On the Second Sunday of Advent I reflect not only on the meaning of the story about the angelic announcement of Jesus’ birth, but the way Joseph, father of Jesus, symbolizes a way toward healing toxic masculinity, challenging patriarchy, and curbing war and violence in our world. By reflecting on the popular carol, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” I also explore how the religious vision of “God with us” can change hearts and minds and turn us toward peace on earth, goodwill toward all.
A sermon on Matthew 1.18-25 for December 6, 2020.
1.
Later in the service today, we’ll sing the popular Christmas carol, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” The Rev. Edmund Sears, a Unitarian minister in Boston, wrote the carol in December 1849. We’re told it was first performed in his home on Christmas Eve of that year. A week later, it was published in a Christian journal, recognized for the way it drew the meaning of Christmas into the present realities of the world at that time. It’s a carol not so much preoccupied with historical events surrounding the birth of Jesus; it’s occupied instead with what Christmas means for a world at war and for the men who lead those wars.
Throughout the nineteenth century, a series of armed revolutionary movements threatened the peace of Europe. Between 1820 and 1849, these movements were met with strong military reactions aimed to suppress or prevent revolutions from spreading. And America was having its own fair share of war. When Pastor Sears wrote the carol, the Mexican-American war had just ended and tensions between America’s northern states and the southern slave states were rising.
“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” was Sears’ pastoral attempt to put the gospel of “peace on earth, goodwill toward all” in the singing mouths of Americans everywhere.
In one of the verses, he wrote:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
the world has suffered long;
beneath the angel-strain have rolled
two thousand years of wrong;
and we at war on earth hear not
the love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise and cease the strife,
and hear the angels sing.
Millions upon millions of Americans have sung this carol for nearly two hundred years, and yet we’ve still had to endure one terrible war after another—on our own soil and abroad—while violence in our communities continues to ruin lives and tear at the fabric of our society. This past year, violent words and violent actions have felt particularly toxic and especially harmful.
How is it that generation after generation of Americans can celebrate Christmas, listen to the scriptures, pray the prayers, sing the songs, participate in Holy Communion, and yet, as Sears says, “hear not the love-song” angels sing—the love-song that could “hush the noise and cease the strife” of “two thousand years of wrong”?
2.
A little more than fifty years after the Rev. Sears wrote “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” the English poet, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called, “If—.” It’s one of Kipling’s best-known poems; in 1995, it was voted Great Britain’s most beloved poem of all time. In this memorable poem, Kipling celebrates a certain way of being a man—a masculinity that’s stoic, strong, unmovable, unfeeling.
. . . .
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Despite the immense popularity of Kipling’s poem in the United Kingdom and its popularity here, across the Pond, I wonder if the poem models a way of being a man that can too easily tilt men toward what’s actually unmanly and inhumane. This vision of the ideal man as stoic, strong, unemotional, and unbending is still encouraged by too much of our culture and prized by too many men far and wide. I wonder, does this vision of masculinity have a connection to the sad state of humanity expressed in the lines from the Rev. Sears’ famous Christmas carol?
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
the world has suffered long;
beneath the angel-strain have rolled
two thousand years of wrong;
and we at war on earth hear not
the love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise and cease the strife,
and hear the angels sing.
“And we at war on earth hear not / the love-song which [the angels] bring . . .”
War and violence has been perpetrated largely (though not exclusively) by men for thousands of years. But the Rev. Sears says (and I think he’s right) that war and violence is what Christmas intends to end.
But can Christmas end the violence? Or is the “love-song which [the angels]” sing a mere pipe dream, a religious fantasy, that, like Santa Claus, is lovey but not realistic?
I choose to believe there is a way—if not to end all war and violence entirely—at least to curb the impulse and redirect our natural aggression toward more creative ends.
3.
The way lies hidden inside today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, an open secret to all who seek it.
