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Epiphany is one of
the great feast days of the church. In some cultures it is
bigger than Christmas. However, I am afraid that, more often
than not, it has become the feast of taking down and putting
away the decorations. In other words, to put the unreality of
Christmas behind us and get back to "normal." The
nativity scenes are put away to wait another year for the baby
Jesus to reappear. Yet the crèche is a visible symbol of a
central tenet of Christianity—the incarnation. "God in
man made manifest," as today’s hymn says. "God
with us, Emmanuel," as we proclaim at Christmas.
I’m always
curious how crosses and crucifixes are ubiquitous symbols of
our Easter faith, whether in our pockets, on our walls or on
our steeples. Yet we put away the symbol of the incarnation. A
new year’s resolution might be to leave at least one crèche
set out to remind us of the incarnation, namely that God came
to be with us. In that way, we won’t forget where we will
find Jesus: in a humble manger, in a small nondescript town.
Today’s lesson
contains one of scripture’s classic one liners: "Can
anything good come out of Nazareth?" In other words:
"You’ve got to be kidding. He’s from where? Nazareth,
you say?" One of the first questions we ask people is:
"Where are you from?" Perhaps you’ve even had the
response "D’oh," as though the listener couldn’t
believe where you were from. History and religion are full of
examples of persons being from the least likely of places,
confounding our own prejudices about where people are from as
though that was their defining characteristic. You can even
find a pastor from the Episcopal tradition in a Methodist
church. Finding God in the strangest or funniest of places is
what this passage suggests.
One of my favorite
authors, Kathleen Norris, has written that she was looking for
God in all the wrong places until she found God in the
unlikeliest place (for her, that is): in church. Her
grandmother’s church in Lemmon, South Dakota. She writes:
"When I started to attend my grandmother’s church,
still thinking of it as ‘hers,’ it was an exercise in
nostalgia." After attending a while, she discovered that
"the cold shock of humility forced me to acknowledge that
my neighbors—sometimes people I had dismissed as small
minded or dull—were acceptable to God as instruments of holy
grace. I began to appreciate the struggle of praying and
working within a community, and recognized the dreadful fact
that the only hypocrite I had to contend with on Sunday
morning was me." In other words, her preconceived notions
were shattered about where you could find God.
For some of us, it
is sometimes hard to find God outside the walls of the church
as we ask ourselves the question: "Can anything good come
out of…?" Reminds me of the old country and western
song, "Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places."
Can anything good come out of Springfield? Let me put that one
to rest. An unequivocal "yes," if you mean
Springfield, Ohio, where Kris Ritter hails from.
This all leads me
to starting a new wristband fad: WWYFJ – Where Will You Find
Jesus? In the unlikeliest of places, if experience be a guide.
Finding things in the strangest of places hit me when I was in
Stratford, Ontario, Canada last summer attending the
Shakespeare Festival and seeing the musical The Sound
of Music. One of the stars of the show was a 13-year-old
boy who played the role of Freidrich and had a voice to set
angels to smiling. My first reaction was to turn to the
playbill credits in the back to learn about this young man’s
credentials, expecting him to hail from Toronto or Montreal or
a similar arts center, only to discover he hailed from
Sudbury, Ontario. Talk about shattering my preconceived
notions of "could anything good come out of
Sudbury?" I visited there once. It was a grim mining town
in the middle of nowhere. Not exactly a hotbed of high
culture.
A remarkable story
of "can anything good come out of…?" is a tale
told by Jill Ker Conway, the former president of Smith
College, in the third volume of her memoirs entitled A
Woman’s Education. She tells of how a program was
initiated at Smith through the generosity of the Charles
Stuart Mott Foundation. It was a scholarship program
established for women on welfare. Not exactly Smith’s
stereotypical undergraduate! She tells of one such mother whom
she learned about at the President’s reception. This student
had brought her children to the reception. Jill Ker Conway, in
making small talk, asked them where they went to school, only
to learn that the answer was: "We can’t go to school.
We have no address. Mom’s on welfare, and no one will rent
to her." She also learned that the mother spent the day
in the library studying with her children and then went home
to her car where she studied by flashlight. The grace in the
story was that they found a way around the rules which
prevented these children from getting an education. One the
greatest moments in her life as president was watching some of
these welfare mothers graduate summa cum laude. She
writes: "Watching the transformation from woman on the
economic margins to woman in charge of her life made the
frustrations of the president’s job sink into total
insignificance." Talk about upending stereotypes. Can
anything good come from a welfare mother?
