Second Sunday after Christmas
A Reflection by Trevor Bechtel on January 5th 2025
Good morning,
A phrase many of you have heard me say before is that church is supposed to be boring. There is a wisdom here beyond setting low expectations for my sermons. Pastor Melissa Florer-Bixler the champion of this idea says, “Worship should resist the logic of capitalism; it should be an invitation to achieve nothing, to produce nothing, to create nothing. Let worship make no calculable sense within the capitalist formation of desire — including the desire to produce moral people intent on doing good.”
I love this idea for its resistance to capitalism, and also its recognition that worship does not need to be about us doing or being good. We can be who we are, and we can show up here, and we can try to connect some part of who and where we are this morning to something that happens here, and we have done what is necessary for it to be counted as worship. We can be bored the rest of the time, or unable to give ourselves over to what is here, and that’s o.k. Of course beauty and talent and practice and performance should and do shape our worship, but they aren’t necessary. I think we get this at Shalom and I’m deeply grateful for it.
The idea that something different is happening in worship than in other spaces also connects to one I learned from my teacher, John McCarthy, about the relationship of institutions to time. He would say that the University has a special relationship to time, and that is one of the gifts it gives to the rest of society, the time to think about things. This is one of the gifts of being bored. Boredom is increasingly being replaced in our culture. When we are waiting in line we can pull out our phone and play a little game or text our friends. But of course this also means that our brains are always being stimulated, and the small rests throughout the day may actually be good for us. Boredom may actually lead to wisdom.
The church also has a different relationship to time. This is measured most concretely by the liturgical calendar which marks the seasons of each year. We know from one of the most boring Christmas carols that there are 12 days to Christmas. Today is the 12th day which means tomorrow is epiphany. It also means that today is the 2nd Sunday of Christmas, something which doesn’t happen every year. It can make Christmas seem a bit longer, something that I know Jodie is excited about. It gives us another chance to sing a couple carols and reflect on what it means that God’s wisdom is revealed most fully in a baby, born in poverty, chased by rulers good and bad, and across borders.
The passages from the lectionary for the 2nd Sunday of Christmas are all about this wisdom, and I’ve chosen to have a passage from Ecclesiaticus, or The Wisdom of Sirach, as the focus for my reflections today.
This book is an example of conventional wisdom. This is the wisdom typified by common sense, by the traditions of a society, by the status quo. In many ways it is the wisdom of the past. The biblical book of proverbs is another example of this kind of wisdom. You don’t need to look very hard to see a contrast between this type of wisdom and the wisdom of the prophets. This kind of wisdom is meant to sustain society, and even sustain its leaders. This really comes to the fore in the passage from Sirach as wisdom herself suggests that she is found in a special way in Israel. This kind of wisdom connects hard work and success with wealth, and foolish and laziness with poverty, and doesn’t have an anti-capitalist critique. Sirach takes this one step further and embeds wisdom in the law.
There is a lot about this kind of wisdom that merits our respect. Common sense is common sense because it works just about all of the time. The things we do as a society have a big impact on us. Think about roads for a second. We decided together in some way that they were a good idea and built and maintained them. It’s easy to forget all the agreements both tacit and deliberate that are needed to bring a road into existence and keep it there. We use our roads in a mostly orderly way, we put the cars in the middle and regulate their speed when they can go and when they need to stop. We put the bikes to the side, and right now we are modifying many aspects of our roads to make more room for bikes. We put pedestrians up on a curb away from the cars, ideally with some trees between them. We can critique roads, but they are a good example of conventional wisdom.
Jimmy Carter is being remembered as a different kind of president right now, and he was in many ways a unique figure in our country’s history. But Jimmy Carter, like any possible president of a country, was very committed to the status quo. He wanted to uphold institutions and ways of doing things. He wanted to advance multi party democracy and public health. I believe he also wanted to do this in a wise way, and in a way that looked favorably on prophetic insight, and that sought to improve the situation of those least fortunate among us. Carter is a good example of the wisdom of the past.
There are many things that we can only do at the level of a society, and its good that we recognize those things and good leaders as wise.
But we also know, those of us who are committed to Mary’s vision, that the wisdom of the past also needs correction. We in this church are committed to finding those special stories that show us how to care not just for society but also those on its edges.
This is the wisdom of the present. It is why Jesus was born. It is not enough for God to have people follow God’s rules, and work in the best possible ways to create a caring and just society. Well, it might be enough if people actually did this, but again and again we show that our version of the wisdom of the past is not usually caring and just. Instead it seeks to preserve wealth at the expense of the poor, to preserve traditional marriage and sexuality at the expense of those who express love differently, to preserve ethnicities by create an otherness for people different than us. So God chooses to become a marginalized person, who doesn’t get married, who starts their life on the run. Jesus lives a life that doesn’t hew to the ways set out for him. He finds a path that doesn’t devalue the wisdom of the past but that discovers a new present.
A few months ago Terri Friedline introduced us to a book, The Mushroom at the end of the World and I finally started reading it this week. I was fascinated by the first story the author, Anne Tsing, tells. It’s about the very polarized debate in the 1990’s about the Northern Spotted Owl and logging operations. A judge ruled in 1991 prohibiting timber sales from federal lands in order to protect the Northern Spotted Owl. I remember the vigorous debates pitting jobs against the environment that happened as a result of this. Tsing notes that at the same time the price of the matsutake mushroom skyrocketed in Japan. Those mushrooms grew in these same lands, and many people from East Asia, recently immigrated to the area, were going onto these lands and harvesting the mushroom and selling them to Japan. They were not noticed by either the capitalist system which didn’t understand this exchange or by the environmentalists who would not have been happy with thousands of people roaming through the forests the northern spotted owl lived in. Tsing tells the story to suggest that in the midst of polarization and capitalist decline there can be a way for people to survive that is different that we might expect. Finding a different way to survive is the wisdom of the present.
This discovery of a different way of being in the midst of conventional wisdom is also a wisdom worth pursuing. Many more people may find that the wisdom of the present is the only way open to them in the next four years. The beautiful thing about the wisdom of the present is that is happening now. It is a path that when we see it can give us something to do, right now.
These paths can be difficult to see though, which is why we also need the wisdom of the future. This is the wisdom of imagination of thinking about what might be possible, and its one good reason to read science fiction. Susan and I recently read Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild Built. In this book robots become self aware and decide to leave human society and live in the wilderness. This causes a huge shift in human culture as well and society abandons capitalist production and finds a way to live more sustainably. It is a book that is full of wisdom about how we might become a new people, even though it is set on the moon Panga and so doesn’t quite project a future for earth. I really enjoyed reading the book and when I decided it might take some space in my reflections this morning I realized that the robot decision to leave human society might resonate with our Anabaptist separation instincts.
Separation from society whether fairly comprehensive like the Amish or by ignoring the politics of where we live like most people who don’t vote or by committing our time to communities that cast an alternative vision of human interaction is a difficult question for me in these times. I recognize the wisdom in devoting myself to something other than capitalism, but I also recognize that when society function better, by providing housing first, or universal health care or a basic income it accomplishes more good, or perhaps avoids more evil, than anything a separated group can do. So we do really need the wisdom of the past, present, and future as we face these days. May we find it.
Amen.
