December 20, 1981

Mary had a problem. Like Sarah the mother of Issac and Hannah the mother of Samuel before her, Luke depicts her as mysteriously getting the message that something special will happen in the birth of her child. At first, however, she felt like doing anything but singing "Joy to the World." The news scared and confused her. Mary lacked something we, and even Luke, have: hindsight. How could she know that future generations would venerate her as holiest of women? How could she know that her child would prove to be just the help so many need in so many ways? I don't know if she lived long enough to experience the joy of being the mother of the messiah; it is pretty clear that she lived long enough to know the pain of it.

You see, Mary's messiah turned out not only to be her problem but a problem also to a lot of people whose messiah standards Jesus failed to meet. Barely making it and humiliated by Rome, the people wanted a sword-swinging messiah to come and pick up where King David had left off. They longed for God to send a messiah to put Israel on top of the heap of worldly powers. They longed for God to send a messiah who would straighten out the world and take away their problems. Like now, people then wanted a magic messiah who gives quick fixes, painless cures, and guaranteed happy endings if not happy middles to their lives. 

Jesus was not that kind of messiah. He proclaimed that the secret to life isn't with sword-swinging kings but with feeding and healing servants. He blew the lid off the world's neat categories of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Jesus was not quite the messiah they had in mind.

And so Mary had a problem. Like parents before and after them, Joseph and Mary knew that parental impotence, that parental powerlessness, which aches to do what it cannot do: protect their child from all hurt and rejection. Mark tells that word got out that Jesus was crazy, and Mary with some of the family went to bring Jesus home. But he wouldn't go. Sure, there were those kicked-in-the-head people of society who lavished their love on Jesus. You would too, if a man like him called you loved children of God when others had about convinced you that you were scum of the earth. Mary probably saw that. Yet, alas, she saw those who pull the strings in her society finally put a noose around her beloved child's neck. Then, like now, it was hard for those who have so much riding on and invested in what is wrong to take a chance on what is right. The people wanted a messiah to give them magic tricks to make their problems go away. Jesus Messiah-Christ is just the Greek word for the Hebrew "messiah" - did not bring magic solutions but God's empowering love to help us deal with our problems, be they personal, relational or the problems of a hungry-saber-rattling world. 

Like Mary discovered, it may just be that messiahs and problems are two sides of the same life coin. Sometimes the problem is the messiah. That is, what comes into our lives as a painful problem may turn into a godded messiah which moves us closer to God, to each other, and to the person we need to be.

What's your predicament or problem today? Is the issue a matter of living with yourself: health problems, guilt, grief, rejection, loneliness, failure, God problems, etc., etc., Or, is your battlefront rational: trying to live with those intimates you both love so much but who can also send you straight up the wall: I hope we have enough room in addition to wrestling with our personal and relational predicaments to be troubled by the hunger, war-threat problems of the earth. Whatever is with you today, get it focused. And with your particular problem in mind and also with Mary in mind, let's talk about ways that that dilemma may prove in the marvelous ways of God to be messiah bearing. If messiah and problems were rolled into one for Mary, then maybe it can be true for you and me. Some ideas about finding messiah's in tough situations... 

First, there is the matter of CREATIVE ACCEPTANCE. Some of you may remember that I shared this idea from James and Evelyn Whitehead's book Christian Life Patterns some time ago in the church newsletter. Although we have plenty of problems of our own making, most of the wrenching situations we find ourselves in are often because of conditions beyond our control, fixes someone else got us in. Despite taking care of ourselves, a health problem stalks us down. A fickle economy can zap even careful budgeters. I doubt even hermits can escape the problems we humans have because our lives are bound up with others parents, children, spouses, and other "et ceteras" whose doings can create problems, pains, obligations and responsibilities for us. Creative acceptance is the decision to work with what I've got in my life situation, to resist the urge to take off, pout, or suck my thumb because I have to deal with problems not totally of my own making.

In his book An Elephants Ballet, minister and writer Robert Kemper tells of his struggle with the onset of sudden blindness in his early thirties. Over a short period of time, he lost his central vision due to a retina disorder. Kemper says he felt like a clumsy elephant trying to do a delicate ballet as he sought to live in the world of the legally blind.

Although specialist after specialist confirmed his condition as irreversible and advised him to learn to live with the bit of side-peripheral vision he had left, he found it hard to accept the diagnosis. He tells of his moodiness, bitterness, and self-pity because of his situation which came out of the blue due to no known fault of his own. It was not until he accepted his condition as the setting for whatever he was to give to and get from life did Kemper begin to make some progress. Once a situation, he says, "...is accepted, one begins to cope with the resulting disorders. When one copes long enough, a new order begins.... That shift from COMPLAINT over what has happened to COPING with what has happened is a wonderful...experience." 

Creative acceptance is the strength God gets to us one way or another to move beyond our complaint over what may indeed be a raw deal to coping with our predicament so that living and loving might continue. Luke portrays the movement of Mary from complaint to creative acceptance in the Annunciation scene. From her first reaction of being "greatly troubled" and probably wondering if she was getting more than she bargained for to "Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be according to your word.” Kemper, Mary, and the other creative acceptors in the world make clear this is not a passive giving up. On the contrary, it is an active God empowered determination to deal with my personal situation or our society's problems even though all is not my fault. It is accepting my prickly predicament as the place where God calls me to live, love and work for him.

