When Fear Cramps Your Heart

Transcription

1 When Fear Cramps Your Heart Sunday December 23, 2018 Advent 4 Joseph gets a bad deal, I always think. He often seems like a second string actor in those nativity scenes and some small ones leave him out completely, focusing only on the mother and baby and perhaps an angel to keep them company. Some portrayals don t leave him out they make him a malignant presence! The Cherry Tree Carol, for instance, sings of an old man who married sweet young Mary. As the family walks through an orchard of cherry trees in fruit, Mary asks Joseph to pick her some cherries. Then Joseph flew in anger, in anger flew he. Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee! Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee! And in response the branches of the tree bend down to Mary, offering her the cherries she requested and rebuking Joseph at the same time. But these negative takes on Joseph aren t part of the story. Joseph s story is in Matthew s gospel. (Luke s gospel tells the story from Mary s point of view, and Mark and John don t include a nativity story at all in theirs.) As Matthew tells it: This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. The law said that Joseph could have had Mary stoned to death for her apparent unfaithfulness to him. But as a kind man, he didn t want her to suffer that fate, even though he was hurt by her actions, as he understood them. Note that Matthew doesn t include a conversation between Joseph and Mary; Joseph

2 makes assumptions based on his hurt feelings but doesn t check them out with Mary. Perhaps if he had opened himself to direct conversation, he wouldn t have needed a visit from an angel. But he does. And thanks to that angel visitor, he is able to move beyond his hurt feelings, beyond his fears of Mary s not loving him enough, beyond his fears of what people will think, and act out of love for Mary, the child, and for himself. The story tells us that the angel didn t set Joseph on a new course, but freed him to follow his own best instincts. It tells us that Joseph was a man who was faithful to the law. But his love for Mary is already guiding him to break the law by not turning her in for the proscribed punishment. Love is already leading him; the visit of the angel helps him to overcome the final residue of fear, moving away from the fear of the law into a path of life. Now this path didn t come without its fears. Every parent fears for the future of their children, and the partner of a pregnant woman fears for her health and safety. But this fear is different. This fear comes with the fullness of life; it isn t the fear which prevents it. This fear is part of the joy of greater life and love; it isn t the fear which holds us back from greater life and greater love. That is the fear the angels warn against. This Advent I ve been reading daily meditations by Richard Rohr, grounded in what he calls radical compassion. In the meditation for today he writes about Joseph and Mary as kingdom people. Kingdom people are history makers. They break through the small kingdoms of this world to an alternative and much larger world, God s full creation. People who are still living in the false self are history stoppers. They use God and religion to protect their own status and the status quo of the world that sustains them. They are often fearful people, the nice proper folks of every age who think like everybody else thinks and who have no power to break through, or to change. In an article this week on Vox, a woman named Cindy Mallette wrote about how she broke out of the fears which kept her protecting what she had and into wider but scarier new life. She had been raised in a conservative Christian home, grew up believing that only Christians could be saved, that gays and lesbians had no place in God s realm, that the poor needed to rely on God and themselves, and that as she put it, no one could call themselves both a Democrat and a Christian.

3 As an adult, she worked for the Koch Brothers foundation and became a Tea Party activist. That understanding guided her life until 2015 when she did something radical. She read the Bible from beginning to end for the first time. The church she was raised in cited the Bible, but didn t encourage its members to read it and certainly not to question the way the minister interpreted it. But this year Cindy Mallette did just that. And she wrote about that reading, For the first time, I saw that overall, God cares most about how humanity treats its fellow humans. Before, the driving force of my political activism was a faith that said God wants us to live moral lives. I, along with the Republican Party, would define morality in narrow terms: heterosexual marriage, abstaining from vices, obeying the law, and not being a financial drain on society. But now I see that God cares most about how those of us with power, privilege, and means help those who are poor, widowed, orphaned, a stranger in the land, in need of justice and/or mercy, and who are frantically searching for truth and love. This was the crux of the Bible. It revolutionized my worldview. And it revolutionized her daily life as well. The Bible opened her eyes and ears to receive and believe the angels who came to her. One came in the form a church friend whose understanding of Jesus message was similarly expanding. He asked her how she could work for the Koch brothers when their goals were not in accord with her religious values. At his suggestion she read Jane Mayer s book about the Koch brothers, Dark Money, and ended up leaving her job. She began driving for Uber and Lyft and found more angels in her car: There was the churchgoing gay couple who loved Jesus yet weren t allowed to go to family holiday gatherings out of fear they d influence their nephews to be gay. The men shed tears over this in my car. There was the former Catholic woman who provides counseling at a Planned Parenthood in Dallas. She shared how most women who see her are afraid they are going to hell for having an abortion, but they can t afford to take time off work to give birth or can t afford another mouth to feed. They want to

4 be able to keep their unborn children, but the financial stress is too much to bear. I wept, and we hugged before she left the car. I also met countless immigrants headed home after long shifts at low-paying jobs. They d been in our country for years, had families here, and still sent money back to Mexico and Central America to support family members there. They personalized the immigrant experience for me. These encounters opened her mind and her heart even more. She wrote, All my life, I felt the weight of fear. It was a fear that I was frequently letting God down by my selfish actions, or by not having strong enough faith. It was also a fear that all around me, people were headed to hell and didn t know it. The secular world anything not overtly related to God, Jesus, or the Bible was misleading people into thinking that doing immoral things was okay, and I thought this immoral behavior was what separated them from God. I was wrong. Fear separates people from God. When love transplants fear, the weight lifts. I felt for the first time in my life profoundly free. But this freedom came with pain and loss, just as it did for Joseph. Cindy Mallette s change in understanding has estranged her from her parents and sister who are convinced she is now going to hell. She lost her job, her church, many of her friends. But she has broken through to a deeper sense of love and joy, a connection with God which doesn t depend on her being better, purer, than other people, but one which frees her to love broadly. For Joseph, his step from fear to greater life led him to flee to Egypt with his wife and young child. In another dream an angel warned him that King Herod would kill his child, so they lived as refugees until Herod had died, only then returning to their home in Nazareth. His step away from fear gave him a son he loved but couldn t always understand. Yet Mary and Joseph must have been wise and nurturing parents, for even though Jesus didn t follow the societal and religious norms of this time, there is no sign in the stories of estrangement between him and his parents as so often happens between parents and children who follow their own way. The stories all show Mary at the foot of the cross with Jesus, and we can assume that Joseph wasn t there only because he was no longer alive. But his love and freedom from fear raised a child whose goal it became to free everyone from their fears and to have joy take its place.

5 The angels don t call us to a life without fear that is not humanly possible and some fears are appropriate from the daily - we want our children to be afraid to touch the woodstove to the life-changing Joseph was right to fear Herod and his troops. Rather, the angels remind us not to be bound by our fears being careful around the woodstove is different from never going into the home of anyone who owns a woodstove. They remind us when we feel fear to take a breath and consider its cause and its effect. Is it a fear coming from wisdom and intuition or a fear coming from a sense of loss or losing control? Is the effect of the fear to make us truly safer, as in fleeing from danger, or to give us the illusion of safety so that we don t have to grapple with change? When the latter fear cramps our heart, remind yourself of the poet Philip Booth s words to his daughter in his poem First Lesson: Lie back daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand. Gently, and I will hold you. Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls. A deadman's float is face down. You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe me, when you tire on the long thrash to your island, lie up, and survive. As you float now, where I held you and let go, remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you: lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you. What fears are cramping your heart? How can you pause and let the message of the angels speak in you? How can you move from fear to greater life, greater joy? These are the age-old questions of the angels, and they come to us still today. - Pamela M. Barz