the Baptist, the Psalmist, now an angel, now a young woman, telling us to pay attention to the rhythm of the world and then listen for the slightly offbeat nature of this story, faint grace notes emerging here and there. “Do you hear what I hear?” an old, perhaps obnoxious, Christmas chestnut asks. Are you paying attention to the halftime show, to the interruptions, to your embodiment of this transforming story? Are you keeping time without fear, playing your drum for him, because of him, playing your drum, playing your best, giving your heart? Christmas blessings to us all. Amen.
|
|
||||||||||||||
