What do we want to carry on? And what is it time to let go of?
Wonderings:
I wonder what you’re feeling in your body today, knowing that ICE agents have killed another person in Minneapolis, an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti?
I wonder what your parents taught you, by their example, that you want to carry on? Or something you want to unlearn, or let go of?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany.
Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 5-13; Matthew 4:12-23
Let us speak, and listen: held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
I want to talk a little bit today about how our Gospel lesson is connected to our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah—what the writer of Matthew’s Gospel is doing with the prophet Isaiah. And by way of doing that, I want to tell you about Tina.
Becoming a mother was a series of epiphanies for Tina. It was an epiphany to hold her daughter, swaddled so tenderly after the struggle and agony of labor. It was an epiphany that her daughter had fingernails, and elbows, and the faintest wisp of eyebrows, and a heart that beat all on its own. And it was an epiphany that Tina’s own heart could have grown larger to accommodate this new love, and still be overflowing with it. She loved the feel of her daughter’s name in her mouth, saying it over and over: Olive, Olive, Olive.
18 months later, when Olive was in the midst of a nap strike, Tina felt a feral rage inside her—rage at her powerlessness to soothe Olive’s crankiness, her powerlessness to make her do the thing her body most needed: to sleep. And as her body got hot and jittery, and her frustration began to feel more and more like panic, Tina had another epiphany. It flashed into her mind, all at once: all the times in her own childhood that her mother had become so quickly overwhelmed by Tina’s big feelings, how her mother had screamed and shouted, how her father had slunk away to the garage.
The time Tina had a tantrum in KMart because she was so tired and irritable—later it turned out that she had the flu: her mom had dragged her to the car by her ear. The time she had come home with the ‘NSYNC CD she had bought with her own money, and was so excited to listen to, and her joy seemed to make her mom angry, and contemptuous, and unpredicatable, and Tina had tiptoed up the stairs, and hid the CD under her pillow.
Holding Olive, powerless to make her sleep, Tina remembered how scared she had been when her mom got overwhelmed and had her own tantrum, and her dad fled from it all; and the epiphany was—I want to be a different kind of parent than the parents I had.
After that epiphany, Tina pulled away from her parents for a few years. She didn’t share as much. It was a season of anger and frustration and grief, that she’d been raised in the way she was, so afraid of her own emotions that she didn’t know she was bottling them up until they burst out in a rush. It was also a season of shame for Tina: she was ashamed, knowing that she could be so afraid of Olive’s emotions that she sometimes shut down, or slunk away when her child needed her the most. Tina spent a lot of time regretting she’d been programmed in the way she had, wishing that she didn’t have this baggage to deal with.
During that season she still saw her parents, and appreciated their practical support, and enjoyed the joy they took in Olive, and Olive’s love for them. And after a few years, Tina started to feel the rigidity of her anger and frustration soften; she started to feel her grief give way to a broader perspective. She could also hold the many gifts her parents had given her; the many ways she did want to parent like they had. And at a family reunion, looking through an old photo album of generations gone by, she had another epiphany: oh, my parents had parents. And, remembering her parents’ parents—their goodness and their volatility and their trauma—Tina could see that her parents had done the best they could to carry on the goodness and to turn away from the stuff that had hurt them as kids. They had done the best they could, and their effort had made a difference.
More years go by, and the whole family is together for Olive’s 10th birthday. And Tina has made a cake, which collapsed, not being fully done in the middle. And Tina feels herself starting to lose it, the stress and the fear of failing in front of everyone beginning to overwhelm her. And just then her mother comes into the kitchen. It’s just the two of them there. And her mother says, “hey, I’ve been meaning to tell you something. I want you to know how proud I am of the mother you are. I see the best parts of my own parenting in you; and I see the ways that you have grown beyond me, showing up for Olive in ways that I couldn’t show up for you. And I feel so much guilt about that—I’m so sorry. I wish I could go back and be for you the mom that you are for Olive now.
“I know we can’t do that…but I want to say: being your mom is one of the greatest joys of my life. And your example is helping me grow, even now; you are showing me how to show my love more fully, and to let go of stuff that hasn’t been working for a long time. So, thank you.”
