Joseph is way too much like everybody else. He has great stuff, exemplified in his many-colored coat. He is beautiful. He is lucky. He is happy. He is an adventurous, ambitious immigrant. And he is miserable. His own brothers hate him. We could stop here with some cliché about how in every life a little rain must fall, but I would like to go a little deeper.
I'd like to say it with the Prophet and Poet Rumi: "Be kind to everyone you meet. Everyone you meet is carrying a burden of some kind." Everyone. You. Me. Us. Them. The president. Borak Abama. Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump. Rosie O'Donnell. Oprah Winfrey. Yoko Ono. Bruce Springsteen. Thich Nhat Hahn. Howard Moody. When you know that you know this - that it is good to be kind because everyone is carrying a burden of some kind - you melt a little. You still wear the many-colored coat. You still "Present" when you are in what my kids used to call "Pub", which is to say public. YOU PRESENT IN PUB. But you aren't so hard about it. Knowing Joseph's story, about how far away from home he had to go, just to get dissed by his own brothers, softens us. And soft is good. It is much better than hard. Soft is to hard as compassion is to conceit.
So let me say a few things about softness and compassion for those of us who carry burdens while wearing beautiful coats. About those of us who look good but may not always feel good.
This, in certain ways, has been a terrible week for the best looking country in the world. We are in a deadlock about whether or not to send more people to the Middle East to fight a war a majority of people can't quite figure out. The Nation editorial, February 5, 2007, said it very well: "World opinion is against U.S. escalation in Iraq. The American people are against it. Congress is against it. The Iraqi government is against it. Can a single man force a nation to fight a war it doesn't want to fight, expand a war it doesn't want to expand? If he can, is that nation any longer a democracy in any meaningful sense? If not, how can democratic rule be restored??" In other words, how can Bloomingdale's stay in colorful business in a world where American brothers are threatening to kill Iraqi brothers? What happened?
Maryanne Williamson, the very popular new age guru, whom usually I like to demonize, is said to have said, "The real shadow in America is that it thinks it has no shadow." Ah. The real shadow is shadowlessness. The real shadow is not seeing the burden that Iraqis or Joseph or war proponents are carrying. Those of us who oppose the war often dehumanize those who promote the war - and thus we enter the dehumanization project. The real shadow is the dehumanization of each other, done by each other, which then ends in warships being exchanged.
Today I want to use Joseph's many-colored coat to help us enjoy this mixed up humanity. We are many colored. We are many. We are all carrying something. Let me be more precise: I've never met anyone who wasn't carrying something. I've seen some pretty good fakes but that's about it. Most of us are well dressed and well costumed while being hypocritical and phony. Think with me for a post-Christmas minute about how abused the bible is by people who think it is an anti immigration, pure people book. This very week more people were rounded up right here in New York because they were not us. They didn't belong here. They were "illegals," as though any human being could be an illegal. This example of the shadowlessness of the American system could drive us crazy if we are not careful. We act as though there was a purity of people, those who belonged and those who do not belong, those who are legal and those who are not legal, and then we proceed in the name of God and country to round them up and deport them. Many use the purity and goodness of the Christian people as their excuse and become like Joseph's brothers, people who, in the name of God and good, try to kill each other. I want to get that excuse out of the way today. The Bible is actually a book that enjoys mixed up, miscegenated humanity.
We just heard, sung again, the long list of Jesus' ancestors. His genealogy. There are a number of important things to say about this list. People like to imagine that Jesus came from royalty, and indeed he did have some heavy hitters in his past. Very few people really get inside this family tree because it is so hard to pronounce, much less understand. Let me tell you a few important things about the list. One is that not everyone is Jewish. For the most part, genealogies in the late First Testament period try to show a line that has been kept free from Gentile contamination. But surprisingly, the first genealogy in the New Testament is designed to show that the line from Abraham to Jesus was intersected time and again by Gentile blood. Matthew's message is clear. From the very start he wanted to show that the incarnation of God transcends all divisions of race and nation. It was the Jews who waited for the Messiah…but the Messiah came from all.
The list is not only "contaminated" - please put that in quotes - by mixed races and mixed classes, it also includes four women. Genealogies just weren't written that way in this time. The women were omitted, regularly. Even the feeding of the 5000 counts the men and tells us so. 5000 were fed, not counting the women and children. One of the women is Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute to trick her father-in-law into keeping his promise to her and producing an heir. The fruit of this tricky union is one of the great grandfathers of Jesus. Another is Rehab, a well-known harlot who assisted two spies sent to Jericho by Joshua. In doing so, Rehab became an exemplar of faith and works. Rehab is a great-grandmother of Jesus. Ruth is also on the list. Ruth was a Moabite, a descendent of Lot. Her place in the social registrar of Israel was surely very low. Nevertheless, Ruth became a great-grandmother of David and distant great-grandmother of our Lord. Finally, the fourth woman. Matthew is embarrassed to even name her directly. He simply calls her the wife of Uriah. She is of course Bathsheba, a victim of the most scandalous case of seduction in the First Testament. She too is a great-grandmother of our Lord. Notably, not a single one of these women is a Jew. Tamara was a Canaanite; Ruth, a Moabite; Rehab, a Jericho; and Bathsheba, through her husband, a Hittite.
