I can’t fry an egg in peace in the morning!
Well… that’s not exactly true…
I can fry an egg in peace in the morning… when my children are away from home.
But when Isabel and Amos and Silas are home around Christmas time, I can’t fry an egg in peace in the morning!
As soon as I start frying an egg one of them will show up – it could be Isabel, it could be Amos… it could be Silas… one of them will appear out of nowhere and say:
“Make me some eggs…”
I sound like I am complaining… and there is a small part of me – maybe about the 8 percent of me that resides in my big toe – that is momentarily bent out of shape… but the other 92% of me is proud and delighted when this happens.
Here is hard evidence that somewhere along the line, I did something right. Not only do they love the way I make eggs, they also love and trust me enough to be know that they can sneak up on me whole I’m still in my pajamas and make their audacious command.
“Sure,” I say. “How do you want them?”
I ask this, even though I know perfectly well that Amos likes a very dry scramble with cheese and a twist or two of pepper, Izzy likes two over medium, and Silas, like me, takes his over-easy.
I ask because it is part of the ritual. I ask because, at the stove with a spatula in my hand, sizzling eggs for my children, I am about as happy as I will ever be in my life.
This is how it’s supposed to be.
I spend so much time longing for my three children that when they converge, and I find myself in a room with all three of them at once, I feel a tremendous sense of fulfillment and relief.
When they are back, the place that I live in is transformed into a home – a place where we all belong.
For a few blissful days my little corner of the world feels right. How it’s supposed to be.
“How it’s supposed to be…”
That kind of a loaded phrase isn’t it?
I am aware that when I say “How it’s supposed to be” my core assumption is that things are supposed to be good.
Sure.. things are supposed to be good.
Aren’t they?
**
The gospels offer us a fair amount of information regarding the circumstances that lead up to Christ’s birth, and there are a wealth of gospel narratives about his ministry and death, but about his childhood, the gospels are glaringly thin on details. Everything that the gospels report about Christ’s youth, is printed in today’s bulletin. Carol just read them for us – two short vignettes told in the second chapter of Luke.
Interestingly, both stories take place in the Jerusalem temple.
In the first story Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the temple to be “presented to the LORD” and to offer the required sacrifices. At this point Jesus is still a mere babe in arms, but even so he is recognized. An old sage named Simeon takes the child in his arms and addressing God, proclaims that the child to be
“your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.”
If that were not enough, an old lady named Anna also joins in. This 84 years old prophet
gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.
These events were puzzling to Mary and Joseph. Jesus, after all, was their child. No doubt they were feeding and cleaning him and caring for him as any parents would do for their child. But when they took him out, he was treated as if he was a person of great consequence – he was described as a divine revelation, and his destiny seemed to be entwined with the salvation of Israel, the fate of Jerusalem. Their child was a child, but when they took him out, he was recognized as some kind of dramatic historical event.
How strange.
Or is it?
We know from the gospel lessons on recent Sundays, that these were not the first such predictions that Mary and Joseph heard. Mary was visited by none other than an Angel of God who told her that she would bear a miraculously conceived child who would be called the son of God. Elizabeth, Mary’s older relative, told Mary that the fruit of her womb would be blessed and that her child would be
a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord…
Then of course there was the matter of the shepherds miraculously showing up to do homage on the night of his birth. The Maji coming from far away.
If all of these things regarding the birth and early life of Jesus were progressing according to prophecy, then can we assume that, as far as Jesus was concerned, God was making sure that things were how it’s supposed to be…
If so, how it’s supposed to be… seems to be good – at least so far.
This begs a question.
Is this what it means to believe in God? Do we believe that God has a plan for each of us that proceeds as it should? Is this what it means to be religious? To believe that God makes sure things are how it’s supposed to be?
**
We certainly want this to be true, but hard reality often makes it hard to justify such a belief.
