“It’s time for a new narrative that recognizes that God loves us, that God dwells with us and in us not in spite of our humanity but because of it. That it is what we see as the most ordinary about ourselves that is the most extraordinary, the most sacred. A new narrative that says that Mary is worthy of being revered because she was a woman who lived a hard life with grace and power and raised a child under the most perilous of circumstances … and that, praise God, in that she is not unique among women but in the blessed company of so many women throughout time into today. A new narrative that says what Jesus said by sitting down to eat with the most scandalous people of his day. That it is when the world most shames us that God is loving us the hardest and holding us the tightest. That it is each of us just as we are, that God loves so passionately that God cannot bear to be separated from us, from you. That none of us are disposable – and it’s time we stopped treating each other and ourselves like we are. It’s time for a new narrative.”
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, December 22, 2019. Readings: Isaiah 7:10-16 and Matthew 1:18-25.
For a text of the sermon, visit our website: https://allsaints-pas.org/a-child-arrived/.
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My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talking ‘fore I knew it, and as he grew
He’d say “I’m gonna be like you, dad”
“You know I’m gonna be like you”
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We learn from what we see.
We learn from what we hear.
I have a great dad. And he learned from what he saw and heard from his dad.
My dad saw his dad work hard at the office all day while his mom worked hard at home.
My dad saw his dad come home every night and sit down in his easy chair and read the newspaper. … and he knew not to bother him. He had had a hard day.
I don’t know how that made my dad feel. I’ve never asked him. But I wonder.
I don’t know if he ever questioned that way of things when he became a dad. If he knew that things could be different.
I don’t know if my dad looked up at his dad and said:
“I’m gonna be like you, dad.”
“You know I’m gonna be like you.”
But at least in this one way … he was.
My dad would come home from work and after dinner he would sit down in his easy chair and read his newspaper.
Now, when I remember him in that chair, I remember feeling three things.
Love, admiration … and distance.
And, I remember … I didn’t question it.
I didn’t ever think … hey, mom has been working pretty hard, too … when does she get to sit down and rest? How does she feel about this? Does she get a choice here?
When I was little, I didn’t ever wonder if there could be a different way. I just assumed this is what it meant to be a dad. And so, wired into my brain, without me even knowing it, are Harry Chapin’s words:
I’m gonna be like you, dad.
You know I’m gonna be like you.
Now, 21 years into being a dad, I’ve learned a few things.
I’ve learned there are so many ways I’m glad I’m like my dad – and so many ways I wish I were more like him. I’ve learned my dad in his own way, for his own time, embraced some and rejected some of what he had seen and heard from his dad. That he was learning how to be a dad, too. And that was a different time. And we all grow into roles incredibly imperfectly.
And I’ve learned when I come home from work, part of me still wants to plop down in a comfortable chair, rest, and not be bothered … feels like I’ve earned that and isn’t interested in thinking about the effect on anyone else… or me.
This narrative of fatherhood I grew up with has shaped me. And … I’ve learned that sometimes old narratives exhaust their usefulness. And this is one of them.
Yes, there were good things about it … values of love and admiration … and yet the ways it has been unhelpful and harmful … creating distance between parent and child, reinforcing demeaning and toxic gender and power relationships … mean it’s time for a change.
We need a new narrative for fatherhood, for parenthood, for family. One that suits what we have learned and are still learning about gender roles, sharing power and human development.
One that takes what is good of what we have seen and what we have heard and leaves the rest behind. One that coming generations can look to and say with pride and joy:
We’re gonna be like them, yeah.
You know we’re gonna be like them.
We learn from what we see and hear, and that’s also true about the stories we tell.
When we only tell stories of warrior men and damsels in distress, boys and girls grow up with an ingrained sense that is who they are supposed to be. And nonbinary and trans kids grow up wondering if there is a story for them at all.
And those stories can become prisons for everyone.