And that was an epiphany, too.
***
Why this story about Tina this morning? What does her story have to do with our readings today? With us, in the midst of a winter storm, in the midst of state violence against the most vulnerable, and those who are trying to defend them?
Here’s one way to read these scripture passages assigned to us today. The prophet Isaiah, he’s doing the best he can, to tell the people around him about God’s desire to restore the people of Israel. Israel, meaning: the people who struggle with God, the people God is faithful to, in the midst of their struggle. Isaiah is doing the best he can with the materials he’s inherited, with the baggage he carries. He’s writing about God’s promise of restoration to the people who live in Zebulun and Napthali—parts of the Northern Kingdom that the Assyrian Empire had seized from the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 732 BCE. He’s writing to people who have lived under the Assyrian siege for years: people living under the aggressive tactics of a cruel and indifferent regime, people who have seen their neighbors brutalized, disappeared, and killed.
Isaiah tells them that change is already underway, restoration is already underway. For those who walk in darkness have seen a great light, that God is already multiplying the people of God again, restoring the losses to their population suffered from warfare and starvation; God is breaking the yoke of their oppressor—the Assyrians.
And the passage goes on…
For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom. (6-7a)
For all the boots of the tramping warriors
and all the garments rolled in blood
shall be burned as fuel for the fire. (5)
Many scholars think it’s unlikely that Isaiah was writing with Jesus in mind, but eight centuries later, people who had known Jesus and experienced his presence among them, they were looking for ways to understand who he was, they were looking for ways to live faithfully in light of their own epiphanies…and they remembered these words that had been handed down to them. And they fit.
Or, at, least, some of them fit. For the community around Matthew, writing and reading this Gospel, the promise to these marginal territories, these out-of-the-way places like Galilee, that fits. Galilee literally means “the land of the Gentiles”—the stranger, the other: God’s promise is addressed especially to such places and such people. The great light that illuminates the darkness; the darkness of occupation, of the spectre of violence—that fits what they have experienced in Jesus, the epiphany of Jesus’ presence among them.
But having experienced that epiphany, the community around Matthew also seems to have said, consciously or consciously, we want to imagine God’s promise differently than our ancestors did. We want to tell the good news differently than it was told to us.
So you’ll notice here that there is no mention of the joy of dividing plunder, or of garments rolled in blood. The yoke of the oppressor will indeed be broken, but not by more violence.
Because what does Jesus do here, how does he act? He goes around “proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” The yoke of the oppressor will be broken by healing, by this strange, good news that there is a new way to live, together, in the abundance of God’s presence and care. The yoke of the oppressor will be broken: not by retribution, but by redemption.
As we will see, the community around Matthew, they don’t fix it all, they don’t root out all of their inheritance that imagines revenge, that waits for violent retribution. It’s still in there, and it comes out in moments of overwhelm. But I wonder if we could imagine an encounter between the prophet Isaiah and this “Matthew,” 8 centuries later.
Let’s imagine that Matthew is struggling to hold it all together, struggling to live with integrity as the world around them seems to crumble, to devolve into lawlessness and chaos, just like we are. And Matthew is overwhelmed, about to lose it. Let’s imagine that Isaiah comes into the kitchen and says, “I want to tell you something. I want you to know how proud I am of the person you are. I see the best parts of my own prophetic imagination in you; and I see the ways that you have grown beyond me, how your experience of God has healed some of the trauma that clouded my vision, has broken apart my paradigm for restoration through retribution…
Being your ancestor is such a joy to me. And your example is helping me grow, even now; you are showing me how to live in God’s promise more fully, and to let go of stuff that hasn’t been working for a long time.
Let me close with this wondering. When Jesus says, “come, follow me,” I wonder what you want to bring along with you? And what is it time to let go of?
***
As we say the Creed today, try saying it as, “I trust in this—and not in success, not in my old coping strategies…
Or try saying it, knowing that those who wrote it might be proud that it has come to mean much more than what they intended.
We believe…