It is also important to note that the last fourteen generations are almost totally unknown. They aren't recorded elsewhere in scripture. By noting them, Matthew reminds us that God nonetheless uses those easily forgotten and overlooked for the good of all. They get us to Jesus, too.
Queen Elisabeth, apparently, was quoted at some point saying that she wanted her son Charles to marry a woman with a history, not a past. Way too many Christians work way too hard to assure that Jesus is pure and spotless. Matthew differs. He says that all kinds of roads, and tickets, and people, can lead to Godliness. How are we going to get from here - the place of pure thoughts about who we are - to there - a place of much color and intrigue?
The best answer I know is humor. Let me introduce you to some mixed up people, some people who instead of killing each other have fun with each other. I love the sign outside of Madison Avenue Baptist Church on East 21st: "Lord give me patience and make it snappy." I so much want the eschaton tomorrow, and I so much don't see it coming. While we wait for everybody to be cloaked in many colors, we may as well enjoy our diversity.
I think of the writer Florence King. She describes herself as an "unreconstructed Southerner, gun-toting right-wing feminist, Episcopal Atheist and postmenopausal misanthropic monarchist." She sounds like the kind of person I would like to know, straight out of Matthew, sporting many contradictory colors at once. When asked to remark on what it felt like to be her and to be part of the lesbian community, she describes going to a retreat in North Carolina. It was advertised as an event which promised a corn worshipping festival, witchcraft workshop, automatic writing demonstration, logos is dead bonfire, nude dancing, vegetarian cafeteria, non-smokers experience. "I returned the flyer with a note across the top, 'It's s time you knew I'm a Republican.'"
Her publicist likes to announce that Florence King has scored 114 politically incorrect offenses out of a possible 121. He says these offences include violation of the mandate that individuals never be referred to as part of a group. Her book titles include Southern Ladies and Gentlemen; Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady; asp, Where is Thy Sting?; and He: An Irreverent Look at the American Male. In the latter, she says, "The academic male is a wart hog with the personality traits of a harem eunuch." In other words, King mixes up mixed up people into a politically incorrect whole. It is not nice to refer to individuals as part of a group and we all know it. But we also await eagerly an end to history in which all can be one. By that we do not mean that all will be the same. Instead, we are looking for the higher, more humorous humanity: where all are many-colored but refrain from killing each other, either with a vanilla homogenization, or a nutty fruitcake, a melting pot, a salad, or whatever metaphor you pick for that time beyond war and killing where the many are one, multitudinously. In other words that the time will come soon when humanity is really, really mixed up.
King was once asked, "How can you hate people so much?" She responded, "Who else is there to hate?" When Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye came out with a favorable review in the New York Times book review, to the dismay of her publisher, St. Martin's Press, she wrote a nasty letter to the writer of the review. "You do not know how to write reviews, here are your faults… " No, Florence King is hardly the modern Joseph we need. She wears a great multi-colored coat, but has an edge that we can enjoy only as long as it is not directed at us. I've always wondered what burden it is that nasty people carry. Remember soft is to hard as compassion is to conceit.
Sometimes it is success itself that makes us hard. The only problem with success, as many of you know too well, is that we are condemned to repeat it. All A's one semester means that there is nowhere to go but up. In a book by Steven Berglas, called Reclaiming the Fire: How Successful People Avoid Burnout, a phenomenon called "Encore Anxiety" is explored. "Encore anxiety is what successful people experience when they have to repeat something they already know how to do. They get bored in the repetition." What Berglas argues is that successful people need to make mistakes as much as they need to corner and hoard success. That's how learning happens. Our very success can become a prison and a burden we carry. We can burn out by becoming the captives of our successes.
My last congregation in Miami was a very successful one. It often bragged that it was an "Oasis of Civilization in an under-civilized city." We even put that in a brochure once. Modestly, of course. One day during an important conversation, one of our very strongest members said, "I wonder if Coral Gables Congregational Church is strong enough to hold its gifts." We were having diversity troubles, which any congregation as diverse as it was is supposed to have. Let me repeat that. If we were true to our claim to be the most racially and economically diverse organization in town - a claim that was statistically accurate, by the way - then indeed we were supposed to have diversity problems. Gifts come with burdens and burdens come with gifts. That is the nature of mixed up, multi-colored humanity.
Linda Immune, the Philippine educator, says that the very process of education is obtaining enough security to have an adventure. In this context, we might even say that the key to success is understanding what stage we are in during the process of gift becoming burden and burden becoming gift. Education is epiphanal: we come to know that we know where we are.
I love a story a friend just told me about her sister growing up in a small Oregon town. She was talking about a friend of her son's today and comparing her past to his future. The 2006 boy was on probation at school because he got caught drunk. One more offense and he would be out. The 1959 girl was pulled over for driving with a beer in her hand in this small town. The girl was so upset when the cop stopped her that she threw the beer can out the window, in full sight of the cop. The cop charged her with littering. When we think pure and legal, when we think violently, we punish each other, imagining that punishment will restore our humanity. When we understand that all are carrying some kind of burden and that some even drive drunk, (which is more than just a shadow!), we soften into a terrible and awesome fear about mixed up humanity. We help each other along. We cut each other some slack. We become aware that we are gifted and burdened, burdened and gifted. So are our leaders. So are our brothers. So is our multi colored coat. So are immigrants and so are natives. So, I think, is God - but that is a conversation for another day.
Amen.