Now often these stories have been told for a long time, are deeply meaningful and have served an important purpose. But we reach a point where old narratives exhaust their usefulness. Where the toxicity and trauma they perpetuate outweighs the good. Where we need to tell the story in a new way that preserves the good and yet fits the many ways our understanding of ourselves and the world is evolving.
This morning’s Gospel is one of those stories.
For nearly 2,000 years, we have told the tale of Mary as virgin mother. It has deeply impacted how we see God, ourselves and one another. It is a story that has spawned glorious art and music … and yet because of its power and how the images have been used particularly against women, it is time to look at whether this narrative as it is written has finally exhausted its usefulness. Whether we need a new way of telling the deep truths of this sacred story.
Now the first thing we have to realize is this story was always meant to be metaphor and never meant to be history. The virgin birth doesn’t even appear in the earliest Gospel or any of Paul’s letters. The two places it does occur, Matthew and Luke, were written specifically to convince Jews and Greeks, respectively, to accept the authority of Jesus’ life and teachings. And that’s why they tell Jesus’ birth story this way.
You see, miraculous birth stories were common in Jewish and Greek traditions. Virgin and other miraculous birth stories were told not only about gods but about people … including Alexander the Great. So, this was a way to say to Jewish and Greek audiences, “what happened here was special and wondrous.” That Jesus was right up there with other gods and heroes of the time.
The metaphor also worked because it jived with a first-century understanding of biology where the woman’s role in pregnancy was as passive and fertile ground for the male seed, and with a social expectation that women were property to be used sexually by men – and God was seen as a man — for procreation and men’s pleasure and control.
We now recognize that understanding of biology is preposterous and that understanding of gender is impoverishing and destructive. The metaphor is worse than useless. Holding to the dogma of a virgin birth does not convey importance but instead such a deep denial of reality that it puts the story of Jesus’ birth on par with Athena leaping from Zeus’ head in terms of stories we need to pay any attention to today.
Worst of all, it is contrary to the story’s deepest truth. The truth expressed at its heart:
“and the child will be named Immanuel’ – a name that means ‘God is with us.’”
The beautiful, poetic truth worth saving and retelling for ages to come is what we say every time we gather here at All Saints Church.
That God dwells in us … in everyone.
That “God dwells in you.”
That Jesus, born in a body
…from a body
…from the joining of bodies
… is sacred.
That our bodies
…all of our bodies
…are good
…and holy
…and that God dwells with them
…and in them,
God dwells in us,
God dwells in you not in spite of who you are but because of you are.
The original writers of Matthew’s Gospel got it right. The truth of Jesus’ birth is important. The truth that God longs for us and is with us in the most intimate ways is healing and life-saving. And… for nearly 2,000 years the way we have told this story has had wounding and deadly consequences.
We learn from the stories we tell.
We become the stories we tell.
And because of that, for nearly 2,000 years as we have told a story
…of the pinnacle of womanhood being the impossibility of a virgin mother,
…of sex being something not holy enough for God and therefore somehow dirty and shameful
…of women being the property of men for our control and pleasure
Because of that, for nearly 2,000 years as we have told a story about God queering the boundaries between divinity and humanity with no role at all imagined for people or families who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer themselves, we have powerfully and tragically said that God in fact is not with you … at least not as you really are.
The story of God having to avoid the most wonderful, embodied parts of what makes us human in order to be with us has long exhausted its usefulness. And on behalf of a church that insists on holding onto this story long after we recognized the truth, if this story has made you feel any shame about your body or your sexuality, if this story has made you feel any less than one in and with whom God dwells beautifully as you are, I deeply apologize.
And yet, apologies are not enough. For the deep truth of Immanuel, of “God With Us,” is worth saving and telling again and again and again. And … it is time for a new narrative. A new way of telling the deep truths of this sacred story.