Our reading of the angel’s instruction to Joseph, husband to Mary and father to Jesus, is sandwiched between two stories of brutal violence. Prior to this story there’s a reference to the brutal destruction of Jerusalem in the early sixth century C.E. and the “deportation” of the Israelite exiles to Babylon. Following this story comes the ugly tale of the slaughter of the innocents. King Nebuchadnezzar in the first reference and King Herod in the second both stand for a form of toxic masculinity that is absolutely destructive, inhumane, and, I believe the Gospel of Matthew wants to say, ultimately unmanly. Nebuchadnezzar and Herod symbolize men gone rogue, manhood corrupted, masculinity devoid of divinity. These two kings stand for all strongmen in power, dictators in families, businesses, churches, and politics, who use their power to keep themselves in power at all costs—which always means some kind of abuse and violence: whether it’s verbal, emotional, or physical.
But in the story of the angel’s appearance to Joseph we’re given a very different vision of masculinity. It’s a way, I think, that the gospel seeks to remake men and make manhood a benevolent force on earth rather than a malevolent one.
The Christmas story in Luke focuses on Mary, the symbol of femininity-alive-to-divinity. In Matthew, our reading today, the Christmas story focuses on Joseph, the symbol of masculinity-alive-to-divinity.
Against the backdrop of Nebuchnezzar’s war and Herod’s massacre—men gone rogue, manhood corrupted, masculinity devoid of divinity—the Christmas story according-to-Matthew highlights two ways of practicing masculinity that are consistent with God’s design for human life.
First, the story illustrates the tender role of Joseph as a father who is loving, caring, and protective of the child, Jesus. In that culture, the caretaking, nurturing aspect of parenthood was understood as the more feminine role. But here, Matthew overturns convention, upends patriarchy and envisions manhood through the lens of the archetype of God as loving father who is capable of drawing on more traditionally feminine characteristics. This is in direct contrast to the ways of the strongman, dictator, and king. Strongman masculinity, despite the strongmen who often appear in earlier parts of the Bible, is opposed to the new thing God is revealing in and through Christ Jesus.
Manhood as loving, caring, and protective flows from a different way of knowing. This is the second way into a masculinity more consistent with divinity. Matthew wants us to understand that Joseph is directed more from his soul than from his mind. Joseph’s insights come more from dreams, from listening to Spirit, than from figuring things out. The story isn’t advocating dreamwork as much as it is advocating the more intuitive, affective, feeling, and sensate side of our intellect. This doesn’t exclude rational thought; there’s a place for the life of the mind. But the strictly rational is overrated, and in fact, it’s more dangerous than we realize.
In his book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, professor Ian McGilchrist writes a tour de force examination of our current understanding of neuroscience. The left brain, he says, our over-dominant rational hemisphere, makes for a wonderful servant, but it is a very poor, and often tyrannical, master. Instead, it is the right side of our brains which is the more reliable and insightful part of us. The left hemisphere interprets the world; the right experiences it. Our best knowing comes from experience.
4.
There are forms of manhood that will never do us any good. For good and beauty to benefit humanity we have to heal those forms of masculinity. There are forms of masculinity that are too soft, overly compliant, passive, timid, too eager to please and not rock the boat. That’s an extreme that must be healed too. But today, the Bible is challenging a masculinity and assumptions about masculinity that promote patriarchy—the rule of the masculine and the suppression of the feminine. Patriarchy is a scourge—it’s not only harmful to our families and communities, it’s contrary to the nature of God.
Some will argue that it’s utopian to dream about an end to war and violence; they say that the only way to curb violence is to meet violence with an even greater threat of violence. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been our most violent yet. The minds of strongmen have devised the most ingenious methods for hurting and killing other human beings. Violence only leads to more violence.
Toxic masculinity and the brutality that often goes along with it, must end. There is another way; there’s a masculinity that’s modeled after divinity, not patriarchy.
Christmas is a revelation of God’s new way. And Joseph, not King Nebuchadnezzar and not King Herod, is what God’s way looks like: manhood as loving, caring, and protective, flowing from a deeper, more spiritual way of knowing, doing, and leading.
If those of us who identify more with masculinity will dare to reshape our manhood accordingly, then maybe we can honestly sing:
For lo! the days are hastening on,
by prophets seen of old,
when with the ever-circling years
shall come the time foretold
when peace shall over all the earth
its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world give back the song
which now the angels sing.