Blessedly, Irrelevant

Blessedly, Irrelevant--December 20, 2016

"In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria." [Luke 2:1-2]

Poor Caesar. For all his straining and striving to be remembered, poor old Caesar Augustus is just not very important in the big scheme of things.

If you know the name Caesar (the  Roman title for the Emperor) Augustus--and that is an "if" to begin with--chances are, the reason you know his name is that at some point during his tenure as emperor of Rome, a peasant girl in her teens had a baby nearly fifteen hundred miles away from the imperial capital who never met Augustus.  Not even once.

If you know the name Quirinius, I am certain it is only because he is mentioned here in Luke's Gospel--he is otherwise regarded as an obscure footnote in history, and biblical scholars themselves aren't really sure why Luke would bother even mentioning him. 

The thing is, though, these guys--Augustus the emperor and all of his local appointed lackeys--all wanted to be important.  They wanted to be immortal, their names forever cheered and inscribed in the annals of history.  They wanted to know they were powerful, important, and glorious. And yet, they were both eclipsed by a newborn laid in a food trough. 

It's wonderful, ain't it?

Frederick Buechner beautifully makes the point like this:  Augustus "ruled Rome and thus virtually the whole civilized world. He was worshiped as a god. People burned incense to him. Insofar as he is remembered at all, most people remember him mainly because at some point during his reign, in a rundown section of one of the more obscure imperial provinces, out behind a cheesy motel among cowflops and moldy hay, a child was born to a pair of up-country rubes you could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge to without even trying."

This is the beautiful upside-down-ness of the living God.  Augustus wanted so hard to prove to the world that he was a big deal.  The whole notion of taking a census is a bit of imperial propaganda and muscle-flexing: the empire wants to know how many subjects it rules over, the empire wants to know how much money it can wring out of them in taxes to finance its armies and exploits, and the empire wants to just show off that it can make people do what it says.  Pick up and go to your hometown. Get your name on the registry--we have to know who is who and where you are. We have to be able to track you.  We have to make sure you are not a threat.

It is telling, I think, that one billion Christians in the world worship somebody who was born while his family was getting their names added to an official government registry... and the pompous dictator who ordered the registry in the first place has been virtually forgotten in the mists of time.  This is exactly what Mary was singing about!

Mind you, Augustus thought himself quite important in his own lifetime.  There is an inscription, dated to 9BC, that was found in Priene, in western Turkey, an imperial declaration about the birth of Augustus.  And in the official party line, carved in stone on the walls of the public marketplace, Augustus is called a "god," a "savior," and a "bringer of peace," and his birth is announced as "good news for all people." The official position of the Empire was that Augustus was going to make everything great--peace for all, plenty for all, and the strength of the empire backing it all up.  Sounds like a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, doesn't it?

One recalls the famous dictum of Margaret Thatcher, comparing true power to social graces, when she said, "Power is like being a lady--if you have to tell someone you are, you aren't."  If you have to go inscribing walls with your name and telling people you are the savior of the world, you ain't.  If you have to tell people you are a god or that your birth was good news for the world, you are more than a little insecure.  Poor old Augustus--he wanted so much to be important.  And now he's a trivia question.  Sad. (Wink.)

This is where the story of our faith begins--with the stark contrast between the world's kind of greatness, and God's upside down way of doing things.  Before we sentimentalize the baby or make quaint little manger scenes in our mind's eye, before we sing a single, "rum-pa-pum-pum," the New Testament dares us to see that Jesus' coming is a revolution right under Caesar's nose, one that upstages even the "great" emperor himself. The Gospels were written, at least in part, to expose the emptiness of the official imperial party line and instead to point to another way.  And for us to hear the Christmas story rightly this year, we are going to need to remember that at the start of it, there is a very frustrated emperor trying, like a mad toddler, to make himself look important, pounding his tiny fists as he insists on putting everybody's name on a registry and puffing up his own self-importance... and the good news is, he's a sham.  God ain't fooled.  And we don't have to be, either.  To read the story of Jesus' birth is to have the curtain pulled away by Toto, and to see that all the propaganda and all the bluster and all the pomp and braggadocio was empty.  And instead, there is real hope in the child laid in the farm equipment who will become a refugee on the run as soon as the powers-that-be find out he is born.

The real savior doesn't need to advertise.  The true God-in-the-flesh doesn't have to announce it or put his name up on a building to make us see we are in the presence of genuine greatness.  The actual birth that is good news for all people doesn't need to be embellished or improved upon--just a baby in the spare trough attended by a teen mom and some night-shift farm hands.  Those are enough to unmask the empty pomposity of Augustus.  Those are enough to undermine an empire.  Those are enough to turn the world upside down.

Poor old Caesar Augustus.  For all of his striving to make himself seem important, the living God revealed him to be, blessedly, irrevelant.

Thanks be to the God in the trough.

O Lord our God, thank you for turning the tables.  Thank you for unmasking the insecurities of the Caesars and emperors and power-hungry of the world.  Thank you for coming among us in all of your upside-down glory.