Our young people have been doing this here for years. Our Christmas Eve pageant has recently featured Mary standing up to Gabriel arguing about a woman’s right to consent to what happens to her body. This year, our young people will explore Mary’s worthiness of of being revered not being because of some supposed and imposed purity but because of the earthiest, most courageous parts of her humanity.
Last Sunday night, as some of the Youth Chamber Choir preached about the gender of God, one of our brilliant young people, Willa Caspole, prophetically castigated the church for being far more concerned with Mary’s virginity than her maternity. The journey to a new narrative has already begun. Our young people are leading the way. Thank God!
And yet, ironically, perhaps the most appropriate new narrative for our day is almost as ancient as this one.
In the second century, the Christian scholar Origen spoke out against a rumor being spread that Mary had been “turned out by the carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convicted of adultery and had a child by a certain soldier named Panthera.”
That rumor was circulated by early opponents of Christianity to discredit Jesus … to say that far from miraculous and important, Jesus was the result of Mary having sex with or even being raped by an unclean Roman soldier.
The story was meant to discredit Jesus and shame Mary … but what if instead, we told a story … like that … with pride and with joy?
What would it mean if the story we told was of God dwelling in us through a woman who decided that she was going to have sex with someone she had fallen in love with rather than someone her father had given her to in a business transaction. That holiness is about God being with us in sexuality freely and mutually celebrated.
What would it mean if the story we told was of God dwelling in us through a woman who was a victim of rape in a world that said and still too often says that sexual assault is always the woman’s fault. That holiness is about God being with us not in some imagined state of purity but in our deepest trauma and in those times when the world has utterly cast us out.
What would it mean if the story we told was of God dwelling in us through the adopted nonbinary child of two women? That holiness is God being with us beyond our imaginary boundaries of gender or outdated and toxic notions of what makes a real parent, a real child, a real family.
What would it mean if the story we told was not “Joseph did not have intercourse with Mary until she had given birth.”
but “Joseph and Mary had sex!
…and sometimes they enjoyed it and sometimes they didn’t
…and sometimes one of them enjoyed it and the other not so much
…and sometimes they didn’t have sex for a long time but they thought they were the only couple that was going through that.
…and they talked and sometimes argued about sex
…and they were attracted to other people sexually and had to wrestle with that.
…and along the way Mary became pregnant
…and maybe it wasn’t what they were planning and maybe it even terrified them
…and they made a choice to keep the child because they decided it was the right choice for them.
…or maybe one of them decided to raise the child and the other one said, ‘it’s been real … see you later.’
…or maybe one of them got sick and died and the other was left alone.
…or maybe they split up and had to figure out what that meant for them as parents.
…and the child was named Immanuel, which means ‘God with us.’”
What would any of these new narratives mean for how you feel about yourself, your body, your sexuality, your life? About the holiness of who you are as you are?
It’s time for a new narrative that recognizes that God loves us, that God dwells with us and in us not in spite of our humanity but because of it. That it is what we see as the most ordinary about ourselves that is the most extraordinary, the most sacred.
A new narrative that says that Mary is worthy of being revered because she was a woman who lived a hard life with grace and power and raised a child under the most perilous of circumstances … and that, praise God, in that she is not unique among women but in the blessed company of so many women throughout time into today.
A new narrative that says what Jesus said by sitting down to eat with the most scandalous people of his day. That it is when the world most shames us that God is loving us the hardest and holding us the tightest.
That it is each of us just as we are, that God loves so passionately that God cannot bear to be separated from us, from you. That none of us are disposable – and it’s time we stopped treating each other and ourselves like we are.
It’s time for a new narrative.
A new way to tell a story worth keeping.
A new story not of God avoiding what makes us human but diving right into the heart of it.
A new story where the miracle of Jesus’ birth wasn’t that it was different but that it was the same… because every birth is miraculous …because every life is miraculous.
A new song to sing about the birth of Jesus that begins:
A child arrived just the other day.
He came to the world… in the usual way. Amen.