As we stand on the precipice of the year 2025, humanity seems incapable of not being at war. The headlines have been full of news about the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict, but according to the Center for Preventative Action, a global conflict policy think tank, there are also civil wars currently happening in Myanmar, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. There are active terrorist insurgencies happening as we speak in Pakistan, Uganda, Nigeria, Mali and Afghanistan and Iraq, and there is a drug war happening in Mexico.
As we stand on the precipice of the year 2025, the environmental peril that confronts us is very real. Climate scientists have been raising the alarm with more and more urgency as the effects of the climate crisis have accelerated faster than any models expected. We needed to have acted yesterday, and now it looks like it will be years – maybe decades – before anything meaningful gets done.
By then it will probably be too late.
As we stand on the precipice of the year 2025, the rights of women have fallen backwards several generations. In many States, women are now denied their most fundamental freedom – the right to determine what happens to their own bodies.
Is this now going to become the law of the land?
As we stand on the precipice of the year 2025, we have a president who is promising to deport millions of people. Texas has already offered the land required to build camps to detain people.
Are people going to die in camps in America in 2025? Is that who we have become?
In the face of all this, how can we possibly insist that it’s supposed to be good? All evidence points to the triumph of bad.
**
The second story about Christ’s childhood also takes place in the Jerusalem temple.
Jesus is now twelve years old, and the devout family has come to Jerusalem to observe the passover. When the festival is over they leave.
Fine.
Well, not really.
In a plot twist that is reminiscent of the 1990 movie Home Alone, the young Jesus gets left behind. Mary and Joseph do not catch the mistake until after a day’s journey.
Eventually they find him and the family is reunited. The story tends to be interpreted as a story about how much poise and wisdom the young Jesus shows…
But I choose to read this story from the perspective of Mary and Joseph.
It took them three days – three days – to find their son.
Can you imagine what those three days were like?
I think it was the end of the world.
This is a deeply personal trauma. Unlike war and climate change and the right to choose, and mass deportation… this devastation was visited upon Mary and Joseph, specifically.
As creatures we seem to be able to disagree, debate, dismiss or deny away the troubles of the world… but when calamity hits one of us specifically… then escape is impossible. In utter desolation, we complain to God.
Is this how it’s supposed to be?
I can just see Mary and Joseph praying in the depths of the night: What have we done to deserve this?
Did we give life to this child, only to lose him? Where is he? What horrible things are happening to him?
**
I have made no secret of the fact that, as a young man I was intensely interested in the Buddhist religion.
I like to think that my interest, and my respect for the Buddhist perspective has not been replaced by my Christian faith, as much as enhanced by it.
My primary allegiance to Jesus Christ – if I can say such a thing – comes from my core belief that love is the crucial human experience. Love is, at the same time, the most rewarding, and the most difficult thing we can do.
Second only to this principle, is the undeniable assertion that is at the core of Buddhism – which is that none of us, no matter how rich or how privileged you, are free from suffering.
Both of these principles can be rationally understood before becoming a parent… both become deeply emotionally true when you bring a child into the world.
To be a parent is to love in a new and all encompassing way. A way that wants to banish all danger from the world. This is my child. I don’t want her to suffer.
And yet we must come to terms with the fact that, as humans, our children will suffer.
Love and suffering are both undeniable.
And most often, they are connected.
On those two nights when Mary and Joseph were separated from their son, they suffered because of love.
Atheists insist that the universe is made up entirely, and only, of molecules that shift about.
This is a universe that has no moral center of gravity. Molecules shift here, they shift there. Morality has nothing to do with it.
To say “things are supposed to be good” is to insist in a moral universe. For a person of faith, goodness is, in some mysterious way, essential to the nature of the universe itself. This is what we call God – that tendency that leans eternally toward the good.
In 1853, a Unitarian minister named Theodore Parker wrote these famous words:
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
My belief in God is an insistence that we live in a moral universe. As a poet, my proof is nothing more complicated than the love I feel when my children come home, and ask me to rustle them up some eggs.
Love is that tendency.
God is that love.
Amen.