Second, the Jesus Messiah whose birth we celebrate empowers us to live out our creative acceptance in the long haul of life with CREATIVE ENDURANCE. Creative endurance is a term of Dr. Peggy Way who teaches pastoral counseling and psychotherapy at Vanderbilt. She says that few people when bogged down in life or when unhappy can simply change careers, go on an around the world trip, write a book, or magically remove themselves from the complicated ties of family relationship responsibilities. For most of us, the real challenge is to hang in there where we are seeking to creatively and caringly endure, where coping and caring come hard. 

The good news of Christmas, God became flesh in Jesus, is that God did and continues to work through humans like you and me to help humans like you and me to keep on keeping on creatively enduring when we fear we can't go on. In his recent novel The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving spins a story about the experiences and inexperience of the off-beat Berry family who run second rate hotels, first in New Hampshire, later in Vienna. The Lacher keeps a bear for a pet, one child is always dressing up in weird costumes, another child is a dwarf who is obsessed with trying to grow, and so it goes with each family member having their own special quirks. With this family, as with real families the comic and tragic are often bound up inextricably together. There are times when the family members really let each other have it. But something begins to emerge in the story: these people stick together. The theme of the book is a saying that they say to each other during difficult times: "Keep passing the open windows.” That is, don't jump out or give up. As I read about these bizarre and offbeat characters, it occurred to me that most of the families I know much about have a bit of craziness in them. Their family, like our families, did not always meet each other's expectations. Yet Irving's Berry family with their quirks galore kept each other creatively enduring by sticking to one another even when tempted to jump out an open window or simply cut out. So, before you give. up on the quirk-full people in your life, consider that those intimate enemies may be your personal messiah to keep you passing the open windows.

In An Elephant's Ballet, Kemper tells of his quest to creatively endure what he came to accept with his severe loss of sight. He describes the hard process of going from sermon preparation at the at the typewriter to doing it with long hours of recording and erasing and re-recording with a tape recorder. He relates the slow process of reading with a special machine which enables him to see only one word or a few letters at a time. He says, "Bob Kemper is like an elephant doing ballet: It may not be a good ballet, but it is amazing he can do it at all." Creative endurance is like that: realizing that we do as well as we do at some points in our lives is worthy of amazement and thanksgiving. 

Those who with the help of God and the others God uses are able to creatively accept and endure both the messianic and garden variety of problems facing them and our world mysteriously open themselves to the authentic CREATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS possible in life.

There is an old Jewish rabbinic story about a man who grew weary of all the problems of living in his little village. Early one day, he set out on foot to search for the magic-heavenly city of his dreams where things always worked out perfectly. He walked all day until sundown. He stopped by the path, ate some bread, and prepared to bed down for the night. He took off his shoes and carefully pointed them in the direction he had walked that day. During the night a practical joker happened by and turned the man's shoes in the opposite direction. The next day the man once again walked until the sun was about to set. He came to a village. It wasn't as large as he expected the magical city to be. Indeed, it looked a lot like the village he left. He even found a little house and family much like the ones he left. He went in and lived happily the rest of his days in his "new" home. With this story, the rabbis taught that often the biggest challenge is not to change our circumstances but to change ourselves. 

Rob Kemper relates that he finally recognized that his greatest enemy was not the blindness per se but the temptation to feel that his loss of sight took away his freedom to have a life worth living. He came to understand more than he had ever before that his basic value as a human being was not based on what he could or not do, see or not see, but the conviction of his identity as a child of God. His loss so absorbed him for a while that he lost touch with the wonder and grace of being alive at all. The transformation did not take away his blindness, but it did take away his perception of himself as life's hopeless, helpless victim. 

Mary's messiah did not bring any magic, quick fixes to the complexities of living with ourselves and our other 4 billion brothers and sisters on the earth. His life and words and the life of those like Paul who followed him do alert us that the presence of problems does not mean the absence of hope or God. He alerted us to the strength beyond our own God gets through to us through prayer through the quirk-full people around us, and even from deep down within ourselves. That strength empowers us to accept and endure with love the situations into which we find ourselves thrown. As we become amazed that we have life at all and mystified that strength beyond our own empowers us to do as well as we do at times, we can become transformed from self-pitying victims. We are transformed into God's servants of compassion in the mix and mess of human problems of hunger, suffering, and war threat. Sometimes painful experiences like Kemper's become our transforming messiah because we are forced to acknowledge that all of our razzle-dazzle accomplishments are but crude huts built upon the massive and magnificent foundation of God's gift of life to us. That gift of life comes complete with unearned air to breathe, a food producing earth, and people with whom to relate. 

St. Francis of Assissi is said to have made a practice of standing on his head from time to time. The view from the standing-on-your-head position shows the unseen air and sky on the bottom holding up on top the trees, buildings, and people of the world. St. Francis said this reminded him that the unseen holds up the seen in life. God did par excellence with Jesus what he continues to do: holds us up...pushes us on...and pulls us together. Sometimes it takes a messiah or some other problem to stand us on our heads so we can rediscover whose we are and who keeps us going. 

Come, Lord Jesus, and stand us on our heads so that we might creatively accept, endure, and transform our situations into locations to serve you and one another in love.