Just this week we
had houseguests from Chicago. I asked them if they were
staying for my sermon on Sunday. They said no, so I began to
wonder if anything good can come out of Chicago. But they
politely asked what I was preaching on. I informed them that
the working title was "Can Anything Good Come Out of
Springfield?" The three teens at the table immediately
knew what I was talking about. As for the adults, there was a
curious look. Now, if your family is like mine, there is some
controversy about whether the Simpsons are suitable TV fare.
We have opted for not including it as an acceptable program in
our house, yet it was clear that our son had seen all the
episodes that subsequently became the focus of a lively
religious discussion. It seems the young persons could name
all the shows with religious content and articulate how faith
was portrayed. They were also discriminating, knowing that the
shows were satire. It proves once again that we can’t hide
from the culture. In fact, I must confess that I have watched The
Simpsons on occasion. For our teens, The Simpsons
was an entry vehicle for discussing the faith. They
understood, perhaps better than us adults, that the show was a
lampoon of all of societal institutions.
The Simpsons
once again raises the whole issue of how Christians are called
to engage the culture. Dr. Ritter led a class last winter on
the seminal book by H. Richard Neibuhr, Christ and Culture.
As Christians, we are pulled by two magnetic poles, one of
which is rejection of the culture, taking our direction from 1
John 2:15: "Do not love the world or things of the
world." Or we can take our guidance from Genesis 1:36:
"Let us make humankind in our image. God saw everything
God made and indeed it was very good." Or we can be
schizoid following the advice found in Matthew 22:21:
"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is
God’s." Albert Einstein once said, in connection with
such a paradox: "The mark of a true genius is the ability
to hold two contradictory thoughts in one’s mind at the same
time."
Why should we take
The Simpsons seriously? According to one poll, 91% of
American children between the ages of 10-17, and 84% of all
adults, can identify members of the Simpson family. Which
brings us back to the central question: "Can anything
good come out of Springfield?" I was recently drawn to
the book The Gospel According to the Simpsons: The
Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family
by Mark Pinsky, with a surprising forward by Tony Campolo
acknowledging the serious content of the Simpsons. Is the show
just about them? Us? Or me? Why is the show so successful?
Because it lampoons all the institutions, mores and
conventional wisdom of our culture yet, in its own subversive
way, it proves to be provocative. The issue is not how it
depicts believers of faith such as Ned Flanders or
non-believers such as Homer. The mere fact that the show takes
religion seriously by treating it as an integral part of the
American social landscape is the news. Finding God-talk in the
funniest of places. The show holds two strains of Christianity
in tension, represented by Lisa Simpson’s concern for others
and social justice and Ned Flanders personal evangelism and
zeal to save souls. The book has some wonderful chapter
headings such as "Does Lisa speak for Jesus? There’s
Something Wrong with that Kid. She’s so Moral." Or
"The Evangelical Next Door: If Everyone Were Like Ned
Flanders, There’d be No Need for Heaven." The
concluding chapter says it all: "Cloaking the Sacred in
the Profane." Whichever side you are on—is the show
profane or is it sacred?—the author and others have analyzed
the show and found that 70% of the episodes contain religious
themes and 10% are focused on religious questions. Compare
that to other popular shows, including the favorite TV
families of the fifties.
The Simpson’s go
to church as a family, and the image of the church is the
whole town of Springfield at worship—the sinners, the saints
and the ordinary folk—suggesting that church is the
community where one need not be a religious fanatic or saint
to participate. Can something good come out of Springfield?
We now come full
circle back to Kathleen Norris. Commenting further on the
nature of church, she writes: "Even more important, it
(church) is a place set aside from the noise and relentless
commerce of the world for giving thanks for all that is larger
than myself. I can join a ragtag band of people and
praise the God who made and sustains us, and who every week
renews our hope that a loving and creative spirit is at work
in us, and in the whole creation. Like nothing else I know, it
brings me back to my senses."
WWYFJ. Where will
you find Jesus? In the funniest of places—even church!
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