Prepare the way

I was not ready for Advent this year.   My stuff wasn't out of the attic, I didn't have any candles, and the worst part--I was just not in the mood.  I wasn't in the mood for blasting the word REJOICE across the church every Sunday, not in the mood for Rite I, and I didn't have a clue what to get everybody for Christmas.  

Prepare the way of the Lord indeed.  

For some reason, Advent happened anyway.   The wreath went up in the church, the candles were purchased, I even procured a new "Advent Bush" that could withstand the ravages of my puppy by living on a table top.  Rite I happened in church, and we belted those rejoices again like we do every year.   Voices are missing and they are being missed, but Advent is happening anyway.  

Life is hard sometimes.  Preparing for Christmas, and by way of that preparing to usher in the Kingdom of God, isn't all chocolates behind numbered windows in an advent calender and haunting ancient hymns.  It's getting up every morning in December, whether you want to or not, and saying "even so, come Lord Jesus" again. 

Mary knew this.  (We haven't even gotten to her in the readings yet.  I think this coming Sunday we get to hear about John the Baptist.)   Mary had her life disrupted by an archangel who appeared ill advised on mechanics of human biology.    I have my days when I think she must have been a little bit psychic because she was faced with an angel of the Lord telling her she's going to bear a son, the Messiah even, and she has the big brass lady balls to tell him that she can't be pregnant because she's a virgin.   It's the holy version of staring down your doctor when they ask suspiciously when your last period was and telling them you have to be exposed to be in that condition.   So either they'd chatted before, or the Lady was totally and utterly caught off guard to the point of reacting to this news with exasperated unbelief.

I LOVE this about her, by the way.   Very young, vulnerable, about to be exposed to a series of life threatening social situations that probably shamed her to her very core despite none of it being what people thought, and she's making sure the archangel Gabriel understands how these things happen.

Life is hard sometimes.   Life is hard but God makes beauty from ashes. 

Even so, come... 

Who are my mother and brothers?

I come from a traditional family.   My parents have been married for forty years.  My grandparents were married for longer.   The only step anything I have are nieces/nephews, and one cousin, who I do not call my step cousin, just my cousin.  I have seen--and benefited from--effects of a traditional two parent home.   I know what it means to belong without actually fitting in to a family.   I have also noticed that the older I get the more I realize how absolutely blessed I am to have been born to these people.   We have our problems, same as everybody else, but at the core of it we still love each other and when it hits the fan, we back each other up. 

I'm convinced that's what makes my family functional.   Functional in the sense  that at the moment everyone is speaking to everyone else and that we're all part of each other's lives.   Today's gospel reading made me think today that maybe Jesus' family was functional in the same way.   They may have thought he was nuts, but in the end, especially in the end, they showed up anyway.   Jesus, likewise, seems annoyed but uses the moment to make a point:

  Mark 3:31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him.
3:32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you."
3:33 And he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?"
3:34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers!
3:35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

Notice that the ties that bind could not have possibly been severed completely because we have his brother James showing up in the Book of Acts at the Council of Jerusalem and his mother follows him to the cross.  No one is throwing anyone away here.    He's just widening the circle.  Widening the circle big time.

I once had the big brass lady balls to say at church that my family never shows up and I have no one to spend Midnight Mass with.   I was immediately corrected.   I say big brass lady balls because those people have been putting up with me since I was 15 years old.   I should know by now that those people are my family.   Put a qualifier of church family on it if you must, at this point, I think we're stuck with each other.

There's more than one way to be family.   I saw La Cage aux Folles Friday night with my good friend and her fiance and saw that played out on the stage.  The crazy maid, the straight son, the drag queen mother, and the father trying to play referee between his son's desire to get past his future in-laws and his partner's need for recognition for his role in raising the boy.   What makes a family?  Is it children?  Long suffering each other's company?  Who was more of a mother?  We didn't see much of her, but I think Ann's mother was more interested in keeping that corn cob in its place than in making her daughter happy.  I think in that family it was the mother.  He wasn't just his father's partner, he was the one who turned their house into a home.  That deserved respect.   Jean Michael deserved respect too.  He turned out different than his parents without turning his back on them, and dealt with all the trauma and drama that comes from the way people reacted to his family when he was growing up.  

There's more to raising kids and living right than being in a traditional relationship and having the equipment to produce offspring.  I know families that are incredibly dysfunctional that are not broken homes in the sense that the parents are divorced.  They are broken in the sense that the love just isn't there.   The father tries to kill the daughter and no one, especially not the mother, calls the cops.  The daughter doesn't think she has any business getting angry about not being protected.  It's just broken.  Never mind that there's not a divorce decree involved, that family is broken.

So what makes a family?  Blood?  Affection?  In the case of Jesus, whoever does the will of God?

Making sense of things

Joseph said to his father, "Not so, my father! Since this one is the firstborn, put your right hand on his head."

¹⁹ But his father refused, and said, "I know, my son, I know; he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great. Nevertheless his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations."

Sometimes it just doesn't turn out like we think it should, does it?

Our parents give the younger siblings something we feel like we should have because after all, we got here first didn't we? When I read this passage this morning I thought of King David---the youngest of his brothers---whom Jesse assumed wouldn't be God's chosen because he was just a kid. To top it all off, he wasn't just just a kid, he was the youngest boy in the family too. God doesn't always seem to make a lot of sense.

My older brother likes to tell me how much meaner our parents were when he was growing up. How he never would have gotten away with half the stuff we did. I think the early Christians--the Jewish ones-- probably felt the same way about the gentile Christians. The council of Jerusalem must have left them feeling flat. These newbies--these 'kids'-- didn't have to keep the law to follow the Way. What a disappointment! From what I've heard, the Church is easing up on us younger folks too. It used to involve more work to be a Christian! Did it? Was the point of the whole thing ever really keeping ritual purity laws in the first place? Or was it learning to put the Lord first? Is the point of Church not wearing lipstick during communion, keeping a doily on your head inside the doors and making sure you didn't have that first cup of coffee before you leave home? Or is it something else? There's nothing wrong with any of these things as long we don't forget that they're not the point. We have to remember what they point to--and remember that even when God doesn't seem to make a lot of sense--he makes sense.